The problem is me, part 3: Ramones

Cover of the Ramones' first album. Photo credit: Roberta Bayley. Image source: Discogs.com

As described in the first post in this series, The problem is me: The Sex Pistols, Steve Jones, and Lonely Boy, hearing The Sex Pistols on my college radio station in 1978 was a life-altering experience. One of the many changes it inspired was that I began to seek out the music of other punk bands. The New York publications I started to explore, including the Village Voice and the New York Rocker, extolled a group of four leather-jacketed guys from Queens who called themselves the Ramones.

It was an era when rock album covers often displayed fantasy art featuring spaceships, surrealist landscapes, knights or wizards. In stark contrast, the Ramones' first album offered a grainy black and white photo of the band standing against a grafittied brick wall. Each Ramone wore the bands' uniform of black leather jacket, well-worn blue jeans, and sneakers. And on the back cover Joey (born Jeffrey Hyman, vocals), Johnny (born John Cummings, guitar), Dee Dee (born Douglas Colvin, bass), and Tommy (born Thomas Erdelyi, drums) each took the last name Ramone, as though they were a band of brothers. By punk standards their hair was shockingly long (for the origins of the spiky punk haircut, see Betrayal takes one: Richard Hell).

The songs on that first album were incredibly simple and short, usually constructed around three chords and rarely lasting more than two minutes. They were also incredibly catchy, with melodies hearkening back to the early 60s. On that first album "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" and "Listen To My Heart" sounded like lost classics, and they covered "Let's Dance" by Chris Montez. They'd go on to cover "California Sun" (The Rivieras) on Leave Home, "Do You Wanna Dance?" (Bobby Freeman) and "Surfin' Bird" (The Trashmen) on Rocket to Russia, "Needles and Pins" (The Searchers) on Road to Ruin, "Baby I Love You" (The Ronettes) on the Phil-Spector-produced End of the Century, and many others.

They quickly became one of my favorite groups, but I was suspicious of my own enjoyment. While they were one of the first CBGB bands and some of their songs portrayed gritty New York street life (hustling in "53rd & Third," hitching a ride to an urban beach in "Rockaway Beach," scoring heroin in "Chinese Rock"), other songs evoked the worlds of comic books and horror movies. Were the Ramones an elaborate joke, or did they mean it, man? (That the answer to that question could be "both"—that they were completely sincere, and at the same time had a sense of humor about their obsessions—was hard for me to grasp.)

Ramones, Ritchie Coliseum, University of Maryland College Park, Tuesday 14 July 1981

Mark Sullivan, "The cretins bop," The Diamondback, 16 July 1981, p. 6. Photo credit: Debbie Gertler.
Image source: University of Maryland Libraries

I had seen the Ramones for the first time in May 1980 at Ida Noyes Gym at the University of Chicago. I had stayed out overnight in line to buy tickets, needlessly afraid that they'd sell out, but when I awoke cold and sore on the flagstones there were perhaps only twenty people in line with me. Sensible people waited until the box office opened that day, walked up and bought their tickets; the show didn't sell out. (An amazingly loyal friend stuck it out with me all night. When I opened my eyes and realized that it had been pointless, I felt worse for him than for myself.) Perhaps it was my lack of sleep, the bright gym lighting on the Ramones' pasty skin—the gym definitely lacked a rock 'n' roll ambience—or the relatively sparse and largely uninvolved crowd, but after the concert that night I left feeling underwhelmed, even chagrined. If the Ramones were a joke, it was on me.

But despite that first experience, while home the next summer in Baltimore I decided to drive 45 minutes to the University of Maryland on a Tuesday night (a work night!) to see them again. It was a summer in Baltimore; to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, what else was I going to do? When I walked into the venue, my heart sank: it was another gym, this time the arena where the Terrapin volleyball teams played. It was cavernous, seating perhaps 1500 people on bleachers, with standing room for another 750 or so on the floor. Only about two or three hundred people had shown up to the Ramones gig at the University of Chicago, and although the University of Maryland was substantially larger, it was summer. I feared that there would be a relative handful of us rattling around in this huge space. A less congenial place to see a band like the Ramones was hard to imagine.

But to my amazement, the arena kept filling; ultimately it was packed. And when the Ramones took the stage they seem to have been inspired by the size and enthusiasm of the crowd. They played one of the fiercest, tightest, most intense sets I've ever witnessed. No sooner would one song end in ringing feedback from Johnny's guitar than Dee Dee would count off "onetwothreefo" and they'd launch into another song. I was right in front of the stage in the mosh pit, and it was in a constant frenzy. I later read that the band blazed through 34 songs in an hour, which is completely believable. For a taste of how fast and tight they could be, here is a clip of "Cretin Hop" from their 1977 New Year's Eve show at the Rainbow Theatre in London:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkucRqyySdA

At the end of the concert I staggered out into the humid Maryland night completely soaked in sweat, bruised, battered, and happily exhausted. This still ranks among the best concert experiences I've ever had. Some bands didn't need to experiment much; they just needed to perfect what they were.

Coda: Although they played hundreds of concerts a year to tens of thousands of fans, the Ramones never achieved the radio play they wanted or the recognition they deserved. Unfortunately, none of the members of the original band is still alive: Joey died in 2001 (of lymphoma), Dee Dee in 2002 (heroin overdose), Johnny in 2004 (cancer), and Tommy in 2014 (cancer).

After the death of Joey Ramone in April 2001 it emerged that in his final moments of consciousness in the hospital he had asked to hear U2's "In A Little While." During U2's summer tour that year Bono would introduce the song by paying tribute to Joey and the Ramones. At a concert in Boston in June he introduced the song by saying "This is a song that Joey Ramone loved. . .it was the last song that Joey Ramone heard in his life here. And that's an amazing thing for someone who grew up as a fan of Joey Ramone."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbJXwG-1Oy4 (song ends at 4:20)

At a concert in Berlin in July he asked a woman in a Ramones t-shirt to come on stage, and then said, "The Ramones are the reason why we started this band, and we owe so very much to the Ramones." U2 then performed the song with the utterly dazzled woman clinging to Bono throughout. The moment was captured by an audience member on video. 

But U2 hadn't always played arenas.

Next time, if there is one: U2 at the International House Assembly Hall, University of Chicago, 11 (or 12?) April 1981.

Last time: The Psychedelic Furs at the Marble Bar

The problem is me, continued: The Psychedelic Furs at the Marble Bar

Psychedelic Furs, Marble Bar, Baltimore, Sunday 5 July 1981

A George Herriman-inspired flyer for the Marble Bar announcing the upcoming Psychedelic Furs show. [1]
Poster by George R. Wilcox/Musigrafix. Image source: Accelerated Decrepitude

After the end of the academic year in Chicago I would return to the family home in Baltimore to work for the summer. There were three advantages to being at home: I didn't have to pay for meals, I had the use of a car, and the drinking age in Baltimore was only 18, which meant I could see shows at venues where alcohol was served. The chief disadvantage, of course, was that I was living at home.

Fortunately for my sanity Baltimore had become home to the City Paper, an alternative weekly similar to Chicago's Reader and New York's Village Voice. As part of my exploration of punk rock (see The problem is me) I began to notice ads for interesting-sounding shows at a place called the Marble Bar. It was located on West Franklin Street in the basement of the Congress Hotel, a former luxury hotel that was now an SRO in a run-down neighborhood just north of downtown. The Marble Bar had live local bands almost every night and once or twice a month hosted a group on tour.

To enter the Marble Bar you had to walk down narrow, dimly-lit stairs into a vast basement room. On the far side was a bar of solid marble. I've seen multiple online claims that the bar was 72 feet long; whatever its dimensions, it was huge.

The Marble Bar's marble bar. Image source: Baltimore Business Journal

The owners, Roger and LesLee Anderson, tended bar except when they'd take the stage with the house band (otherwise known as The Alcoholics) to do vintage rock 'n' roll covers. As I recall, a can of Budweiser cost $1. I would generally buy one when I arrived and then nurse it for the rest of the night. In my defense, I was an impoverished student and was supposed to be saving money for my return to college in the fall. And hey, it probably made for a safer drive home after closing.

LesLee and Roger Anderson at the Marble Bar. Photo courtesy LesLee Anderson. Image source: Baltimore Magazine

I don't remember the first night I went there in the summer of 1979 or 1980, but I soon went there regularly on Friday or Saturday nights. (Yes, I was one of the derided "weekend punks.") I would also go on a worknight (ah, youth) if a band I'd heard of was appearing there.

For a Baltimore basement dive the Marble Bar hosted some surprising shows, including Black Flag with the Minutemen (circa What Makes A Man Start Fires?), the Bush Tetras (circa Rituals), The Cramps (circa Smell of Female), the Dead Boys (circa Night of the Living Dead Boys), the Dead Kennedys (circa In God We Trust, Inc.), Iggy Pop (circa New Values), Sonic Youth (circa Confusion is Sex), The Teardrop Explodes (circa Kilimanjaro), Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, the Undertones (circa Positive Touch), and X (circa Wild Gift—a great show, and unfortunately one of only two of those listed that I was able to see, the other being the Bush Tetras). Baltimore's location between New York City and Washington DC meant that it was a logical place for bands to stop over on their East Coast tours, and musicians probably spread the word about Roger and LesLee's stalwart support of the local scene.

Poison Ivy of The Cramps at the Marble Bar, 2 March 1983. Image source: Jim M (Flickr)

The bar wasn't air-conditioned and the only ventilation was its open door, so on nights when it was packed it could get pretty muggy and airless. It was, of course, also the era when people smoked in bars, and so before the night had advanced very far there was always a thick pall of (mostly) cigarette smoke hanging in the air. When you arrived home after a night at the Marble Bar your hair and clothes smelled like an ashtray.

The most crowded I ever saw the place was when the Psychedelic Furs played there. Like so many English punk and new wave bands they were formed after a Sex Pistols concert, but their sound also hearkened back to the early 70s glam rock era. [2] Like Roxy Music, the Furs included a saxophonist (Duncan Kilburn) in their lineup; like Lou Reed and David Bowie, vocalist Richard Butler sounded world-weary and his lyrics were often elliptical. But although their sound drew on many influences, Butler's gravelly, whiskey-and-cigarettes vocals and John Ashton's flanged guitar also made it distinctive.

The Marble Bar had a sign near the door announcing that the maximum occupancy was 449 people, but I'm guessing there were many more jammed into the club that night. We were so tightly wedged together in front of the stage that you couldn't move; had there been a fire none of us would have made it out alive. I have no idea how the Furs made their way through the densely packed crowd massed between the dressing rooms and the low platform that served as the stage, but somehow the band suddenly materialized a few feet in front of me. In addition to Richard Butler, Ashton and Kilburn, the band included Roger Morris on second guitar, Butler's brother Tim on bass, and Vince Ely on drums. When they launched into the first song, "Into You Like A Train," we all started jumping up and down in unison, because that was the only way you could move. And if the people jammed up against you were jumping up and down, you did too. I understood instantly why English punks had invented the pogo.

The Furs had just released their second album, Talk Talk Talk, and played most of its songs, including "Mr. Jones," "All of This and Nothing," and "Pretty in Pink," plus many favorites from their first album (here is the setlist). Although they would go on later to have some hit synth-pop and dance singles, and "Pretty in Pink" would even become the title song of a John Hughes movie [3], for me the band was at its peak this July night in a sweaty Baltimore basement.

Astonishingly, the Marble Bar show was recorded and has been posted. I'm amazed that 43 years later I can, at least aurally, relive that night, sound system issues and all (you can hear the high end drop out towards the end of "Pretty in Pink" at about 27:24 in the video, and it stays out for the rest of the show). At the end of the show (around 55:12 in the video) Roger Anderson says "this is one of the best shows we've ever had here," while apologizing for the sound and proactively refusing the refunds that no one was asking for—we just wanted an encore. A very Marble Bar moment. I don't recall being disappointed by the sound, but I was very close to the stage—so close that I remember watching the ever-lengthening ash on Richard Butler's cigarette, waiting for it to fall. The song "Fall" from their first album was not, alas, on their set list; probably it was planned for an encore that didn't happen due to the sound system issues. Whatever the problems with the sound system, it was a great concert and a peak Marble Bar experience.

https://youtu.be/KjQn895U4n0

Coda: On 26 April 1984 Roger Anderson had a fatal heart attack in the Marble Bar. [4] LesLee tried to keep the club going for another year or so, but in May 1985 she gave up the lease. Apart from some sporadic shows over the next few years the Marble Bar has been empty ever since, and the neighborhood is even more desolate now than it was then.

I'm clearly far from the only person with fond memories of the Marble Bar. Tom Warner's blog Accelerated Decrepitude offers some excellent posts about the place and the people who made it special:

• Marble Bar Poster Art
• Marble Bar Pixs
  
• Retro Baltimore: The 2016 Marble Bar Photo Shoot

Baltimore Magazine published a good retrospective on the 35th anniversary of the Marble Bar's third "closing forever" party in 1987:

• The Marble Bar, a Haven for Punks and Misfits, Closed Its Doors for Good 35 Years Ago by Kendell Shaffer and Hope C. Tarr, Baltimore Magazine, May 2022
  

The Psychedelic Furs show at the Marble Bar was not the only memorable event of that summer. Just nine days later I went to see another exhilarating show by a favorite band in a very different venue: a volleyball gym.

Next time: Ramones

Last time: The problem is me: The Sex Pistols, Steve Jones, and Lonely Boy

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1. The flyer suggests that the show took place in June; however, a June calendar for the club doesn't list a Furs show, and multiple sources (including Setlist.fm and YouTube) confirm the 5 July date. Note the $5 ticket price (in advance).
   
2. Alex Ogg, "All Of This And Nothing: The Psychedelic Furs On Talk Talk Talk." The Quietus, 2010, https://thequietus.com/articles/05128-the-psychedelic-furs-interview-talk-talk-talk/
3. In Alex Ogg's interview linked above, Richard Butler says "The idea of the song was, 'Pretty In Pink' as a metaphor for being naked. The song, to me, was actually about a girl who sleeps around a lot and thinks that she’s wanted and in demand and clever and beautiful, but people are talking about her behind her back. That was the idea of the song. And John Hughes, bless his late heart, took it completely literally and completely overrode the metaphor altogether!"
4. In the image of the article on Baltimore Or Less, the first character of every line in the first column is cut off, and so I think the transcription misstates the date of Roger Anderson's death. According to the retrospective article in Baltimore Magazine linked above, he died on 26 April 1984, not 6 April.
   

Poor Things

Poster for Poor Things. Image source: CelebMafia.com

Poor Things (2023), starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and Mark Ruffalo; screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray; directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos' film version of the novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, is a bit like a postmodern Bride of Frankenstein. In the opening moments of the film a young woman in Victorian dress commits suicide by leaping from London's Tower Bridge into the Thames. [1] We learn later that her corpse, still warm when pulled from the river, is revivified after receiving a brain transplant from her own unborn baby. We then follow the adventures and misadventures of Bella (Emma Stone), who has a child's rapidly developing consciousness housed in an adult woman's body.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in Poor Things. Costume design by Holly Waddington.

Godwin Baxter, the doctor who reanimates Bella, is portrayed in the film by Willem Dafoe. In a brilliant touch, his face is criss-crossed with scars, a visual correlative of the novel's hint that his famous surgeon father Sir Colin "had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method" (p. 274). Baxter is himself the product of an experiment [2]:

Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) in Poor Things. Prosthetic design by Nadia Stacey.

In the novel, Baxter says of Bella that she

'has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood  Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires. Not having learned cowardice when small and oppressed she only uses speech to say what she thinks and feels, not to disguise these, so she is incapable of every badness done through hypocrisy and lying—nearly every sort of badness. All she lacks is experience. . .' (Poor Things, p. 69)

Virtually every man she meets wants to exploit the beautiful but naïve Bella for his own sexual gratification. But Bella has her own agency, not to say wilfulness. Eager for the experience she lacks, she abandons her earnest fiancé, Baxter's assistant McCandless (Ramy Yousef; for no clear reason, McCandless is renamed Max in the film from the novel's Archibald) and runs off with hedonistic lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). In the novel, Bella reports in her letters to Godwin and Max that she frequently "weds" Wedderburn; in the film, instead of employing this cleverly apposite pun, she calls sex "furious jumping."

A child's brain in a woman's body is the misogynistic Wedderburn's erotic ideal. (And not only his, of course: the position of women in Victorian society is largely one of enforced childlike dependence.) Wedderburn tricks Bella into boarding a ship bound for the Mediterranean in the delusional hope that he can control her better onboard. But despite his best efforts he cannot prevent Bella from learning about the world through reading, conversation with cynical fellow passenger Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), and direct experience. And with experience comes, as it does for all of us, the bitter knowledge of deceit, injustice, and cruelty: the immense suffering that humans, and the social and economic systems we've created, cause other humans.

Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) in Poor Things.

When the ship makes port in Alexandria, Bella disembarks and is thrown into an intellectual and emotional crisis by the extreme poverty and misery she sees. This crisis awakens her moral conscience and her outrage. When Wedderburn finally gets lucky in the ship's casino, the unworldly Bella hands his winnings to two of the ship's crewmembers to distribute among the poor. (Of course, they only distribute the money between themselves.)

Bankrupt and thrown off the ship in Marseilles, Wedderburn and Bella make their way to Paris. There Bella encounters the madam Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter; in the novel her character is named Madame Cronquebil). Bella discovers that in Swiney's brothel she can earn money working only 20 (unpleasant) minutes every hour, and can spend the rest of her time as she chooses. In the brothel she is befriended by fellow prostitute Toinette (Suzy Bemba), who introduces her to both the principles of socialism and the joys of sapphism.

When Bella returns to London, unwelcome revelations await her. From Baxter she learns the horrifying truth of her origin. And then her wedding to McCandless is interrupted by her former husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott; the character is named Aubrey in the novel), a general in Britain's imperial army. With all the power of money and the law behind him (and aided by Bella's desire to learn about her past), he takes her back to the life that as Victoria Blessington she so desperately wanted to escape. She soon discovers why.

I've mentioned a few of the differences between the novel and the film above; there are many more, large and small. A very large one is the ending, which in Tony McNamara's screenplay is entirely rewritten. Gray's book is also set in a recognizable version of the historical 19th century; the film's elaborate production design by Shona Heath and James Price places the characters in an alternate world that gives us an ironic distance from the action. In a steampunk Lisbon, aerial trams whoosh by on cables; Alexandria looks like an Arabian Nights fantasy; and Madame Swiney's Paris brothel could have been designed by an erotomaniacal Antoni Gaudí.

Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) watches from the doorway of her brothel as Bella approaches in Poor Things.

But the most significant difference is that the movie's focus is mainly on Bella's personal development rather than, as in the book, her awakening to the necessity of political action to bring about social change. In Lanthimos' movie Bella decides to become a doctor because, as she tells McCandless, Baxter's surgery is the place where she is happiest. In the book, it is because she discovers from Baxter that the city in which she lives is filled with "stinking, overcrowded rooms where you will find as much huddled misery as you saw in the sunlight of Alexandria" (p. 196). Bella studies medicine in order to combat the miseries of poverty by treating the sick, giving women the knowledge and means to control their own fertility, and fighting for basic measures of sanitation and public health. As she learns, "prevention of disease was more important than cure" (p. 198).

The novel has a multilayered metafictional structure that would be very difficult to realize on film; perhaps the production design is Lanthimos' attempt at recreating Gray's distancing effects in a visual medium. Purporting on the title page to be edited by Alasdair Gray, the novel opens with an introduction by him describing the discovery of the volume among boxes of discarded law office files, and closes with his "Notes Critical and Historical." In between lies the text of a memoir of which only one copy was ever printed. Written by Archibald McCandless, M.D., and intended for the eyes of his wife Victoria, it tells the story of Victoria's transformation into Bella. The memoir is followed by a letter from Victoria McCandless to her grandchildren disputing and complicating her husband's version of her life. She points out,

He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg's Suicide's Grave with additional ghouleries from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard's She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass. . .He has even plagiarized work by two dear friends: G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. (pp. 272-273)

Mild spoiler alert: The movie has a happy ending of sorts, with Bella finding fulfillment by creating a polyamorous intentional community around her. Although in The Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels wrote of a revolutionary society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all," Alasdair Gray's ingrained pessimism as a Scotsman, socialist, and student of history doesn't permit him to end on a note of merely personal contentment.

One of H.G. Wells' "scientific romances" is The War in the Air (1907), written just a few years after the Wright Brothers' first flight. Set just a decade or two after its publication date, the novel depicts aircraft as decisive weapons in a world war launched by Germany. As major cities are bombed into rubble, a global financial collapse and a virulent plague lead to the complete destruction of industrialized society. At the conclusion of the letter to her posterity, Victoria McCandless writes,

H.G.'s book is a warning, of course, not a prediction. He and I and many others expect a better future because we are actively creating it. . .H.G. Wells' warnings should be heeded. But the International Socialist Movement is as strong in Germany as in Britain. The labour and trade-union leaders in both countries have agreed that if their governments declare war they will immediately call a general strike. I almost hope our military and capitalistic leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need, and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place. (pp. 275-276)

The letter is dated "1st August, 1914."

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1. Alasdair Gray's novel is set in 1880s Glasgow, not London.
2. In the novel, Godwin is described as being "a whole head taller than most" with a "big face," "ogreish body" and "thick limbs" (p. 13); visible scars are notably absent from this description and from Gray's illustrations.
   

The Wager and slavery

Captives being taken on board a slave ship on the west coast of Africa. Image source: The Guardian

David Grann's The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is a compelling saga of an 18th-century British naval expedition in the Pacific to attack the Spanish trade in South American silver. The expedition ended in disaster: only one of the six ships ever returned. It's a story of brutality, cowardice, and courage. It's also, and mainly, a tale of an extraordinary feat of seamanship, in which 81 men set sail in overloaded jury-rigged boats from the desolate island on which the warship HMS Wager had been shipwrecked, and somehow managed to navigate 2500 sea miles to a safe harbor. But only a handful survived the perilous journey and ultimately returned to England—where they were put on trial for mutiny. 

Grann's retelling of this story, as well as the fate of the one ship in the expedition that managed to fulfill its mission, the flagship HMS Centurion, is vividly written with many novelistic touches, and is highly engaging. For more on Grann's book and the story of the expedition, please see the post Shipwreck, mutiny and murder: The Wager. [1]

But Grann's book also contains significant gaps in both fact and historical context. As Fara Dabhoiwala writes in the London Review of Books, key omissions involve the connection of the men and ships of the expedition with the Atlantic slave trade.

The leader of the Pacific expedition, Commodore George Anson, had spent the two years before the mission commanding the Centurion as a naval escort for British slave ships on their journeys from the west coast of Africa to the sugar islands of the Caribbean, something that Grann doesn't mention. Anson had also spent a decade as part of the naval garrison in Charleston, South Carolina, where he bought property. Charleston was largest slave-trading port in North America; it's estimated that 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. came through Charleston. Though apparently not a slaveowner himself, Anson was deeply implicated in protecting and sustaining the slave trade.

Portrait of George Anson, 1st Baron Anson, by Thomas Hudson, before 1748. Image source: National Maritime Museum

In addition to omitting Anson's backstory, Grann also falsifies the story of John Duck, a mixed-race member of the Wager's crew. Duck, raised in London, was probably the son of a British man and an enslaved African woman. Dabhoiwala speculates that Duck's father may have been a British captain of the same name known to have been master of the ship Ann around 1709.

On the Pacific expedition, Duck had lived through an onboard plague of typhus, the decimation of the crew by scurvy, and the wreck of the Wager. Like the other members of the crew, after leaving the sinking ship he was stranded for months with little food on an otherwise uninhabited island off the west coast of what is now Chile. After dozens of men had died of starvation (and some by violence), most of the remaining crew had left the Wager's cruel and incompetent captain David Cheap behind and sailed off in the most seaworthy of the Wager's boats. Duck was among those risking a quick death at sea against a lingering death on the island.

Portrait of David Cheap by Allan Ramsay, c. 1748 (detail). Image source: The Guardian

After leaving the island, Duck had survived for three months as one of the dwindling number of men on the Wager's jury-rigged longboat, christened the Speedwell. The survivors had navigated two thousand nautical miles through the Straits of Magellan and up the east coast of South America. Their ultimate goal was the Portuguese colony of Brazil; had they landed in Spanish-held territory, they would have been held as prisoners of war.

Duck was one of more than a dozen men who had been sent ashore to find food at Freshwater Bay (near Mar del Plata in what is now Argentina). When a storm blew up suddenly and pushed the damaged Speedwell away from the shore, eight of the foraging party were stranded on the beach. Duck and several others, including Isaac Morris, Samuel Cooper and John Andrews, were soon captured by indigenous Tehuelche tribesmen.

In Grann's account, the men spent two and a half years with the Tehuelche, who "led them from one village to another, staying for months in one place" until they reached the Spanish settlement of Buenos Aires. There, according to Grann, Duck was "kidnapped and sold into slavery. Morris didn't know where his friend had been taken, whether to the mines or the fields—Duck's fate was unknown, as is the case for so many people whose stories can never be told."

But the men were not guests of the Tehuelche. According to Dabhoiwala, after they had been captured all the men had been immediately enslaved. Being enslaved by the indigenous tribesmen meant something a bit different from being enslaved by Europeans. Dabhoiwala writes that "slavery among Native Americans. . .was largely a form of involuntary household servitude. It didn't mean being worked to death on a large plantation or down a silver mine, or being horrifically maltreated, as enslaved Africans in America routinely were." Morris later wrote that "our Work was chiefly to fetch Wood and Water, and Skin all the Horses which they killed; and tho' we were their Slaves, we were treated very humanely, and they would suffer no one to treat us ill."

Tehuelche tribesmen, date unknown. Image source: Awasi

The Tehuelche also enslaved captured Spanish women (Dabhoiwala does not mention what might have happened to any captured Spanish men). Duck's companions stated that each of the enslaved seamen had "a Spanish Woman given him to Wife, and that some of them had left Children behind." Of course, free consent is impossible under conditions of captivity, and the effect of the unions was to engender more slaves for the Tehuelche.

After two and a half years, the men were taken by the Tehuelche to Buenos Aires, where they were sold to the English agent for the Asiento de Negros. [2] They were held captive there for more than a year, "treated more like Slaves than Prisoners of War," before hostilities between England and Spain ended and they were repatriated to England. But Duck was not imprisoned with the others and never returned to England; his fate is unknown. It's certainly possible that he was separated from his companions due to the color of his skin and sold into Spanish slavery by the English Asiento agent. It's also possible that, as his companions stated in one account, the tribesmen refused to sell Duck to the agent because he was "too near of a Complexion with those Indians" that they, "insisting upon his being an Indian. . .therefore they would keep him." But Dabhoiwala offers another possibility: Duck may have chosen to remain with the Tehuelche voluntarily, because winding up in the hands of the Spanish might well lead to enslavement in more brutal conditions, or repatriation to an England that might hang him as a mutineer.

Dabhoiwala writes,

Perhaps Duck, far from home, had made a new life. Even the unrecorded and the enslaved, whatever the extremity of their predicament, are actors in their own stories. Perhaps he himself chose to remain behind.

We can only hope he was given the choice.

Cover of David Grann's The Wager (Doubleday, 2023), featuring "Ships in distress in a storm" (detail) by Peter Monamy (c. 1720-30), courtesy of Tate Britain. Cover image source: David Grann

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1. Martin Scorsese is currently planning a movie version of The Wager. Grann is also the author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017), which Scorsese adapted as a film in 2023.
2. The Asiento de Negros was a monopoly on trading slaves in Spanish territories. The Spanish did not generally capture or purchase slaves in Africa and convey them to the Americas, but instead outsourced the procurement of slaves to agents from countries more directly involved in the slave trade.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Poster for What's Love Got To Do With It? (2022). Image source: IMDB.com

The marriage crisis

Marriage is in an ongoing state of crisis. People are choosing to wait longer before they marry—median age at first marriage is now in the 30s for both men and women in the UK—and more are choosing never to get married at all. Although in the U.S. the legal right to marry was extended in 2015 to gay and lesbian couples in all 50 states, the number of marriages per 1,000 people is entering its fifth decade of decline: in 1980, there were 10.6 marriages per 1,000 people, while in 2020 there were around 5 (a COVID low; the number has since rebounded to around 6, but the long-term trend is steady decline). The marriage rate has fallen even though the percentage of people of marriageable age has increased over the same span, from around two-thirds to almost three-quarters of the population.

U.S. marriages per 1,000 people, 1980-2022. Data source: Provisional number of marriages and marriage rate, United States 2000-2022, CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System; Sally C. Curtin and Paul D. Sutton, Marriage rates in the United States, 1900-2018, NCHS Health E-Stat, 2020.

One reason for more women choosing to remain unmarried may be that, as Clementina Ford writes,

Marriage is not now and never has been designed with women's happiness in mind — and yet we're told that without it, we will be miserable. As any sociologist can tell you, it's men who benefit from marriage: they live longer, they are generally healthier and happier, and their economic prospects improve [compared to single men]. On the other hand, studies have shown that married women die earlier. [1]

Ford is citing a study of 100,000 Europeans that found that marriage adds 1.7 years to the average husband's lifespan, and subtracts 1.4 years from the average wife's. [2]

As marriage rates have fallen, so have divorce rates, but they are still proportionately high: in the U.S., the divorce rate fell from 5.2 per 1,000 people in 1980 (49% of the 1980 marriage rate) to 2.3 in 2020 (45% of the 2020 marriage rate). In other words, roughly speaking, for every two marriages there's one divorce. Let me just say that I would not get on a plane if I had little better than a 50% chance of making it to my destination.

Share of marriages ending in divorce in the US, by year of marriage. Image source: Our World in Data

Given our spectacularly poor track record at picking people who will be good, fulfilling, and reliable partners in the long term, shouldn't we seek assistance in making that choice? Two recent phenomena reflect this idea:

• Marriage Pact: Begun at Stanford in 2017 as an undergraduate project, Marriage Pact is an algorithmic matchmaking service. According to a recent story in the San Jose Mercury News, each participant fills out a 50-question survey about their "core values," such as "communication styles and conflict resolution. Smoking and drug habits. And things like: 'If you do nothing for an entire day, how do you feel?' On a 1 to 7 scale, 'like a lard' is 1 and 'like royalty' is 7."
  
  
  
  No pictures or swiping are involved. Each participant receives one name, an email address, and a percentage: their highest-rated match among fellow participants. The marriage pact is a pledge to marry your algorithmic best match if you don't find someone better by a mutually-agreed date—a kind of marital backup plan. It has now spread to nearly 90 campuses around the country.
  
  According to the San Jose Mercury News story, of the nearly half-million participants to date, "a tiny fraction land in long-term relationships, even marriage." But the creators claim that 30% of the matches meet in person, and one-ninth of those wind up dating for a year or more. If those numbers are true, that's a 3.3% relationship success rate, or 33 out of 1,000 participants. With a current U.S. marriage rate of 6 per 1,000 people, on your own you could do a lot worse.

• Indian Matchmaking: A 2020–23 Netflix reality series created by the Indian-American documentary director Smriti Mundhra, Indian Matchmaking features Sima Taparia, a Mumbai-based "marriage consultant." Mundhra had featured Taparia in her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl (co-directed with Sarita Khurana), which followed the efforts of three middle-class families to find husbands for their college-educated daughters.
  
  
  One of the families was Taparia's, and we watch her struggling to succeed as a matchmaker for her own daughter, Ritu (who would prefer to continue her career in financial services).
  
  The TV series follows Taparia's efforts to find acceptable matches for multiple clients each season. In a Guardian article a viewer criticized the first season as a "cesspool of casteism, colourism, sexism, classism." Women must come from a "good" (i.e., high-caste) family and be light-skinned, slim, and at least average in height; "the prospects for women who are dark-skinned, overweight, or under 1.6 metres (5ft 3ins) are presented as bleak, if not a lost cause entirely." Women are also subject to "moral policing": they must not have an extensive romantic history, or children from previous relationships. An NPR story reports that in Season 3 the series introduces "Priya, a pretty 35-year-old who is dating after a divorce and worries that men she encounters think she is 'broken.'"
  
  
  Mundhar has now created a spinoff, Jewish Matchmaking, which dropped on May 3 of this year. Can Poly Matchmaking be far behind?
  

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Many of us could clearly use some help in finding good romantic partners. Which brings us to What's Love Got To Do With It?, the 2022 feature film written by Jemima Khan and directed by Shekhar Kapur. [3]

The film starts promisingly. Zoe (Lily James), an "award-winning documentary filmmaker" (is there any other kind?) has grown up with her Anglo-Pakistani next-door neighbor Kazim (Shazad Latif). When Zoe finds Kaz at his brother's wedding, sneaking a cigarette in their childhood backyard treehouse, he confesses that he is ready to settle down and is willing to try to find a Pakistani bride through an arranged marriage: "Well, 'assisted marriage.' That's what we're calling it these days." Zoe is initially incredulous—"What, like assisted suicide?"—but then decides that Kaz's search for a wife will be the perfect subject for her next film.

Shazad Latif (Kazim Khan) and Zoe Stevenson (Lily James) in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Greg King's Film Reviews

Zoe herself is starting to feel that it would be nice to have a relationship that lasts longer than a weekend. But despite (or perhaps because) of these feelings, she continues bonking men she's just met in bars, waking up in strangers' beds, and shying away from a handsome, kind veterinarian (Oliver Chris) she meets through her mother's dog's misadventures. Her desire to be in a couple is more than cancelled out by her fear of commitment; while she's looking for Mr. Right, she seems only to be attracted to Mr. Wrongs.

Of course, unlike the characters we can see exactly where this story is heading, but there's a good deal of pleasure in getting there. In the initial part of the film the humor in Khan's script can be delightfully pointed, as in Zoe's clueless but well-meaning mother Cath (Emma Thompson) calling the wedding celebrations "exotic" ("'Exotic' meaning good foreign rather than threatening foreign?" asks Zoe. "Yeah, exactly," responds Cath).

Cath Stevenson (Emma Thompson) in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Cinema Clock

Or Zoe's white male producers (Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen) gradually becoming more interested in Zoe's proposed film about Kaz as they run through possible working titles ("My Big Fat Arranged Wedding"; "Meet the Parents—First"; "I Hope She's A Pretty Woman") and check off the funding boxes: "Eth? Tick. Female director? Double tick." (The white producers later critique her film as being shot through a "white lens"—evidently not "eth" enough.)

And although Zoe defends the practice of arranged marriage to the producers, in conversation with Kaz she's still skeptical. When he says of arranged marriages that "over time, you grow to love the person you're with," she responds, "What, like Stockholm Syndrome?" When, on the way to an appointment with the Muslim matchmaker (Asim Chaudry) hired by his parents (Jeff Mirza and E&I favorite Shabana Azmi), Zoe asks Kaz the difference between using a matchmaker and using a dating app, Kaz says "I suppose you could call it a bespoke, 3D, halal Tinder. Operated by your parents."

Kaz's parents Aisha Khan (Shabana Azmi) and Zahid Khan (Jeff Mirza) in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Firstpost

When the matchmaker Mo asks asks what they are looking for, Kaz's mother Aisha brings out the stereotypical criteria: "A girl from the same. . .background, soft-spoken, long hair. Not too dark." Kaz's father wants the bridal prospects to have complexions no darker than "wheatish." The film's portrayal of reflexive color prejudice is all too real.

Kaz soon begins to meet over Skype with Maymouna (Sajal Aly), a lovely young Pakistani woman. Of course, both sets of parents are hovering in the background the whole time, and can't help themselves from interjecting regularly. But perhaps Maymouna is not quite so chaste and demure as she appears, and has her own agenda. . .

Maymouna (Sajal Aly) and family in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Variety

The most treacherous moment in any romantic comedy, though, is the ending, and there's no way to talk about where the movie goes wrong without spoilers. So if you want to avoid them, please skip the next two paragraphs:

• Spoiler 1: There's a subplot featuring Kaz's sister Jamila (Mariam Haque), who has become estranged from her parents and the family matriarch Nani Jan (Pakiza Baig) because they have rejected her marriage a non-Muslim white man. Towards the end of the film Kaz invites Jamila to the family Eid celebration without telling his parents or Nani Jan. When Jamila arrives, she has her husband and new baby in tow. Of course, fulfilling her traditional role as mother instantly erases all discord, and Jamila, her husband and baby are welcomed back into the family. This feels like a reinforcement, rather than a critique, of motherhood as a woman's destiny.

• Spoiler 2: When it comes time for the main characters to figure out the pairing that has been obvious to the audience from the first scenes, there are a couple of problems. Since Zoe and Kaz have grown up together like sister and brother (although we do learn that as kids they shared their first kiss), when they finally start thinking about each other romantically it seems queasily semi-incestuous. And the big kiss they exchange just before fadeout is anything but electric. Since movies are shot out of sequence, my guess is that Kapur unwisely shot the kiss early in the filming schedule, before the actors had gotten to know and feel comfortable with each other. Perhaps the lack of spark is a deliberate directorial choice, signalling the difficulties and awkwardnesses that lie ahead for the couple. But a sense of difficulty and awkwardness is not the final impression that most romantic comedies want to leave with their audience.

—End of spoilers—

What's Love Got To Do With It? is worth seeing for the witty first 90 minutes or so of Khan's script, the performances of Lily James and Shazad Latif as people who only slowly come to realize that their best match may be right next to them, and the pleasures of watching veteran actors Thompson and Azmi as their mothers. As with many romantic comedies the ending doesn't quite fulfill the film's early promise. On the other hand, you could do a lot worse.

https://youtu.be/0LqOp2MNwao

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1. Christina Ford, "Marriage is an inherently misogynistic institution—so why do women agree to it?" The Guardian, 30 October 2023.
2. Roger Dobson, "The stress of marriage shortens your life by a year (if you're the wife)," The Independent, 26 February 2006. 
3. Screenwriter Jemima Goldsmith Khan is the British former wife of Pakistani cricket star, later Prime Minister, and current prisoner Imran Khan. Director Shekhar Kapur began his career in India, directing Masoom (The Innocent, 1983), with Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi; the indelible Mr. India (1987), with Anil Kapoor and Sridevi; and Bandit Queen (1994), with Seema Biswas. He then moved on to the UK for Elizabeth (1998), with Cate Blanchett, and then to Hollywood for The Four Feathers (2002), with Heath Ledger and Kate Hudson. Since the sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2008), however, he's only contributed segments to anthology films, directed short films and some TV series episodes, as well as the 2016 documentary Science of Compassion.