This is it. The big one. El Gordo. The nonesuch. The nonpareil. The sockdolager. The kafoozalus of wackadoodledom. A webwork epic of the first water. The only novel from Keeler’s last decades that can stand tall beside THE AMAZING WEB and THE BOX FROM JAPAN and the other gargantuae from his prime years.

A kolossal kaleidoscope of Keeler Koinkidink, replete with conundrums, counterplots, Confucianisms and whathaveyou.   

  It’s a whale of a tale of a wacky will.
                “The will of who?”
            The will of Poo.
                “And Poo is who?”
            He’s Poo Ping Fu!

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

It’s also, of course, the tale of a wooden parrakeet. Why did an American about to be hanged in London’s Pentonville prison beg his death-house guard to bring him a champagne cork, a glass eye, and the bird of the title? How, more than ten years before, did the identical three objects figure in the murder of a young Chinese woman in Chicago? Why, more than ten years later, did a mysterious customer enter New York’s famous “If We Ain’t Got It, It Don’t Exist” store and purchase the exact same triad of items? And what have all these questions to do with the impossible skein of dilemmas in which Harry’s hero finds himself?

It will not surprise Keelerites to learn that the hero of PARRAKEET is Chinese—or, as most of the whites in the novel call him, a Chinkie. When we first encounter Kwan Yang—whose real name is Eng Wing, although he can’t prove it, and who is an American citizen by virtue of having been born aboard a U.S. submarine-chaser based in Canton harbor, although he can’t prove that either!—he’s working as a linen sorter in a Manhattan laundry. He dreams of marrying the lovely Su Lin and of becoming a famous architect someday, but his chances of achieving either goal are less than the square root of minus zero. For one thing, he owes seven more years of servitude to the ring that smuggled him into the United States. For another, his inamorata is the grandniece and ward of our old buddy Hong Lei Chung, supreme rodent of the Tong of the Lean Grey Rats Which Swarm the World, to whom the evil-faced opium-smoking gambler Lung Chee has already paid kush-tang money in return for Su Lin’s reluctant hand in marriage. As if those weren’t obstacles enough, the Immigration authorities are hot on the trail of evidence—in the form of a fingerprint from the tiny hand of a baby cremated in Canada many years before!—that Kwan Yang really is Eng Wing, upon the establishment of which fact the poor schnook will be locked up for a year and then deported back to the stinking docks from whence he came, to spend the rest of his life as a coolie. Of course, the wacky will of Poo Ping Fu figures in all of these complications. But if I were to hint at its outlandish provisions—or at how everything else in the plot is connected with the fateful game of Hui Hui Hung Shung played in a shack along the Brooklyn waterfront, or with the Chicago skyscraper commissioned by Simon Deck the Chocolate Bar King, or with Dr. Ramon Alfonso Marengo Ytturez, long-vanished inventor of a cheap synthetic morphine, or with any of the dozens of other strands that make up the web—this introduction might become almost as long as the book it introduces. Still and all, before I turn the platform over to Harry I need to say a few words about one subject.

Race.

The title and premise of Three on a Match suggest an ensemble film, but don’t be fooled. This is Ann Dvorak’s movie, and the finest showcase for her avid, feverish energy. She was twenty years old and blazing her way through her first year as a star, starting with her electrifying turn as Tony Camonte’s insatiable sister in Scarface. Slender and elegant, with a refined beauty, Dvorak always seemed to be looking for trouble. “Somehow the things that make other women happy leave me cold,” she says in Three on a Match, explaining the gnawing dissatisfaction that a devoted husband, a cherubic son and a life of luxury can’t assuage.

The other two on the match are Joan Blondell and Bette Davis, but they are stuck with tepid roles, and even Warren William (as Dvorak’s husband) is uncharacteristically virtuous and bland. All raw nerves and dangerous luster, Dvorak makes her haughty, self-immolating character not only more interesting but more sympathetic than the nice women who profit from her fall.

Let’s open with a few passages of deathless prose from the classics.

EMORY’S SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE (18 in.; to 35 lb.) is the only Southwest member of an edible group with long necks and short tempers. Handle with care.

BELTED KINGFISHER Where there are fish there are Kingfishers, beating the air in irregular flight, diving into water with a splash and emerging with fish in their beaks.

THE EASTERN MOLEor common mole makes the mounds that dot your lawn. You are unlikely to see any moles, for they stay underground unless molested.

You saw them in the basement of your third-grade best friend, or in your school library. If you were lucky, you had one or two at home—your older sister read them first, years ago; maybe they’d even belonged to one of your parents. Paperback books just a bit smaller than pulp fiction novels, though equally thick, their illustrated pages of a glossier, higher quality. The typeface was Futura, that design marvel of yore, also seen in the old Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. Insects, Seashores, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians—which did you have? The Golden Guides gave us our natural world in all its glory, and managed to do it in a singular style, dry yet affectionate, concisely informative and never, ever dumbed-down. They were written for children, but each, too, is a cracking read for any adult eager to learn. Or to remember.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, along with the escalating regional wars it has ignited, has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own.

These two assertions, though seemingly distinct, are inextricably linked. For if those who relentlessly sustain Israel—militarily, politically, and economically—were to finally withdraw their support, the Middle East would not be the powder keg it has been for decades, a situation that has catastrophically worsened since October 7, 2023.

Though no oversimplification is intended, the brutal reality is that all it would take is for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, allowing the devastated, genocide-stricken Strip the faintest chance to heal. Over 56,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children and 28,000 women, have been brutally slaughtered since the commencement of this war, a horrifying tally expected to surge dramatically when comprehensive investigations into the missing are finally conducted.

Only then could the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy begin, where the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be fiercely championed within an international system built, at least theoretically, upon unwavering respect for basic human rights and international law.

No fame is more fleeting than the showbiz kind. Some entertainers are just too much in and of a particular time. In the 1920s Harry Richman was a big star, billed as the Greatest Entertainer In America. He could sing and play piano, dance and act a little; he ran a hugely successful nightclub, was the toast of Broadway and, very briefly, a star in Hollywood; he wrote or introduced several songs that are still sung. But most of all he just personified the Roaring Twenties. He was the sleek, rakish, vaguely smarmy bon vivant in top hat and tails who was enjoying the decade’s non-stop party as much as you were. It’s been said that he was to the 1920s what the Rat Pack were to their era. Harry’s career peaked just as the party crashed to a halt at the end of the decade, and he faded out in the 1930s. If his name comes up at all today, it’s probably less often as an entertainer than as a footnote in aviation history.

He was born Harry Reichman in Cincinnati in 1895. His dad, a Russian Jewish immigrant, started out peddling eyeglasses door to door, carrying all his equipment on his back. He worked his way up to a prosperous wholesale business and real estate empire, and developed a taste for the high life. It killed him by the time Harry was an adolescent. In his thoroughly entertaining (sometimes suspiciously so) 1966 autobiography A Hell of a Life, Harry paints himself as a fecklessly scheming kid who grew up quick. At nine, he writes, he was a weekend ticket taker at an amusement park, shortchanging every customer he could because he was saving up to marry his childhood sweetheart. One night he showed off his ill-gotten riches by taking the girl out on the town. They stayed out too late to go home, so Harry got them a hotel room. When the cops burst through the door in the wee hours they found the kids sleeping fully clothed on separate beds. A doctor confirmed that the girl’s honor was intact. Her dad put the kibosh to their romance anyway.

Harry’s mother bought him piano lessons, dreaming he’d be a concert pianist, but like most kids at the time he was more interested in ragtime and jazz. He left home at around fourteen and headed to Indianapolis. There he and a kid who played fiddle went door to door in the kind of neighborhoods where an upright in the parlor wasn’t uncommon. They’d bang out a few popular tunes for spare change. As Remington & Reichman they were soon touring the very small-time Webster circuit of vaudeville theaters in the Dakotas and Canada, known to vaudevillians as the Death Trail. Harry kept working his way around the west, singing at the piano in saloons and whorehouses, working as a singing waiter in restaurants, as part of a “Hawaiian” hula act in a circus sideshow. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco he was in a musical act that opened for Harry Houdini, fifteen shows a day. Playing in Los Angeles clubs favored by the movie crowd he got to be pals with Charlie Chaplin and Al Jolson, whom he idolized. Jolson got him a shot at Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, the late-night club revue that gave Eddie Cantor his big break. Harry raced to New York, but flopped and was canned after only one night. He was so despondent he ran off and joined the Navy.

He arrived back in New York in 1920, just when Prohibition did too. Now he and the city were ready for each other. On vaudeville stages he found work as an accompanist for headliners like the singer Nora Bayes and the beautiful twin Dolly Sisters, and for a while was Mae West’s on-stage pianist and straight man. He was reluctant to speak lines at first because he had a lisp that he could hide more easily when singing. West convinced him it was a distinguishing feature. He soon got top billing on his own on the Keith-Albee circuit. He also played at ritzy speakeasies like the Beaux Arts, where, he claims, Prohibition’s hostess with the mostest Texas Guinan stole her signature line “Give the little girls a big hand” from him.

Nils T. Granlund, known as NTG, was both a radio pioneer and the publicist for Marcus Loew’s movie theater empire. He hired Harry to headline live radio shows from Loew’s State Theatre, the movie palace in Times Square. Harry plugged new songs on air, like Billy Rose’s “Does the Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” With NTG’s help he opened his own Club Richman just behind Carnegie Hall. Harry made it one of the most opulent and exclusive nightclub/speakeasies in town. A lot of Broadway and movie stars became regulars, as of course did Mayor Jimmy Walker, and the Vanderbilts and Whitneys, and foreign royalty – you saw everybody who was anybody there.

Or wanted to be somebody, like the chorus girl Lucille Le Seur. Accounts vary as to how Lucille got into the swank club. In one version, she convinced NTG, her sugar daddy at the time, to get her a spot in the club dancing the Charleston. NTG introduced her to Loew, who arranged a screen test at MGM, where she’d get her first tiny roles in 1925. Studio chief Louis B. Mayer decided her name sounded like Le Sewer, so the studio ran a publicity campaign in which the fans got to give her a new name: Joan Crawford. She never liked it.

Made in 1972 in the wake of Vietnam, Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey prowls the warm sickly halls of an old New York flophouse á la search-and-destroy. The place must have looked like cold storage at the time, but today it appears almost luxurious – a relic from an era when the poor could still afford a room from the small-time slum operator. By the 1980s, hotels such as the Monterey fell to the liberalization clearances fueling the NYC bankruptcy fire sale, like the old diners that gave your Ma a job for life and the palaces of the Deuce. Who’d have thought that that hoary nemesis of American industry, the mustachioed Evil Landlord, would have won out in the end? In 1971 the gold standard was abandoned, courtesy of Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle.

On November 20 1942, a Brooklyn jury returned guilty verdicts on a pair of Williamsburg teens, 16-year-old Neil Simonelli and 18-year-old Joseph Annunziata, for the murder of Irwin Goodman, their math teacher at William J. Gaynor High School. The two of them had never much liked Goodman, a 36-year-old father of two. When he reported them to the principal for smoking in the boys’ room, they walked eight blocks to Simonelli’s home, where they picked up a pistol, then back to the school. They confronted Goodman and got into a scuffle with him. The gun, which Annunziata was holding, went off, perhaps accidentally, fatally shooting Goodman through the back. Because the jury entertained a doubt that the shooting was premeditated, they convicted the boys of murder in the second degree. The pair went off to Sing Sing together to begin sentences of 20 years to life. Had the verdict been first-degree murder, they could have been the youngest New Yorkers ever executed. 

The city’s newspapers, from the New York Times to the Brooklyn Eagle, provided extensive coverage of the case, and there was commentary in national magazines like Time. What fascinated them all, beyond the crime itself, was the boys’ lifestyle and attire: uniformly, the press described Simonelli and Annunciate as “jitterbugs,” “Zoot Suit Youths” and “Zoot Suit Killers.”

Whether or not anyone in the press had actually seen Simonelli and Annunziata wearing zoot suits was a moot point. By 1942, “zoot suit” was a metonym for “juvenile delinquent.” What the black leather jacket and the hoodie were to later generations, the zoot suit was to the war years. 

When the zoot suit first appeared it was mostly associated with black youths and the jitterbug in neighborhoods like Harlem. It consisted of an outrageously outsized jacket, with superwide padded shoulders, that hung down to the knees and the fingertips. The pants were exaggerated as well, ballooning and deeply pleated, then pegged tight at the ankles. A broad-brimmed or porkpie hat, pointed or platform shoes, a long watch chain, and a variety of tie styles completed the ensemble. 

A moral crusader from his early years, Anthony Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1844. His father, Thomas, was a prosperous farmer who also owned two sawmills. While the family had plenty of money, it was through the influence of Comstock’s fervent Congregationalist mother Polly, who like her husband had descended from Puritan stock, that the seven Comstock children led very austere lives marked by hard work, religious instruction, and precious little fun. Among his siblings, Anthony was the only one who clung fiercely to his mother’s fire and brimstone sensibilities. Polly died when Anthony was ten, but by then he knew full well Satan was a very real force in the world, and the only way to stay right with God was to remain pure in thought and deed, resisting the ever-present temptations presented by the Prince of Lies. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling and especially sex were all tickets straight to Hell, a belief he inflicted on everyone around him. This made him, no doubt, a very annoying child.

Muselmann is a term from the Holocaust. It was used by prisoners of the camps to describe their fellow inmates, those who were utterly emaciated and resigned to impending death. The word is Yiddish for Muslim, deriving from the old Turkish word, müslüman. In the camps, its use was varied and there are many opinions on its origin and application, most notably from Victor Frankel, Eugen Kogon, and Primo Levi (all of whom were Holocaust survivors). Here is Levi’s powerful description: “Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmanner, the drowned form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand ...” 

The term also appears in works by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanislaw Klodzinski (who wrote a whole study on the word), Germaine Tillion (inmate of Ravensbrück), to name a few. ‘Muselmann’ is a remarkable word and concept, able to call up profound images and associations.

In 1922, Baltimore-based journalist, essayist, literary critic and gadfly H. L. Mencken wrote, “I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth.” Toward this end he used his American Mercury magazine and other publications as platforms from which to wage his ongoing war against the more ludicrous expressions of self-righteous morality, in particular fundamentalism, Prohibition and censorship. He once described the Puritan mindset that so dominated the American Northeast as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,” and his post-mortem evisceration of Anthony Comstock (who had staged the most singularly effective and far-reaching censorship campaign the nation had ever seen) remains shockingly timely. But That’s another story.

Comstock had taken his fight against obscenity national with the conscription of the United States Post Office, lobbying for legislation that made the mailing of materials deemed obscene a federal offense (again that’s another story). But on a local level his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was an extremely effective weapon when it came to cracking down on New York-based publishers, booksellers, book buyers, art galleries and theaters that displayed or sold material he found personally offensive. The NYSSV was so effective it spawned other bluenose organizations in other major US cities around the turn of the twentieth century, in which holier than thou citizens took it upon themselves to scrub their own communities clean of books and art they didn’t like. It wasn’t just Fanny Hill and pornographic stereographs they were after, but George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Eugene O’Neill, and The Decameron. Among these tight-assed citizen vigilante groups, the most powerful by far was Boston’s Watch and Ward Society, formed in 1878 with the stated purpose of cleaning up corruption in local politics. Perhaps finding that a futile waste of time, in 1906 the leaders of the Watch and Ward Society shifted their focus, aiming their vigilance at any manner of artistic expression they deemed unseemly or that might undermine the upstanding moral virtues of the fine God-fearing Christians of Boston. They did this, with the cooperation of the local vice squad and the blessing of city fathers, by banning anything they found offensive and ordering the arrest of those responsible.  By the second decade of the twentieth century, no city in the nation could approach Boston when it came to banning things, and the term “Banned in Boston” soon became a big selling point in other American cities. If a book or play had been banned in Boston, you could almost guarantee hot diggity sales across the rest of the country.

The cult director of Two-Lane Blacktop talks film theory, painting, politics, and, last but not least, actor Warren Oates.

Despite transparent light and searing heat, all seems frozen. Something clings to the landscape. Amidst Joshua trees and sagebrush, an ineffable presence surrounding even the stinkbugs.This is where George Stevens—who once said that Utah’s western desert ranges “look more like the Holy Land than the Holy Land”—filmed The Greatest Story Ever Told. Soon thereafter, a younger man breathing that same numinous air made a very different kind of movie. In fact, Monte Hellman made two: The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, displaced and gritty, eternally unblessed, a diptych belonging to the Western, yet standing at a slight angle to it in the same breath.  

Monte Hellman entertains a few questions on this perennial state of unblessedness, and the peculiar tone of what are, in my opinion, misnomered movies—his “Existential Westerns.” And here, I’m after the concrete processes that actually drive Hellman’s characters, his post-modern wraiths. So we touch on film theory, painting, politics, and, last but not least, that revenant of 1960s/70s cinema, actor Warren Oates. Always the smallest glint of insanity in his face, no matter how benign the expression—to me, Oates is the dark side of amiability, with those burlap features and that corpse laugh of his.  

He reemerges in Two-Lane Blacktop, recently screened at Anthology Film Archives here in New York City. When I arrived home in the wee hours, after walking over the Manhattan Bridge with a buzz inspired by Hellman’s extraordinary film, I sent him an email. He responded almost immediately. A charmed night! Our short interview begins in Utah, where one big jowl with eyes (Oates) seems to well up from the parched earth of Monte’s no-man’s-land.  

DANIEL RICCUITO: Your movie, The Shooting (1966), emerges a year after the Stevens epic. Despite the shared location and profound sense of ghosts in the desert, your film couldn’t be more different—The Shooting is austere and scaled to simple, highly realistic storytelling. Of course, there’s also a pervasive dream-like atmosphere, so perhaps you’re telling a surrealistic story… with a straight face? I’m reminded of Balthus paintings in which the air surrounding the figures—his “negative space”—is always poised to congeal into dangerous forms. 

Count Dracula (1977) is a British television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s canonical vampire tale. For Tim Lucas, who recommended I check out this awkward video/film hybrid, it does greater justice to the original Dracula than any other filmic version. “Judi Bowker,” claims Lucas, “is the only real Mina ever represented in film, and it makes her corruption all the more tragic.” Dracula isn’t the central focus. This gives Bowker’s Mina Harker — who might accurately be described as a doll-like, even pat incarnation of honey-haired innocence  — the chance to evince a modern paradigm, becoming, by immeasurably small degrees, a model of high-minded vampirism. Mina communes, unprotected, with madness AKA the fly-eating menace called Renfield. Surviving the encounter with her true opposite number (normally Dracula himself), she does so by moving him with frankness: “I was very interested in what you were saying about Eternal Life… I feel we understand each other”. It’s a finely turned performance echoed satisfyingly by the soundtrack’s Ondes Martenot, more human and throaty than any other electronic instrument, here centralizing a woman’s existential experience — drawn from, but not solely dependent on, Stoker’s original late-Victorian metaphysics. Even Count Dracula’s hybrid format, then-standard for English television, seems appropriate to Mina’s curiously doubled existence as she glides along an ethical Mobius strip like an enlightened somnambulist.

by Daniel Riccuito