Eddie and Liz, Oscar and Raymond Chandler

The 1946 Academy Awards were presented March 13, 1947 at the Shrine Municipal Auditorium in Los Angeles, Ca. It had been only fifty-seven days since the nude severed body of Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot on South Norton.

The murder investigation was severely lagging by then, with no further contact from the unknown killer since late in January. Homicide Capt. Donahue was forced to call off the dogs. Press interest had largely shifted to the murder of nurse Jeanne French.

Never ever fear, Dear reader, interest in the Short case would be nearly revived a mere forty-eight hours later with the discovery of a suicide note and some clothing at the foot of Breeze Ave. in Venice. But I digress. The Hollywood night of nights is tonight. And the big winner that night was "The Best Years of Our Lives". The Best Picture of '46. It's unknown whether Bette Short ever had suffered through this turgid post-war melodrama, or not. But chances are she have had to. Anyhow, she liked to go the movies. Everybody did.Even the lame ones.

Also nominated for an Oscar in an impossible coincidence that year is Raymond Chandler, screenwriter of The Blue Dahlia (1946). Released in April, TBD had been a huge hit even in second and third run houses all over the South land. It had still been playing in Long Beach when she hit town in August. It was playing in San Diego when she arrived there in early December and where she and her fate met in the Aztec Theatre. Legs! The Black Dahlia and Blue.

There on screen was her figurative father and the druggist's nasty little boys calling her The Black-eyed Dahlia after Gordon hit her. The barriers between movie fantasy and reality melted there. She hadn't two months left to live. The film lives on. But beware, there's no such thing as a black dahlia. Or a blue dahlia for that matter and an huge prize involved in breeding one which hadn't been collected for one hundred years in 1946.

But this one had had to be made fast, they were having trouble with the Army. Chandler saw this one as his last big chance to win the Oscar(he'd been nominated before), and took to drinking to finish it on time, but the murder took that away too. Too bad, too, because The Blue Dahlia is a great flick by any modern yardstick and still has all it's facts, madam.

The awful crime had inevitably blown back on the movie,(Houseman in the sixties adds no credence to the Army objecting to the script's reference to infanticide on the home front). The great novelist would never receive an Academy Award even though his influence on the medium is truly impossible to overstate today.

Edwin F. Burns might have found that part of the plot rather familiar as his own wife only the year before had killed their child and committed suicide while Eddie was serving in the Army in the Solomon Islands. There's your Army beef, Wellington. The Burns's family/personal problems were never published in the Times colossus. The overweening of the word press, the need to consider home front morale in early 1945 would be reason enough to hush the whole thing up, but when Ed gets back the shock will have worn off. Ed will understand.

Oh well, war is hell, you know? World War II was the worst. Therapeutic movies, yes. That's what the people want. Hollywood heals? Down at the heels? When Johnny come marching home? Go see a movie, or buy a few lotto tickets, turn on the marconi and dance, either way you're in or you're out, and you're out maybe, what? Twenty bucks? Maybe tomorrow. Tonight, you'll watch the Live Oscars for free. These really are going to be the best years of your life.

King Solomon's Islands

If not the bloodiest, the campaign for the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific was certainly the most protracted hard fighting of the Pacific Theatre of Operations during World War II. My father, Walter L. Mezger, USN spent most of the war on New Guinea, a Gunners Mate on a P.T. boat. He managed to get a really, really great tan. And already I've digressed. Arrah!

Edwin F. Burns was already classified as a camera repairman when he was inducted into the Army on December 15, 1942 in the city of Los Angeles. He was thirty-three years old, married, with a child on the way in '43 that he would never see.

You see. Ed's next stop was...yup. The Solomons, with an hot Army Air Force Photo Recon Squadron that would see action there into early 1945 as mopping up these strategically vital islands and archipelagos continued.

Walter was 21 and single, and born to kill Nips when he freely enlisted in the United States Navy from New Jersey, and back in June of 1942, because he'd heard the food was better in the Navy. A wise choice. He would make Chief and live to 83 not suffering a scratch from thirty years of largely successful war making.

Our Mrs. Burns has the baby, a daughter. She suffers it in his absence until the age of two and then goes mad and drowns the child in her bath and then takes her own life, deeply depressed mournful and lonely, alone and helpless. The semi-literate Ed had never even written a letter to her. Overburdened with her cares, at the end of her string. Why?

Maybe the third year at Christmas of '44 had been too much for her? Too late. Los Angeles was supposed to be their home, which he was away from, fighting to protect them all, but who would protect their women and children from the vagaries of war at home? She never bargained for that. Neither did he. L.A. had let him down, again. The lousy God-damned L.A. draft board. Where was L.A.P.D. for his wife and kid? Serving them up, but not protecting, I guess.

Ed, who had a tan that was the envy of the Slot and Iron Bottom Sound, had more or less forgotten the dependents way back in Southern California. It was a dream. He was on his way to Ft. Wood in St. Louis, Mo. The Army's best psychiatric hospital. They did what they could. He was discharged from the hospital in time for the bombing of Nagasaki. Dad was in Okinawa, on VJ Day. Ed was finally back in the city, in another dream. That was the day he noticed his tan was beginning to fade. He went to the beach.

Gene Lyons

The Reader Reactionaries

FBI: Federal Bureau of Illinois

When is President Obama going to fire this guy, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald? The partisan GOP holdover seems determined to choose the person who will fill the president's old senate seat now held by Roland Burris, perhaps by himself? It's a damnable disgrace. Now it seems discredited Republicans want to govern Illinois by FBI wiretaps, because they can't do it legitimately at the ballot box. And by the way, who's paying for this nonsense? You are.

Now we all know that the GOP has long since been a den of thieves and media sucking hacks like this guy. I wonder if they're tapping new Governor Pat Quinn? Burris? Obama himself? I'd want to be sure. The one person we can be relatively sure they're not listening to is Rod Blagojevich.

Are they going after Burris because he's an African-American? Yes. The seated bureaucrat prefers the low-hanging fruit. The FBI has a long history of racism up to and probably including the outright murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, a crime for which they have never paid. The Bureau itself looks to be seriously in need of massive institutional reform and modernization in it's thinking or we're gonna have problems with them once again.

The president must act to secure this pile of oily rags smoldering in his own backyard before the GOP and the media gin up one of their ultra-hyperbolic character assassinations for him. Not that anyone should doubt it's coming, but it's too early to tell from exactly where. I just wouldn't take chances. Dump the incompetent hack fool Fitzgerald now. Go pick on Indiana. We birthed a new era here on the prairie and we're tired.

Illinois claims to be the land of Lincoln, he owned some. And in that way, it holds deep and mystical connections to the Republican Party that once was. However modernity has not been at all kind to our brothers and sisters on the right, who rather than embracing change, fell into conservatism, reaction and an unreasonable fear of losing that which they had claimed for themselves but refused to extend to others, just as entitled as they, because they consciously or unconsciously differed with them.

Gene Lyons

Milton Friedman's dead

The Illuminating Gaze: Étant donnés decoded

Marcel Duchamp undoubtedly had the sharpest eye of the entire pre-WWI Da-da movement. He was one of the greatest artist of the last century. In his final major work, "Étant Donnés; 1° la chute d'eau/2° le gaz d'eclairage, 1946-66", he apparently brings that great artistic eye to the Elizabeth Short murder scene. I've never seen it, and don't know any one who has. Philadelphia, here I come. But first...Let's deconstruct it somewhat for our own purposes.

After supposedly subjecting his audience to some radical changes in perspective, viewers are then found peeping through eye holes upon an artificial outdoor scene wherein a ghostly life size white female figure is shown nude and reclining supine, as viewed from the south of the conventional frame among some weeds and other plants. Her chalky left leg is lifted obscenely akimbo and arrests the viewers gaze left of mid frame and holds it there. Found art? Yes, right where Ed (yes, ED) left it. While not exactly what Betty Bersinger saw that morning, but I digress.

Suddenly finding themselves trapped in a voyeur's tableau, the shocked and violated viewer then can only follow the directions, as given, in order to regain their lost psychological equilibrium. Her left hand holds up the lamp, and lights the way to a saving fall. Then we're thrust hard north and east to the first degree given to; 1° The Waterfall. 2° The illuminating gas is in the lamp she holdswhen we return our eye to it's grotesque parody of Lady Liberty, and somehow, you have fairly approximated the sacred scene on Norton.

Your course is set north by east, magnetic north, the agonic line.

The line segment between the two "objects" is even more radically fore-shortened. Switched. The waterfall is then obviously the watery death of Ed Burns by drowning in Santa Monica Bay off Venice Beach.

Marcel Duchamp was closer to the killer of the Black Dahlia than even he knew. He had deduced the land and water navigational nature of the big clue the killer had given to the Keystone cops almost as an afterthought by labeling his two objects in terms of Cartesian degrees, the key to Ed's murder map. His female figure remains intact, logistical concerns having not troubled the artist's space terribly, as did the killer ,with the seemingly senseless post-mortem bisection of the cadaver.

Her incandescent gas lamp thus lights the way to her killer and to his own end two months later. Even while Duchamp had nothing to prove with this piece, his insights into the still unsolved 1947 murder of the Black Dahlia in Los Angeles CA. are nothing short of pure post-modern genius.

The illuminating gaze into the criminal mind? Then artist here is a thief and a killer in cahoots with the killer, and that is the way Duchamp saw his art, and in that, he also succeeds. Perhaps poaching the native borns knowledge of the ground, he knew. Would he be about giving away too much ? Then Maybe like all great criminals, he would've made a very good cop.

Gene Lyons

Bye-bye bipartisanship

Gene Lyons

Gitmo goodbye