My robot can kill your robot with the power of my mind

[sovay]

Single Malt & Song did not put me in a coma, temporary or otherwise, but I had a very nice time nonetheless. I sang "Ten Cents a Dance" by request and "Gentleman-Rankers" (with teenybuffalo) because I love it and I need to learn "Paddy's Lamentation." Why does my life not contain more applejack on a regular basis?

I am leaving shortly for the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival's 'Thon; I do not expect to be online much for the rest of the day and/or tomorrow. I am not liveblogging. I am bringing a backpack with my computer and some books in case I overdose on media and need to curl up somewhere and read for a bit, but I think that's sort of the opposite direction.

I have never tried to watch movies for twenty-four hours straight in my life. I have absolutely no idea how it will work out. (The good news: I don't want to see everything on the list. And I have no compunctions about bailing if it's my health or Re-Animator (1981), although there are films they could show that would make me change my priorities.) It should be fun to find out.

Comments

Re: "Paddy's Lamentation"

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I have both the versions heard in Gangs (it's actually two different interpretations cut together, because Scorsese) and a version done by Sinead O'Connor. THe lyrics are pretty much identical. Which would you like me to send you a link to?

Re: "Paddy's Lamentation"

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

BTW, good luck at the 'Thon. I myself will be staying home, continuing to feel blah and watching Boardwalk Empire.

[sovay]

Which would you like me to send you a link to?

. . . Both?

I myself will be staying home, continuing to feel blah and watching Boardwalk Empire.

I'm really sorry about the blah. How is Boardwalk Empire continuing?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Liking Boardwalk Empire a lot. One thing you really do see is that interestingly (and this is borne out by re-studying Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York), the era in which you could get entire collects of Jewish "gangsters" was an earlier one; what we're seeing in 1920 is more "mob" action--smaller and meaner, little knots of Italians built around family or familial relationships, with rotating groups of young Irish and young Jews clinging to the sides.

Granted the "big guy" in New York who we see is Arnold Rothstein, but A) he's coming out of a gambling/book-keeping background which has him acting as unofficial consigliere and matchmaker for other mob leaders and B)he's still not working with only other Jews, since his right-hand guy is "Lucky" Luciano. And the older, more established mobs are all Irish, because by the 1910s/20s, the Irish have moved up to being the backbone of city infrastructure, doing all the jobs nobody else wanted and thus getting to run the graft machine: They're labour, they're firefighters, they're managing supply and demand, they're (like Steve Buscemi's "Nucky" Thompson) City Treasurers, with brothers who run the police force and Senators making back-room deals with them.

One way or the other, it's a young man's profession, so I was right: No generational Jewish family-based mobs, not least because the first thing that seems to happen when good Jews go bad is that their fathers disown them. Asbury says, of "Little Augie" (one of the last "true gangsters" in Ne York, supposedly), that he was buried with a tombstone which said he was 25 even though he was 34, because "it had been nine years earlier that he had taken control of the gang, and on that same day, his father had declared him dead."

[sovay]

Granted the "big guy" in New York who we see is Arnold Rothstein, but A) he's coming out of a gambling/book-keeping background which has him acting as unofficial consigliere and matchmaker for other mob leaders and B)he's still not working with only other Jews, since his right-hand guy is "Lucky" Luciano.

Who was also connected to Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Man, I want a good book on this subject.

One way or the other, it's a young man's profession, so I was right: No generational Jewish family-based mobs,

Hey, research!

not least because the first thing that seems to happen when good Jews go bad is that their fathers disown them.

Hm. What happens when they marry?

Asbury says, of "Little Augie" (one of the last "true gangsters" in Ne York, supposedly), that he was buried with a tombstone which said he was 25 even though he was 34, because "it had been nine years earlier that he had taken control of the gang, and on that same day, his father had declared him dead."

I had not heard that story.

I grew up knowing that both my mother and her brother had been declared dead by our religious cousins in Florida because they married outside the religion. This was denied vehemently by the current-generation representative of that branch who spoke to my mother after my grandfather's funeral, and I will admit someone must have kept tabs on us if she'd heard about the death, but she was strangely surprised to hear my uncle Jeff was alive . . .

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we haven't seen Bugsy Siegel yet, though a very young Al Capone is a supporting character. Last night's episode contained a sequence in which Capone's boss, Chicago gangster Johnny Torrio, takes him to a local beer baron's son's bar mitzvah, so there's at least one example of somebody remaining religious yet dealing dirty with the goyim. Rothstein's bunch in New York seem to be pretty Americanized and/or areligious, though, aside from one of them swearing at Agent Van Alden in Yiddish.

(I don't know what happens when they marry, either, since none of them seem to be. Capone has a wife--an Irish girl--and a son, who's deaf; Rothstein seems married to his work. The other young dudes are all mainly running around with hookers, though Lucky Luciano also has a fairly hot affair with Jimmy Darmody's showgirl mother, Gillian.)

That's really interesting about your Florida cousins. I can see how later generations might have been: "No no, that was just something the older people did, so we'll deny it if asked", but then again, I think it'd be really hard to separated fact from fiction at that far a geographical divide.