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March 15, 2024
Vincenzo Camuccini, Mort de Caesar, 1798
Posted by JD Hull at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
Irish Guys: All The Wrong Stuff.
Saint Patrick's Day is on Sunday.
For starters, be advised that real Irish-American males do not wear green on March 17. They do the same things they do any other day, to wit:
A. Get up
B. Inhale aspirin
C. Dress as usual: Dockers, clean "Guinness"-emblazoned golf shirts if there's an important meeting
D. Work, kind of
E. Read, with difficulty (don't count on Ulysses)
F. Head to a real bar (not ones with faux-Irish names like "The Dubliner" or the generic "Irish Bar")
G. Tell stories
H. Listen to some music (rarely Irish tunes)
I. Get drunk; and
J. Fall down on the floor.
I happen to know I'm Irish--maybe too Irish--and as Irish as they come. One great-grandmother, a Belfast Protestant named McQuitty, provides most of the DNA there. In my case, that's 7% of my genetic makeup and, believe me, it's enough. If you're not a slam dunk at proving you're Really Irish--e.g., your parents' names are Flanagan and Murphy, and those are their first names--and want to know for sure if you've got All The Wrong Stuff, here's a test you can take and decide for yourself:
1. All your brothers and sisters are in Alcoholics Anonymous.
2. You talk incessantly and in your sleep and for no reason.
3. Captivated audiences--e.g., juries and Rhodes and Marshall scholarship selection committees--take months and often years to realize that nothing you said made sense.
4. Your idea of foreplay is '"I'm home! Brace yourself, Brigit!"
5. Distant relatives in County Cork list "wearing trousers" and "dwarf-tossing" on resumes.
6. You once read "Angela's Ashes" and secretly dread the first day your wife or girlfriend humiliates you in front of your kids, your mates and the rest of the neighborhood.
7. For years after your last appointment psychiatrists beg you to take your money back.
8. You've spent 20 minutes on the phone giving long-distance relatives about to visit you a detailed report on the weather. You hang up, look out the window and see if you were right.
9. You make fun of Welsh people because they drink too much.
10. You're available at any time to speak at any length about any subject.
Pont Saint-Patrick, Cork 1900
Posted by JD Hull at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2024
Hôtel du Jeu de Paume: 54, rue Saint Louis en l'Ile.
"Welcome back, Monsieur Hool." This is Hôtel du Jeu de Paume, the non-oath version. Erected in the 17th century, it once housed a tennis court built by Louis XIII, king from 1610 to 1643. Beams from the early 1600s cross the ceilings. An interior garden. The walls: old books, newer original art. Neither Left or Right bank. Save for your 5th trip to Paris. The longstanding and competent staff takes a "working" dim view of both Americans and Brits. They are wonderfully rude, Paris smart, and Yankee-style industrious. A haughty Labrador even lives here full-time. This is Hull McGuire's hands-down favorite since 2003. Brits never stay here twice. Too French. Be late to breakfast at your peril. The staff does not merely leer and grin when it is says "no" or "impossible!". They laugh, too.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2024
The 7 Habits of Highly Clueless Corporate Lawyers.
Lawyers who won't take a stand is a time-honored tradition. Ernie from Glen Burnie, a lawyer and a life-long friend of mine, is not such a creature. It's just his nature. He's an activist in all matters. He'll stand up for people who pay him--and for people he just met on the subway. In late 1995, when the championship Netherlands Women's National Volleyball Team were staying at the Mayflower, Ernie, I and two lawyers from the DC office of [firm name deleted] met the four tallest at Clyde's.....sorry, we're getting sidetracked.
There are so many wonderful stories about Ernie from Glen Burnie. But read first the very short story about Ernie's big find circa 1990. We first reported on it in June of 2006. It's about an old parchment he claims was discovered in Alexandria, Virginia, around the same time we both began practicing law in the District. Do see The Seven Habits of Highly Useless Corporate Lawyers. This is a true story, mostly. So listen up.
Stand-up guys: The author, then a dead-ringer for writer Jack Kerouac, and EFGB in their pre-lawyer and pre-Netherlands Women's National Volleyball Team years.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
O Rare Partner Emeritus Redux
If you work for a peer firm, you will encounter me or someone very much like me. [Y]ou cannot avoid the essence of my character if you aspire to succeed... I or some form of my embodiment will exist to make your existence as uncomfortable and unpleasant as it can be. Welcome to the legal profession you self-entitled nimrods have created.
--Partner Emeritus, Above The Law, 2009
‘O Rare Ben Jonson’
--Words on the gravesite slab of eccentric English dramatist and poet Ben Jonson (1572-1637) in Westminster Abbey. Jonson also was buried upright.
Twenty-five years ago, before The Great Neutering, before attorney gene pools started to dilute, when service professionals were well-rounded, if not classically-educated Renaissance people, when it meant a great deal to be a lawyer, and indeed to be a man, we had practitioners like Partner Emeritus. That is the nom de plume of a retired Brahmin New York City lawyer with an impressive following on the internet and who many culturally illiterate people--i.e., most lawyers these days (sorry, but that is the perfect truth)--apparently simply do not get. He's intimidating and spine-tinglingly scary to the maggotry, a comedic genius and WASP Yoda to the urbane.
Whoever he is--I sense pretty much everything about the way he portrays himself is authentic save his real name--PE has been there and done that (his legal breadth intrigues me) in upper-tier corporate law. And, perhaps, in life. Like me, he is an accomplished and unapologetic philanderer. A cad. Color him, too, a bit picaresque. Well-read. Well-traveled. He acquired and trained two Afghan show hounds. He even played polo, for fuck's sake. And like me, he does love the law, and this profession, which he worries about. Partner Emeritus is also an accomplished satirist. A Lenny Bruce for those with Mayflower DNA. Governor-for-Life of Upper Caucasia. A Dean Swift for modern Manhattan.
PE entertains in two distinct, interchanging, modes. You commend his taste, and judgment, when he shifts gears from Satirist to Learned Critic. (You don't know when that is? That shifting? Your problem. Start getting a real education by attending the theatre, visiting art museums and reading Tom Jones, Candide, Huckleberry Finn. Devour Miller, Kubrick, Pope, Orwell. Behold Nabokov, Heller, Huxley, Mencken. View Pieter Bruegel. Listen to Gilbert & Sullivan. Will take years--but it's worth it.) Ninety-five percent of the time--no, I do not agree with his every assessment--he's right on the money about people, places and things. His writing is art. Class art. Informed art. Funny art. He disturbs, and brilliantly.
PE's best gift? It is his instinct for detecting two related (I think) qualities he detests: hypocrisy and mediocrity.
Watch him each week expose the growing cadre of bad actors--i.e., twinkies, teacups, imposters, poseurs, plagiarists, thieves--who regularly shill on ATL's eclectic pages, Partner Emeritus has an instinct for the jugular that is dead-on, lightning fast and funny. If you think--and not merely react--you will learn something. You may feel a bit uncomfortable about how you stack up in this universe. But you should learn something about yourself. Otherwise, try not to blow a tube, or pull a hamstring, laughing.
You can read him and howl along with me most weekdays to his comments to certain articles at Above the Law. For many people, PE is the best thing about David Lat's celebrated and storied website. Excerpts from one wistful ATL comment last week:
Prior to owning a 1981 DeLorean DMC 12, I owned a gorgeous 1979 BMW M1. One Saturday, while my wife was with her family at Martha's Vineyard, I took my car into the city and decided to visit the old Copacabana. There, I met a woman named "Sophia." We drank Dom Perignon and danced Salsa and some disco (I was a maven on the dance floor and could have given John Travolta a run for his money during his "Saturday Night Fever" phase). During that evening, Sophia slipped a drug into my drink. The next thing I know, I woke up with a throbbing headache and my lower body was in pain. Apparently, I had crashed my vehicle into a divider on the Long Island Expressway and Sophia was unconscious next to me. A police cruiser drove by and stopped. I explained to the officer that I had been drugged by the latina woman next to me and that she had robbed me (I made sure to place my wallet in her purse before she regained consciousness).
We were taken to the local police station where I filed a report against Sophia. My BMW M1 was totaled and impounded. After a few hours, Sophia and I were awkwardly outside the police station at 5AM. I was in excruciating pain but I had hungry eyes for her so I brokered a deal with Sophia. I offered to drop the charges against her if she agreed to get in a cab with me and go back to my estate and make love to me. She agreed. I will never forget that night. I should have gone to an emergency room (pro-tip: cocaine is more effective at numbing pain than morphine) but all I could think of was being with Sophia, who resembled a young Maria Conchita Alonso.
What I would do to be 37 again.
There are times when I think whether I regret that night. A vintage 1979 BMW M1 would fetch me a cool $750K today but then I would have no memory of Sophia. You could say Sophia was probably one of the most expensive hookers in the history of mankind (despite that my insurance carrier covered the NADA value of that beast of a vehicle at the time, it did not compensate me for the future vintage value of that car which I believe only 500 were made), well next to the women who divorce their wealthy husbands and take them to the cleaners.
Note: Original post July 6, 2015
Partner Emeritus, New York City. Circa 2008.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)
March 11, 2024
Happy Birthday, J. Dan Hull, Jr.
John Daniel Hull, II, 1900 - 1987. My grandfather - always a class act. I spent his last 15 or so Thanksgivings with him in Missouri with just him and my grandmother Alene, who died in 1998 at 101. J. Dan had quiet energy, poise and quality. Elegant. Author, educator, JFK administration mainstay. Cosmos Club. Ozark boy who wanted to go to Yale. He did it all.
John Daniel Hull, II, 1933, New Haven, Connecticut
Posted by JD Hull at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2024
Racehorse Haynes on Imperfections
“I would have won them all if my clients hadn’t kept reloading and firing.”
--Richard "Racehorse" Haynes (1927-2017). Trial Lawyer.
Posted by JD Hull at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)
Whitman channels Emerson
“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”
--Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Writer Jack London thought you could not wait for it. You needed, he thought, to go out and hunt inspiration with a club. Walt Whitman, however, was luckier. He was a relatively young man when Ralph Waldo Emerson was thinking and writing. Emerson set off the young printer and hack writer, hurling him into an exuberant and celebratory realm, where no one American had ever been.
Posted by JD Hull at 07:07 PM
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