Little Criminals

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The album's cover artwork is a photographic portrait of Randy Newman by celebrity photographer and graphic artist Bob Seidemann. It features Newman standing on the West 7th Street overpass above the I-110 freeway in the Financial District of Los Angeles. Larkin, Colin (2007). Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4thed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195313734. I highly recommend this film to anybody interested in socio-dynamics, especially because although set in Canada I can say the dynamics are universal because of the way it mirrored my own. 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.)

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] Gemini Awards: Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Program (Mimi Kuzyk)Does this throw open a window on a Hughes interior we would rather not have been allowed to glimpse? It certainly seems to carry the amoral and stricture-less sensuality Hughes ascribes to children into a realm different from artistic vision—that is, we accept his picture of children in A High Wind in Jamaica as convincing not because we agree with it as proposition (we might well not) but because we accept his world as an artistic whole; but this seems to be breaking a frame rather than building a world, and it brings a cold chill. Far more compelling to Emily is asudden understanding vouchsafed to her in an ordinary moment, when“she suddenly realized who she was.” That ontological moment thatcomes to—all? many? some?—human children has come to her: theunderstanding of her possession of a singular living being, herself,whom she must now be, through childhood and growing up, forever. Thisis a situation to ponder: Des, who lives in squalor, comes home to find a police officer and a social worker in the kitchen, talking to his mother about his behavior in the wake of his recent arrest, which she doesn't take seriously. Following an incident where Des gets stabbed by his mother, he ends up in an assessment centre for troubled children. In the centre he meets Rita, a psychologist who tries to understand Des's motivations, and over time gets some positive results on his behaviour.

After being taken to the police station, where Cory is detained. Cory's mother and stepfather try to keep him away from Des, but despite their best attempts, Cory continues to meet with him. Des, who is still on the run because of his escape from the assessment centre, goes to his home where he sees his mother passed out and intoxicated in the bedroom with a boyfriend, oblivious to his presence. Little Criminals is an assortment of little stories all penned by their own little authors, and none of them are to be trusted. They are, however, to be taken seriously. After all, this is empathy exemplified. One of the key issues with humanity is that we assume everyone thinks like us, or at least in a manner adjacent to how we think, just versions of ourselves either gone awry or, in the rare instance, idealised. However, you can’t really sidestep into the mindset of a man who races around clamping down on people’s collars. So, it is best to simply get the story straight from the vampire’s mouth.My Aim Is True (the title is a line from “Alison”) is in the Top Twenty in Britain; it is likely to go higher, as Costello recently managed to get himself busted for taking his electric guitar into the streets. The LP is already getting airplay on American FM stations, and a tour of sorts is set for late fall. How far Costello can go — especially given the unfortunate timing that surrounds his assumed first name — remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that once he is heard, he is going to shake up a lot of his erstwhile peers and make many musicians whom he would not consider his peers seem quite irrelevant — he has the musical sophistication, which is to say access to the musical credibility, to do that, as, at the moment, the Sex Pistols don’t. Little Criminals opens with what is perhaps Newman’s most famous song, “Short People.” Behind its jaunty piano and happy horns there stands one very cruel narrator, tossing off lines like, “They got little noses and tiny little teeth/They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet“ and “They got grubby little fingers and dirty little minds.” Then comes a seeming twist, in the form of a bridge that goes, “Short people are just the same/As you and I/(A fool such as I)/All men are brothers/Until the day they die/(It’s a wonderful world.)” This could be Newman’s way of unsaying every mean thing he’s said (“Short people got no reason/To live”), but I suspect not. Instead I suspect it’s the narrator’s ultimate joke on his listeners. I don’t buy his empty platitudes about the brotherhood of man any more than I buy his saying it’s a wonderful world. They’re just more sarcasm, the mean icing on a cruel cake. What elseshall I tell you, to describe to you ‘Archimedes’? I say nothingof her brilliant paintwork, or the beauty of her lines: for I wantyou to know her, not as a lover knows a woman but rather as a medicalstudent does. (The lover’s part can come later.)” Whether or notthe reader ever loves the Archimedes, the story of her five full daysin the maw of one of the worst hurricanes on record is enormouslygripping, and something like physical loss can be felt in the awfulsudden realization that the great funnel, guyed to withstand winds ofa hundred miles an hour, is gone. In the blinding, roaring seas thecrew has neither heard nor seen it go: it hasn’t crashed over theside; it has been lifted clear away. 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.

Upon first listen, the slow, string-laden “In Germany Before the War” is simply a sad song about a sad man who’s “looking at the river,” but “thinking of the sea” and his encounter with a little girl. Nothing overt happens between the two, but the song’s dark, suggestive undertones (“We lie beneath the autumn sky/My little golden girl and I/And she lies very still”) resonate disquietingly until you come to learn its subject is Peter Kürten, the German serial killer and so-called Vampire of Düsseldorf, many of whose victims during the mid- to late-1920s were little girls.Pop songs can be platitudinal, but Newman is never commonplace once on Little Criminals. In fact, his short story styling is so refreshing that the musicology barely gets the credit it deserves. So seamless are the scores he lays over the twisted words of his off-kilter protagonists that they go unnoticed in some ways, like acting at its best when you forget the person on the screen was recently on the cover of a magazine.

Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrateded.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. p.216. ISBN 0-646-11917-6. Not wanting to be in foster care or arrested when he turns twelve years old, Des sets the house on fire and conceals himself in a closet, falling asleep as the house slowly engulfs in flames. The young man who plays Des is brilliant. It is impossible to look away from him, however horrific or painful his behavior. The supporting performances are also fine, especially the step father and social worker characters. Over 100,000 children, between the ages of nine and sixteen passed through Epuni's doors, suffering horrendous physical and psychological abuse. White says his documentary tries to outline how we should help those Epuni alumni. "Currently the Government are trying to force through compensation for these men, which is more or less a 'take the deal and move on' or you can go through the court system. So we are essentially still victimising these men by not truly doing what needs to be done."

Tracklist

It’s likely no one has ever written as many mordantly funny songs as Randy Newman; satiric songs that cut so many ways, harboring sly irony beneath their apparent meaning, and a deep well of incurable sadness beneath the sly irony. The dark thread that connects the clueless partygoer of “Mama Told Me Not to Come” to the freezing midnight purse-snatcher in “Naked Man” to the impotent bridegroom (“Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword?”) in “A Wedding in Cherokee County” is the unhappiness that lies at the heart of the human condition. Newman is a surgeon poking about in our heart of darkness, with his razor-sharp scalpel of sarcasm.