Tuesday, January 29, 2019

WEIRD WESTERNS: SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009)

★★★☆☆

George Romero's oddest zombie film, in which an island full of Irish cowboys and fisherman battle over what to do with the undead.

By Max Sparber

There's a lot that is baffling about George Romero's "Survival of the Dead." Romero, of course, created the modern zombie movie with "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968, the first of a trilogy of beloved zombie films that wed horror to an oftentimes daffy sensibility for social commentary — a lot of people remember "Dawn of the Dead" as a deadpan parody of mindless consumerism, but forget the film includes a pie fight.

Romero rebooted his own series years later with "Diary of the Dead," a film that used a zombie outbreak to satirize the culture of narcissism that has risen with social media — his characters could not stop taking selfies even when the dead rose from their graves.

"Survival of the Dead" runs approximately parallel to "Diary," and briefly intersects with it, but most of the film's action takes place on a place called Plum Island off the coast of Delaware.

The island is split between two feuding Irish families, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons, and they are at war with each other about how to resolve the zombie outbreak that has plagued their island. The O'Flynns, led by "Twin Peaks" villain Kenneth Welsh, dress like Irish fisherman and scour the island for the walking dead; when they find a ghoul, they shoot it in the head.

In the meanwhile, the Muldoons dress like cowboys and are led by Richard Fitzpatrick, a religious bully who will not destroy the zombies, hoping instead for some miraculous salvation, but seems mostly motivated by the desire to be right about something that O'Flynn is wrong about.

So they have the zombie equivalent of a range war, lifted directly from the movie "The Big Country," which likewise was about sailors battling cowboys. The zombies here literally stand in for cattle — they are corralled into horse stalls and tied up in fields.

Even by Romero standards, this is a deeply weird idea for a horror film, and neither critics nor audiences seemed to appreciate it.

It doesn't really work. Romero has admitted that having the island run by Irish patriarchs was mostly a vague gesture to Northern Ireland's Troubles — he wanted to have the film's feud reference a recent internecine conflict, and felt Jews and Arabs would be a bit too obvious.

As much as I like the idea that an entire East Coast island has been colonized by Irishmen who insist on dressing like characters from a 1958 western, it feels less like an inventive satiric detail than a strained metaphor. I guess I'm not mad about the idea that if you drop a group of Irish people anywhere in the world, they'll simply start fighting each other again, as though they never left Ulster. There was plenty of feuding on the part of the Irish in America, but it was rarely a recreation of the fight they left behind. As an example, often referenced in reviews of this film, there were the Irish McCoys who legendarily feuded with the Hatfields, but the Hatfields were from England. Irish-Americans developed new feuds in America; they didn't bring the old ones.

That being said, there is a lot of inventiveness in this film that works. Romero has longed worked with zombies that compulsively repeat simple actions from their lives when they were living — like a second-long loop of film that can be trigger to repeat itself. So Plum Island is filled with zombies going about their daily business, such a mailman, chained to a mail box, who constantly tries to stuff mail in it.

And there is the O'Flynn daughter, who died at some point and has been riding around on the back of a horse ever since, a grey figure that occasionally gallops through a scene, more like a cowgirl ghost than a zombie.

In most zombie films inspired by Romero, the monsters are mindless shamblers, staggering from place to place and only rising to action when they attack and devour a victim. But Romero's zombies retain a hint of their humanity in this reflexive need to engage in simplified human behavior, as though they still have some memory of having been alive.

This gooses the film a bit, in the way good horror does. This is a Weird Western in which the monsters are genuinely haunting, but with a whiff of tragedy. And, as if often the case with Romero, more human than some of the human characters.

The script for "A Glance at New York," the play that introduced the character of Mose the Fireboy, has survived.

Apparently none of the other Mose playscripts are available, although there may be some in private collections, but "Glance" is available through a script omnibus called "On Stage America!" edited by Walter J. Messerve, and various online dealers also offer their own printing. The play is long in the public domain, so anyone who wants to print up a copy and sell it may do so.

There are two things you should know about "A Glance at New York" at the outset: Firstly, it isn't a play so much as it is a series of comic episodes set around the Bowery neighborhood of mid-19th century New York. Secondly, Mose is not the main character.

In an early version of the play, he is reported to have barely appeared at all, but proved popular enough that the play was revised to include more of him. Additionally, characters that would become prominent in later Mose plays, such as his girlfriend Lize and his sidekick (and sometimes foil) Syksey, are mentioned in the play but barely appear.

The main character in "Glance" is George Parsells, a rube from Albany whose visit to New York includes repeatedly being fleeced by two local confidence artists. He has a frequently absent tour guide in the form of his friend Harry Gordon, a local with a yen for George's cousin, who is also in town.

Harry went to school with Mose, and so, a third of the way into the play, invites him on a series of hikinks. They dress in women's clothes and surreptitiously attend a woman's bowling alley, they go to a bar called Loafer's Paradise and start a fight, they attend a mock auction, and they go out to eat.

The primary comedy of the script is that George manages to get had everywhere he goes, with Mose often bailing him out by throwing punches. Oh, and at one point, Mose is handed an abandoned baby in a basket, whereupon he starts crying and declares that he will never abandon a baby in need.

There are a few elements of interest in this play. Firstly, it is genuinely funny -- when George and Harry first meet, Harry insists on getting them a carriage, despite the fact that they only plan to travel a block. But to walk would be out of fashion, and so Harry sets off to find a carriage. When he returns, much later in the scene, Harry complains that he had to walk two blocks to find a carriage. The play is filled with these sorts of small, absurd moments, the sort Oscar Wilde would later excel at, where following fashion or convention leads characters to ridiculous action.

Secondly, the play works as a sort of inventory of popular confidence games of the era, all committed by a team named Mike and Jake. There is a pocketwatch scam, a billfold scam, a tour guide scam, and even a scam involving convincing George that the flashing light atop Barnam's American Museum is comet.

The auction George attends is one enormous confidence game, where he finds himself purchasing an enormous quantity of costume jewelry without meaning to. My research into history has led me to believe that a large, if scarcely mentioned, part of the economy of tourist and commuter cities was fleecing hayseeds, and "A Glance at New York" is like a master class in how to separate a county naif from his money.

But, finally, there is Mose, and it is easy to see why he became such an iconic figure of the American stage during this era.

The play was written by a burlesque writer, and so is filled with the mannered conventions of the burlesque, including asides, interstitial songs, and broad comedy. But Mose was inspired by a genuine youth movement, members of who, as we have discovered, would have been in the theater's pit, watching how they were represented onstage and ready to make trouble if they didn't like what they saw.

As a result, Mose has a swaggering verisimilitude that feels, at times, documentary. His onstage language is a warehouse of slang and idioms of the era, and he talks in a way that sometimes sounds transcribed from interviews with Bowery Boys.

As an example, here is the famous monologue that introduced Mose, who is a butcher and volunteer firefighter, although he is thinking about giving up the latter:

I've made up my mind not to run wid der machine any more. There's that Corneel Anderson don't give de boys a chance. Jest 'cause he's Chief Ingineer he thinks he ken do as he likes. Now, last night when de fire was down in Front Street, we was a-takin' 40's water; I had hold ov de butt, and seed she was gittin' too much fer us; and I said to Bill Sykes: "Syksey, take de butt." Says he, "What fur?" Says I, "Never you mind, take de butt." And he took de butt; so I goes down de street a little, and stood on 40's hose. Corneel Anderson cum along and seed me. Seys he, "Get off de hose!" Seys I, "I won't get off de hose!" Seys he, "If you don't get off de hose, I'll hit you over de gourd wid my trumpet!" Seys I, "What! I won't get off de hose!" And he did hit me over de gourd!

I realize this requires translation, and I am not sure I know enough about volunteer firefighting in the mid 1800s to completely explain it. But "Syksey, take de butt!" became a catch phrase from the play, and is widely misunderstood now, even though it is still quoted, so I will do my best to explain.

When Mose says he is thinking about giving up running "wid der machine," he's literally talking about a machine -- a water pump on wheels, which groups of firemen would gather round, some in front, pulling, some at the back end, or "butt" end, pushing.

There's a common misapprehension that "take de butt" means "hold my cigar," but, as best as I can tell, Mose is telling his friend Syksey to take over his position at the back of the pump.

The problem is that they have attached their pump to water from a rival station, and too much water is flowing through the pump for it to be effective. So Mose goes and stands on the hose to slow the flow of water, getting him in trouble with a Colonel Anderson, who is either in charge of his company or a rival company.

Anderson carries a trumpet because, in the early days, this was how firemen signaled they were coming -- old fire pumps sometimes had fanfare-style trumpets tied to the front, so firemen could blast out warning toots as they ran down the street. Colonel Anderson demands that Mose get off the house, and, when Mose refuses, the Colonel hits him with the trumpet.

At least, this is how I understand it. Whatever is going on, the play has provided a snapshot of the experience of a volunteer fireman, and, as the actor who played the role of Mose, Franck Chanfrau, was a former volunteer fireman, I think we can assume that it represents the sort of experience that actual firemen had at the time.

There are frequent flashes of this sort of of verisimilitude throughout the script, which, after all, presents itself as an observer's representation of New York in 1848 (it's original title was "New York in 1848").

When Mose first appeared onstage, he was played by a man who shared Mose's experiences, and knew an actual Mose that he used as a template, and written by a man who knew that men just like Mose would be in the audience, and would rebel if they felt they were misrepresented. The play is exaggerated and comical, but rooted in fact, which is especially interesting.

The further we get from the first play, the further we get from reality. Mose started out as a real man, and as a realistic stage character; he would soon become increasingly fictionalized and exaggerated, finally becoming a tall tale, as we shall see.

WEIRD WESTERNS: GRIM PRAIRIE TALES (1990)

★★★☆☆

A middling Weird Western anthology that benefits greatly from its wraparound story, in which James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif, playing two craggy frontier types, tell each other stories.

By Max Sparber

"Grim Prairie Tales" is a Western anthology of short supernatural pieces, scripted and directed by Wayne Coe, whose background seems to have been as a storyboard artists and never again made a feature film, although his IMDB page suggests he's attempted to get some additional Weird Western pieces off the ground.

Coe has given the film a genuinely entertaining wraparound story, in which two weary travelers on the frontier regale each other with spooky stories around a campfire. It benefits enormously from the fact that the two roles are played by James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif, although the dialogue has its own pleasures. Jones is a grizzled bounty hunter toting a body, and he is eccentric to the point of madness, while Dourif is a twitchy writer with dapper clothes and suspicious manners.

The anthology has four stories, and, at the film's release, critics claimed the stories were unmemorable and undercooked. This seems like a fair criticism, as I saw it years ago and mostly forgot about it, but for one story about a pregnant woman and a traveled that culminates in the most gynophobic sequence I have ever seen on film. I will not bother to discuss this sequence, as, rewatching, its sudden and unexplained body horror is the least interesting story in the film, if the most memorable.

No, the other three stories interest me, because they attempt something more complicated than a simple genre mash up. All three try, with various degrees of success, to make their horror indigenous to the west, rather than grafted to it. The first tells of an old man who disturbs an Indian burial mound and suffers the consequences, the second tells of a lynching, and the third tells of a gunfighter haunted by the man he killed.

Of the three, I think the middle one is the most successful, and, oddly, so do Jones and Dourif, who have a funny habit of acting as both storytellers and critics. There is nothing supernatural about the tale, but it tells of a pioneer child who discovers her father (played by the ever-oily William Atherton) is a murderous racist — and then coming to terms with the fact.

This story barely seems to qualifies as a Weird Western tale, but it is a horror story in its own way, with its own monster. Lynchings certainly weren't unique to the old west, but Coe suggests that they had their own quality on the frontier. Atherton is new to life on the frontier, owning a mile of land he hasn't even started to plow, when the lynch mob comes to call, and one very quickly gets the sense that if he refuses to play his part, he will be cut off from the settler community. We also get the sense that everybody knows this would be fatal for him and his family. So the frontier has created this sort of impossible circumstance, where survival is contingent on joining in with murder.

The story of the old man and the Indian graveyard works worst of all. It is brief and confusing, and while I like the fact that it addresses the original sin of the West — the destruction of the indigenous population — Indian burial grounds are a woeful cliche of horror. There is something satisfying about the old man's fate, in that he is buried alive in an Indian burial mound, which I haven't seen before and is specific to the west. And yet it wasn't clear what his trespass was, and why it was fatal.

The story of the haunted gunfighter is mostly set in a room in a brothel, where the gunfighter starts to unravel. His meltdown involves an animated dream sequence in which he become a bullet, and the animation resembles something Bill Plympton might have animated hopped up on peyote. The man's emotional collapse is signaled by him becoming very fussy about his appearance, and both this and the animation are unexpected, if not terrifying.

But there is something to be said for the unexpected. There's something to be said for a movie that looked at old Western movies and said, you know, without changing too much, these could be horror movies.

There have been a few films like that. "High Plains Drifter" has a lot in common with Clint Eastwood's other cowboy revenge movies, except he might be a ghost. "Ravenous" is a sort of gloss on actual frontier cannibal stories, but goosed with the Native American Wendigo legend. The recent "Bone Tomahawk" is essentially "The Searchers," but with cavemen at the end of the trail.

I find my preference is for this sort of film, even when, as with "Grim Prairie Tales," it's not quite successful.

"A Glance at New York," the play that introduced the character Mose the Fireboy, is unusual for a play of its era, in that we have a fairly detailed account of its creation.

The account comes from Benjamin Baker, the playwright, and is included in a book called "An Interviewer's Album: Comprising a Series of Chats with Eminent Players and Playwrights," authored by the admirably named George Oberkirsh Seilhamer in about 1881.

Baker gives a brief account of his biography: He was born on Grand Street, and was forced to move when his father died when the boy was 10. He was apprenticed to a harness-maker, but he didn't like it and ran away.

He worked for a while as a clerk in New Orleans, and then, at 17, decided to become an actor. He joined a troupe in Natchez, Mississippi. He made his way back to New York, appearing at the Franklin Theater with Junius Brutus Booth, and then moved on the the Chatham Theatre. He was engaged to write a burlesque at the Olympic Theatre, which was a success, and many scripts soon followed.

And then comes Mose, as related:

[Baker states that] "The subjects of my dramatic efforts were mostly the follies of the day, and, of course, were not calculated to live."

"But Mose has lived," the interviewer interposed. "That piece made me a great gun," Mr. Baker answered, laughing, "and it made Chanfrau famous in a single night almost. I struck Mose in 1848. It was first played for my benefit in a little piece of mine afterwards called "A Glance at New York," but named for that night only "New York in 1848." Mr. Mitchell used to give us a week's notice of our benefits. Mary Taylor was ill, and I depended on Chanfrau for mine that season I had promised to write the part of a fire boy for him, and we thought that my benefit night would be a good time to try it. I made Mose a rough melon, but sweet at the core. In writing the piece I was afraid the Centre Market boys would take offense at it, and to satisfy them I put the pathos about the baby into it."

"Cornelius Mathews is under the impression that Mose was taken from his novel," the interviewer said, anxious to draw Mr. Baker out on this point, especially as Mr. John E. Owens had strenuously objected to Mr. Mathews' claim.

"I know that Mr. Mathews is under that impression," Mr. Baker replied; " indeed he has said the same thing to me, but it is a mistake. I had not read 'Puffer Hopkins' at the time I wrote 'A Glance at New York ' The only suggestions which were drawn from any extraneous source were the cellar scene and the part of Major Gates, the hint for which I took from '102 Broadway,' by William Henry Herbert. I never took the trouble to correct Mr. Mathews' mistake, and there are other claims in regard to the piece which are equally without foundation. For instance, I saw not long ago that one of the papers spoke of the death of the original of Mose — Mose Humphreys, who died recently in the Sandwich Islands. He always claimed to be the original, but I never thought of him either in writing or naming the part. Indeed, most of the parts were not named until after it was determined that the play should be called a 'Glance at New York,' and the piece, when it had been rewritten after its first production for my benefit, was not rechristened until it had been in rehearsal some time. Afterwards I wrote for the Chatham Theatre another piece with the character of Mose in it, which I called 'New York as It Is.' It was entirely different from a 'Glance at New York,' but it was in the same style."

"How about its production in Philadelphia?" the interviewer asked.

"Burton wanted to do the piece at the Arch Street Theatre, and he brought John E. Owens, who was his comedian, to the Olympic to see it. The house was so full that night that I had to give Owens a seat in the orchestra. After the performance Burton gave me $25, the usual price for pieces in those days — twenty- five dollars was a pile of money then — and I furnished him with a copy."

There are a few things to discuss here. Firstly, we've had the mention of the Centre Market in New York a few times. This is a reference to a one-block street in lower Manhattan consisting of a variety of storefront businesses, including a gun shop, and Centre Market boys seem to be another term for Bowery B'hoys -- "Our Firemen, The History of the NY Fire Departments" mentions the Lady Washington fire crew, of which Mose Humpheys was one, and says that they "were a lively crowd, being composed mostly of Centre Market boys."

"The Golden Argosy," from 1885, did an article on Frank Chanfrau where they wrote that Mose was a "Centre Market 'B'hoy'" and added that "the Centre Market boys were the roughest and the toughest of the town, and in the theater pit they were a power. It was to them all the playing was done; their approval was worked for, and their disapproval was dodged ... that is, the eggs and vegetables."

There is a scene, mentioned by Baker above, which I will discuss when I summarize the play, in which Mose finds an abandoned child. "Argosy" mentions it as well:

The author felt some trepidation and anxiety as to how the Centre Market boys would receive a "take-off" of themselves, audaciously acted to their faces.

Chanfrau was stricken down with brain fever during rehearsals, two days before the event. A brother actor watched the patient and studied the part of "Mose," for fear the one for whom it was intended and who was stricken down, should not recover in time to appear. Chanfrau pulled through, though, and appeared on the appointed night as "Mose." The Centre Market boys were out in force. They received Mose with a coldness that boded no good to the piece, the actor and the author. But Mr. Baker had introduced an incident into the play that showed "Mose" as a rough with a warm spot hidden in his heart, and when this incident was arrived at it just melted the pit, and they shook the house with applause.

George Oberkirsh Seilhamer also mentions an author named Cornelius Mathews, whose book "The Career of Puffer Hopkins" was supposed to have inspired Mose.

Mathews was a popular author who created a movement called "Young America," which was intended to prove that American literature was just as good as its European counterpart. Edgar Allen Poe might have agreed with the sentiment, but thought little of the author, writing of "Puffer Hopkins" that the books was "one of the most trashy novels that ever emanated from an American press." Depending on your tastes, this is either a condemnation or an irresistible endorsement.

"Puffer Hopkins" is a satiric novel of New York politics, including bare-knuckled fire boys, but Baker dismisses any influence. Baker also refuses to credit Mose Humphreys, pointing out that the name of the character hadn't been chosen until shortly before the play opened -- this is repeated by Allston Brown's letter to the New York Times, who wrote that "The name of the principal character -- Mose -- was not given to it until the last rehearsal."

I think it is likely that Baker wrote his fire boy character without thinking of anyone in particular, and that actor Frank Chanfrau played the character with Humphreys as his model, as he always claimed.

There is only one influence that Baker will cop to, and that is "102 Broadway," by William Henry Herbert; presumably he means Henry William Herbert, another author Poe had no use for, calling his writing "woefully turgid."

It's hard to know what Baker is referencing here, as I can't locate anything written by Herbert called "102 Broadway," but it is possible that Baker simply means that a character he authored, Major Gates, was actually inspired by Herbert, who lived on Broadway. The character of Major Gates is English, like Herbert, and is likewise woefully turgid.

Benjamin Baker would continue to write, but spent most of his career as a theater manager and as the assistant secretary of the Actor's Fund, until he died of a stroke in 1890.

WILD COUNTRY MUSIC: SHEL SILVERSTEIN

You may not know Shel Silverstein.

I mean, I'm sure you think you do. Most of us a grew up knowing a bit about Uncle Shelby: Prolific penner and inker of children's verses and of "The Giving Tree." You may even have stumbled across his "Uncle Shelby's ABZ" book in your grade school library, which seems, at first, like another of his collections of light comic poetry for children, until you read it and realize that it's just pretending to be a children's book. You might catch on about the moment Shel Silverstein asks you to empty your parent's wallets and mail him the money.

Hell, you may even know that he penned "A Boy Named Sue," which was a hit for Johnny Cash, and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and “The Unicorn Song,” which, for some reason, has become a standard for Irish folk bands.

But it's not terrifically surprising that the guy who wrote "Jimmy Jet and His Teevee Set," in which a boob tube-obsessed child starts to transform into the object of his attention, would also be behind these pop favorites.

Perhaps you've seen photos of Uncle Shelby. He was a lean, bearded man with a shaved head and the eyes and hawk-like nose of a villain from a Sinbad movie. Perhaps you thought "This is him?"

Because the man in the photo doesn't look like somebody who would write poems to amuse children. The man in the photo looks, instead, like somebody who might kidnap a child in a book by Robert Louis Stephenson.

And then you stumble across a song like "Polly in a Porny" off a 1973 album, in which Uncle Shelby complains that his girlfriend does things in movies that she won't do with him. Who the hell is this?

Well, this is the Shel Silverstein you may not know. This is the Silverstein who drew cartoons for Playboy,and actually lived at the Playboy Mansion, starting in 1956 and continuing, on and off, for decades (including, apparently, for almost the entirety of the 1970s.)

And this Shel Silvestein wrote songs for adults, and released a surprising number of records — somewhere around 11. These range from amusing to astonishing, starting with his Dixieland-inspired "Hairy Jazz" from 1959 and reaching their apogee in a pair of breathtaking albums, "Freakin' at the Freaker's Ball" from 1969-1972 and "The Great Conch Robbery" from 1980, bookending his Playboy decade with a pair of albums where he returns, again and again, to two themes: sex and drugs.

Sample song titles from the albums: "I Got Stoned And Missed It," "Masochistic Baby," "Don't Give a Dose to the One You Love Most, "Quaaludes Again," and the aforementioned "Polly in a Porny."

He half sings, half speaks these musical tales of decadence, sometimes gasping his way through gales of laughter, sometimes backed by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Band, playing groovy, acid-tinged country rock that calls to mind most particularly Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem from the Muppet Show, but, you know, not kid-friendly.

His songs all display the sort of doggerel genius he brought to his better-known poetry, and the same playful wit, although you're not likely to find a line like "The masturbators are baiting their masters" in "Where the Sidewalk Ends," and sometimes his gleeful cackling on the albums sounds genuinely demonic, like Silverstein was, in fact, some sort of giggling imp.

His magnum opus is to be found an another album, however, titled "Songs and Stories" from 1978; the song is called "The Smoke-Off," and details an epic battle between a world-class marijuana smoker named Pearly Sweetcake and a beatnik named The Calistoga Kid, who claims a talent for rolling joints.

What follows is a stoner's version of one of those extended tall tales that folks used to tell in frontier, spoken over a bouncy cowboy guitar. Silverstein's tale takes an obsessive interest in exaggerated details, included a seemingly endless list of types of reefer, including:

Just tops and buds of the rarest flowers
not one stem branch or seed
Maui Wowie
Panama Red and Acapulco Gold
Kif from East Afghanistan and rare Alaskan Cold Sticks from Thailand
Ganja from the Islands and Bangkok's Bloomin' Best
And some of that wet imported shit that capsized off Key West
Oaxacan tops and Kenya Bhang and Riviera Fleurs
And that rare Manhattan Silver that grows down in the New York sewers

Silverstein's tale lasts six and a half minutes and spans several years, culminating in a lunatic climax that costs the life of one of the two contestant.

One imagines Silverstein sitting in the grotto of the Playboy mansion in the middle of the 1970s, surrounded by topless naifs, strumming his guitar by the side of the pool and telling this story as a joint is passed, and his telling grows longer and his story wilder, and a newcomer listens in with disbelief.

Who is that, the newcomer asks. Shel Silverstein, one of the topless girls answers. The child's author? the newcomer asks, astounded, and the girls respond with chorus of giggles. The children's author? one retorts. Man, you don't know him. You don't know him at all.

We've met Mose Humphreys, the tall, red-headed Bowery Boy who inspired Mose the Fireboy. And we have heard tell that there was a fight once, between Humphreys and another firefighter named Hen Chanfrau. We heard that during this fight, Hen's younger brother Frank stood by and cheered.

This is Frank's story, and the story of how he created a stage character that became a fad in his lifetime and a legend afterward.

Let's begin with a brief summary of his life, as recalled by the New York Times in an obituary of the actor, dated October 3, 1884:

He was born on the 22ns of February, 1824, on the corner of the Bowery and Pell street, in the fifth ward of this city. The tenement in which he first saw light was the historic "The Old Tree House." He was taught the rudiments in city schools. His father, who kept a famous eating house, failed, and, being compelled to support himself, Frank went westward and learned the ship carpenter's trade on the shores of the great lakes. While still a lad he was a member of the "Dramatic Institute," an amateur theatrical organization which used to attempt Shakespearean performances in the old Franklin Theatre. This connection procured for him the acquaintance of some theatrical folk, if it had no better result, and when he returned from the West, without employment, he obtained a place as a "helper" on the stage of the Bowery Theatre. In those days, he was a member of the Volunteer Fire Department, and ran with Engine No. 15 -- the "Old Maid." He developed remarkable mimetic powers while working at the theatre, and was wont to imitate Tom Hamblin, the manager of the Bowery; the elder Booth, Forrest, who was a rising star, and the other celebrated actors. Hamblin heard of his ability and gave him a position as utility man in the company. Here he remained, taking the first steps of his profession, for some years, and afterward he joined the company of the Park Theatre, where he was considered a promising young actor. It was not until he appeared at Mitchell's Olympic as Jerry Clip, the versatile barber, in "A Widow's Victim," that Chanfrau's name became familiarly known. That performance was highly amusing and ingenious. Soon after Chanfrau joined Mitchell's companyMr. Ben Baker, the stage manager of that house, hastily wrote a sketch entitled "A Glance at New-York in 1848," which was produced for Mr. Baker's benefit on Feb. 15 of that year. In it Mr. Chafrau appeared as Mose. The following April he became a partner, with Mssrs. Halsey and Ewen, in the management of the Chatham-Street Theatre. For a number of years thereafter he played Mose at Mitchell's, and on the same nights appeared also at the Chatham-Street in the same character. The Chatham-Street piece was called "New York As It Is," and was also written by Mr. Baker. Chanfrau's Mose outlived both of these trifling plays, and figured also in "The Mysteries and Miseries of New-York," "Three Years and after," "Mose Married," and "Mose in California."

Mose made Chanfrau. The play was a mere sketch, and the Bowery b'hoy was its most conspicuous though not its only striking character, for Lize and Sikesey were both acknowledged types of the low life in New-York. Chanfrau caught the mannerisms and speech of the good-natured New-York rowdy, a type which has long since given way to the transplanted product of the criminal hatcheries of the Old World, and presented a picture at once accurate and amusing.

For those who didn't catch it, Chafrau came to the attention of theater producers for his skill at impersonating established actors, including "the elder Booth." They are speaking here of Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln.

Chanfrau experienced a long career downturn after his remarkable success as Mose, and his career didn't enjoy a resurgence until 1868, when he created the role of Kit in "The Arkansas Traveler," a revenge tragedy set in the American frontier. He played the role 300 times, traveling with it throughout America. According to the Times obituary, he grew bitter in his old, and gained considerable weight, in part because of rheumatism, which contributed to his death by stroke.

My previous piece on Mose Humphries told two stories of Chandrau's youthful encounters with the basis for his Mose character, but I have found one more that claims that the actor actively sough out Humphries and studied him while preparing for the role. It's from a rather odd book called "My Angling Friends: Being a Second Series of Sketches of Men I Have Fished with," author by Fred Mather in 1801, and is exactly what it claims to be: A collection of memories of people that Mather has caught fish with.

One of these men was author Ned Buntline, who used Mose as a character in his novels, which we will come to. But in his discussion of Buntline, Mather writes the following:

F. S. Chanfrau made a great hit in his character of Mose, a soap-locked, red-shirted volunteer fireman, who always wore a plug hat on one side of his head and held a cigar tilted up at an acute angle. The play furnished popular quotations of firemen's talk, and we schoolboys would quote: "Sykesy, take de butt" and "Get off dem hose or I'll hit yer wid a spanner" etc. Mose was our hero about 1850, and now as I go through Centre street on my way to the Forest and Stream office, I stop each week and look in the window of No. 20 at a picture of Chanfrau as Mose, disgustedly saying: "I'm bound not to run wid der machine any more." Five old-timers were in the City Hall by invitation of Martin J. Keese, an old fire laddy, to meet me and talk of Ned Buntline, and when I mentioned this picture they went to see it. "It's like a glimpse of the old days," said Keese, "to see that picture, but it's sad to think of the descent from Mose to Chimmie Fadden. Ned Buntline took the character of Mose from Mose Humphrey — you remember him, Jake? He ran with old 40 engine and got licked in every fight he went into. Chanfrau spent weeks studying Mose and made up just like him." And then these old "boys" became reminiscent of fires, fights, Harry Howard and other chiefs, and I enjoyed their enthusiasm as they lived their lives over again.

As you'll see, once we start discussing the play itself, there is considerable reason to believe that New York's volunteer firemen didn't think much of the character of Mose. At the same time, there are quite a few who say, as with the Times obituary, that Chanfrau's performance was notably authentic.

I expect both are true. There's no reason to think that Chanfrau, who was born in the same neighborhood as Mose, was himself a volunteer firefighter, was acclaimed for his skills with mimicry, and had met Mose on several occasions and had perhaps studied him for weeks, would not be able to produce an authentic portrait of a brawling fireboy onstage.

But as the character of Mose became an inspiration to a new generation of Bowery Boys, there is every reason to think that volunteer firemen might not appreciate that this trouble making streetfighter had come to represent them.

IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: UNDERWORLD (1927)

There has been a fifteen year gap between the "Musketeers of Pig Alley," which looked at inchoate juvenile delinquency and gangsterism in New York's slums, and "Underworld," which presents a complete culture of brutal dandies at war with each other.

That seems like it is both a long time between movies and too short a time for gangsterism to grow up as much as it did, and let me offer some explanations for both.

Firstly, there were likely other gangster movies during this time, and we have lost them. 80-90% of the films made during the silent era are gone through a combination of general neglect and the short-lived nitrate stock the films were printed on. A significant movie that followed this one is gone -- "Gang War" from 1929, which had a short cartoon paired with it, and the cartoon was none other than "Steamboat Willie," the first Mickey Mouse short. Steamboat Willie is still with us, but "Gang War" is long lost.

So there may have been a rash of films during the 20s that charted the rise of the gangster, which, thanks to Prohibition, had become a lucrative business. The Pig Alley gang felt like a holdover from the 19th century, with their battered suits and their petty crimes. "Underworld" feels like all the gangster films that would follow it, with Tommy guns, bejeweled molls, rivalries between gang bosses, and flashy suits.

But whatever came before that is now lost, I think we can credit the film's director for creating a look that we now associate with the mobster -- a sort of rough elegance, marked by dapper suits and big hats. "Underworld" was directed by Josef von Sternberg, who had a talent for glamorizing the demimonde, most famously with "The Blue Angel," the film that gave us Marlene Dietrich in a top hat.

All the character in "Underworld" have affectations of noir glamor. There is the mob boss, "Bull" Weed, played by George Bancroft as a brutish Irish lout in a fancy suit. He frequently hands out silver dollars as an affected gesture of magnanimity, but bends them with his bare hands before giving them up, like some circus strong man.

His girl is Evelyn Brent, a sulky brunette with bee-stung lips and evening gowns covered in feathers; as a result, nobody ever calls her anything other than Feathers. And there is Bull Weed's consigliere, to use a term borrowed from the Italian mob: He is a former drunk played by Clive Brook, and now named Rolls Royce.

Brook cleans up well -- he slicks his hair back and starts wearing tuxedos and a gangster hat so large it resembles something worn by the Pioneers, and Feathers immediately falls hard for him, which leads to complications.

In the meanwhile, Bull is having a minor spat with another crime boss, and if you're wondering if this is set in the world of Irish-American gangsters, wonder no more, as the other boss is named "Buck" Mulligan.

In a tradition that would be borrowed throughout the history of gangster films, Mulligan uses a flower shop as the front for his criminal enterprise, and he and Bull have a puckish rivalry. They like to get each other riled up, which isn't hard, as both have roiling temperaments, and any perceived slights will cause either to leap to their feat, hair suddenly wild, fists flailing, held back by friends. When Mulligan backs Feathers up against a wall at the end of an annual gangsters ball, things turn deadly.

The remainder of the film is a jail break and a spectacular, preposterous shootout with the cops, who surround Bull's apartment with military-style police vehicles and unload with every automatic weapon they can find, quite literally perforating the building as Bull fire back with a sub-machine gun.

As lensed by von Sternberg, even this looks great -- it may have been the first time anyone had filmed a man in a suit creating mayhem with a Tommy gun, which would become the iconic image of the 20s gangster.

And Bull was based on a real gangster, Chicago's Tommy O'Connor, who was born in County Limerick, Ireland and came to America to make trouble, shooting down a cop named O'Neil in the Windy City.

O'Connor was sentenced to hang but broke free of the courthouse. Nobody knows what happened to O'Connor after that -- he may have gone on to more robberies and at least one more murdered police officer. Director von Sternberg and the film's screenwriters (including Robert N. Lee, who would later write "Little Caesar") give their cinematic O'Connor a more final ending, and even a moment of grace at the end of the film. But they kept the essential brutality of the story, in which, in the underworld, a double-cross is a death sentence, and a cop is just a problem solved with a bullet.

I've eaten a lot of deviled eggs in my day. I sometimes go party, where I just want to live like there is always a 1970's-style party going on. I even imagine multiple variations of the theme: Fondu parties, where everybody is dressed in leisure suits and discusses art movies; Studio 54 parties, where everyone is spray painted gold and shares amyl nitrate; key parties, where everybody is dressed in leisure suits and discusses art movies.

During these party deliriums, I eat a lot of hors d'oeuvres, because that seems appropriate. And so deviled eggs have wound up being an entire section of my party nutrition pyramid, which also includes such categories as "cocktails," "canapes," and "flambes." But my experience with deviled eggs has been limited to the Midwestern version, which is, for those of you who haven't had it, a half a hard-boiled egg with its yolk removed, combined with mayonnaise and mustard, and then returned to the middle of the egg, sometimes garnished with paprika.

I had not realized there were international versions of the deviled egg until I tried this Ukrainian iteration, called "Nachynani Yayechka" or "stuffed eggs." It is very much like the Midwestern version, but with the addition of finely chopped sweet pickles and scallions to the yolk and, of course, dill as seasoning. I don't know that this is what John Steinbeck ate when he visited Ukraine in 1947, but he described eating some "strange-tasting stuffed eggs." It's possible he got another version of the recipe I located that had smoked ham in it. Maybe he got the one with chicken liver. Or mushrooms. Anyway, he's right that these don't taste like Midwestern version.

The pickle, of course, makes all the difference, and viva la difference. Obviously I already like deviled eggs, as the mustard in the filling gives the hors d'oeuvre an almost delicatessen flavor, and this quality is greatly increased with the addition of pickle -- my girlfriend makes an egg salad sandwich that contains pickle, and this is like a deconstructed version of that.

(I want to take a moment to note that my girlfriend always seems to have made her own version of whatever Slavic food I am taste testing, despite coming from a lumber family in Northern Minnesota. We were at a loss to explain it until a genetic test determined that she is part Croatian. It may also explain why her mother once tasted Slivovitz, a plum brandy that most people compare to a junkyard fire, and declared it "smooth.")

I am curious to try some of the other recipes. As I investigate these appetizers, it's become increasingly obvious to me that Ukrainians think that just about anything can be added to egg yolk, mustard, and mayo and stuffed into an egg white.

That sounds like a party to me.

MOSE THE FIREBOY, AN INTRODUCTION

I am going to do a short series of posts specifically about the mythic figure of Mose the Fireboy. Up front, I should mention that I have no evidence that Mose was Irish-American, either in history or in fiction. I have yet to find any source that identifies any ethnicity at all.

There are hints of possible Irishness here and there, and I will point them out when they appear, but nothing definitive. Nonetheless, we Irish-Americans have claimed him.

Just to offer a quick overview, Mose the Fireboy has had several incarnations, and I intend to look at all of them. He was a historic figure named Mose Humphreys, a printer and volunteer fireman. The original Mose became the model for a character named Mose in a play called "A Glance at New York," a slang-slinging, pugilistic butcher-firefighter who then starred in a series of popular plays.

The character of Mose was picked up by dime novels, mostly by Ned Buntline, where he was the leader of the street-fighting Bowery B'hoys. He was elevated to a mythic, folkloric figure of tall tales in Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York," and, over the course of the 20th century, turned into a sort of tall tale character, like Paul Bunyan. Finally, he was undoubtedly a primary inspiration for Bill the Butcher in the "Gangs of New York," along with William Poole, a butcher and bareknuckle boxer.

I will begin with Mose Humphreys, who is directly credited as the inspiration for Mose the Fireboy. Wikipedia offers an entry on the man, but it's one of those entries where, when you try to track down the sources, they are all contemporary and they all quote each other. So let's go to some sources that are closer to primary and see what we know about him.

Theater critic Alston Brown wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1902, years after the character of Mose the Fireboy had debuted on the stage, giving a belated but detailed account of the origin of the character. I will quote the letter more when I discuss the play, but I want to mention the facts it offers as to the inspiration behind Mose. "Mose Humphrey was a popular Centre market lad," Brown wrote, "and was a member of Martha Washington Engine Company."

Later, Brown adds the story about the actor who played Mose, Frank Chanfrau, first discovering the character:

He lived near Essex Market with his parents, and daily dropped in at a Broadway house, corner of Grand street, to get a sixpenny plate of corned beef. One day a fellow with a red shirt and open collar came in and sat down near him. The swagger, the 'soap locks,' the projected chin, &c., formed a strong typical figure. Calling to one of the waiters, he said: 'Look heah! Give me a sixpenny plate ev pork and beans and don't stop to count them beans, d'ye heah?' This was Mose Humphreys, one of the fireboys, and a printer employed on Beach's Sun."

Now, this was written decades after the event it describes, but it gives us enough to start to dig. Firstly, we must ask if there is any documentary evidence of Mose Humphreys, fireboy and printer. There were city directories from the era, and I found at least one person had located a Moses Humphreys who had been a textile worker, but the listing predated the time of our fireboy. So I dug a little, and behold:

Humphreys, Moses C., printer, and probably our fireboy.

This is from the 1839 edition of Longworth's American almanac, New-York register and city directory, and it seems likely that this is our Mose. It is, after all, hardly a common name, and the likelihood that there were two Mose Humphreys working as printers in the same era in New York is passingly rare.

I should note that we will see his name written as both Humphrey and Humphreys (as happened in the NY Times article). This is both maddening and entirely common for the era, where people seemed to take their names as mere suggestions, and might offer up a different spelling or version every single time they were asked.

Let me note here that, while Humphreys isn't a uniquely Irish last name (and seems to be French in origin), it is common enough in Ireland, having been the surname for politician Francis Humphreys, rugby player Ian Humphreys, and activist Sheila Humphreys.

Mose's address in this listing is interesting -- 111 Mulberry, with Mulberry being one of the boundary streets for the largely Irish Five Points neighborhood. It was also just a few blocks off Bowery, making the story of seeing Mose in a bowery eatery entirely credible, as well as his identification as a Bowery B'hoy.

Brown's letter to the Times also insisted that Mose had been a volunteer firefighter with the "Martha Washington Engine Company," which is ... close. There was a volunteer fire department called the "Lady Washington Engine Company," number 40, located then at 173 Elm Street, which now is 185 Lafayette Street -- a few blocks from Mose's address, and a block off Bowery. If only there was somebody who might remember Mose from those days.

What have we here? It's an 1887 collection of memories of the early years of the New York fire departments, titled "Our Firemen" and authored by Augustine Costello. And, as it happens, the firemen remember Mose. He appears a few times in the book, starting with this passage:

One of the queer characters of the old days was "Rooster Kelly," who used to run with Engine No. 30. He was remarkable for the tall stories he used to tell, and for the interesting way he had of making them appear truthful. Years after the disbandment of the Volunteer Department, he related the following story about ''Old Mose:" "Mose ran with old Forty. He keeps a billiard saloon in Honolulu now. I kin remember the night him and Orange County — he was our foreman — had it nip and tuck. They were both bully boys, but Orange County kinder got the bulge on him after a four hours' tussle. One might, Orange County, Mose and me, Tom Hyer, Captain Tom Reeves, and Alick Hamilton, were down in Hob Wanamaker's saloon, corner of Reade Street and Broadway, when the fire bell rang. The fire was down in Wall Street. Just after he got there, somebody threw a stone out of the third story window of the house next door to the fire. Well, that stone struck Orange County on the shoulder, bounced off, and struck the rooster that was standing next to him handling a bucket, and killed him deader'n a door nail."

Moses Humphrey, or "Old Mose," as he was called, was the typical "Bowery boy," whom Frank Chanfrau, the actor and fireman, caricatured in his famous play. " Mose" belonged to Engine 40 (Lady Washington). Chantrau's impersonation was not pleasing to the majority of firemen, who regarded it as a libel upon themselves. America's Own, or the Fireman's Journal, of which Anthony B. Child was the editor, took the actor severely to task. By the way, it was in this paper that Maggie Mitchell received her first notice at her debut at the Bowery Theater. The Journal praised Chanfrau as an actor, but added : "It is ridiculous to attempt to make a part out of such a character as Mose is represented to be. His benevolence, and the clap-trap manoeuvres of the stage, are all sham. The effect of this character upon the juveniles who visit the theater is plainly visible, as they take every opportunity to imitate the character. Its effects upon the Fire Department are serious, in the estimation of those who are not acquainted with its members, as they set every fireman down as a 'Mose,' degrading to youth."

Let's note for a moment that Costello claims that Mose moved to Honolulu. It comes up again, a few pages later:

No. 40 ("Lady Washington") housed in Mulberry Street, near Grand. Her foreman and assistant foreman were Joseph Primrose and John Carlin, brother of William Carlin, who subsequently owned and kept the hotel on Fourteenth Street, opposite Mary's. Among the most conspicuous of her lighting men were: Mose Humphreys, a type setter (afterwards the prototype already referred to of Chanfrau's Mose in a "Glance at New York"), who died in the Sandwich Islands, where he had married a native woman, and reared a large family of young natives; and Jim Jeroloman, a shipbuilder, six feet four inches tall, who wore earrings, and who challenged "Yankee" Sullivan to a prize fight, but was easily beaten.

We'll return to that in a bit, but first, a story from the book about Mose's fighting. The various volunteer fire departments had a tendency toward competition and violence, and this resulted in a battle between two departments, as described:

The most conspicuous opponents at the other end of the line were Hen Chanfrau and Mose Humphreys. Both were pure-blooded Americans and men of noted bravery. At the crisis of their little difficulty, when victory appeared somewhat uncertain on whose gladiatorial arm to perch, a handsome bright-eyed lad of twelve years ran quickly out of Alvord's hat store, in which he had acted as clerk, and nimbly mounting an awning-post, shouted down to one of the combatants, who had just then pressed his antagonist backward over the tongue of 40 engine, and was pounding him very industriously, "Give it to him, Hen; Julia is looking at you from the window ! Don't choke him ; give him a chance to holler enough!" This nimble and encouraging youngster was Frank Chanfrau; and Mose Humphreys, who presently chorussed Frank's advice with a hearty acknowledgment of defeat, was to suggest to the then comedian in embryo a type of character which won him a double fortune and an enduring fame.

The fight lasted about thirty minutes. It resulted in the total defeat of No. 40, who abandoned their apparatus and fled precipitately. The victorious 15, determined to humiliate their antagonists in the most bitter manner known to the Volunteer firemen of that day, seized the captured engine — which was beautifully painted in white and gold — dragged it to a pump, and deluged it with water. They held possession of it for hours, but finally released it to John Carlin. They, however, refused to permit any of "40's fellows" to enter their bailiwick, and the latter were made to suffer the additional mortification of seeing their beloved "Lady Washington" drawn home from the scene of heir defeat at the tail of a cart. This notable battle terminated hostilities between 15 and 40.

So, according to this tale, Mose the Fireboy, the brawling king of the bowery, was actually badly beaten in a fight against another fireboy, who was none other than the older brother of actor Frank Chanfrau, who during the fight urged his brother on and later won fame playing the loser of that battle.

The book offers one last look at Mose, offering this tale of his fate:

Whether it was David Garthwaite or John Carland, who had 40's trumpet that night the writer is uncertain but Mose Humphrey had the head of the rope. Old firemen recollect Mose--not the Mose represented on the stage by Frank Chanfrau, who pulled on 15's rope, but Mose Humphrey of Lady Washington Engine Company No. 40. He was tall and slender, had red hair, and could hold his own well, express himself forcibly when excited, and down many a heavier weight; but it was his pride to be at the head of 40's rope. The last heard of Mose he was at Honolulu, Sandwich Islands. The King took a fancy to Mose and doubtless listened attentively to his narration's of fire life among the boys in New York, and the exploits of Old Hays, A. M. C. Smith, Prince John Davis, Bowyer, Stanton, Matsell, and others prominent in police history before the era of stars or blue coats and brass buttons, not excepting the M. P.'s of Mayor Harper's reign. Mose was made chief of police, and was never timid about going in himself when occasions required. No Sandwich Islander or imported tough had any terrors for Mose; he could lay them out without turning a hair, and give Captain Williams points how to deal with a crowd without being euchred. He had been educated among the New York boys who struck straight out from the shoulder, at a period when a knife or a pistol was never dreamed of being used. Their motto was "go in if you get squeezed." And they went in every time. Mose became owner of a hotel, and was looked upon as one of the solid citizens, but he never went back on the "White Ghost."

The book insists Mose wound up in Honolulu. Is that possible?

Maybe it is!

Here we have a record of one Moses Humphreys, US citizen, being naturalized in Hawaii on September 20 of 1850. And what's more, the Hawaiian Gazette offered up a story about Mose the Fireboy in September 6, 1871, with this biographical passage about Mose Humphreys:

Mose Humprheys seemed to feel a sort of paternal interest in the play. He went regularly to the Olympic, and having cut his name on the wooden bench in the pit to designate his seat, was in the habit of outsing all other claimants without ceremony. He died in Honolulu several years ago, and it is said he retained the "Mose" characteristics to the last.

[Mose Humphreys came to Honolulu in 1850, in a New Bedford whaler, and for several years kept a sailor's boarding house. In the early days of the fire department, Mose was a member of engine company No. 1, but reassigned after a few year's service as the duties of a fireman here were not exciting enough to suit him. He was a perfect encyclopedia on sporting events, and during his residency here kept himself thoroughly posted on matters connected with the "fancy," the New York Clipper being his favorite oracle. Mose had satisfaction on several occasions if witnessing the character, of which he himself was the original, represented on the stage of the Royal Hawaiian Theatre, the play having been produced there for the first time in 1856, by L.F. Beatty, J.S. Townsend, and others, with the former as "Mose." The proclivities of Mose, as a member of the "fancy," made him prominent but once here; and that was during the visit of "Yankee Sullivan." With this exception, he was one of the most quiet characters in town, his eccentricities only making him noted. He worked in the Advertiser occasionally, and also in the Old Mission bindery, being both a book binder and printer. A short time previous to his death he went to Maui, where he became a farmer on a small scale. He returned to this city and finally died in the Queen's Hospital in 1864.]

Here's a photo of Honolulu engine company No. 1 from the period when Mose Humphreys would have been a member.

Could one of these bold-looking fellows be Mose?

This is a Ukrainian/Russian dish called "lenivie golubtsi," which I am told translates as "lazy cabbage rolls," presumably because the meal is usually the sort of thing you'd put into a roll, but you couldn't be bothered. This may be the best-named food yet -- how many other cultures have recipes that insult your work ethic?

I have located a recipe that finely chops the ingredients, adds rice, gets squeezed into little balls, and then deep fried, but I was feeling especially lazy, so I went with the simplest recipe. This is a mix of shredded cabbage, diced carrots, tomato paste, onion, and ground beef (as I am a vegetarian, I used a vegetarian substitution). The whole of it is fried on a stovetop and left on a low heat for a while, and then just plopped onto a plate and seasoned with salt, pepper, and, this being an Eastern European dish, dill.

The results are pure comfort food, and, as a Minnesotan, a comfort food that was unexpectedly familiar. We have a rather famous local meal called hotdish, which is a savory casserole, and there are two types -- those made with a tomato base, and those made with cream of mushroom soup, which we call "Lutheran Béchamel." This tastes like the sort of thing a Minnesotan with tomato sauce might whip up, although, in Minnesota, you never know what they might throw in -- cocktail weenies, wild rice, chow mein noodles, even marshmallows, god help us.

I decided to try an experiment and mix the leftovers with a traditional Minnesotan hotdish ingredient, egg noodles, which also seemed appropriately Jewish, because if I dumped some cinnamon on the resulting dish I could pretend it was a kugel that went terribly wrong somehow.

And in answer to my own unstated question: Yes. Lazy cabbage rolls on top of egg noodles is a hotdish. In fact, there is an almost identical Minnesota recipe called Cabbage Hamburger Hotdish. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this, or by the fact that almost everything I have made so far tastes oddly familiar. Despite Minnesota's insistence that it is the unrecognized seventh Scandinavian country, we also boast a sizable Eastern European population, especially in the the Twin Cities, Duluth, and the Iron Range.

I suppose it had never occurred to me that Eastern Europeans were secretly inserting their ingredients into Minnesota hot dish recipes. But now I know. The intention of this project was to explore the recipes of Eastern Europe, but I've come to the realization that I've already explored a lot of these recipes. They were just loaded into casserole dishes and served in church basements.

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: WHISKEY TOMATO SOUP

I first had whiskey tomato soup in an Irish bar/restaurant in Minneapolis about 10 years ago. The place was called Kieran's, and has since moved to a more prominent location near Target Field in the ever-troubled Block E.

Then it was homey and genial and catered to after-work-hours businesspeople. It still does, but on a grander scale, and I like both versions of Kieran's about equally, but the older was a short walk from my old apartment and felt like my neighborhood bar. I would often go in, and I would almost always get the whiskey tomato soup.

I have since worked with the former owner and namesake, Kieran Folliard, when he launched his own whiskey, called 2 Gingers. My girlfriend worked for a while in one of his other bars, The Local, which had a longstanding record for leading the world in the amount of Jameson it served. And yet I have not been able to get the recipe for whiskey tomato soup from Kieran.

I can't be sure, but I think the soup was introduced there. It's not indigenous to Ireland, unless the Irish have been especially secretive about this food. The oldest reference I can locate to this peculiar combination of liquor and soup is from March 15, 2010, and, son of a gun, I wrote it:

"Let it be noted, however, that sometimes authenticity isn't always desirable," I wrote. "For instance, we have a number of Irish pubs in the Twin Cities, but most don't serve authentic Irish pub fare. You're not able, for instance, to order KP Meanies, which is a pickled onion-flavored corn snack. Most don't offer black pudding either, which is a sausage made from animal blood. To the best of our knowledge, nobody in town offers dulse, which is a red algae sometimes enjoyed as a snack food. Some foods just don't make the jump to the United States, so, if you're eating at, say, Kieran's, you're probably going to be having a whiskey tomato soup rather than crubeens, which are salted pig's feet."

There was a pub, Killarney House Restaurant in Davidsonville, MD, that also offered a whiskey tomato soup in 2010, but this first appears online in November of that year; maybe they read my article and got ideas.

I've scoured newspaper archives and old books, and I can find nothing that predates my 2010 article. So I'm going to go ahead and call it, barring further evidence: Whiskey tomato soup is an Irish-American innovation, began in Minneapolis at Kieran's, and I was the first person to make note of it.

Why do I like it so? I suppose it must be the whiskey, as I am not especially keen on tomato soup. But, then, the Irish make tomato soup differently than we yanks -- they make it creamy, and that's how Kieran's offered it. So maybe the creaminess had something to do with it.

Eventually I did manage to track down the original recipe, and Kieran's also used fresh tomatoes, rather than pouring their soup from a tin, and, having made it myself, it makes a difference. What results us robust and sweet, and the tomato and whiskey flavors combine as though they had been yearning for each others for years. I imagine Kieran's used Jameson, as that was the whiskey that made their reputation for a while, and certainly the soup seemed to have Jameson's mix of malt and spice.

Here's a version of the recipe: You're going to want to roast fresh plum tomatoes for about 45 minutes, and then combine it with a saute of garlic, onions, and, if you like, basil. Add to this a can of plum tomatoes, including the juice from the can, and heavy cream. At the end, dump in Jameson to taste, spooning the soup to break up the tomatoes.

The whole of it will probably take about two hours, which is terrible, just terrible. It took me 10 minutes to walk to Kieran's and five for them to serve me the soup, and that seems like it's about the outer limit of time that a person should reasonably be expected to wait for whiskey tomato soup.

Various sites list this as a Russian/Ukrainian recipe, but I had a hard time tracking down whether or not this is true. Finally I located a recipe called "soğanlı yumurta," which seems to mean "bulbous eggs," which is about as delightful a name as imaginable.

The recipe I made was quite simple: Chop up some onions, brown them in a pan, and then fry an egg on top of them. If I can trust Google translate, the original version also includes spices, sometimes red pepper, sometime paprika, and in some the onion are chopped into rings instead of being diced. Nonetheless, the recipe is essentially the same.

It is, as you can guess, a recipe with a strong onion flavor to it. We tend to use a light hand with onions in America, sprinkling a little raw chopped onion onto hamburgers and sandwiches as flavor, or breading and deep frying rings of the stuff.

But for me, I don't know if I have ever met somebody who has just cooked an entire onion and then eaten it, even though this is a popular recipe throughout the world. I suspect the reason for this is our fear of having bad breath, but you're just going to have to set this fear aside to enjoy this meal, or other Eastern European meals that make extensive use of mounds of onion or garlic. And I haven't even started making food our of cabbage.

I like a cooked or browned onion. The vegetable develops a pleasing sweetness when cooked, and pairs well with egg without overpowering the flavor of the egg. It's a simple dish, but because it thrusts the flavor of the onion so much into the forefront, it feels like nothing an American would ever make. You see, in American, we have egg with maybe a little bit of onion.

In Russia, we have onion with maybe a little bit of egg.

IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY (1912)

I will be somewhat brief in discussing this film, for two reasons. First, the film itself is somewhat brief -- about 17 minutes. Secondly, it's not clear that this is an Irish gangster movie. There are a few reasons to think it might be, which I will detail shortly, but I include "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" primarily because it is reportedly the first film made about organized crime.

"Organized" is a bit of a misnomer here. Our film's criminals, led by the Snapper Kid (Elmer Booth), just sort of wander around Pig Alley. They rob a musician at random. They seem like they plan to rob a bar and then don't. They go to a dance, where the Snapper Kid flings a drink out of the hand of the musician's girlfriend; historians of the film have suggested the drink was drugged and he was saving her, although this is hard to glen from the movie itself.

Later, the Snapper Kid and his gang get into a shootout with another gang, during which the musician takes his wallet back. The Snapper Kid escapes, and is almost pinched by the police, but the girl he rescued provides an alibi. Somebody hands the Snapper Kid money. The end.

The film was by D.W. Griffith, and there are some stylistic tics that are worth mentioning. Griffith is rightfully understood as one of the first filmmakers to develop film into its own medium -- early attempts at filmmaker often consisted of performances of stage melodramas or vaudeville performances before a stationary camera.

Griffith, in the meanwhile, explored the way camera setup and movement could contribute to storytelling, and in the film he introduced two notable experiments. In one, a girl in a street scene stares directly at the camera, which reportedly always caused excited chatter in the audience. The was Griffith mimicking the look of documentary films, where he had often noticed that bystanders would look directly at the camera, and this may have been film's first attempt at cinéma vérité.

Secondly, for a scene in which the Snapper Kid and his gang creep down an alley for a gunfight, Griffith demanded the cameraman focus on the gangsters and let the background become blurry. This is a common technique nowadays -- it's called "shallow focus" -- but was so outre then that Griffith reportedly had to drag his cameraman to an art museum to show him classic paintings in which the background is blurred to convince him it was artistically credible. And he was right -- the scene where the Pig Alley Musketeers slowly close in on the camera has real menace to it.

There was a Pig Alley in New York, where the film was set. It was right off 288 Greenwich Street, which, unless I'm misreading the map, is in what is now Tribeca. I don't know if this is the Pig Alley that Griffith meant; the name was common enough, always given to streets where locals raised hogs.

New York's Pig Alley was a tenement, housed a large immigrant community, and was the site of a massive conflagration in the middle part of the 1800s. But, again, this may not have been Griffith's Pig Alley. It was common enough to apply to invent alleys to represent immigrant tenements, as the comic strip The Yellow Kid did with Hogan's Alley.

It is interesting that this early gangster film isn't so much about the sorts of organized crime stories later films would focus on -- numbers running, the dope racket, murders for hire, and, of course, booze. This is really about street hooliganism, and the Musketeers of this film feel more like the sorts of characters we would later find in juvenile delinquent films.

They look young -- one, in a checkered shirt, looks like he can't be older than 16, and the Snapper Kid really does look like a kid. They just sort of amble around the tenement in ill-fitting sack suits and battered fedoras, a dapperness that looks taken off a charity clothes drive rather than the sort of bespoke elegance of later gangsters.

And the Snapper Kid, as played by Elmer Booth, has a youthful derring-do; he's like a young version of the cocky, pugilistic Irish gangsters played by James Cagney, forever bouncing on the balls of his feet and sizing the world up with a cockeyed smile.

It's the Snapper Kid that gives the film its only hint of Irishness, or, more properly, it's Elmer Booth, who would die a few years later in a car crash. He was a stage actor, and, at the exact moment "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" was touring movie houses, Booth was on the road with a play called "Stop Thief!" The play was about a group of kleptomaniacs, but Booth played a legitimate crook in it, one with a typically Irish last name: Jack Doogan.

The Snapper Kid is, in fact, so very like a Jimmy Cagney character in looks and mannerisms that there has been speculation that Cagney modeled his performance on Booth's. There is, as far as I can tell, no evidence of that. But it makes "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" worth noting as a starting point, because, whether or not The Snapper Kid was intended to be understood as Irish, he exists as sort of an ur-Irish gangster.

There would be a lot to follow him, and they all seemed to have elements of the Snapper Kid in them, from their hoofer's physicality to their expressive bonhomie to their sudden bursts of unpremeditated violence. Whether or not the Snapper Kid was an Irish gangster, all Irish gangsters going forward would be a little bit Snapper Kid.

When I made this, it had been hot and muggy, which is the sort of thing that makes the idea of turning on an oven and burners in the kitchen profoundly unappealing. Instead, I decided to make a Ukrainian salad, and a little research led me to something called "salat s ogurtsami i pomidorami," which literally means "salad with cucumbers and tomato."

There's more to it, of course. There's also pressed garlic, onion, and a dressing made of sour cream and mayonnaise. Oh, and the salad can be herbed as well, and a lot of recipes suggest dill, which is starting to seem like to go-to herb of choice for recipes from the former Soviet Union.

I feel a bit odd writing about this salad. I expected this project to be a voyage through the strangeness of a foreign palate, and, instead, this salad is extraordinarily familiar. I grew up eating something very like this, as did my girlfriend -- it's her go-to salad, and her diet is thoroughly Minnesotan.

That being said, it's often not the main ingredients that make the meal, but the preparation and flavoring. We Minnesotans tend to just splash ranch dressing onto this sort of salad -- considering that ranch dressing contains garlic and dill, as well as a mayonnaise base, it's like we were trying for the Ukrainian recipe and just missed it.

And here's the difference: ranch is made with buttermilk, which has a tart sweetness. The Ukrainian dressing prefers sour cream, with its straightforward sourness, which is definitely one of the defining tastes in the Eastern European flavor profile.

It is, I will allow, a subtle difference, but the Ukrainian dressing benefits from subtlety. I find that ranch dressing tends to overpower whatever it's put on, whereas the Ukrainian dressing allows the flavor of the cucumber and tomato to come to the fore.

Still, it's a bit like I sat down to make a Ukrainian breakfast and the results looked and tasted almost exactly like Cheerios. It's like I traveled to Kiev and the first thing I saw was a Paul Bunyan statue. There's only so much familiarity I can handle.

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: MULLIGAN STEW

Mulligan stew, it's a hobo stew, yes? That's what Wikipedia would have us believe -- that it was a communal stew, where every tramp that could would pitch in a little ingredient, one with chicken, one with potatoes, one with salt, one with onions, and then all would sup together. It's based on Irish stew, Wikipedia tells us. The website even quotes a 1900 newspaper describing this act of trampish collaboration.

I don't know. I find an 1898 reference to Mulligan stew in the Helena Independent, where they describe a Scotch terrier, adopted by a military company, as looking like a tarantula and having the color of a Mulligan stew. Later that year, soldiers complain about their diet in the same publication, saying it consists exclusively of "bacon, beans, and Mulligan stew."

The same year, I find a re ence to the meal in a Fresno Republican Weekly paper, a report from a soldier in Company C, who says "Alvin Akers and Topsy Faber are in charge of the culinary department now and the tasty manner in which they get up a 'Mulligan' stew would tickle the palate of the most critical epicure."

So maybe later the stew was a hobo thing, but, in its first appearance, it was a military thing; a 1905 Fresno Morning Republican article explicitly describes the making of a Mulligan stew in the "army style."

Later slang dictionaries say that "mulligan battery" was military jargon for a cook wagon, so maybe one influenced the other. We don't know what was in this stew yet, and the earliest ingredient I have found is from an 1899 article in the Fresno Republican about an impropriety part at a club thrown by some hunters who had collectively managed to bring down 90 doves. They used these as the constituent ingredient in a Mulligan stew.

We get a fuller recipe for the stew in an epic poem from Alaska from 1901, a description of making the stuff along the Alaska trail that reads as follows:

A "Mulligan stew!" do you ask what is that?
You're just a "cheechawker," I'll bet my old hat!
Why, up in Alaska, it's just the right stuff!
One failing it has -- you can't get half enough.
It's odor you smell as it cooks, and it seems,
'Twill never be done, to fulfill your fond dreams.
It's ptarmigan , dumpling and spuds, in a slush,
Pork, onions, and beans (they all help one to "mush"),
Salt, pepper and garlic, hardtack and rice, too,
And all odds and ends -- that's a "Mulligan stew."

To quickly clarify, "cheechawker" is apparently Chinook jargon for a newcomer, and ptarmigan is a gamebird that it common enough in Alaska, and also called the snow chicken.

The meal seems to have been common in Alaska -- an author in the Bellingham Herald in Washington State described a trip to the northern state on a ship, and he described his meal as follows: "Breakfast consisted of wolly-gahow, slumgulleon, mulligan stew, 16 to 1, smear, bullets, etc. For dinner we just reversed the order."

I'll just come out and say I don't know what most of these foods are, but for Slumgullion, which is probably an old miner's term for any muddy beverage. Whatever he was eating, I would love to see these items offered on a contemporary menu.

I find what seem to be both our first Irishmen and our first hobos in 1905, in Missoula, where the Anaconda Standard reported on Charles O'Neill and James O'Brien, drunk and possessing stolen vegetables, who were on their way to the "tall timber" to make stew. The vegetables included green onions and cucumbers.

The first proper recipe I find comes from a printer's convention in Colorado Springs in 1906, when a collection of typographers made Mulligan stew for their guests.

Believe it or not, there's a hobo connection here -- there was a subculture of itinerant type specialists called "tramp printers" who would move from job to job, relying on the frequent need for typesetters to underwrite a restless life on the road. Their recipe is as follows:

Chicken, young or old
Beef, tender or tough
Salt pork (plenty of salt)
Mutton (made from sheep)
Potatoes (commonly called "spuds")
Carrots, turnips, tomatoes, green corn (and other vegetables)

Take an ax (or similar device) and chop all into fine particles (more or less), throw entire mixture into a large receptacle and coil until all the ingredients are tender (the meat especially). Serve while steaming hot.

This is the recipe, which the Denver ex-delegates to the International Typographical union used yesterday in preparing the famous "Mulligan stew," -- the printer's delight -- which was the bill of fare at Bloomfield park, when 1,000 delegates to the annual convention which adjourned in Colorado Springs, which adjourned Saturday, with their friends, were guests of the Denver printers.

Ordinarily, "Mulligan stew" is made in a tomato can over a small fire at the side of a water tank, forty miles from nowhere, while the "cooks" are awaiting the arrival of a friendly freight train to take them on their way.

As you can probably tell by now, a Mulligan stew is pretty much any old thing, as long as it involves meat and vegetables. Tramps liked it because it could be made out of whatever they could scavenge, and the military probably liked it because it made good use of leftovers.

I suspect for this exact reason the soup also become popular in firehouses -- you start seeing the stew show up in a lot of stories about firemen. Fort Worth's Captain Frank Massengale, of the Seventh Ward Fore Company, apparently had a recipe that was quite celebrated, at least according to a 1908 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Massengale failed to share his recipe, so once again we must turn to the hobos to know how it's done. The following is from a Denver Post article from 1911 describing a raid on a hobo camp in which stolen chickens were discovered -- already in the meal:

Recipe for Mulligan stew by John J. Duggan, hobo:

Two fat hens.

Three large onions, half a dozen turnips, two carrots, a bunch of parsley, some bread crusts, a hunk of bacon and a hambone. Boil until done in a wash boiler.

If ever there was a meal ready for some mixological invention, it is the Mulligan stew. It might be worth revisiting the original Irish stew recipe, where the base meat is mutton or kid, but the Americanized version inevitably seems to include some sort of bird meat. Potatoes, carrots, and turnips seem standard.

If you're going to make it, though, find out what wolly-gahow was. That seems like an important side-dish.

The Scintillating Non-Fiction of Max Sparber

Fragments that will eventually be assembled into books.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2019

WEIRD WESTERNS: SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009)

★★★☆☆

George Romero's oddest zombie film, in which an island full of Irish cowboys and fisherman battle over what to do with the undead.

MOSE THE FIREBOY: THE SCRIPT

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

WEIRD WESTERNS: GRIM PRAIRIE TALES (1990)

★★★☆☆

A middling Weird Western anthology that benefits greatly from its wraparound story, in which James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif, playing two craggy frontier types, tell each other stories.

MOSE THE FIREBOY: THE PLAYWRIGHT

Thursday, January 17, 2019

WILD COUNTRY MUSIC: SHEL SILVERSTEIN

MOSE THE FIREBOY: THE ACTOR

Monday, January 14, 2019

IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: UNDERWORLD (1927)

COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: UKRAINIAN DEVILED EGGS

Thursday, January 10, 2019

MOSE THE FIREBOY, AN INTRODUCTION

COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: LAZY CABBAGE ROLLS

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: WHISKEY TOMATO SOUP

COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: FRIED EGG WITH ONION

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY (1912)

COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: CUCUMBER AND TOMATO SALAD

Monday, January 7, 2019

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: MULLIGAN STEW

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