End Of The Line

Goodbye Charlie Watts; you were always so cool amid the chaos.  All Down The Line from a 2008 concert filmed by Martin Scorsese.

The Year Of The French

 "Our life has been a house with the door bolted and the shutters fastened tight"

In late August 1798, three French warships sailed into a harbor on the coast of Mayo, a poor isolated country in the northwest of Ireland.  About a thousand soldiers disembarked under the command of General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, an illiterate trader of animal skins from the Vosges who rose in the tumult of the French Revolution and brutally suppressed the Vendee uprising.

The expedition fulfilled the wishes of many Irish exiles who had pleaded with the French Directory for an invasion to liberate the island from the British (an earlier expedition in 1796 by a large French invasion force thwarted by ill winds off the south coast of Ireland).  

Humbert's first landing was to be followed by a second, larger fleet carrying several thousand French soldiers, a fleet that never arrived.

Attracting a crew of a couple of thousand Irish, mostly peasants or landless and armed primarily with pikes, Humbert embarked on an 18-day campaign into the island at first winning unexpected success in battle before Lord Cornwallis captured Humbert and his French and massacred most of the Irish.

Humbert had been too late and landed in the wrong place.  A much larger Irish revolt erupted in May in the south of the island with its organizers, the Society of United Irishmen, counting on French support which did not arrive before the revolt was ultimately suppressed by the British in July with much brutality on both sides and between Catholics and Protestants.

It was these events that led 1798 to be referred to by Gaelic speakers as The Year of the French.

The tale of the Mayo uprising, of those caught up in it, Catholic and Protestant alike and the long sordid history of Britain in Ireland is the subject of Thomas Flanagan's magnificent novel, The Year of the French.  Published in 1979 and recipient of multiple awards, I read it in the 1980s and just completed rereading the book.  This is not a military narrative, rather a beautifully and poetically written story of the people caught up in the events.  Many of the characters are those prominent in the uprising and its suppression, most of whom died in its course or were executed after (the captured Humbert was exchanged and resumed his military career, fell out with Napoleon and emigrated to America, setting himself up in New Orleans, where in January 1815 he encouraged the French community to assist the American army in resisting the British attack, and carried a rifle at the Battle of New Orleans for which he received the thanks of General Andrew Jackson).

We also meet invented characters such as the itinerant Gaelic poet, schoolmaster and drunk Owen MacCarthy who, though ambivalent, finds himself entangled in the uprising.

Flanagan portrays all his characters in full and with sympathy or at least understanding and makes us understand the course of Irish history that led to this tragedy and of the conflicting motivations of all parties.  What some were fighting for was never quite clear and for others it was a romantic vision of Ireland detached for reality.  For a thoughtful exposition on the themes of the novel and the inherent conflicts among the rebels read this piece.  

And, above all, we have Flanagan's lovely writing.

The author's view of the events can be seen in the conclusion of one of his narrators, a Protestant minister in Killala, prisoner of the rebels during the uprising, whose life is saved by Ferdy McDonnell, the Catholic leader of the militia in town.  The minister after reflecting on his reading of Gibbon who makes the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:

"Each cause and reason is locked securely into place.  And over all the mighty drama presides the awesome authority of Gibbon's splendid language, his unimpassioned rationality . . . Great was Rome and catastrophic was its fall, but great too is the energy of the historian's mind, the cool deliberation of his judgment.

But then!  We put the volume upon the table, and go out for a stroll in the garden or to visit a sick parishioner or perhaps only to pare our nails, and doubt seeps in . . .  Perhaps it had not been like that at all.  Perhaps all had been chaos, chance, ill-luck, perhaps even Providence . . .  Perhaps it is not Rome that we have seen, but Gibbon's imagination bestowed capriciously upon the past . . ."

The words at the top of the post are uttered by Ferdy McDonnell as he ends a discussion with the minister and are proceeded by this comment from the minister, "It was as though he hated history itself".   It is this tortured history, from which there seems no escape, that Flanagan makes us feel in our bones.

Thomas Flanagan was an American professor of literature and The Year of the French his first novel, published when he was 56.  He went on to write two more volumes, both concerning Irish history, The Tenants of Time about the Fenian uprising of the 1870s and The End of the Hunt regarding the Irish War of Independence in 1920-21.  Both are fine books though neither rises quite to the literary and evocative heights of The Year of the French.

Hang Time

Super 70s Sports reminded me today of this spectacular play by Dr J (Julius Erving) in the 1980 NBA playoffs.  Dr J was the first player I saw who seemed to be able to hang and move in the air (the second and last was Michael Jordan).  This play was one of his most memorable carried out against the Los Angeles Lakers with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as one of the defenders.

He made this. Think about that for a minute. pic.twitter.com/NR6g0bXe62

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) August 6, 2021

 

Below is a video clip showing the play from several angles as well as the reminiscences of several of the other players.

And, in one thing leading to another it reminds me of another NBA moment from the 80s, this one shocking - when Larry Bird and Dr J (who was noted as a gentleman on the court) got into a fight with each attempting to strangle the other.  This occurred towards the end of J's career and at the height of Bird's, when Larry was demolishing J on the court and taunting him at the same time (Bird was a master trash talker), leading to the Doctor finally exploding.  As Bill Simmons wrote, "It was like seeing the Easter Bunny trying to strangle Santa Clause".

Miami Brothers In The Arms Of Vice

From the second season of Miami Vice, a show I watched very infrequently.  Closing scene of the episode Out Where The Buses Don't Run.  The show often featured popular music, but not just short clips which was the usual TV approach, instead playing long excerpts of mood-making music with very little dialogue.  Here it is one of my all-time favorites, Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits when Crockett and Tubbs investigate an abandoned warehouse.  

Everyone in this scene is a Miami cop. At the beginning is Edward James Olmos, Crockett and Tubbs' supervisor.  Next up is Bruce McGill, also known for playing D Day in Animal House and Secretary of War Edward Stanton in Lincoln, and finally David Strathairn, Eddie Cicotte in Eight Men Out, the Jason Bourne movies, Secretary of State William Seward in Lincoln, while appearing in about a million other films.

Miami Vice featured an innovative color and style palette imposed by director Michael Mann, who also employed a lot of shots not seen on TV before that are now standard in movies and cable.  See, for instance, the close up of the moving wheel on Crockett's car and the shot where the car accelerates away from the camera.

Consequences

On the evening of August 4, 1789 the newly assembled National Assembly of France voted to abolish the "privileges" of nobility.  Formed in the turmoil of the early days of the French Revolution, the Assembly represented all of the estates (Nobility/Religious/Bourgeois) of the country.  The proposal was introduced by the Vicomte de Noailles, a member of the nobility.  Noailles had served under the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution and negotiated the formalities for the surrender of Lord Cornwallis' army at Yorktown.

Count Mirabeau, one of the early leaders of the Revolution and an advocate for establishment of a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Britain, denounced the elimination of privileges as the victory of the "theorists" who had nothing practical to offer the people.

Within a few years most of the nobility who agreed that night to give up their privileges were executed, imprisoned, or in exile.  Noailles escaped to America, returning to France after Napoleon took power in 1799.  Other members of his family were not so fortunate.  His wife was guillotined in 1794 along with her mother and paternal grandmother.  Her sister was spared at the last minute due to the intervention of U.S. Minister to France James Monroe, but only after she witnessed the beheadings of her family.

The privileges given up by the nobility in 1789 were real, though the delusions of the theorists eventually led to an orgy of mass murder and chaos resulting in the eventual seizure of power by Napoleon.  In today's world even the "privileges" being so easily tossed about as an epithet only exist in the minds of the "theorists" who increasingly control our institutions.

Baptise Me

The virtuoso guitar playing and redemptive vision of Robert Randolph.