Category Archives: The Morgue

Two Movies to Watch For

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A Haunting in Venice
Kenneth Branagh’s third film outing as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is certainly loaded with stylish touches (trailer). A dark and stormy night, water everywhere. A gloomy palazzo where a Halloween party for orphans is staged. A crashing chandelier. Masked gondoliers. A psychic invited in the hope she can communicate with a former opera star’s dead daughter. Directed by Branagh and written by Michael Green.

Oh, and a houseful of suspects. Branagh has made a third try at getting right the mustache which prompted so many cackles in Murder on the Orient Express. This one is . . . interesting. Layers. No sign of the scar mentioned in Death on the Nile as the reason for growing the thing in the first place. Although the first two movies hewed closer to the original Agatha Christie novel, this story based on her novel Hallowe’en Party, has strayed off into territory of its own.

Super supporting cast—Tina Fey as mystery writer Ariadne Oliver who inveigles Poirot into investigating the medium; Kelly Reilly as the opera singer; Michelle Yeoh as the psychic; and the brilliant Camille Cottin as the housekeeper. (You may remember Cottin as the star theatrical agent in the French comedy series, Call My Agent.) And, you may recognize Jude Hill as the boy who played the lead in Branagh’s Belfast. Here he plays the 12-year-old son of a PTSD-afflicted doctor, played by Jamie Dornan, his father in Belfast too.

All you’ll miss if you wait for Haunting to stream is the scenery. A Gothic pall overlays the story, but the plot itself is a tad weak. Not mysterious enough for a mystery and not scary enough for horror. Christie’s original must have been shocking, though, because it’s the only one of her books in which a child was the murder victim. Not here. Here it’s Poirot who almost becomes the victim of apple-bobbing. Not great, but you don’t leave the theater feeling bludgeoned by sound effects, either.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 76%; audiences: 78%.

Theater Camp
While the movies about kids’ summer camps have worn their jokes thin as tissue-paper already, don’t let that discourage you from seeing this fresh take on the genre from directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman (trailer). It stars Tony award-winner Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen), Molly Gordon as loyal camp counselors and Noah Galvin as tech support, plus an ensemble of hammy, misfit campers.

The long-time owner of a theater camp in the Adirondacks (it’s Camp AdirondACTS) falls ill and is unable to carry on. Her son (Jimmy Tatro), who has no feeling for theater, kids, or camp takes over. He fancies himself a finance genius, which seems in his mind to consist of writing himself many inspiring post-its. Can the counselors save the day?

Fun and refreshing, it’s what you’d call a “small movie,” and since it’s already probably too late to see it on the Big Screen, Hulu is streaming it.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 85%; audiences: 80%.

(Almost) Lost to History

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If we think about the pieces of the past that are “lost to history,” we likely think of events and places and people from decades ago. If you follow this blog, you’ll know of my enthusiasm for genealogy, so the past lives of many people in my family become vague and irretrievable only when I hit the 1500 and 1600’s (like my ancestor’s 1657 death, which was considered so suspicious the sheriff convened an inquest).

That in mind, it may come as a surprise that barely fifty years ago—in 1973, when the Beatles were still a group—a massive fire near St. Louis, Missouri, destroyed millions of records of U.S. Army personnel from both world wars and other 20th century conflicts. At the time, the federal government preserved a single copy of the Official Military Personnel File (OPMF) of every person who served. You may know how difficult it can be to pry information out of veterans—very often they simply “don’t want to talk about it.” When their descendants get bitten by the family history bug, these records are a way in.

At least they were. But, after the fire, 80 percent of them—17,517,490—personnel records were gone. In her article for Wired magazine, “Soldiers Stories Lost,” author Megan Greenwell quotes archivist Terry Cook: “Archives are constructed memories about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and familial connections, and about who we are as human beings.” The fire left a big hole in that memory.

What followed has been a massive and ongoing effort by the National Archives to save everything it can. It first had to dry the records, soaked by the days-long efforts of 42 local fire departments to quench the fire. It has had to fight mold. Some documents merely singed, some were utterly lost, and some would have to be kept in special storage forever. When staff members receive a request for information, if it is for one of the 17.5 million burned records, they first determine whether any record at all remains, any bit of the original. If anything can be retrieved, they’ve become expert in handling it, scanning it, and sending it to the requester. If all else fails, an infrared camera may detect ink patterns on a sheet that looks thoroughly blackened.

Although it may seem that the Archives efforts have been painfully slow, ironically, time has been on its side. Technological advances, like that infrared camera, didn’t exist until recently. Had they hurried the job, the opportunity to use it would have been foregone.

With the precise vision offered by hindsight, the building could have been better protected, a few trash can fires could have been investigated more thoroughly, electrical problems could have been corrected, the design could have included a sprinkler system and firewalls. Eventually, a careless smoker confessed the fire may have been his fault, but the extent of damage was such that the authorities concluded it’s impossible to pinpoint a cause.

What a relief it must have been when, in 2011, the staff and records moved into a new, much more fireproof facility, a tribute to their dedication in continuing this laborious work into a sixth decade!

Is Peak True Crime in the Rearview?

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In 2014, the 13-episode podcast Serial investigated the murder of a Maryland teenager and “electrified group chats, provided rich loam for conspiracy theories, and turned hordes of millennials into experts on cell towers,” says Katy Waldman, a New Yorker staff writer. Somehow the genre convinces people, ordinary citizens, that they can know what and who are behind a crime. As a result, in a number of recent cases, investigators have been swamped by amateur detectives and wild theories.

Earlier this year, Waldman reviewed a book questioning the public’s preoccupation with true crime—podcasts, tv shows, movies, and books. Waldman’s review centered on Rebecca Makkai’s 2023 novel, I Have Some Questions for You, primarily a murder mystery set at a prestigious boarding school, which also critiques true crime on three counts, “exploiting real people for entertainment, chasing gore rather than studying systemic problems, and objectifying victims,” especially young white women who are pretty and rich.

Is the popularity of participatory and armchair crime investigation “the thrill of conjuring monsters to despise” as Waldman suggests? Or another example of “the numbing, almost hallucinatory pervasiveness of violence against women,” and “how greedily such stories are consumed”?

About a third of podcast listeners listen to true crime, but only last week, in the Washington Post, Hope Corrigan reported on people quitting the genre altogether. Corrigan opens her article with the story of a young woman who realized she was becoming overwhelmed by anxiety and paranoia, which she attributed to a “near constant consumption of true crime.” Those who quit this preoccupation report improvements in their mental state and sleep.

What seems to be changing now, Corrigan says, is how “some fans, and even podcast hosts, grapple with heightened anxiety and qualms over exploitation of victims,” and profiting from someone’s murder. Families of victims are speaking against the shows. A victim of a non-fatal attack said she “would rather get stabbed again than have TikTok users descend like vultures on my social media.”

Not unexpectedly, the popularity of the genre has inspired some tasteless merch, including a doormat that reads, “Crime Shows Have Taught Me Unexpected Visitors are Sketchy.” That may have started out as a poor joke, but recent tragedies suggest quite a few people may actually feel that way.

True crime tales may be most valuable when they reveal problems in the system that can be corrected. In the hands of a “capable creator,” stories of real crimes can reveal a lot about how the justice system works or doesn’t work, can demonstrate how social class and race affect crime and punishment, and can give voice to the voiceless. In less skilled hands, negative effects may predominate.

Professor Jean Murley, who studies the cultural impact of true crime, cites The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson, as one of her favorite books in the genre. This memoir and meditation from 2007 deals with one of the Ann Arbor murders of 1967-69, which occurred when I was living there. I read Nelson’s book several years ago and was surprised at how much of what I was sure I knew was simply wrong. Several novels I’ve read in recent years have considered the impact on investigations of social media piling on—notably New Zealand author Paul Cleave’s The Quiet Ones and The Pain Tourist. Unfortunately, such fictional accounts reflect actual events in society, where social media “suspects” become targets of vigilantism

What’s Happening in Your Back Yard?

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Is your local newspaper thinner-than-ever? Is it mostly advertisements, and those mostly for health care? Does your local paper even still exist? More than 20 percent of US newspapers have closed their doors in the past decade.

We hear a lot about food deserts, but what about news deserts? The competing newspapers in large cities used to keep each other on their reportorial and editorial toes, but bigger cities today generally have only one daily paper—or none. Coverage of local issues has diminished. And, in truth, readership has declined sharply. That isn’t only because citizens (like me!) prefer to get at least some of their news online, but by publishers’ business decisions. National and international news comes from the wire services, local news is almost non-existent. One in five Americans lacks a source of local news.

A ray of hope, then, in the coalition of 22 charitable foundations that has made a five-year, $500 million commitment to an initiative called Press Forward to help news organizations report on their communities. The effort is spearheaded by the MacArthur Foundation, and its president, John Palfrey said that the country is losing a newspaper every week, and “It’s hard to have a democracy when you don’t have good local news. When you lose credible news sources, misinformation and disinformation swoop in.”

According to recent research from Northwestern University, communities that don’t have a strong print or digital news organization see declining voter participation and increasing corruption, due to the loss of the watchdog role.

The business case for local news will still be hard to implement successfully. Local media may be helped by proposal sin Congress and in seven states to give local news operations various tax credits and incentives, but innovative financing built on some mix of revenue sources will be needed and may not always succeed.

Travel Tips: Treasures of the New York Public Library

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A jaunt into Manhattan recently let us visit the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. On exhibit is just a portion of this 125-year-old institution’s many treasures. Well worth a visit, the jaw-dropping free exhibition lets you see first-hand a wide selection of amazing artifacts—Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s handwritten farewell address, and the drafts of literary icons like Maya Angelou, manuscripts by musical geniuses Beethoven and Mozart and Dizzy Gillespie.

A small section shows some of the anti-Nazi pamphlets smuggled into Germany cleverly hidden in packages of food and the like. You can see all six of the Library’s copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. One of the interesting things about that display is that the descriptions enumerate the subtle—and not so subtle—differences among them. You can see the first great printed book, too—Gutenberg’s Bible—but before modern printing, individual copies of a book were not perfectly standardized. The discrepancies created fodder for innumerable dissertations and theories by Shakespeare scholars.

But, it’s not just books. It’s also stuff. The collection of stuffed animals that inspired the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, and Kanga. Five batons made for Arturo Toscanini in their unfinished state. Eventually, the wand would be painted white to look like ivory. The costume of ballerina Alexandra Danilova from a century ago. Cole Porter’s cigarette case. Charles Dickens’s desk and chair, and on and on. Globes, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick. Really, a feast for the mind, and every visitor will find at least one thing to love. You might forget to look up, you’ll be so fixed on the displays, but the ceiling of Gottesman Hall, where the exhibit is, is pretty spectacular too.

The Golden Triangle (The Pittsburgh One)

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A recent Midwest trip involved a brief stayover in Pittsburgh, where my husband and I met as graduate students at Pitt. Whenever we’re in town, we seek vainly for traces of those days!

We drove into town late one afternoon and up to Mt. Washington, the neighborhood overlooking the Golden Triangle where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio River. We had dinner at a restaurant cantilevered over the steep cliff, which you can reach by funicular (the red car in the photo), as well as by auto.

The meal was great, and we watched the pleasure boats, one big barge, and the Cruisin’ Tikis meandering around the rivers below. Also of interest, but not in a good way, was the swarm of Spotted Lanternflies in that part of town—and all over Pittsburgh, really. I stepped on as many as I could, but they tend to be too fast for me. We have these dangerous pests in New Jersey where we live, but not in numbers like this. We even saw one crawling up the inside of the restaurant window!

Over the years, we’ve visited many of the Pittsburgh’s museums and attractions and used this visit to catch up on two we’d missed. Neil had read David Randall’s The Monster’s Bonesabout the fierce competition between Andrew Carnegie and NYC’s Museum of Natural History to acquire dinosaur bones being discovered in Montana and Wyoming in the late 1800s. Neil wanted to see what Carnegie’s team had found, so we visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Wow! Dinosaurs obsession skipped me, but the curatorial staff has done a remarkable job of presenting the skeletons and the paleontology. Much else of interest to see there too. Like gemstones—more up my alley.

We stopped for a nourishing lunch at the Milkshake Factory. Exactly what it sounds like, though they sell ice cream sundaes too. Oh, and chocolate candy. The branch we visited was near the Pitt campus, and we strolled around, working off maybe 1% of those milkshake calories and visited the Stephen Foster memorial on campus—who knew?—near the Cathedral of Learning. (The University boffins were very proud of the Cathedral of Learning and showed it off to Frank Lloyd Wright, whose reaction was, “Nice lawn.”) Anyway, the Foster memorial seemed mostly closed, but it’s nice to know the composer of “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races” is honored in his home town.

The visit to the Heinz Memorial Chapel (yes, that Heinz, Mr. 57), dedicated in 1938, was something else again. It’s a beautiful small nonsectarian chapel, also near the CofL, which hosts about 2500 events every year. Its brilliantly colored stained glass windows depict leaders from science, literature, governance, religious, and human aspiration—with an equal number of male and female figures. Thus you find Sir Thomas More just above William Penn (pictured) and Queen Isabella above Florence Nightingale. The windows were designed by Bostonian Charles J. Connick, whose first training was in Pittsburgh, and contain almost 250,000 pieces of glass.

You can’t visit Pittsburgh without traveling over some of its many bridges, most painted an unexpected, bright yellow. We naturally had to cross the Andy Warhol Bridge to visit the Andy Warhol Museum. This was an attraction I enjoyed more than expected to. I was thinking, “I don’t even like canned soup,” but there was much to see, as the artist worked in so many different styles and media.

He was born on Pittsburgh’s South Side to an Austro-Hungarian family named Warhola. They were poor, had no indoor plumbing, and yet he became one of the most famous celebrities of his era. The exhibits included a how-to video about his method for creating his blotted line works (like those pictured in this article), which was fascinating. Well worth a visit!

Conspiracy Theory Season

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A new presidential election season is fast-approaching, and it would be timely to take a look at the American Electorate. The publication Military Times recently reminded me of a survey reported a decade ago that found 12.6 million Americans believed that “Lizard People” run the country. Reptilians are popular characters in science fiction and fantasy, going back decades. Time enough for people to distinguish fact from fiction, you’d think.

Also at that time, as reported in The Atlantic, 37 percent of Americans believed global warming was a hoax. (Time to re-ask that one.)

Conspiracy theories explain this confusing world in simplistic and sometimes bizarre ways. Some of them boost their appeal by pretending to secret knowledge, playing on alienated individuals’ desire to be “on the inside.” Think QAnon. In fact, one social psychologist has suggested that the smaller the group believing a specific theory, the more attractive it becomes. “You’re special,” the belief conveys.

Perhaps the difficulty is not what conspiracy theorists believe, but what they don’t believe. They don’t believe government and other leaders work in their best interests. This can morph into disbelieving any information from official channels—for example, that 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook, that COVID vaccines work. Loss of trust in social, political, and economic institutions has many causes, some quite compelling, which is why effective accountability efforts are so important. They are more than a response to a single incident; they preserve the integrity of the entire institution.

With the election looming, conspiracy theories are likely to blossom in classic and new forms. Sometimes these theories focus on supposed external enemies, and sometimes the enemies are within, like the lizard people. Americans who feel alienated and powerless are more likely to believe them, as a way of explaining why their lives feel out of their control (and it’s not their fault). Ironically, the result may be that they are less likely to take action to improve their situation, consigning themselves to lives of dissatisfaction.

Picture: SarahRichterArt for Pixabay

Top-Notch Espionage Movies? Ask A Spy

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Former CIA operations officer Mark Davidson is writing the new column, “Chalk Marks,” for the national security news outlet, The Cipher Brief. The column will explore his interest in the intersection of intelligence and espionage with literature, film and popular culture, and it promises to be quite entertaining.

His first posting responds to a frequent question he receives: “What is the best spy movie?” Of course, he acknowledges up front that the quality of the film has nothing to do with how realistic it is. He says, “I love the Mission Impossible films, but they are about as reflective of life in the clandestine service as Hogwarts is to boarding school.”

When it comes to realism, though, he has a solid recommendation from the Cold War era, which he believes strongly was the golden age of espionage—the John Le Carré/George Smiley era—a time when he says tradecraft and counterintelligence mattered most. He suggests:

The Good Shepherd (2006), directed by Robert De Niro and starring Matt Damon and a bunch of stars (trailer). While the film may be a little history-heavy (it ends in the early 1960s), it portrays “tradecraft, mindset and minutiae at a level that few films have ever attempted.” As a writer of stories, I find “mindset” vitally important. How would a character act in this particular situation? When a story gets it right, we barely notice; when it gets it wrong, we say, “they’d never do that!”

Hallmarks of this film are tradecraft, atmosphere, and how little things contribute to success or disaster. If you’ve watched Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, about disgraced MI5 agents, you’ve seen the importance of minutia again. Sometimes the complexity of the agent’s task is revealed by its going wrong. Davidson says, “The Good Shepherd is among the best at revealing the fine line between adrenaline and stress and the precipice between success and compromise that CIA officers experience every day, and how difficult it can be to know if you are winning or losing.”

In multiple scenes, Damon’s character works with CIA experts to tease information out of the unfathomable: analyzing a murky photo or sharpening a muffled recording. Davidson considers these scenes a rare and penetrating look at this vital aspect of the work. Of course 2020 technology has 1960s methods beat, but how analysts can patiently decode a less-than-optimal image or sound file “is breathtaking and the value, immeasurable.”

Davidson also appreciates the subtlety of some of the tradecraft. Signals are a good example. “An effective signal is seen only by the person it’s intended for; anyone beyond that is a problem.” He predicts that viewers will miss some of the ops acts in The Good Shepherd, at least the first time they see the film. “I missed several, and I did this stuff for a lot of years,” he says. All part of the fun!

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Travel Tips: Saratoga Springs

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Saratoga always brings to mind two things: horse racing and poor Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. She’s desperate for gambler Nathan Detroit to take her to Niagara Falls and tie the knot, but he never makes it that far. “And they get off at Saratoga for the fourteenth time . . .” See it here!

Our recent upstate New York trip included a stop-off in Saratoga, less than two hours north of New York City, where we watched an afternoon of graded stakes races. Our betting system has a perfect record: we lose every time! But not this time. We won enough on one race to come out ahead. That’s if you don’t count parking, what we paid for the program, and a bag of chips. But a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

If you do go, note that you don’t need to go through the complicated reservation system for the Turf Club and other sit-down restaurants. There are plenty of food vendors. And I’ll bet (this one I won’t lose), you can get a beer or cocktail, too. You can find an online map of parking (including free parking), but parking is not a problem.

The pair of trumpeters who play the iconic call to the post wandered through the reserved seats and entertained a bit—“When the Saints Go Marching In” and the like. There are about forty minutes between races for walking around, finding a snack, and seeing the paddock area.

But the big attraction not to miss is Saratoga’s National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame “where the history of thoroughbred racing comes to life!” Fascinating permanent exhibits about horse racing in America (which started in the Colonial era with some of my ancestors) up to today. Artworks, replays.

And, at present, a special exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of Secretariat and his jockey, Ron Turcotte’s, astonishing 31-lengths Belmont victory (see it here). We have a friend who was at that race! It was an amazing performance.

My husband rides every week, and we couldn’t feel more respect for these wonderful animals. I know there are plenty of questions about the ethics of horse-racing, and I won’t convince any anti-racing advocates. Certainly, everything should be done to protect the animals, like adopting some of the European practices that make the sport safer there, and, possibly, my friend Eileen’s idea that major races like the Kentucky Derby shouldn’t be for three-year-olds. Giving them another year might let them gain strength. Various sources say equine skeletal development and bone growth is complete by age two, though the supporting muscles and soft tissue may continue to increase. When you look at that 1500-pound animal and those immensely slender ankles, it’s no wonder the sport is risky.

Still, a well-run horse race is a thing of beauty.

Related Reading: Hyperion’s Fracture by Thomas Kelso about the effort to safe an injured race-horse. The veterinary aspect was fascinating, though the pharmaceutical exec bad-guy a little over-the-top for my taste. You learn a lot while rooting for Hyperion.

Fort Ticonderoga: Key to the Continent

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A short trip to Upstate New York last week involved a smorgasbord of activities, including getting my thumb stung by a hornet, which I do not recommend as a vacation enhancement.

We used Glens Falls as our base and drove along the west shore of Lake George up to Fort Ticonderoga, site of so many battles in Colonial times. We didn’t visit Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George, because it is already so fixed in my mind by my favorite movie, the 1992 Daniel Day-Lewis Last of the Mohicans.

Instead, we headed to Fort Ticonderoga at the narrow southern end of Lake Champlain. The northern tip of Lake George and the southern portion of Lake Champlain, both north-flowing lakes, are connect via the difficult La Chute River. Although the river is only 3.5 miles long, it drops about 230 feet (more height than Niagara Falls), which made it a key portage point for the military, if not an easily traversable waterway. Fabulous views on this drive!

Fort Ticonderoga was a pivotal point in numerous battles; between French explorer Samuel de Champlain and the Iroquois (1609); during the French and Indian War, when the Colonials fought alongside the British (1758-59); and in the American Revolution when the Patriots fought the British (1775-1777). As you can imagine, it’s easy to get tangled up in this history as the flags flying over the fort were changing with great regularity.

To combat confusion, each year the nonprofit (non-governmental) organization that maintains the Fort and runs its extensive history education program, adopts a particular year and focuses some of its programming on the experiences of a particular set of combatants at that time. When we visited, the program was focused on 1760 and the final British campaign to conquer New France (i.e., Canada).

Another notable year in the Fort’s history was 1775. News traveled slowly in those days, and the fort’s small contingent of British occupiers hadn’t heard about the battles of Lexington and Concord—the start of the American Revolution. In the middle of the night, they were overwhelmed by a small group of Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Allen, and Massachusetts militia, led by Benedict Arnold (still on the American side at that point).

Their purpose in capturing the fort was to seize its cannon and transport them three hundred miles over the snow-covered Berkshire mountains to Boston. The cannon were desperately needed there, in order to end a nearly year-long British siege. Several famous artworks depict the struggle over rough terrain by men and oxen, but it is apocryphal that oxen were used in this way. The cannon were pulled on sleds by horses, no easy feat, either, though the myth persists.

Don’t miss the boat trip out into the lake which provides helpful views of the Patriots’ various military positions on both sides of the lake, including Mount Defiance and Mount Independence. Ticonderoga was uniquely situated to control any forces seeking to travel south from French Canada and thereby, it could protect the entire Hudson Valley, Albany, and New York. Although New York itself was in British hands, it could not be resupplied by this route.

Aside from the costumed tour guides and staff who put on a wide variety of programming, the property includes a really beautiful “king’s garden,” corn maze, hiking trail, colonial crafts demonstrations (tailoring, shoemaking, musket maintenance, and the like), and spectacular scenery. Kids and grownups were having a great time! We did too. Except for the, you know, hornet thing.

Photos: of the fort by Mwanner and of the soldiers by Gin; each used under this Creative Commons license, no changes made.