Tuesday, 26 November 2024

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Last week we published a poem from Jill Bialosky's new book from Knopf, “The Players,” and if you didn't see it you can find it on our Web site, www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

The poet is a New Yorker, an editor at W. W. Norton, and a daughter grieving the loss of loved ones.

It's unusual for us to print two poems by one poet, in sequence, but this one and the one from last week go very well together.

Red Rover

We take our last walk.
Walls stripped of portraits,

warped mirrors, dressing tables,
and the grandfather clock

with its stoic face
and elaborate gentle fingers.

For years we struggled to break
free of the closeness of rooms,

the obligation of birth order,
the metaphysics that bind

one element to the other,
as if we were still wild girls

playing wild rover in the garden,
breaking through a chain of linked hands.

American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2015 by Jill Bialosky, “Red Rover,” from The Players, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Jill Bialosky and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2017 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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‘THE DEUCE’ ON HBO

New York City’s Times Square, the site of massive crowds to celebrate both Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan at the end of World War II, soon thereafter became a symbol of the Big Apple’s decline.

From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Times Square, particularly along 42nd Street, descended into a mix of peep shows, adult theaters, massage parlors and seedy bars. Prostitution and drug peddling were common occurrences in daily life.

Released in 1969, “Midnight Cowboy,” starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as street hustlers, depicted Times Square as a gritty, dark and desperate venue that only got worse in the 1970s and 1980s, before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up and Disney bought real estate.

HBO has launched a new gritty drama series in “The Deuce” that revisits those bad old days of Times Square starting in 1971, with a cast of interesting characters involved in the illicit trades of the neighborhood.

Appropriately, the title of this eight-episode series is taken from the nickname for Manhattan’s 42nd Street between Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue, a stretch of then-rundown real estate where the most prominent features were garish theater marquees and trash-littered sidewalks.

This new HBO series has been created and written by former police reporter David Simon and his collaborator George Pelecanos. “The Deuce” is to the sex industry what their series “The Wire” was to the Baltimore narcotics scene.

The creative team of Simon and Pelecanos has a knack for weaving various storylines and characters through different layers of law enforcement bureaucracy, criminal enterprises and societal upheavals.

The setting of “The Deuce” in a decaying New York is ripe for exploration.

In a great cast of exotic characters, the emblem for a downward spiral incongruously mixed with hope for something better might be James Franco’s dual role of twin brothers Vincent and Frankie Martino.

At least in the early episodes, Vincent, working double shifts as a Times Square bartender and trying vainly to hold his fractured family together, is not the focal point of “The Deuce” but more of a mirror image of the degradation and exploitation at hand.

On the other hand, Frankie stands more as a symbol of moral decline. He’s a notoriously reckless gambler in debt up to his neck with mobsters who pressure his brother Vincent to make good. Frankie also has a bad temper that creates needless tension for Vincent’s ambitions.

The real star is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Candy, the rare streetwalker working without the oppressive oversight and control of one of the many violent pimps who constantly cruise the area in flashy Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals.

Not driven by sentiment or deep feelings, Candy rejects the notion of being exploited by anyone, but paradoxically her chosen line of work is inherently submissive to the base desires of others.

Nevertheless, Candy may realize better than other sex workers that her career has a brief shelf life, and as a result an escape from the street life could be in the porn industry that may soon be emerging from the notorious underground black market.

Candy’s personal life is also complicated by the fact that her young son is living somewhere in the outer boroughs with her mother who seems to naively believe that her daughter is constantly away on pressing business.

Of the many hookers plying their trade, some are less hardened than others. Lori (Emily Meade), fresh off the bus from Minnesota, falls into the sex trade when pimp C.C. (Gary Carr) plays the part of a smooth operator to show her the ropes in the business.

The most intriguing of the prostitutes is the sweet-natured Darlene (Dominique Fishback) whose interest in literature and classic films proves to be unsettling to her volatile, violent pimp Larry (Gbenga Akinnagbe) who always intimidates his stable of women.

One of Darlene’s regulars is an old man who pays her extra just for her company to watch films from the 1930s on his television set. This too is a source of aggravation for the intense and demanding Larry.

NYPD officers, outside of occasional paddy wagon raids, appear somewhat indifferent to the illicit activities, with Det. Flanagan (Don Harvey) as the one most likely to look the other way even after arrests are made.

“The Deuce” has far too many notable characters to follow, but Michael Rispoli’s mob boss Rudy is one to watch when he becomes Vincent’s unseen partner in the launch of a new cocktail lounge called the Hi-Hat.

The attention to period details of 1971 is truly impressive. The creative team behind “The Deuce” has very effectively captured the realism of the festering corrosion of Times Square, from dirty sidewalks to the rotting core of the area’s deteriorating businesses and structures.

“The Deuce” has so many moving parts that a viewer can become invested only by committing to watch each episode of the series for the interesting multiple layers of human drama to unfold.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
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AMERICAN ASSASSIN (Rated R)

The late Vince Flynn, author of political action thrillers, produced a series of exciting novels about CIA counter-terrorism agent Mitch Rapp, a killing machine with an insatiable appetite to take down the bad guys.

“American Assassin” is the first adaptation of a Flynn thriller, and if Dylan O’Brien’s work as the screen version of Mitch Rapp is a success, it’s quite possible for a new action hero to emerge in the mold of Jason Bourne.

The film opens with Mitch on a beach in Ibiza with his pretty girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega) to whom he proposes marriage as they gambol in the calm ocean water. But all hell breaks loose when the resort is invaded by gun-toting terrorists.

While Mitch is fetching some celebratory cocktails, the obvious Middle Eastern terrorists open machine-gun fire, randomly killing dozens of tourists in a vicious attack. Sadly, Katrina is viciously gunned down in front of his very eyes.

Flash forward to eighteen months later, and Mitch so fervently trains for revenge that his excessive force on sparring partners at the local gym result in his expulsion. His fierce determination attracts notice from CIA deputy director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Latham).

The agency keeps a watchful eye on Mitch’s every move, knowing that his new-found proficiency in the martial arts and handling deadly weapons along with Arabic language skills have the makings of a covert ops agent.

Mitch proves his psychological profile of a loner with the aptitude to make him a killing machine when he infiltrates the Libyan terrorist cell run by Al-Mansur (Shahid Ahmed), the group that carried out the murder spree at the Ibiza beach resort.

Though deemed unreliable and a dangerous loose cannon by CIA Director Stansfield (David Suchet), Mitch’s instinctive talent for revenge is found to be a worthy quality to be explored by Irene Kennedy, the CIA’s counter-terrorism chief.

Mitch is soon thereafter whisked away blindfolded to a remote location in the Virginia woods for training as a fighting force under the direction of hardened Cold War veteran Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), whose repeated mantra is not to make any mission personal.

But for Mitch, it’s all about getting revenge on the type of bad guys who do harm to innocents like Katrina, and if anything, he wants to avenge the wrongful deaths of those who just happen to be in the proverbial wrong place. Just think of the many attacks in Europe in recent times.

While Mitch’s training may be a work in progress, an urgent situation requires the trainee and a fellow recruit named Victor (Scott Adkins) to team up with Hurley and Turkish agent Annika (Shiva Negar) to recover plutonium that could end up in the wrong hands.

The setting of Istanbul creates the veil of mystery that surrounds the geopolitical underpinnings of renegade Iranian officials meeting with an arms dealer so that a hired-gun physicist can create a nuclear weapon for a truly deranged mercenary.

The mercenary in question goes by the nickname of Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), an American operative turned traitor who had been trained by Hurley but went over to the dark side as some sort of twisted vengeful act for a perceived betrayal during a previous mission.

It seems almost standard in the Jason Bourne and James Bond films to move around numerous foreign locales, and “American Assassin” is no different as Hurley’s team ends up skipping through various European cities wreaking havoc in public areas that could complicate the mission.

As the action shifts to the scenic city of Rome, there is little time to admire the beautiful fountain plazas before the team discovers the bad guys are holed up in an underground bunker beneath a depressing housing project.

At last, the lair of the Ghost has been found, where the nuclear device is being finalized for an imminent attack upon the U.S. Sixth Fleet on maneuvers in the Mediterranean seas.

Getting to the point of Hurley and his crew confronting the Ghost requires navigating through action scenes that include expected car chases and an extensive fight scene in a fancy hotel suite, as well as dealing with double-crosses and various forms of serious jeopardy.

There is an extended, hard-to-watch torture incident where one of the good guys is brutally harmed by the ruthlessly vicious Ghost, which only serves to deepen our collective wish for his early and painful demise.

The climactic showdown takes place on the sea, involving hand-to-hand combat on a speedboat, a daring helicopter rescue and a frantic effort to save the Sixth Fleet from a nuclear explosion aimed in their direction.

Though “American Assassin” touches a nerve for real-world possibilities, this hard-boiled thriller has created a new action hero, and the intensity and excitement of the action on display suggest not only the possibility of a sequel but a fervent wish that it may be so.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
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Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography.

Jill Bialosky is a New Yorker, an editor at W. W. Norton, and a daughter grieving the loss of loved ones. It's unusual for us to print two poems by one poet, in sequence, but this one and the one I selected for next week go very well together. They're from her new book The Players, from Knopf.

The Guardians

All day we packed boxes.
We read birth and death certificates.
The yellowed telegrams that announced
our births, the cards of congratulations
and condolences, the deeds and debts,
love letters, valentines with a heart
ripped out, the obituaries.
We opened the divorce decree,
a terrible document of division and subtraction.
We leafed through scrapbooks:
corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet,
racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity
parceled in one volume—
painstakingly arranged, preserved
and pasted with crusted glue.
We sat in the room in which the beloved
had departed. We remembered her yellow hair
and her mind free of paradox.
We sat together side by side
on the empty floor and did not speak.
There were no words
between us other than the essence
of the words from the correspondences,
our inheritance—plain speak,
bereft of poetry.

American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2015 by Jill Bialosky, “The Guardians,” from The Players, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Jill Bialosky and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2017 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

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