about a scene from the Columbo episode, “Any Old Port in a Storm”

“Any Old Port in a Storm” aired October 7, 1973, and guest starred Donald Pleasence as Adrian Carsini, a wine connoisseur who murders his half-brother to prevent him from selling the family winery. Peter Falk is, of course, Lieutenant Columbo.

Adrian Carsini's anxiety grows with each encounter with the amiable detective. In the just-one-more-thing scene (a staple of every episode), Carsini is almost begging to be caught and relieved of the pressure when Columbo mentions the detail that first triggered his suspicion: the dead man's sports car—which Carsini staged at the beach where he dumped the body—was spotless even though it had supposedly been parked there in the rain. Columbo yells his apparent afterthought—turning the screw even more—from the end of the winery's long driveway:

Columbo: Oh, Mr. Carsini! Sir! I just remembered one of the reasons they’re not releasing your brother’s body. I forgot to tell you the other day. Well, you know your brother’s car? It stayed out on that cliff for a week. During that time, it rained, and then we had some sun. But when we saw the car the morning we found the body, it looked like it just came off a showroom floor.

Carsini: What’s your point?

Columbo: No water marks. Can you explain that?

Carsini: No, I can’t.

Columbo: Well, there must be a reason for it. There always is!

Carsini: When you find it, will you tell me!?

Columbo: Believe me, sir, you’ll be the first to know!

Pleasence makes an excellent wine snob. His half-brother is handsome, athletic, an adventurer. But Adrian—short and prissy—has only wine, and his vulnerability is that his world is so small. It makes him desperate.

 

Note: 

- Peter Falk was on Johnny Carson right before the episode aired and expressed his great admiration and appreciation of Pleasance. 

- Dana Elcar has a nice little role as Falcon, a sweet-natured wine enthusiast from Texas.

 

 

something about “Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation,” a nonfiction book by Jamie Thompson

Standoff counts down the minutes of July 7, 2016, the punishing summer night when a lone gunman waged war on police amid a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Dallas. That night, protesters, moved by the recent murders by police of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, marched in cities across the nation to demand policing reforms and accountability. Dallas police were monitoring the city’s peaceful protest when a black, young man in a bulletproof vest, armed for battle, murdered five officers and wounded eleven other people.

A chaotic gun battle in the streets moved into a downtown community college, where police cornered the shooter. As a negotiator tried to talk down the gunman, whose cause was sick vengeance for racial injustice in America, the SWAT team armed a robot with a bomb, directed it to the gunman, and blew him to bits.

The author of Standoff, Jamie Thompson, cycles chapters through perspectives—on events and on the issues—from the officers, from family, protesters, a doctor, and the police chief and mayor—people whose lives changed that night.

Aside from the negotiator, who is black, the officers, in Thompson’s telling, all have the colorless view that police decisions should not be questioned—and the officers’ views are the ones most frequently expressed in Standoff. The officers are also portrayed as heroic or tragic. They were.

Note: Jamie Thompson won an Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in writing for her coverage of the gunman’s ambush of Dallas police in July 2016. Thompson originally covered the shooting for The Washington Post and later wrote about it for The Dallas Morning News. She has also contributed to D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and the Tampa Bay Times.

something about "Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge," a nonfiction book by Jim Schutze

Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge, by Jim Schutze, was a best-selling true crime book in 1998. It was adapted into the 2001 film "Bully," directed by Larry Clark. The crime involves the brutal murder of Bobby Kent, a vicious kid in a comfortable, middle-class Ft. Lauderdale beach community. Kent's best friend and a group of peers lured Kent to his death. 

 

This is the story of a damaged and depraved community. Schutze, a local Dallas journalist, is pitiless and closes his book with a swipe at the adults loitering at the edges of the kids' lives. Reading this dissolves a little more faith in humanity. It's great.

about being dull

 
A knifeman forces an 84-year-old priest to his knees at the altar and slits his throat. Why is it that this horrific episode did nothing for the imagination? Is it because it is situated within the shapeless war on terror instead of the short rash of violence wrought during the early Norwegian black metal scene?

Think of someone you love. Someone who is so essential that you forget they live. Whose presence looms so large in your life that you take them for granted. Someone who, it's only when they're gone, that you really understand what they mean to you.

Imagine that person far away. Imagine that person being told to wear an orange jumpsuit. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Then imagine that person forced to their knees. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, a zealot with a bright knife. The zealot, with a hand on your loved one's shoulder, speaks to the camera and says he has no choice. Your loved one will die and no one will be responsible and no one could have done anything differently.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.

John Wilkes Booth

something about Christopher Hitchens' "No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton"

In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens assailed the supposedly murderous ambition of one American politician. In No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, he tackles another. But Clinton does not have as much blood on his hands. Instead, most of Hitchens' blitzkriegs target Clinton for being a peerlessly sleazy, corrupt, debased fraud. Clinton seduced and raped women, then hushed them with threats. He pretended to be a populist, but pushed policies that benefited the elite at the expense of the people, especially the disadvantaged. He played to racial fears and stereotypes, and still managed to gain favor among minority voters. He and his wife, Hillary, pushed healthcare reform that favored the top four or five insurance companies. He tapped soft money resources and intentionally confused those secretive donations and private funds with public financing so he could use all the money to achieve his ends. He ordered bombing campaigns in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to provide political cover during his impeachment. He told lie after lie after lie. Hitchens is merciless here, peppering his insults with wit and delivering this diatribe in pointed prose. His sourcing leaves something to be desired, but Hitchens fires off good arguments that should give pause to any Clinton supporter.


Note: 
I sometimes come across conspiratorial claims about Clinton (and his political machine) murdering opponents or anyone capable of implicating his family in a crime. There is no such content here.

something about the documentary film "Into the Abyss" by Werner Herzog

In his review of "Into the Abyss," Roger Ebert starts off with this:

"Into the Abyss" may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

Well said. And here, at this cross-stitch of crime and poverty, the value of life runs threadbare.

Herzog documents the people and events surrounding a triple homicide in the small city of Conroe, Texas. The crime is violent and pointless, the sentences inconsistent and accidental. We hear from the convicted suspects, the families, investigators, and prison staff. With this crowd, Herzog has stumbled into a special kind of poor--a subculture of white, angry desperation that doesn't seem to know any other way. Herzog's approach is distanced, and he rations his usual pithy but insightful commentary.

When I think of an abyss, I think of a space in which blackness persists where the eye looks for light. The film's most glaring abyss is death row inmate Michael Perry: Seeing his youthful face, we expect--almost demand--him to show us something redeeming, something innocent. But it never comes. He is incapable probably of redemption or innocence.

But an abyss is also marked by its limitlessness, and even in this senseless loss, the victims' family attempts to salvage something. And another glimmer of hope (for those opposed to capital punishment) comes from a Death Row guard's turn away from death in favor of a universal right to life.

This is a very fine documentary, an effective and subtly powerful example of the form. Through Herzog's lens, overarching pointlessness and defeat lie naked. Presented with the abyss of the human soul, we find two thoughts juxtaposed: (1) No one has the right to take a life, and (2) some people don't deserve to live. There is no answer. Just traces of a spirit deeply buried within flaws and sad stories.

another word about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham's trek to the lonely height of Mount Moriah took three days; for three days an ass jostled there, carrying Abraham and his long-wished for, unconditionally loved son. The journey would end in the father's sacrificing Isaac. What if Abraham had resigned himself to the loss, to living the rest of his life having used his own hands to saw through Isaac's throat? And, worse still, what if, having accepted and prepared himself to perform that horrific act, what if God called it off, and let Abraham keep Isaac?

Abraham would be forced to live with the child he had already sought to kill.

The amazing thing--where faith is found--is not in the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son; no, it was Abraham's knowing that he would not lose Isaac, no matter what happened on Moriah.

Through faith I don't renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything ... It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole of temporality in order to win eternity ... Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.