Today in Supreme Court History: August 6, 1792

8/6/1792: Justice Thomas Johnson takes judicial oath.

Justice Thomas Johnson

 

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

In re Equitable Office Bldg. Corp., 72 S.Ct. 1086 (decided August 6, 1946): Bankruptcy trustee’s plan of reorganization had been accepted by the Bankruptcy Court. Application to Justice Reed to stay consummation of the plan by two previously unobjecting stockholders who had found a refinancer with better terms. Reed holds that the lower court’s refusal to modify the plan was not discretionary and, citing Bankruptcy Code provisions as to appealability, grants stay. (Business was refinanced in 1947, though it later sold the building which, built in 1915, still stands, at 120 Broadway, downtown Manhattan. Full of law firms. I’ve been there many times. Big, old, echo-y bathrooms. Some big, old, echo-y lawyers too.)

[Dan Schiavetta]

today’s movie review: The Devil in Miss Jones, 1973

This was one of the “big three” of “seminal” (ha) porn films, along with Deep Throat (reviewed here last week) and Behind the Green Door (which I’ve never seen and don’t have a particular desire to, any more). It starts out with Georgina Spelvin committing suicide by slitting her wrists (graphic) but on the way to the afterlife she finds her sexuality awakened for the first time via various sex scenes engineered by a mysterious force. Or at least that’s how I remember it. For the first time she experiences orgasm and becomes addicted to the “big O”. At the end she finds herself locked forever in a bare room with a man who is totally uninterested in her. She tries to masturbate but no matter how much she tries she can’t “get off” — she’s in Hell, because she committed suicide, a mortal sin.

!

I saw this around 1990, obtained via a sex store in San Francisco called “Good Vibrations”. The blurb said it was “a must for recovering Catholics”. It was anything but. I was horrified. As a recovering Catholic myself it set me back several years. (Fortunately I re-recovered quickly.)

An undercurrent of guilt underlay a lot of these early porn films, as if the filmmakers, despite their proclaimed boldness, could not shake free of the basic conviction that what they were depicting was sinful and had to be punished. (Many also ended in violence, for example The Godson. More generally in film, a young nude woman who enjoyed sex soon got killed in some gruesome manner, as in some horror films, and the opening scene of Jaws.) Subconsciously they were giving the pre-performance statement of no offense being intended, such as Philistrate’s intro to the mechanics’ play in Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i, 114 – 124. All this of course was rooted in the filmmakers’ own sense of guilt.

I’m giving Good Vibrations a bad rap. It doesn’t deserve it. I visited when I was in California for law school. I had only been in “adult bookstores” that were seedy, with secretive, guilt-ridden men thumbing through books and magazines without buying them (the cashier: “This is a bookstore, not a lookstore!”), gazing at sex toys without daring to touch them. GV was on sunny Valencia Street, staffed by smiling, helpful women, with a mostly female clientele. I felt out of place but welcome as various products were described to me. And sex toys were touched. On a counter front and center was a collection of vibrators which customers were turning on and fondling with their hands, as if they were at the perfume counter at Bloomingdale’s. A much healthier environment, and it seemed like the shackles of (Catholic and other sourced) guilty had finally been shed.

[Mr. Bumble]

Seriously?

[Syd Henderson]

Probably another first date movie.

[Mr. Bumble]

Wonder if he pulled the old pecker in the pop corn trick?

[Krayt]

He's an ai bot giving the audience what they want!

[Magister]

Interesting review. I have not seen any of those three movies, although I've heard of them. When I was in graduate school in the 80s, campus film societies would periodically run porn films; one I recall, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, roughly following the plot of My Fair Lady, did not end with guilt or punishment for the woman in question. Perhaps because it was made slightly later in the 1970s; there was a huge shift generally in how women were treated (at least in the US) over very few years.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I don’t know about now, but pornography used to be put under abstruse academic microscopes. I honestly don’t think most of those professors were viewing all those films with hidden, less intellectual agendas. For an example that can be read online, see Linda Williams, “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible”, 1989.

[Magister]

It probably still is, but it looks like an area prone to being commandeered (or casualties) in culture wars. While I expect the campus film societies were just pandering for profit, some of them offered films coordinated with academic courses (certainly earlier, when VCRs were less common).

[Dan Schiavetta]

That’s a shame.

This is an except from Williams’s book, which I think makes a valid point, at least as to the straight male market for porn:

“When Tiresias revealed the quantitative secret of female sexual pleasure, he put Hera in a position of weakness vis-a-vis the power of Zeus. To the Greeks, sexual pleasure was constructed in opposition to the ideal of self-mastery and control; so when Hera was portrayed as having nine-tenths of the pleasure of sex, the apparent moral was that she is an out-of-control female. In contrast, Zeus’s mere one-tenth of pleasure demonstrated the moderation and self-mastery that earned him the right of patriarchal authority over others, including his wife . . . the female loses the game of power if she wins that of pleasure. It is as if women, who had no part in Greek political or public life, were granted the greater part of pleasure both as a consolation for their lack of power and as proof that they were incapable of exercising power in the first place. Thus in the end pleasure, although desirable, was damning. . . What does it mean when in Insatiable (Godfrey Daniels, 1980) Marilyn Chambers’s multiply orgasmic heroine cries out for ‘more, more, more’, even though she has apparently had an enormous amount of sexual pleasure already? Is Chambers a modern-day Hera damning herself once again by letting out the quantitative secret of her ability to keep on enjoying?”

It remind me once again of how women enjoying sex in horror films were so often punished for it, perhaps by a director or scriptwriter channeling Zeus.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The same thing was true of the slasher movies of the '80s -- the kids who had sex died, those who didn't lived.

[Dan Schiavetta]

That’s probably what I was thinking of.

[Magister]

Interesting that the Golden Age of slasher movies was 1978 to 1984, at the end of the Golden Age of pornography. Perhaps the porn audience that wanted the sluts to suffer in the end migrated to the slasher genre when porn moved away from the undercurrent of guilt. Roger Ebert commented on worse examples of slasher films:

These films hate women and being in a movie theatre surrounded by people who are identifying not with the victim but with the attacker is a very scary experience.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/9973886/Roger-Ebert-a-stealth-feminist.html

[F.D. Wolf]

It is a misconception that more women than men are killed in slasher films. For example, there were 16 Friday the 13th films between 1980 and 2009. In 14 of those, more men than women are killed (often in widely disparate ratios); in two of them, an equal number of men and women were killed. (Source: listofdeaths.fandom.com).

[Magister]

Different sources give different statistics. I see claims that women spent more time in fear, regardless of their death count; that would track with the final girl trope - the horror film wants the final confrontation to spend a long time being terrified and men being terrified doesn't work as well. The whole thing is further undercut by later movies that want to subvert the usual expectations. For the period Ebert was talking about (or at least that I was), the trend was pretty clear.

TV Tropes describes the slasher movie as

Movies about near-indestructible Serial Killers stalking attractive young women, a combination that allows for buckets of gore and enough flesh to titillate.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I can cite dogmatic authority on this (Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series): “Women are more easily and more deeply terrified, generating more sheer horror than the male of the species“ (“Wolf in the Fold”, Season 2, Episode 7)

[F.D. Wolf]

On this day in legal history, August 6, 1930, New York County Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater mysteriously disappeared. From Wikipedia:

In the summer of 1930, after the start of the first investigations of what would become the Seabury Commission, Crater and his wife were vacationing at their summer cabin in Belgrade, Maine. In late July, Crater received a telephone call. He offered no information to his wife about the content of the call other than to say that he had to return to New York City "to straighten those fellows out". The next day, he arrived at his apartment at 40 Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village, but instead of dealing with business he proceeded onward to Atlantic City, New Jersey, with his mistress, showgirl Sally Lou Ritz (real name, Sarah Ritzi; 1907/1908–2000).

Crater returned to Maine on August 1 and traveled back to New York on August 3. Before making this final trip, he promised his wife that he would return by her birthday on August 9. Stella stated that he was in good spirits and behaving normally when he departed for the city. On the morning of August 6, Crater spent two hours going through his files in his chambers, reportedly destroying several documents. He then had his law clerk, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him that amounted to US$5,150 (equivalent to about US$90,217 in 2022). At noon, Crater and Mara carried two locked briefcases to Crater's apartment, where Mara was told to take the rest of the day off.

Later that evening, Crater went to a Broadway ticket agency, Supreme Tickets, and bought one seat from William Deutsch, the proprietor of Supreme, for a comedy called Dancing Partner at the Belasco Theatre. He then went to Billy Haas's Chophouse at 332 West 45th Street, where he ate dinner with Ritz and William Klein, a lawyer friend.

Last known sighting

Crater's dinner companions gave differing accounts of his departure from the restaurant. Klein initially testified that "the judge got into a taxicab outside the restaurant about 9:30 p.m. and drove west on Forty-fifth Street." This account was initially confirmed by Ritz: "At the sidewalk Judge Crater took a taxicab." Klein and Ritz later changed their story and said that they had entered a taxi outside the restaurant, but that Crater had walked down the street.

Crater had just been appointed to the court in April 1930 by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rumor had it that Crater had paid off Tammany Hall officials to secure the appointment. During his four months on the bench, he produced two published opinions. Crater had some unsavory associates within the New York underworld and a penchant for showgirls and high-end prostitutes.

In October, a grand jury investigating the disappearance called 95 witnesses and produced 975 pages of testimony, but failed to conclude whether Crater was alive or dead, had disappeared on his own volition or had met with foul play. Crater was declared legally dead in 1939, and the case was closed in 1970 without resolution. The investigations into the disappearance would begin a chain of events that would send shock waves through the New York City political establishment, resulting in the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker and the end of Tammany Hall's stranglehold on the city.

https://untappedcities.com/2021/08/06/joseph-force-crater/

[Dan Schiavetta]

Thanks!

Good to hear from another adult.

The juveniles are out in force today so let me quote from another adult, Garrison Keillor, who wrote this about a recent vacation:

I am obligated to be an optimist because I’ve had a lucky life — I had a big career in a field for which I had no aptitude, my heart got surgically repaired, I married well on the third try — so it’d be dishonest to sing about the water tasting like turpentine and wanting to lay my head on the railroad line so the 4:19 can ease my troubled mind, so I don’t, I sing Van Morrison’s “These Are the Days of the Endless Summer,” but I respect skeptics and I’m glad that investigative journalism is at work shedding light on dark corners.

Take the recent piece in the Times about the NRA’s transformation from an organization of sportsmen to a powerhouse lobby that ruled Congress and expanded the Second Amendment so that we now have 400 million guns in the country and mass killings are a routine matter that has poisoned urban life. You read the piece with disgust at the machinations of politicians, and then you set it aside and enjoy the day. I got to ride the Keystone Express out to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and do a show at which I sang, with my friends Heather and Christine, Jerry Garcia’s “Attics of My Life” and Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the audience joined in on the “Sha la la la la la la la la la la la de da,” which we repeated several times until we got the correct number of las. You cannot allow the existence of evil to overshadow the beauty of life in this splendiferous world we walk around in.

Pennsylvania: you have to love a state with towns named Blue Bell, King of Prussia, Wissahickon, Mount Airy, Flourtown, Conshohocken, West Conshohocken, Swedeland, Schnecksville, Lumberville, Plowville, Normal Square, Jim Thorpe, Mount Joy. The map of Pennsylvania is a testament to individuality. The developers of suburbia prefer generic names, such as Riverside and Lawnview but the Keystone State is a land of proud originality.

Not far from where we sang, we saw Amish boys and girls in solemn traditional garb playing volleyball and whooping and laughing and this, rather than the latest shooting, is the real news, the happy persistence of independence and the acceptance of it by the neighbors. The Amish set up tents in cornfields and offer dinner to the tourists, fried chicken and corn on the cob, and I hear that it’s very amiable and the corn is fresh off the stalk and fairly fabulous.

Acceptance is a natural phenomenon. It’s happened with gay couples and it’s happening with people named Samuel who now want to be called Sarah and with Ellens who now identify as Allens. I grew up in a very white community and I am still quite aware of race but I think younger people are much less aware, having grown up with so many shades of skin. It’s a natural process of familiarity.

The media are naturally attracted to despair, death, destruction, division, danger, because they make for a good story. “Hamlet” wouldn’t be a classic if Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude sat in a circle and worked out their differences: you really need Polonius to be stabbed and Ophelia to drown and Laertes to seek revenge and the big sword duel and the poisoned goblet. But journalists go to ridiculous ends at times: for example, a story in the Washington Post about why it’s so dangerous to fall off a cruise ship while at sea. Something, the story admits, that is extremely rare, there being railings and all, but the reporter makes a great deal out of precious little.

I’m 80 and it’s clear to me that ordinary life in America has progressed rather majestically. When I unload the dishwasher and put laundry into the washer as our cleaning lady Lulu vacuums around me, I think of my grandma on the farm, a smart woman and a progressive, and what she might’ve done had she had some appliances and bought chicken at a supermarket instead of chasing it down and hacking its head off and defeathering it and frying it over a woodfire.

Grandma said, “I’ve lived through the best, most exciting time in human history. My life started with covered wagons, and it has gone through jet airplanes and television.” She never drove a car, she drove horses because they knew the way home, but freed of dishwashing and laundry and cleaning, I think she might’ve sat down and done what I’m doing now, writing something in gratitude for life’s blessings. Thanks for everything, great and small. We’re lucky.

[F.D. Wolf]

Thank you! I am, of course, familiar with Garrison Keillor, though I have never heard his radio show or read any of his writing (until your post, that is.)

As you know, Keillor (and your) politics and mine aren't exactly the same, but I too see many trends in this country I don't like, but, I too, remain an optimist, and am confident I always will (even if that is not always apparent in my posts).

[Dan Schiavetta]

thank you F.D.!

[Krayt]

There’s good reason to be optimistic. Life is better than ever before, and continues this trend, by actual measurements of health and wealth.

In the west, our worst health problem is too much calorie-rich, cheap food, a novel problem to have historically. Economists measured things like calories produced per person, dollars per calorie, and so on, to try to get a handle on starvation and lack of nourishment.

Too many fatasses? Much of the world and history envies you. What a wonderful problem to have!

Keep that in mind the next time some scold starts screetching.

[Magister]

Good stories from both of you, but I'm still going to risk being thought not an adult by commenters I actually respect.... My favorite town name in Pennsylvania remains Forty Fort, and my immediate reaction to the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker was "Dyn-O-Mite!"

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Don’t forget Eighty Four. Originally Smithville (not Smithton, former home of Jones Brewing Company, maker of Stoney’s beer, founded by “Stoney” Jones, grandfather of Shirley Jones (Mrs. Partridge, Academy Award), whose singing and dancing lessons at the Pittsburgh Playhouse were funded by Stoney’s beer). Home of 84 Lumber, whose founder, Joe Hardy died on his 100th birthday after a life that was usually at least that bizarre.

Or Paradise, a small town that periodically must survive a family driving down the main drag singing “Cheeseburger in Paradise” while consuming cheeseburgers that apparently must be purchased outside Paradise — a McDonald’s five or ten miles away seems to be the nearest purveyor.

Or Intercourse, from which one must travel a bit to obtain Intercourse Blush Table Wine, sold along State Route 340 between Intercourse and Bird-In-Hand.

Intercourse is four miles from Paradise. In a better world, the government warning on Intercourse Blush Table Wine labels might read, “WARNING: Paradise can be an unexpectedly long way from Intercourse -- and vice versa.”

[Dan Schiavetta]

Ha!

[Mr. Bumble]

"Good to hear from another adult."

Says the "adult" who relives youthful wet dreams and reviews 50 year old porn films.

[Syd Henderson]

Judge Crater's disappearance is indeed a date in Supreme Court history, just a different Supreme Court.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I practice in the (N.Y.) Appellate Division and I get Supreme Court decisions reversed all the time. How many lawyers here can say that?

[Magister]

Some time ago, I learned here that New York's Supreme Court was not its highest court, and wondered then if New York did that just to dis everywhere else.

[F.D. Wolf]

I would hardly be the first to notice the seemingly backward nomenclature in New York, where the "supreme court", which is presided over by "justices", is a lower court, while the highest court, the "Court of Appeals" is presided over by "judges".

[Magister]

Well, I've also heard that New York was once New Amsterdam. And the courts and now the titles of those who preside! I guess people just liked it better that way. Even if there are no Giants actually playing there any more.

[Mr. Bumble]

"The meritocracy!"
Indeed. Read the entire entry and see a full and meritorious life.

[Mr. Bumble]

"It’s much better to nominate someone like Jackson or Sotomayer from an underrepresented group than a crony or family member."
Yes, we're all better served when a less competent person is selected. Who were the "underrepresented groups" in 1791?

[bevis the lumberjack]

Be nice if the justices could do simple math, but that’s just me I guess.

[Mr. Bumble]

"Who were the “underrepresented groups” in 1791?"

[Mr. Bumble]

The next time you need medical care make sure you choose a doctor from an underrepresented group rather than the most competent one available to you.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Germans.

As a percentage of the whole, largest minority group we ever had.

[SRG]

I am reminded of the observation that porn films create unrealistic expectations...like the plumber turning up on time.