Chasing the Ripper, by Patricia Cornwell (Kindle Single, 2014)
The Jack the Ripper case was presumed solved in September, with spotty DNA evidence on a garment that may or may not have been connected to one of the crimes and may or may not have been washed since that crime pointing to Aaron Kosminski as the culprit.
Kosminski has been on the list of Ripper suspects for ages. But so have others, and the champions of those various other possible Rippers seem unfazed by the Polish hairdresser’s stepping up in the serial killer sweepstakes.
Patricia Cornwell’s slim “Kindle Single” Chasing the Ripper is a postscript to her massive book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, in which she argued that Walter Sickert, the celebrated English artist, was the Ripper.
I want Cornwell to be right. I like the idea of Sickert as the Ripper. I find her arguments on his behalf to be sensational and entertaining. If one is to be obsessive about any murder case, one should at least be entertaining about it. Cornwell’s case is based on artwork and party anecdotes. She has gone the DNA route just as the Kosminski contingent has, but the beauty of Cornwell’s theories are that they are woven into Victorian culture—art, literature, industrialism, celebrity, media frenzy—and not just a worn piece of fabric.
Cornwell uses this opportunity not to tear down the case for Kosminski, or applaud it for that matter. She acknowledges the Kosminski theory then dismisses it offhandedly, then restates her own case for Sickert. She confronts the critics and naysayers who found fault with her book.
The brevity is appreciated. Her thesis is clearer. I still want to believe it. And I want other people to take a shot at articulating this wondrous theory that a great naturalistic and doom-laden British artist was also the country’s most esteemed murderous fiend.
Monthly Archives: January 2015
Rock Gods #318: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
Best band of last year happens to be one we discovered in December. There may be a psychological basis for this. Record labels often release certain albums at the end of the year on the expectation that critics preparing their top ten lists have already forgotten the beginning of the same year.
It’s not like that with local bands.
Tonight: The Wofts and Mihtohseeni Onki at The Bullfinch. They’ve rehearsed a band-merging finale… Evidence As To Man’s Place in Nature, college rock, at Hamilton’s… Baron of Fancamp, seriously, at D’ollaire’s. Not “an evening with,” either—full band, all-electric, endless set…
Riverdale Book Review
One of the stated impetuses (impeti?) for the new Archie #1 reboot, according to a press release, is “showcasing the beginnings of the historic love triangle between Archie, Betty and Veronica.” But, as any longtime Archie reader knows, that origin-story-of-sorts (one in which the heroes and heroines don’t gain superpowers but only smooch) has been told a zillion different ways over the past seven decades. One of them, “Down Memory Lane” by George Gladir and Bob Bolling, is reprinted in the current issue of Archie Comics Double Digest (#257). Another is currently unfurling in the bloodsoaked pages of Afterlife With Archie. Depending on which mythology you follow, the Archie/Betty/Veronica triangle started when the characters were babies, or in grade school, or middle school, or in freshman year of high school—pretty much every era of their young lives excepting the womb.
For Tomorrow We Shall Die: Diary of a College Chum #268:
We’ve told the club guy that we are done.
Scribblers Music Review
Crocodiles adhere to a Paisley Underground retro-Velvets pop sound for “Teardrop Guitar,” but add harmonies and a non-wasted energy. The balance of raw and refined is remarkable. The chorus: “I… wanna see you cry.” The song is part of the most recent Crocodiles album Crimes of Passion.
January 8, 2015
Magic number: MCMLXXVI
Magic word: stentorian
Melted Plastic Bertrand
Ca Plane Pour Moi is an all-purpose tame punk anthem. I’ve heard it used in TV shows and in theater plays. Last summer I saw a street performer at Faneuil Hall in Boston do yoyo tricks to it.
The current issue (#38) of Ugly Things, a non-academic scholarly journal chronicling “wild sounds from past dimensions,” has a five-page article about the band Elton Motello. The band was built around the duo of Alan Ward and Mike Butcher, who released “Ca Plane Pour Moi” under its original English title, “Jet Boy Jet Girl,” in Belgium in 1977. Plastic Bertrand (a project of Lou Deprijck) changed the lyrics but retained the same backing musical track. Yvan Lacomblez is credited as the song’s composer, but several aspects of the record’s creation are under dispute. Ugly Things gives Ward & Butcher’s side of the story, and they claim “Ca Plane Pour Moi” and its flip side “Pogo Pogo” were basically developed in the studio as demos, based on a vague concept of Deprijck’s.
The song was later covered by Captain Sensible of The Damned, with The Softies backing him.
I have great memories of Ca Plane Pour Moi. I was a junior in high school when it came out in the U.S. I was on the high school radio station and had been given a copy of the single at a CMJ convention. We had exchange students from France in our school around that time, and that one record formed a real bond between one of those visitors and us radio station punks. (We kept trying to get him to translate the Plastic Bertrand lyrics, but he would tell us that there were too many slang phrases which he couldn’t convey—including the title, which means something like “that’s OK by me.”
When I noticed the Elton Motello and Captain Sensible versions in the import shops in Harvard Square, I naturally grabbed them, and experienced the schoolboy giddiness of the naughty lyrics “he gives me head.” At the time, I convinced myself that these British acts had purposefully sullied the French lyrics with boundary-pushing content in the current punk fashion. I didn’t know that these were the original lyrics in their original language. The English lyrics both intrigued and repulsed me, as good punk songs should.
While t”Jet Boy Jet Girl” is seldom heard these days (those lyrics weren’t just arch, they contained non-PC sentiments such as “I’m gonna make you be a girl), “Ca Plane Pour Moi” has become the acceptable face of wild boyish ‘80s punk and its soon-to-be-born sibling New Wave. It’s used to shorthand the frantic pace of life in the neon-spraypainted ‘80s. I was watching Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street on Netflix the other night, and there it was. Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. Ca plane pour moi.
Rock Gods #317: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
The All-Area Boys were having lunch at the Dioguardi Diner when they were “discovered.” Theyt got in a jukebox fight with an older guy at a table on the other side of the restaurant, trying to keep his ‘70s “Joker” rock off the system and pushing their own rockabilly favorites instead. The boys sang and banged along with each hotheaded victory. The old man, who turned out to work for a talent agency (as an accountant, but still…) bowed to their superior taste and offered to introduce them to his colleagues.
And the rest is not history. A deal never happened. The best thing to come out of the encounter was Dioguardi’s primo grilled cheese sandwiches and the debut All-Area Boys 9” vinyl single—“Jukebox Wars,” on their own AAJW label.
The platter’s been getting played on college radio and has garnered some genuine label interest. A deal might happen after all.
But the real prize, the milestone, the number one hit is this: The All-Area Boys have their record as number A-3 on the jukebox in the Dioguardi Diner.
Now they’ll win all the wars.
Tonight: The Blessington Method and Backward, Turn Backward, at the Bullfinch… Man from the South at Hamilton’s… An Evening with Ikon of Elijah at D’Ollaire’s…
Riverdale Book Review
Archie Comics Double Digest #257, which arrived in my mailbox Tuesday, leads off with a Bob Bolling-illustrated Little Archie story—not written by him, as so many were, but bearing his distinctive rounded drawing style. (Things flow and rolling in Bolling stories; even his people are round and pudgy.) Bolling’s still alive, in his mid-‘80s. When did he do this story? (A wonderful appreciation of Bolling, “Bob Bolling and the Pursuit of Melancholy Innocence, by Jaime Weinman, can be found here.
This is one of those nostalgia-packed trad Archie digests meant to hold the line against all the progressiveness and innovations in the non-digest Archie titles. There’s a snow-shoveling story, a generation gap story, two Monkees-style Archies stories (from when that hallowed band was a trio of Archie, Reggie and Jughead), a modern-art-is-bunk story (“How d’you know if they’re upside down?”). Besides Little Archie, the ‘50s Archie also-ran Wilbur (“America’s Son of Fun”) is represented. The Archies stories, complex arrangements of wacky gags, quick-changes, fantasies and a perceptible plot, are drawn by Bob White, in a style that really stands out nowadays. Not as much as the pair of Harry Lucey stories (“Hall of Fame” and “The Christmas Game”) do, however. Most of the stories here, in any case, are drawn by Stan Goldberg. Samm Schwartz barely gets a page in edgewise.
For Tomorrow We Shall Die: Diary of a College Chum #267:
The guy who runs the club calls us every day.