Little Criminals

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Elvis Costello’s debut album brought home to me just how timid Little Criminals really is. Costello’s best songs are anything but timid, but they’re as intelligent as some of Newman’s finest, as endearingly elusive in their meanings, and funny in the same bitter, self-deprecating manner. They are also, like Newman’s signature songs, very weird. Costello, a twenty-two-year-old excomputer operator who grew up in Liverpool and now looks like an underfed, misanthropic Buddy Holly, is proof that not only are things quite strange in England today, they are capable of getting a lot stranger. I've learn't how those formative years really impact you as a human going into later life, and this is what we need to think about and talk about. I wonder if I had been put in that situation where would I have ended up." The quality of the child actors was just excellent. Myles Ferguson, who tragically died just five years after appearing in this film, was able to portray Cory's descent into crime in a way that makes the audience identify how easily a child can be led astray. But it is Brendan Fletcher who steals the show. He depicts Des' hard edge and dark emotions while retaining a sense of vulnerability and childish desperation in the character. He leaves you feeling a conflict between condemning Des as irredeemable and wanting to help this child climb to a better future.

The device of the VestigialRaconteur is used again in Hughes’s next book, In Hazard, which hasnot been reprinted by NYRB Classics. It is a book in many ways asunusual as his first, though without the harrowing dilemmas createdby flawed yet potent human understanding—without, in the end, thechildren. Based on a true incident involving a steamship caught in aCaribbean hurricane in 1932, the book began as a nonfiction account,something like The Perfect Storm, and became fiction because ofHughes’s reluctance to make characters out of the actual crew andofficers. In the end, the steamship and its agony become more realthan the people Hughes invented. Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father” is sad, simple and sad. “Here I am/Lost in the wind,” sings the girl, to the accompaniment of some lugubrious strings and the piano of one Ralph Grierson, “Round in circles sailing/Like a ship/That never comes in/Standin’ by myself.” She sings, “Sing a sad song/For a good man/Sing a sad song/For me/A sad song/For a sailor/A thousand miles from the sea.” It’s as flat as the plain she’s standing on, until she adds at the very end, “Papa, we’re going sailing.” And if they don’t break your heart, those lines, you don’t have a heart to break beating inside you. Why should songwriters have to work under strictures that short story writers don’t have to work under?“ Newman asked in the press release. “Why do you always have to write about yourself?“ Well, he’s liberated from that notion with this work of comic brilliance. He makes use of pop’s formulaic structure to turn his stories into set three-minute vignettes where the brooding music provides the depth of great prose.

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Gemini Awards: Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Program (Sabrina Grdevich) Oh, how I laughed during those first couple of scenes. This silly little film about an 11 year-old who carries a gun, steals cars, robs stores, burglars houses, extorts money from other kids, burns houses, shoots rats, buys drugs, distributes drugs to his mother and his friends, and then kills a guy. What a great comedy! But it wasn't intended to be a comedy. It was intended as a social drama. How can this be? The events in this film are absurd and ridiculous. The characters are all stereotypes right out of a 4 year-old's comic-strip-induced immature imagination. The dialog is laughable; people talk like morons. It's a very dumb film. The Wooden Shepherdess, Hughes’s last novel, begins with a long passage set in prohibition America, to which Augustine has arrived by a series of not very convincing accidents. On the lam and without resources, he hides out in New England with a gang of local kids burning away an aimless summer. Something in this situation, which is derived from Hughes’s experiences in America as a young man, brings out again all that makes him such a fine writer; it is full of beauty and strangeness. A few people are thrown together in quasi-illegal ambiguity, at once in danger and out of control, like the occupants of the pirate ship in A High Wind in Jamaica. For the narrator, it seems to be an American condition: For one thing, his vision of the human flaws that allowed the war to happen is insufficient. What seems so universal in the small and local tragedy of A High Wind in Jamaica seems narrow and particular on the world stage of political battles and the fall of governments. The German characters—whose physical and sensory world is built with the same utter truth to experience as the Jamaica of A High Wind in Jamaica—are too often mere summaries of class attitudes and the shifting political scene of Weimar’s last days, the Beer Hall Putsch, and the rest. Actual historical figures appear, including, memorably, Hitler himself, but while these characters are carefully cast, their historical actions and statements taken into account in the invention of their thoughts, there is something centrally stagey about them. Maybe as historical actors we are stagey, and our limits will be clear to any future godlike observer; but unlike the limits of Emily and Captain Jonsen, these seem to be the author’s failings.

Evident in Hughes’s novels, as inthe novels of some of his British contemporaries, is a sort ofamateur or handmade quality, a way of appearing to have made a bookout of materials at hand, without a lot of fussing over the unities.In this mode, showing is not privileged over telling, and the writeroften divagates to speak to the reader—to make pronouncements ortell truths in the present tense (a device called the gnomicpresent), or to describe or analyze his characters in aconversational fashion, or to deplore the state of things, or torecall a circumstance similar to but different from the one he isrecounting. He seems not to know the rules of point of view, or caremuch for them, slipping into this or that mind and heart wheneverconvenient—not in an omniscient way but as though writer, reader,and characters were all gathered around a communal fire, the fire ofa shared compassion and shared values, which may be strained ormodified by the tale’s unfolding, an unfolding that at times mayneed to be directly explicated. (Another writer who uses the modebrilliantly—of course it is a mode, a style, a manner, a device,and can be used well or badly—is Hughes’s near contemporary andfellow NYRB Classics selection T.H. White.)

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Yet, as if by some mute flash of understanding, no one commented on his absence. . . . Neither then nor thereafter was his name mentioned by anybody: and if you had known the children intimately you would never have guessed from them that he had ever existed. Des's mother relinquishes custody of him, which he has a hard time accepting. Rita informs Des that they are trying to find him a foster home, Des takes the news with disgust and flees as soon as Cory visits him. Canadian album certifications – Randy Newman – Little Criminals". Music Canada . Retrieved June 1, 2023.

In Hazard was something of aflop. Virginia Woolf was interested but felt that between the stormand the people “there’s a gap, in which there is some want ofstrength.” Ford Maddox Ford, on the other hand, saw it as amasterpiece of a peculiar kind:

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This film considers people, most especially children, living at or beyond the margins of society. It is a worthy companion to Bunuel's "Los Olvidados". The central character, Des, is an 11 year old boy, the leader of a group of delinquents. From the outset, he is loathsome and (seemingly) without any redeeming value. The viewer's reaction to this character is disturbing; how can you hate an 11 year old. The story follows Des through one vicious episode after another. Slowly, ever so subtly, the little boy inside the monster is revealed, and circumstances which have created the monster examined. In September 1977 the British music magazine NME published the following interview with Newman talking sardonically about his then new release: "There's one song about a child murderer," Newman deadpans. "That's fairly optimistic. Maybe. There's one called 'Jolly Coppers on Parade' which isn't an absolutely anti-police song. Maybe it's even a fascist song. I didn't notice at the time. There's also one about me as a cowboy called 'Rider in the Rain'. I think it's ridiculous. The Eagles are on there. That's what's good about it. There's also this song 'Short People'. It's purely a joke. I like other ones on the album better but the audiences go for that one." [6]