Boxing the Compass: Crime Classics of the Early '70s

There's just nothing else like 'em. These really aren't up there with Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, or Night Moves, but they all have that realistic, mundane, day-in-the-life-of-crime vibe that reached its apotheosis in Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, and The Sopranos. Respect.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, dir. Peter Yates)

Robert Mitchum's performance here as the titular criminal is masterful as he tries to escape his fate; his wheeling and dealing isn't the work of a master con artist—even though it may seem that way at first—but the frantic scramblings of a man who knows he's doomed but can't admit it to himself. Who could? Caught between the Irish mob and the Feds and one seriously low-level gunrunner, he does everything he can to avoid another trip to the big house. The way this one plays out is pure '70s grit. Terrific Boston locales too. I suppose the only odd thing here is how a man of Mitchum's age could have kids barely in grade school. This was recently released on a Criterion Collection DVD.


French Connection II (1975, dir. John Frankenheimer)

Since the original French Connection swept up the major Oscars in '71 a sequel was practically a foregone conclusion. Missing the estimable Roy Scheider (lost at sea with Spielberg and co. for Jaws) FCII might not boast his and Hackman's buddy routine and the New York mean streets, but it has a harrowing forced addiction/detox sequence and parts of Paris the tourists never see. Hackman pushes Popeye even further in his single-mindedness, although he still takes the time to get drunk (in a hilarious scene with a French bartender) and try to pick up hot French chicks. The climactic shootout with Charnier (Fernando Rey), the bad guy from the original, is terrific, and the final shot reduces the action movie to its barest essential. The poster doesn't lie.


Charley Varrick (1973, dir. Don Siegel)

This character-driven heist-gone-wrong piece is best known today as the origin of a line from Pulp Fiction ("a blow torch and a pair of pliers"), Joe Don Baker's hired killer Molly who seems to be an inspiration for Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and this unexpected exchange between Varrick (the estimable Walter Matthau) and a willing lady:

Charley Varrick: I like your bed. You may find this hard to believe but I've never slept on a round bed.
Sybil Fort: Is that so?
CV: What's the best way? North, south, east, or west?
SF: That depends on what you had in mind.
CV: What I had in mind was boxing the compass.

Walter Matthau makes a dirty double-entendre?! Probably the best one since "It took me three hours to figure out that 'F.U.' was Felix Unger!"


Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, dir. Sam Peckinpah)

Reviled by many, considered by some to be Peckinpah's masterpiece, this existential modern-day western Mexican manhunt features the always-welcome Warren Oates. It revels in cruelty, grunginess, misogyny—indeed, misanthropy—slow-motion death, and some terrific lines. Shoving off goons hanging around a cemetery: "Don't look at me with your goddamn fuckin' eyes!" To an already-dead body as he shoots it: "Why? Because it feels so damn good!" And to his prostitute girlfriend who objects to gathering up the head of a man dead and buried: "The church cuts off the feet, fingers, any other goddamn thing from the saints, don't they? Well, what the hell? Alfredo's our saint. He's the saint of our money, and I'm gonna borrow a piece of him." Apparently when Oates saw Tom Waits on TV in the mid-'70s, he exclaimed, "That guy stole my act." He was probably speaking of this scene:



Also contains the classic bit, perhaps a cinematic anomaly, of trying to kill crabs with tequila. Yes, those kinds of crabs. There is nothing Warren Oates cannot do. Respect.

The Public Image, Y'all: Rip Torn in Payday (1973)

"Argh! Fuck y'all! I'm not public property!" So growls country star Maury Dann in the little-known 1973 character study Payday. A road movie taking place over two frenzied, pill-popping, Wild Turkey-guzzling, bird-hunting and groupie-fucking days, Rip Torn gives it his Method-acting best as the kind of man who knows he can create any kind of mess and his handlers will pick up the bill. "You're just a rich little child with a lot of toys," a woman tells him, but you've pretty much figured that out by that point. Payday invokes the madness of the road--if it doesn't quite achieve full-on insanity, it reaches a decent point of intoxication and sleepless edginess.


Dann is equal parts Hank Williams and Barnum & Bailey, but he's got the attributes reversed: he's not that talented in the art of country music but can certainly take advantage of all the suckers that surround him; he likes to get fucked up but actually might not be that great of an entertainer. Despite ostensibly taking place in the honky-tonks of the era, only the opening sequence gives any real glimpse of that world, with Torn wailing away on the corny "She's Just a Country Girl," (all songs are by Shel Silverstein) winking and mugging to the desperately unhip patrons.


The face Dann presents to his fans is one much different from the one he shows in the backrooms and hotel rooms and parking lots and even at his old mother's rundown rural home. Sly, charming, and ingratiating when socializing with regular folk, he's willful and destructive behind the scenes and not above cheaply "seducing" one of the prettier "unhip" patrons or smarmily trying to get out of a speeding ticket. Still it's painful to watch the his humiliation at having to brown-nose an unctuous DJ ("Pigfucker son of a bitch") at a hick radio station, trying to get out of a public appearance by presenting the guy with a bottle of Wild Turkey while on the air ("Here's some game birds I shot"). We can see how promoters pressured and used veiled threats on stars--and how much the artists resented it but felt powerless to fight back. But Maury Dann is not exactly afraid of fighting back. He's a precursor to the "outlaw country" stars like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson that would soon rejuvenate the genre.

His manager, no-nonsense, Pepsi-swilling Bob (Jeff Morris) routinely gets Dann out of scrapes ("I don't care how you fix it, get me out of this town tonight"), and the affabale, chauffeur/wanna-be chef Chicago (Cliff Emmich) does whatever Dann wants--and eventually takes the biggest fall of all for him. The two women along for the ride are Mayleen (Ahni Capri) his "girlfriend," and Rosamond (Elaine Heilveil ), a young groupie Dann pilfers from his soon-to-be estranged best bud Clarence (Michael Gwynn). Rosamond and Dann have sex in the backseat of his Cadillac while they think Mayleen is asleep next to them. This of course turns out terribly. Mayleen confronts the younger woman in a gas station ladies' room: "You'll never see 21 birddogging other women's men. Get the message?" Rosamond, suddenly wise beyond her years, lights a smoke and coolly replies, "I believe I do--do you?" Zing!

But ultimately, all women are expendable, interchangeable, left on the side of the road. Literally so, for Mayleen, abandoned with a wad of cash that Dann tells her is more than she's worth. Uh, zing?

I took great pleasure in seeing the details of period and place as the entourage of good ol' boys swung through the '70s South: men's hair severely parted and oiled, gas-guzzling American cars made of steel and leather, cowboy-style Levi's, enormous belt buckles, and long-sleeved pearl-button-snapped Western shirts that any y'alt.country dude would kill for.

Its screenplay by cult novelist Dan Carpenter, Payday, despite good characterization, seems a tad under-ambitious, indifferently directed by Daryl Duke (Silent Partner). In the dramatic confrontations Torn is doing most of the heavy lifting. Still, the climactic sequence, which finds Dann taking off in a Cadillac into the country in a desperate attempt to escape his fate while ruminating acidly on his childhood, is well-done and keeping quite in character. The title Payday implies not only his getting cash for his appearances but also the movie's final scene. It's worth sticking around for. Grab a bottle of Wild Turkey and enjoy.

No Such Thing as a Cretin: The Ramones' Rocket to Russia (1977)

It's about summertime and I've been cruising around in the new ride, blasting an oldy-old favorite: the Ramones' third album, Rocket to Russia. It was perhaps the second or third Ramones album I owned back in the mid-'80s, and I wasn't expecting much as my friend who gave it to me told me it wasn't as good as their debut. How wrong he turned out to be.

Released in November 1977, at the commercial, pop-cultural height of the filth and fury known as Punk Rock, Rocket to Russia was make-or-break time for the band. Sire Records was gearing up for some serious sales and betting a lot on the band. It's no wonder, then, that the album has the band's cleanest, leanest, most accessible sound, refined to defiant, power-chorded perfection, with Joey Ramone's shouts, hiccups, and croons perfectly suited to the full-throated singalong quality virtually every song here has.


How any rock lover can resist the obvious, sugary-yet-substantial charms of intro tune “Cretin Hop” with its no-nonsense two-chord shuffle the opens the album escapes me. Once Dee Dee's bass and Tommy's drums wallop in, the song immediately encapsulates the album’s good-time freakshow tone.

“Isn’t a song about cretins in poor taste?” an interviewer asked guitarist Johnny Ramone back in the day. “No,” he said, “because there really isn’t any such thing as a cretin anymore. Same with pinheads. If we did a song about retards, that’d be in poor taste.” Holy shit, I realized—he’s dead fucking right! (You’re gonna have to trust me on this—it was in a fanzine I bought at a Ramones show in 1989 that was actually a reprint of a fanzine from the ’70s—whew!)

There's the nihilist's anthem "I Don't Care," a punk dirge in which Joey declares "I don't care about this world/And I don't care about these words." "Ramona" is a bittersweet confection with a lovely melody about a girl and the kids who love it loud; ditto the poison-pen love letter “Locket Love.” One of Joey's earliest songs, written before the Ramones, is the plaintive ballad "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" (a roaring cover by Ronnie Spector in 1980 with Cheetah Chrome on guitar truly does the song justice). Can’t go wrong with the delights of the covers of “Do You Wanna Dance?” and the live staple "Surfin' Bird." These two songs are a perfect example of what endeared me to the Ramones when I was a teen, that they seemed to get it right: innocence without irony, absurdity without cruelty. Wouldn’t it be funny if we, you know, covered a forgotten one-hit wonder pop song with power chords, tuneless vocals and an irresistible beat?

Of course there are the stone-cold classics: "Teenage Lobotomy." "We're a Happy Family." "Rockaway Beach." And then there's the song that I consider to be just about the most perfect pop song ever written, "Sheena is a Punk Rocker."

An ode to free spirits and non-conformists everywhere, to New York City, and to the power of identity that the best rock'n'roll provides, "Sheena" is everything that makes the Ramones great in 2 minutes 47 seconds:

"Well, the kids are all hopped up and ready to go/ They got their surfboards and they're heading/ to the Discotheque a Go-Go/ But she just couldn't stay/ She had to break away/ Well New York City really has it all—Oh yea-ah, oh yeahhhh!"

Second verse, same as the first. A put-the-top-down, fist-in-the-air, sing-along radio-friendly classic if ever there was one. However, when it was released as a single, radio stations took one look at the phrase "punk rocker" and recoiled in fear. Really. It's funny to think today that that phrase once struck horror into the stoutest of record company hearts, but it's true. "Safety pins, vomit, anger, snot," the whole deal was terrifying.

Ah well, surely the less-threatening sounding "Rockaway Beach," with its Beach Boys-go-garage vibe and unforgettable chorus ("Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach/It's not hard, not far to reach/ We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach") would leap to the top of the charts and ensconce the Ramones in the nation's warm bosom.

Except that this sunny, funny, delightful little ditty was released in the dead of winter. And it died. And that was it. Rocket to Russia, charting at Billboard #49 (only 1980's End of the Century would chart a few spaces higher) stopped cold. Despite relentless touring (for the next 19 years!), the spectacle of Punk Rock was a "dangerous" one, and any band associated with it was thrown out with the bathwater. Plus, audiences outside of New York City's Lower East Side just couldn't get with four geeky-looking guys in motorcycle jackets, Captain America T-shirts two sizes too small and ripped-up blue jeans—straight-leg, not flares!—not when there was John Travolta looking so suave and so dapper in his disco get-up. But come on, people, look at these fucking hipsters!

Today the reputation of the Ramones is beyond reproach; unbelievable as it may seem to all those DJ detractors and pretty people who were busy buying up those Styx, Foreigner, ABBA, and Bee Gees albums in 1977, they are firmly established as one of the most important bands in rock'n'roll history. Who ever would have thought?

Well, all the cretins, pinheads, and teenage lobotomies throughout the world, that's who. There are such things after all.

"One-half hillbilly and one-half punk..." Lux Interior 1946-2009

It's with a heavy heart I relay the news: Lux Interior, lead singer of the mighty Cramps, has died. Long one of my most beloved bands, a perennial favorite of punks of all stripes and generations, the Cramps walked it and talked it, performing like '50s rockabilly JD's hopped up on bop pills and strychnine, rioting in the streets after spilling out of a movie house playing all-night monster movies. Over two decades I saw them perform several times, never at anything less than full-tilt boogie and leveling anything in their path. The first time I saw them play I tried to look up Poison Ivy's skirt, then felt bad about it when she caught me, glaring down from on high while playing those bargain-basement swamp-riffs from beyond the grave. Lux put his head through the ceiling tiles of the club (the venerable City Gardens in Trenton, NJ) while I thought he was going to go into full lycanthrope mode.

The Cramps have too many great songs for me to link to all of them, but here's "Garbageman," from their first full album, Songs the Lord Taught Us in 1980, and it has everything that made the Cramps special: it's creepy, fun and sexy, goth without dork, bad-ass without macho, and the above-mentioned lyrics. Plus Lux's wondrous hair. Thanks for everything Lux! You will be missed.

A Criminally Canadian Christmas: Elliott Gould in The Silent Partner (1978)

With the tiniest hints of Hitchcock and, in one shocking moment, of the Italian giallos of Argento (see the broken glass over the title), The Silent Partner is a movie virtually unknown to, well, everyone. Set during Christmas 1977, the set-up is one we've seen before (which is fine with me): an everyday guy, Miles Cullen (Gould), who ends up in facing down a criminal mastermind. Cullen's a go-nowhere sorta fella working a boring job at a bank in a shopping mall with a little crush on his obnoxious boss's mistress, coworker Julie (a delectably bright-eyed Susannah York).

Cullen's other coworkers include an impossibly young John Candy and his improbably nubile girlfriend, a Suzanne Somers-type blonde who wears tight-fitting t-shirts that have cutesy bank-related phrases on them like "Early withdrawals penalized" and "Bankers do it with interest" (what, no "Night Deposits Welcome"?). Lonely evenings are spent playing chess and collecting exotic fish--until Cullen discovers that the mall Santa, Reikle, (a fey, sadistic Christopher Plummer) is planning on robbing the bank. Only then Miles does spin into action: when "Santa" robs him, Cullen defrauds the bank (and therefore also Reikle) by keeping a portion of the stolen till for himself, and then stashes the cash in one of the bank's safe deposit boxes.

Completely unrelated DVD cover

Of course, we movie fans know it's never that easy to escape the drudgery of everyday life, and while Miles attempts to woo Julie away from the boss, Reikle has seen him on TV being interviewed about the robbery. That cat-and-mouse game that follows resembles the chess games Cullen challenges himself with but turns far deadlier as he realizes he and Reikle are inextricably entwined in their criminal tête-à-tête.

This is a film made in Canada that, oddly enough, is actually set in Canada. Despite some stellar reviews on Amazon and in some blogs I ran across, it's hampered by its sometimes dull, dry delivery. Moments of black humor and morbidity crack the surface, as well as moments of almost Scorsesean violence, but director Daryl Duke, going by his IMDB entry, was a journeyman workhorse TV director and you can certainly tell that. The screenplay (based on some long-forgotten Danish novel), however, is by Curtis Hanson, he of the masterful L.A. Confidential. This is the second time in recent months Hanson's screenwriting credits have suprised me (at Halloween I learned he also adapted Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" in 1968).

Plummer as Reikle, not dressed as Santa or woman

Gould has none of the smart-alecky, rubbery-faced charm and playful subversion he did so well in The Long Goodbye and the fantastic California Split, but that wouldn't fit Miles Cullen. In the couple scenes that he really shows emotion--panic in one and disgust in the other--the movie comes alive. A romantic evening between him and York is quite believable. The dreary daily grind of his life comes through, but I would've appreciated more of the Gould that was so prevalent in the '70s. But I suppose Cullen has to play it cool; he's got cops and Julie and his boss and a psycho-criminal and soon, the mysterious and exotic beauty Elaine, (Céline Lomez) sniffing around his every move.

You really don't want to see what happens with that fish tank in the background.

There are some great '70s moments here: a tacky Christmas office party; dimly lit "affair" bars with tinkly jazz and pretzel bowls; Miles' bachelor apartment and Julie's "liberated woman" one. Oscar Peterson's score is dramatic and overt, adding much malevolence to scenes that, honestly, would have limped along without it. Plummer is his usual urbane bad-ass self, even in drag and a Santa suit, and Susannah York is classy and elegant as a woman frustrated by Gould's inexplicable behavior (uh, as in not fucking her when he gets the chance). Céline Lomez is quite sweet and yet tough as the beauty caught between Cullen and Reikle--to disastrous results. But, c'mon, you knew that right? Thrillers like this are, quite purposely, paint-by-numbers (or murder by numbers, if one is a Police fan).

The Silent Partner came at the end of Gould's briefly brilliant career of the '70s; emotional insecurities as an actor and celebrity led to lack of good work and virtual unemployment through the '80s and '90s (until he returned as Ross and Monica's dad!). But I find Gould one of the most interesting actors of his age, perhaps even more so than Nicholson, Pacino, and DeNiro, simply because he could not make the transition from the personal films of the 1970s to the anonymous blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond. Perhaps one would do well to recall his famous words from his best role, as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye: “It’s okay with me.”

Currently listening: Johnny Thunders, Too Much Junkie Business (1983)

Johnny Thunders: man of taste, restraint, charm and good sense. (The New) Too Much Junkie Business contains some of what made Johnny good, some of what made Johnny bad, but little of what made him great. Originally released in 1983, this hodge-podge collection of songs--some live, some studio tracks--is too hit-and-miss and will really only appeal to full-fledged Thunders fans and completists. Even though it was co-produced by Stones' producer Jimmy Miller, it sounds like it was barely produced at all.

Sorry, it may be 1978, but it's not Aerosmith

The CD starts as Johnny greets all listeners with a personal message, delivered in his hilariously slurred, druggy Noo Yawk twang: "Hey all you kids this ain't none ah that bootleg shit, this is da real thing," and then blows a sloppy snotty kiss at you. The opening track, "Who Do Voodoo," is just all right; the vocals are unclear so who can know what the song's really about. Voodoo, one assumes, but one must never assume with Johnny; you can pretty much guess "voodoo" is slang for "heroin."

Next up is "In Cold Blood," just marginally better, with a tough riff and a low-rent swagger that makes it enjoyable. "Just Another Girl" is all right--which Johnny calls, in a moment of sensitivity, "Just Anudda Bitch"--but like many of Johnny's songs, it's under-produced with too much bass. Still the guitar-work is inventive which is what you expect when it comes to Johnny.

Johnny knew that looking cool wasted was at least half of rock'n'roll awesomeness

"Sad Vacation" is a live track from the Peppermint Lounge (not the original), a slow, bluesy lament for Sid Vicious (get the title? Johnny, what a cunning linguist) with some really absurd lyrics: "You're singing from your grave/It's so hard to do." What?! Did he say, "Singing from your grave"? What the heck does that mean?! I dunno, but it cracks me up every time I hear it. But Johnny's heart is in the right place, and it shows a real affection for that damned kid, so I'm going to let him slide.

Too much rock and/or roll

"Diary of a Lover" is a pretty acoustic tune, although in the midst of it he blurts out "Girls, they fuck up your head." Charming to the last. Things pick up with one of the L.A.M.F. classics, "Get Off the Phone." Then the title track, a live sloppy rave-up with a great riff, admittedly stolen from Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. To wit:

Your life becomes as sickening as that mess you call your face/
That pig you call your girlfriend, she's been in there for days/
Climbing up the walls, shot some on my balls/
Wrap it up, call it art/
Now your record's in the charts

The sneer that launched a thousand punks

"King of the Gypsies" is '60s pop, sounds like it was recorded with a portable tape player, and features some kinda lame "gypsy"-like guitar wrangling. Johnny's self-pitying side comes out in "So Alone" and then we see once again what made Johnny good: a live version of "I Love You," a song I'm not crazy about but which is delivered here with passion and conviction. The CD wraps up with a couple of the New York Dolls' classics, "Jet Boy" and "Great Big Kiss." In the latter he duly insults both the audience and his female back-up singers.

So like I said, Johnny Thunders: man of refinement and good taste. I know you died almost 20 years ago, but God love ya, Johnny, wherever you are.

Farewell and adieu: Bettie Page, 1923 - 2008

One of the icons of sexual liberation and counter-cultural retro cool has died. Bettie Page needs no introduction, does she? I was introduced to Bettie's loveliness when I was a teenager frequenting comic books shops in the '80s. Yum. Thanks for everything, Bettie!

"Water, water everywhere..." Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977)

"I'd rather face a thousand crazy savages than one woman who's learned to shoot." Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart in 3 Women

Another 1970s masterpiece from director Robert Altman, 3 Women is an enigmatic story of fluid identity, displacement, and mythic concepts of womanhood. Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall are perfectly cast as women who continually mirror one another as they share a job and an apartment. Janice Rule as Willie Hart completes the title in a lesser role as an artist, but her paintings, nightmarishly erotic, hover at the blurry, watery edges of the entire film.

Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux gives us a voiceover narration that in its dissociation and lack of affect reminds me, in a good way, of DeNiro's in Taxi Driver. Bourgeois, petty, and given to yammering at the mouth long after folks have walked off, utterly ignored by her neighbors, men and coworkers, Duvall gives a career-best performance as a nearly painful to watch loser. Too bad it's in this underseen gem.

Coming off her Oscar-nominated leading role in Carrie (1976), Sissy Spacek stars here as another girl child, wide-eyed Pinky Rose (Freudian much?) who also seems to be repressing her raging id (Yes). Eventually she will experience betrayal, trauma and rebirth, and reject her (impossibly old, impossibly still sexual) parents. Reborn, she threatens the now-unstable Millie in a whole new manner.

The only man of any significance is former stuntman/TV-cowboy stand-in (i.e., not a real man), Willie's husband Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier), who shoots blanks (ha-ha, get it?) with his old prop gun. Crude, leathery and macho, he insinutates himself into the women's lives... but at what price? I'll give you one hint. It seems he didn't always shoot blanks, for Willie is pregnant...

As always, Altman's camera slowly weaves across scenes, never quite settling in any one place, but giving us hints and allusions to characters' states of mind. Slows dissolves and flowing water, long takes of barren landscapes, flesh young and old, women with real guns and men with toy ones, life floating by as if a dream, Altman pictures a world of women dehumanized, and their imperfect struggle for power and selfhood, however fleeting or imagined. The haunting, slightly ghostly score seems more fit for a psychological horror movie--but then, perhaps it is perfectly suited.

The Criterion Collection DVD has a commentary by Altman, who is always eager to recount the genesis of his movies (3 Women was based on a dream of his, with input from Duvall for her character's diary entries and voiceover) and fun stuff that happened while shooting. I listened to a fair amount but shut it off for a reason I'm sure he'd appreciate: I wanted to keep my impressions of the film pure and intact; a film so firmly subjective demands a personal response.

The trailer perfectly captures the movie's tone:



I was utterly captivated and moved and disturbed by 3 Women, not expecting when I sat down to find a film so allusive (and elusive), so monstrously mythic, and yet firmly rooted in the arid Southwest in the mid'70s. Overall the movie is reminiscent of both Ingmar Bergman and Roman Polanski--Bergman for its thorough deconstruction of personality and measured pace (Persona); Polanski for its chilling dreamlike tone that portends doom at any moment and threat of insanity (Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby), and because, in the end, I'm not sure if this is a work of overt misogyny or heroic feminism. But it's all Altman in the end.

The 2009 Wolfman Remake

From Comic-Con, a bootleg trailer for 2009's remake of The Wolfman, directed by Joe Johnston. With esteemed actors Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Emily Blunt in leading roles, I think we can expect good things--certainly as long as no one tries to pull of an English accent with as disastrous results as Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Some of my favorite horror flicks of the 2000s have been werewolf movies (Ginger Snaps and Dog Soldiers) but it's cool to see the filmmakers going back to the source, the 1941 movie with the immortal Lon Chaney Jr. as the doomed Lawrence Talbot and Claude Rains as his father. It doesn't bother me at all, another horror remake; this story is a mythology, reinvented for a new generation. And with Rick Baker along for that reinvention, you can count me in.

The dead don't haunt: visiting the Charleston jail

On a recent late August evening I visited the Charleston Old Jail in South Carolina as part of a package tour. The building is of course protected by a builders’ society and whatnot; its upkeep is limited to what will make it safe for tourists. It's billed as being haunted, and forms a cornerstone of the booming "haunted Charleston" tourist biz. Why haunted? Because it's old and creepy and lots of horrible things happened there. You know how it was, long before concepts like "human rights" and the outlawing of torture (although you'd be forgiven if you doubted the actuality of the latter) informed American society.

I don’t believe in the supernatural. In fact, such a thing is a flat contradiction in terms and cannot exist: if something exists, it is real and therefore natural. Nothing can be above or beyond the natural world.

Ultimately the supernatural does a disservice to reality and to the human imagination. Horrible things happened in this South Carolina jail and places like it (the Amityville murders being perhaps the most famous American "haunting"), but the only way to keep us interested in them is to slop on a coat of ghosts and creepies and flying bricks and bleeding doorways. The terrible warden, who tortured for fun and profit, is said to haunt the jail, smoking his pipe and leaving the scent of tobacco wafting about. So--what? Pipes and tobacco can be ghosts, too? (Although this warden went missing one day and was never found. Well done, fate!)

People will always want their ghost stories, but it seems that the exploitation of horror takes precedence over understanding what drove these people to do what they did, or to contemplate the finality and surety of their lives.

If ghosts exist, then one day they will be quantified by science. If they exist they are natural. But as it stands they are all hoaxes and misunderstandings, the results of the human mind’s many failings, its desire to impose structure, to see patterns, to see human faces, in the seeming randomness of nature. It bears repeating: we impose patterns over the terrible chaos that is life; we refocus and refocus so that our POV is of years and bodies and emotions, not of quarks and supernovas and misfiring synapses.

I can’t deny there was a creep factor to the jail, but you can find this in any old structure that drips with age and decay, with rusted iron fixtures and imposing steel doors. Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps the two greatest horror writers of the 20^th century, understood this; age and loneliness terrify us. As for me, the only chill I felt was within myself when hearing of the wretched crimes of both those who were imprisoned there, and of those supposedly in charge.

Why in the world would a person’s ghost haunt the place of its gravest and darkest days? It doesn't; I think it’s the psychic toll places like this take on our imaginations now, today, long after the deed is done. We need our ghosts to float these iron stairwells to let us know that once something terrible is done it cannot be undone. Does anyone ever hear of happy lovers haunting a romantic enclave at sunset on a tropical beach? No, because we need nothing there to expunge us of our guilt.

The dead don’t haunt us. We haunt ourselves.