tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-226589202024-03-18T15:52:31.808-04:00AMERICAN LEFT HISTORYThis space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.comBlogger37557125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-79899156801037770102025-10-22T15:47:00.000-04:002019-03-08T16:23:24.006-05:00From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-A Dissenting View- “Occupy Wall Street”: Rebels for Liberal Reform-For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Click on the headline to link to the <i>International Communist League</i> (ICL) website. <br />
</b><br />
<b><i>Workers Vanguard</i> No. 988<br />
14 October 2011<br />
</b><br />
<b>“Occupy Wall Street”: Rebels for Liberal Reform<br />
<br />
For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!<br />
</b><br />
Below we print excerpts from an October 8 forum by Spartacist League spokesman Irene Gardner in Oakland.<br />
<br />
This past Wednesday my comrades and I were at the mass demonstration in downtown Manhattan with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, roughly 700 of whom were arrested by the NYPD at a march over the Brooklyn Bridge a few days earlier. I think the scale and popularity of these protests have surprised the New York City ruling class somewhat. It’s another indication of how much anger is out there. <br />
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Each day we open up the paper and discover another set of horrible statistics about the effects of the capitalist crisis on poor and working people. The reality is a lot worse than the numbers. Back in 2008, the con men on Wall Street, whose financial swindles were central to the economic collapse, were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. But the working class, black people, Latinos and the growing mass of the poor have been made to foot the bill, losing jobs, homes, pensions and just about anything else that makes life livable. <br />
<br />
Today, one in six people of working age in the U.S. are unemployed, with long-term unemployment the highest since the Great Depression. The Census Bureau now reports that 46.2 million in the U.S. live under the poverty line, and of those, 2.6 million fell into poverty just in the last year alone. Those who still have a job are being squeezed to work harder, faster and longer for lower pay. And there are plenty of people who have given up even looking for a job altogether. A new census report also shows that one in five New Yorkers now live in poverty, the highest level in a decade. Another astounding figure: in New York City the number of homeless students in public schools has quadrupled since 2008, to almost 43,000 as of last October.<br />
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Meanwhile, during the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the manufacturing and productive capacity of the U.S. has dropped significantly. And now we’re in a global financial crisis with Europe ready to implode.<br />
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Even billionaire New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mentioned that riots could happen if job prospects don’t improve. It is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns union-hating Bloomberg and other multibillionaires like Warren Buffett. President Obama has now been pushing a new tax rate for millionaires (the so-called “Buffett Rule”) in exchange for Democrats’ support to more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. In reality, this token “tax the rich” scheme is meant to be sugarcoating on another round of anti-working-class austerity.<br />
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Obama and the Democrats want to appear as if they care about “the little guy,” but in reality Obama championed the same austerity agenda as the Republicans all summer long, pushing for massive budget cuts. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are a political party of the capitalist class. As one Verizon striker put it, “The Democrats are doing the job of the Republicans, only with a smile.”<br />
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Economic crises, booms and busts, are nothing new—they are endemic to the capitalist mode of production. A key contradiction that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified is that under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor. Those who own the means of production—the factories, mines, railroads, banks—constitute the capitalist class, also known as the bourgeoisie. Those who subsist only on their labor power—their mental and physical ability to work—constitute the working class, the proletarians. Between these two classes lies a variety of merchants, independent professionals and others known as the petty bourgeoisie. But the main, decisive classes are the capitalist class and the working class.<br />
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Consciously or not, labor seeks to resist exploitation. It comes into constant conflict with the uncontrollable drive of capitalist production, which is the drive for the accumulation of more and more capital, and the production of more and more profit. This is the basis for class struggle—the irreconcilable class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. <br />
<br />
The Imperialist Epoch<br />
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V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, described how capitalism in the late 19th century reached its highest stage—imperialism. He described how the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates with ever-growing needs for investment funds and other financing, leading to the dominance of finance capital, centrally the giant banks. As the capitalists in the advanced industrial countries strove for newer markets to exploit, they carried out wars to redivide the world and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed people around the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II and waged countless bloody wars in colonial and semicolonial countries. <br />
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The way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when workers took power in their own hands, expropriating the bourgeoisie and establishing the Soviet workers state. It is high time that working people, who create the wealth in this society, run this society! We need an all new ruling class—the workers! Fight, don’t starve! Labor must rule!<br />
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In a climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse, even under Stalinist bureaucratic misrule.<br />
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When the capitalist world was in the midst of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union actually increased its industrial output. As Leon Trotsky pointed out in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936:<br />
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“Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”<br />
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Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia long for the days when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers struggles in other countries.<br />
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Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. However, China’s Stalinist regime also undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we call for proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy. <br />
<br />
From Spain’s Indignados...<br />
<br />
I want to talk a bit about Europe and in particular Spain, where I visited this past summer. Along with the wild roller-coaster ride of the stock market, Europe has been in the news just about every day with the imperialist rulers desperately trying to keep the economies afloat. In Europe, the financial crisis has sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union (EU), an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states, some richer, some poorer. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. As proletarian internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. We say that only the conquest of state power by the working class can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy. <br />
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In Spain, youth unemployment is around 45 percent. Factories are closing, hospitals are cutting back, and evictions during just three months of this year numbered over 15,000, more than 150 a day. When I was in Spain I got to discuss with some of the “Indignados” (“the indignant”) at their encampment in Puerta del Sol, the central square in Madrid. The Spanish Indignados are essentially a petty-bourgeois movement that arose in response to the austerity measures being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) before its huge defeat in the municipal and regional elections in May. The PSOE in power has carried out a relentless capitalist austerity drive. <br />
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Those who started the Indignados movement were inspired by the best-selling book Indignez-vous! (Be Indignant!) by Stéphane Hessel, a French anti-communist bourgeois ideologue. They were also inspired by the protests in Egypt and Iceland. They occupied squares in major cities throughout Spain, numbering in the tens of thousands, mostly youth, calling on people to “stand up against indifference in a peaceful uprising.”<br />
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Their main organizers, around a group called Real Democracy Now, put out a manifesto calling for an end to corruption and an end to the dictatorship of the markets, “real democracy.” But what is democracy in a class-divided society? Under capitalism, it is democracy for the ruling class, those wealthy few who own the means of production and carry out laws to defend their private property. There are no laws that will establish equality between the capitalists and the working class. The capitalists have a state apparatus, armed bodies of men (cops, courts, prisons) to keep the bourgeoisie in power and repress any challenge to their rule. <br />
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So how do the Indignados propose to change society? By endless protests and encampments? You can be indignant all you want, but to really make a change you have to ally with the social power of the working class, the only class that has the power to stop production and has the historic interest to overthrow capitalism. But the leadership of the Indignados movement is anti-union and therefore anti-working-class, because unions are the basic defense organizations of the working class. In Spain early on, the Indignados assemblies would not allow any union or political organization to join with them, “in order to guarantee the political neutrality of this citizens’ movement”! Their so-called “non-political” stance is actually very political—in the direction of anti-communism. This is shown by their exclusion of left groups from speaking at assemblies and attempts to censor left groups from distributing their literature.<br />
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Even their anti-leadership emphasis on “consensus” decision-making is undemocratic. Instead of using majority votes to make decisions, people are supposed to debate endlessly until they all agree. Then, of course, a non-elected clique usually makes the decisions in the background.<br />
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While the Indignados leadership pushes anti-union politics, it seems that many of the youth don’t necessarily buy into it. One example is that there have been large teachers strikes in Madrid recently, and some Indignados have put out a statement in support.<br />
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Many of these youth hate the effects of capitalism but do not see socialism as an alternative. The whole “death of communism” ideology pushed by the bourgeoisie following the fall of the Soviet Union is reflected in such low-level protest movements. This is also a reflection of the betrayals of the Social Democracy and the Communist parties, which have engaged in decades of class-collaboration—the Spanish labor union bureaucrats work hand in hand with the Socialist Party government! We fight to win youth over to the side of the working class, to the program of international socialist revolution, and to the understanding that you need a Bolshevik vanguard party to accomplish this.<br />
<br />
...To “Occupy Wall Street” <br />
<br />
The new Occupy Wall Street encampment, which has been gaining steam around the country, is in solidarity with the Spanish Indignados, raising similar demands against corporate greed and for a “leaderless resistance movement.” As one columnist put it, it’s like a “festival of frustrations” and people are plenty mad. They also look for inspiration from the “Egyptian Spring.” But look at what has happened in Egypt—the workers continue to get screwed under a renewed military dictatorship. What’s needed is not endless protests and occupations of squares but workers to power!<br />
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For many of the youth in the encampment, this is their first protest. Many are pro-union, but they view the working class as just another base of support for their all-inclusive “movement.” We’ve been intervening into the Occupy Wall Street protests, distributing lots of Workers Vanguard, looking to win over those who are open to a Marxist perspective of international socialist revolution.<br />
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Many of you have seen the video of the Wall Street protesters getting viciously attacked by the NYPD during a march to Union Square, where 80 people got arrested. The videos show several young women being corralled inside a movable police pen and pepper-sprayed by cops. Others were kicked, bruised and thrown over barricades by the police. And then last weekend 700 were arrested when the police trapped them on a march over the Brooklyn Bridge. According to a recent New York Times article, the NYPD is geared up to deal with “unrest.”<br />
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Many of the protesters are saying that the problem with the cops is that they were “unprofessional.” But these cops are as “professional” as they come! They are precisely carrying out their “profession” as the capitalist state’s armed bodies of men. There are massive illusions that “the cops are workers, too,” with slogans like “NYPD is a layoff away from joining us” and “The 99 percent includes cops.” No, the cops are not a part of the working class—they have a special role to play as part of the capitalist state apparatus. We say cops, prison guards and security guards out of the unions!<br />
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What we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street protest is lowest-common-denominator politics, which does not at all challenge the rule of the bourgeoisie. An example of this was seen in the attempt to create a General Assembly declaration: Somebody objected to using the phrase “redistribution of wealth” because it sounded “dangerously similar to theft”! So it was decided, via consensus, to remove this phrase altogether. If you look at their final declaration posted on the Web, it does not even oppose capitalism, it just raises the same appeals for classless “democracy.” This is not new. A lot of these same themes were put forward during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s, here and in Europe, which did not go anywhere.<br />
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Many of the slogans raised, like “We are the 99 percent,” are totally compatible with the Democratic Party’s line. In fact, the Democrats are working to get on top of these protests as a way of invigorating Obama’s campaign for the next election and to counter the Tea Party. Not only has Obama empathized with the protests, but yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported that even Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke have expressed sympathy! You also have celebrities like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon there—one of the first things she asked was if people were registered to vote. And there are the left-talking Democrats like Charles Barron, all looking to corral youth toward the Democratic Party. <br />
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As I mentioned at the start, several unions have called for joining the Occupy Wall Street protests. A recent article noted, “The decision by organized labor to join the demonstrations has given them an extra jolt of numbers and credibility, since unions have historically played an important, but waning, role in mobilizing voters on the left” (New York Times, 6 October). The labor bureaucrats’ program is not about class struggle. It’s about pressuring the Democratic Party to go a little easier on their membership during a period of union-busting austerity. <br />
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One of the more vocal unions in support of the protests has been the New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU). Like other unions, the TWU is under heavy attack by the bosses. TWU members showed real social power when they went on strike in December 2005, defying the state Taylor Law banning public workers strikes. But the workers were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other NYC unions and the TWU International, and in the end were sold out by their own local union misleaders.<br />
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TWU bureaucrats and the rest of the AFL-CIO officialdom are pushing impotent “tax the rich” schemes along with reformist left groups like the International Socialist Organization, the Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. These “tax the rich” demands are tailor-made to fit in with the current Obama administration and Democratic Party platform. The corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash, but you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.<br />
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This past spring, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters (including students) came out to occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up collective bargaining for public workers unions. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon. Instead they channeled the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators, which failed miserably. Wisconsin public employee unions have been dealt a real defeat.<br />
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Within the labor movement, the proletariat is saddled with a pro-capitalist union bureaucracy that promotes the lie that the interests of labor and capital are compatible. They tie working people and the oppressed to the capitalist system, especially through support to the Democratic Party. The trade-union misleaders poured a whopping $450 million into the 2008 elections, backing capitalist politicians like Obama as “friends of labor.” <br />
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It is absolutely necessary to forge a new leadership of the unions to mobilize labor in struggle for its class interests, to fight against all forms of discrimination and for full citizenship rights for immigrants. A strategic question for the American workers revolution is the fight against black oppression, which is rooted in the very foundation of capitalism in the U.S. If the unions are to fight for their very existence, they must take up the defense of the ghetto and barrio poor by fighting for jobs, quality housing, education, health care and more.<br />
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The decades of betrayals by the labor bureaucracy have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. Right now International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 in Longview, Washington, is in a battle for its life, fighting against the union-busting of the EGT multinational conglomerate. They have been facing court injunctions, arrests and police assaults, including pepper spray and cops in full riot gear, in a fight to defend their union.<br />
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Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. It is crucial that we build a revolutionary vanguard party that will bring the critical element of consciousness to the proletariat, to transform it from a class in itself to a class for itself, fighting to do away with this entire system of wage slavery. Join us in the fight for a socialist future for humanity!</div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-7364222525721839052025-10-22T14:35:00.000-04:002019-03-08T16:22:10.858-05:00The General Strike In Greece- Make The Bosses Pay-Victory To The Greek Workers!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Click on the headline to link to a <i>BBC</i> online report of the events surrounding the two-day General Strike in Greece.<br />
</b><br />
<b>Markin comment:<br />
</b><br />
The international working class movement and its allies, including in the <i>Occupy</i> movement, needs to support the Greek workers in their General Strike. The line is drawn in the sand. Make the bosses (in Greece, and internationally) pay. The bosses created the mess, let them pay. If not, move aside and let the workers rule. As for the Greek workers, who today stand as the vanguard of the international working class offensive against the bosses austerity drive-<b>Build workers councils in order to prepare to take power and create a workers government. The time is now. Labor must rule </b></div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-7397270795153359052025-10-19T15:46:00.000-04:002019-03-08T16:21:51.718-05:00The General Strike In Greece- Make The Bosses Pay-Victory To The Greek Workers!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Click on the headline to link to a <i>BBC</i> online report of the events surrounding the two-day General Strike in Greece.<br />
</b><br />
<b>Markin comment:<br />
</b><br />
The international working class movement and its allies, including in the <i>Occupy</i> movement, needs to support the Greek workers in their General Strike. The line is drawn in the sand. Make the bosses (in Greece, and internationally) pay. The bosses created the mess, let them pay. If not, move aside and let the workers rule. As for the Greek workers, who today stand as the vanguard of the international working class offensive against the bosses austerity drive-<b>Build workers councils in order to prepare to take power and create a workers government. The time is now. Labor must rule </b></div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-39944204420332383222025-09-03T03:19:00.000-04:002019-03-08T16:16:35.956-05:00*From The Blogosphere-From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<strong>Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.</strong></div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-65051007048725167732025-07-18T10:10:00.000-04:002019-03-08T16:20:16.018-05:00From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity-Workers Must Rule!-For a Socialist United States of Europe!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Markin comment:<br />
</b><br />
As always in such general strike and possiblly pre-revolutitonary situations a call by communist propagandists for independent working class organizations to take power is in order. For A Greek Communist Party-Greek Trade Union Federations (and whoever else of the up-against-the-wall middle class and student elements they can bring in) government!<br />
*********<br />
<b>Workers Vanguard No. 983<br />
8 July 2011<br />
<br />
European Crisis and the Bankruptcy of Capitalism<br />
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Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity-Workers Must Rule!-<br />
For a Socialist United States of Europe!<br />
</b><br />
On June 29, as a two-day general strike virtually shut down the country and tens of thousands protested outside, the Greek parliament approved a new round of brutal austerity measures demanded by the Greek bourgeoisie and its imperialist overlords. The demonstrators—who included, in addition to workers, a broad range of the population from students and other youth to professionals and retirees—were viciously attacked by club-wielding riot police. More than a year of unrelenting attacks on the living standards of the Greek population has resulted in seething unrest across broad layers of society. In the last year alone, there have been at least a dozen one-day general strikes and massive protests. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost, homelessness has skyrocketed and many people, especially pensioners, are reliant on soup kitchens for their survival. <br />
<br />
Video footage of the wanton violence meted out by the cops has provoked widespread indignation, as has another video documenting collusion between the police and hooded provocateurs who infiltrated the protesters. Police fired endless volleys of tear gas and stun grenades and pummeled protesters with chunks of masonry. At least 38 were reportedly arrested in what was blatantly a cop riot. We demand that all charges be dropped against the anarchists and other anti-austerity protesters, including those arrested during the earlier general strikes!<br />
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It is clear for all to see that working people are being fleeced to pay for a crisis they are not responsible for. The economic crisis gripping Greece—a particularly severe expression of the world capitalist crisis—was triggered in the spring of last year as global financial capitalists, fearing that the heavily indebted Greek government would default on its loan obligations, began spurning Greek government bonds. The plummeting price of those bonds threatened European banks, especially in France and Germany—foreign financial institutions are exposed to some 340 billion euros in Greek public and private debt. <br />
<br />
To try to head off the crisis, at least temporarily, the European Union (EU) and the IMF agreed last year to a 110 billion euro “rescue package” on condition that Athens impose draconian austerity measures on Greece’s working people. The October 2009 elections replaced the right-wing New Democracy (ND) regime with the bourgeois-populist Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) of George Papandreou, with the bourgeoisie calculating that the masses would more readily accept “sacrifice” if demanded by PASOK. The PASOK government answered the EU and IMF’s ultimatum with a year-long campaign of slashing public sector workers’ wages, gutting pensions and ramping up taxes. These attacks hit hardest at the poorest in society, including immigrant workers. In addition, Greek officials, in response to EU/IMF demands that they raise cash by privatizing a host of state-owned enterprises, have launched what the bourgeois press describes as a “fire sale,” auctioning off airports, ports and prime land. <br />
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European capitalists fear that a default by Greece could immediately pose a similar collapse by other heavily indebted countries such as Ireland and Portugal, which have already received bailouts from the EU and IMF, and Spain, whose economy is larger than that of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. Fearing the potentially catastrophic effects of such contagion, the EU/IMF hastily agreed last month on a second “rescue package” for Greece, amounting to a further 120 billion euros. Yet hardly anyone believes that these bailouts will do more than delay the inevitable default.<br />
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Everyone can see that the fate of the Greek working class, and much of the petty bourgeoisie, will be ever more dire without a radical solution. The working masses have demonstrated their combativity time and again. But the workers’ leaders, whether the despised PASOK-loyal tops of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and the Confederation of Public Servants (ADEDY) or the far more militant-sounding Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its PAME labor front, have thus far succeeded in channeling workers’ anger into what amounts to militant parliamentary lobbying. In effect, they appeal to the Greek capitalists to stand up to their senior partners in Germany and France. This nationalist class collaboration is a recipe for demoralization and defeat. <br />
<br />
The allies of the Greek proletariat are to be found not among its “own” exploiters but among the workers elsewhere in Europe and beyond. A proletarian upheaval in Greece could trigger a wave of class struggle throughout Europe against the ever more brutal and incessant attacks of the capitalists against the jobs, benefits and living standards of all workers on the continent. A workers government in Greece would immediately repudiate the imperialist debt. Such an act would require a direct appeal to the proletariat, from Germany and France to Spain and Portugal, to come to the defense of their Greek class brothers and sisters against the combined forces of the European bourgeoisies. <br />
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As long as Greek workers are mobilized primarily against the foreign diktats of the IMF and EU, they will be unable to see that opposing the imperialists is intertwined with overthrowing the Greek bourgeoisie. The Greek government is not simply a tool of the European and other imperialist powers, as some signs in the Athens demonstrations suggest, but of the Greek bourgeoisie that has always exploited, suppressed and bled the working class in the pursuit of profit. <br />
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The question that is objectively posed is the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of working-class rule. Yet there is a huge disparity between the objective needs of the Greek working class and oppressed on one side and the political program of their leadership on the other. The repeated strikes and protests are designed to dissipate the anger of workers, whose militancy is clearly not the issue. The problem is that the working class is hamstrung by a leadership that accepts the need for the working class to bear some degree of austerity to “bail out” capitalism, while objecting that the terms and conditions dictated by the IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB) are too severe. <br />
<br />
The program of the labor bureaucracy—defined by what is “practical” under capitalism—has led to disaster for the working class. To overcome the gulf between the workers’ present consciousness and the necessity for a workers government based on organs of proletarian power, a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party would put forward a series of transitional demands, starting from the felt needs of the masses and pointing the way toward the seizure of state power by the working class and the expropriation of the rapacious capitalist class.<br />
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To combat mass unemployment, it is necessary to demand the sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public works. To protect even their current living standards—already among the lowest in Europe—workers must demand that wages be indexed to inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the industrialists and bankers, workers should demand that the capitalists open their (real) books. With the imperialists demanding the dismantling of state enterprises, the proletariat must fight for the expropriation of the productive property of the capitalist class as a whole and the establishment of a planned economy under workers rule, where production would be based on social need, not profit.<br />
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Combat National Chauvinism!<br />
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Throughout Europe, the capitalist press and politicians have been whipping up a chauvinist frenzy against Greeks, who are portrayed as lazy, ungrateful scroungers. Last year the right-wing German Bild (27 October 2010) screamed: “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks…and the Acropolis too!” A recent London Financial Times (9 May) editorial demanded: “Athens must be put under the gun.” For all the talk of bailing out Greece, the only “bailout” that is taking place is that of Europe’s banks. Columnist Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times (21 June): “It is far less embarrassing to state that one is helping Greece when one is in fact helping one’s own banks.”<br />
<br />
With chauvinist arrogance, the European imperialists, led by Germany, are seeking to impose on Greece, an EU member state, the kind of diktat they are accustomed to issuing to neocolonial countries in the Third World. The Financial Times (17 June) reports that officials of the “troika”—the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission—are demanding that “outsiders” be brought in “to make Greece’s privatization program happen,” adding that “because Greece seemed incapable of collecting taxes, international experts would come in to do that, too.” The article further reports that Finnish officials were insisting that “Athens assets should be securitised so they could be used as collateral. If Greece defaulted, lenders would gain an airport or some other utility.” <br />
<br />
The imperialists’ dismissive attitude to Greece’s sovereignty has in turn fueled national chauvinism in Greece. Right-wing opponents of the EU/IMF’s bailout include New Democracy, Greece’s main opposition party. ND represents Greek business interests that have no intention of paying the imperialists’ extortion themselves and fear, as BBC economics editor Paul Mason put it, “a tax bill the like of which they have never dreamed, nor indeed paid.” However, ND and PASOK are united in the determination that Greek working people pay for the country’s economic crisis.<br />
<br />
Recent months have seen the explosive growth of a new movement, the so-called “indignant citizens” movement. The “Indignados” placed themselves at the head of the mass mobilizations outside parliament, where Greek flags proliferated, the Greek national anthem was sung and anti-American and anti-German sentiment was rife. Protesters have waved EU flags with a swastika at the center—equating “German” with “Nazi” and invoking the spectre of World War II, when Greece was occupied by German imperialism (followed by rampaging British troops). <br />
<br />
In Spain, the Indignados movement arose in response to the austerity measures that were being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Party government before its huge defeat in the last elections. In Greece, the petty-bourgeois Indignados emerged in the context of the abject failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to present any way forward for the struggles of the working masses. The two main trade-union federations, the GSEE and ADEDY, representing the private and public sectors respectively, are controlled by PASOK, which is imposing the austerity measures. Despite the “socialist” reference in its name, and the credentials given to it by opportunist left groups, PASOK is a capitalist party. <br />
<br />
Broad layers of the middle class that could be rallied behind an insurgent proletariat struggling for power are instead being drawn into virulently chauvinist, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class movements. Displaying overt hostility to the organizations of the working class and the left, the Indignados present themselves as a “pro-democracy” movement of all classes. As in Spain, all leftist political parties and trade unions, as well as red flags and banners, were banned from the Greek protests at first. Not surprisingly, given the nationalist fervor whipped up by the Indignados, Golden Dawn and other fascist outfits have been seen at the protests.<br />
<br />
There has been an ominous rise in racist attacks, as desperately impoverished immigrants are used as scapegoats for the economic devastation. Earlier this year, fascist thugs rampaged through a heavily immigrant area of Athens, killing one person and wounding many more. Golden Dawn got over 5 percent of the vote in municipal elections in Athens late last year. According to the London-based Institute of Race Relations, Golden Dawn’s Nikos Michaloliakos, accompanied by eight apparently armed bodyguards, gave a Nazi salute at a council meeting in Athens in January. <br />
<br />
The fascists are emboldened by the racist policies of the government. Greece’s border with Turkey is one of the front lines of “Fortress Europe,” with EU border patrols employed to keep immigrants out. The Greek government has announced plans to build a razor-wire fence, equipped with sonar systems and thermal sensors, along the border. The workers movement must fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to unionize foreign workers. For union/minority mobilizations to stop fascist provocations! For integrated workers defense guards to protect immigrant neighborhoods!<br />
<br />
Communist Party: Left Face of Greek Nationalism<br />
<br />
The Stalinist KKE adopts a posture of militant opposition to the PASOK government and promotes PAME as a class-struggle alternative to what it calls the “government- and employer-led” trade unions. But the Greek Stalinists present no fundamental alternative to the betrayals of the GSEE/ADEDY union misleaders. Despite its occasional verbal radicalism, the KKE is hostile to the program of workers revolution to overthrow Greek capitalism. <br />
<br />
The KKE’s political bankruptcy is evident in regard to the Indignados. In an article in Rizospastis (5 June), the KKE correctly noted that “the ‘anonymous’ leaders of the ‘movement of the squares,’ the ‘non-partisan,’ ‘spontaneous,’ ‘non-politicized’ citizens, appear to be politicized, declaring themselves ‘anti-left’.” The article adds that with their slogans “Out with the left,” “Parties out” and “Trade unions out,” the Indignados are “not that democratic, or, to be more accurate, they are undemocratic.” What the KKE cannot challenge, though, is the virulent nationalism of the Indignados, which the KKE itself shares.<br />
<br />
Indeed, the KKE has made defense of “national sovereignty” its own calling card, and is particularly virulent in espousing Greek nationalism in relation to Turkey, the traditional enemy of its “own” bourgeoisie. For example, in a speech last year, KKE general secretary Aleka Papariga complained that the EU was not taking account of “our national sovereignty rights” when considering Turkey’s bid for membership. She went on to chastise Papandreou for “trying to cover up the issue by dividing the Aegean, something that will have an adverse effect on the islands’ defense.” Nationalism within the workers movement is the chief obstacle to constructing a genuine revolutionary workers party in Greece.<br />
<br />
It is a travesty that the KKE retains a reputation as militant fighters against capitalism based on the Resistance against the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Greek Civil War of 1946-49. In pursuit of its program of class collaboration with the Greek bourgeoisie, the KKE handed power back to the bourgeoisie following World War II. The working class, backed by the peasantry, was the decisive force in the anti-Nazi Resistance, mounting massive strikes and demonstrations from late 1942 until the withdrawal of German troops in 1944. The working class, arms in hand, had state power in its grasp. But its leaders, the treacherous KKE, actually welcomed the arrival of British troops into Greece, enabling the imperialists to stabilize the situation, bring back the hated monarchy and massacre the workers. <br />
<br />
The Greek Stalinists lived up to the terms of the secret Tehran agreement, whereby Stalin granted the imperialists the “right” to preserve capitalist rule in West Europe and Greece. Politically disarming the proletariat, the Stalinists went so far as to join a “national” government of the bourgeoisie. In February 1945, they signed the Varkiza agreement, which physically disarmed the KKE-led Resistance forces as British troops and the Greek National Guard were preparing to unleash a full-scale wave of terror against the masses. Only in February 1946 did the KKE finally abandon its suicidal policy and take up the “armed struggle” again. In October 1949, after ferocious repression, the Civil War was ended. The KKE ranks had fought heroically. But needless to say, the KKE learned nothing from the tragic consequences of its treachery and continues to pursue its bankrupt program of subordination to the Greek bourgeoisie. <br />
<br />
What the Trotskyists wrote at the end of World War II holds true for the role of the Stalinists throughout the Civil War:<br />
<br />
“The Greek masses were burning with revolutionary determination and wished to prepare the overthrow of all their oppressors—Nazi and Greek. Instead of providing the mass movement with a revolutionary program, similar to the Bolshevik program of 1917, and preparing the masses for the seizure of power, the Stalinists steered the movement into the blind alley of People’s Frontism. The Stalinists, who enjoyed virtual hegemony of the mass movement, joined with a lot of petty bourgeois politicians, lawyers, professors, who had neither mass following nor influence, and artificially worked to limit the struggle to the fight for capitalist democracy.”<br />
<br />
—“Civil War in Greece,” Fourth International, February 1945<br />
<br />
The social-democratic reformists in Greece—such as the Socialist Workers Party (SEK), which is affiliated to the British group of the same name, and Xekinima, the Greek affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)—stand to the right of the KKE in their enthusiasm for the anti-Communist, anti-working-class Indignados. For example, Xekinima calls to “Extend the movement to all work places, workers’ neighbourhoods, and the youth” (socialistworld.net, 27 June). The notion of classless “democracy” that these groups promote has long been an anti-Communist code word that actually means support to bourgeois class rule. Thus, both the SEK and Xekinima supported capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92 and hailed counterrevolutionary forces such as Polish Solidarność and Boris Yeltsin’s Russian “democrats.” <br />
<br />
For Workers Revolution!<br />
<br />
The Trotskyist Group of Greece fights to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party capable of leading the working class to power. Above all, this means breaking the workers from nationalism and winning them to a revolutionary internationalist perspective. During Round One of the present crisis, the TGG issued a 28 April 2010 leaflet that opposed the widespread Greek nationalism as “poisonous to class consciousness.” Any effective struggle against the bosses’ attacks must begin with the understanding that the workers have no country, until they seize the one they’re in. Our comrades insisted: “What is needed is international workers solidarity across the EU against capital” (see “Down With PASOK Government’s ‘Stability Program’!” WV No. 959, 21 May 2010).<br />
<br />
The Greek financial crisis has increased the seething national antagonisms in Europe, as seen in the diplomatic spats between France and Germany. German chancellor Angela Merkel, unpopular at home and with a shrinking majority in the Bundestag (parliament), has clashed with French officials and with the ECB over whether the bankers have to accept some losses. Following pressure from the IMF, Merkel agreed to a new bailout package while the French banks have offered to roll over Greek debts for 30 years. Whatever divisions there may be within bourgeois circles over how to deal with the catastrophic financial situation, in Germany, France, Britain and Europe as a whole, each government is determined to make the working masses pay for a crisis that is caused by the capitalist system itself. <br />
<br />
The EU is an imperialist trade bloc, centered on a pact between the French and German capitalist rulers to ratchet up the exploitation of the working classes at home while trying to gain advantage over their imperialist rivals as well as the smaller European states. At the same time, the EU is an unstable formation that intensifies national antagonisms and fuels chauvinism. <br />
<br />
We Marxists oppose the EU from the perspective of proletarian internationalism. The comrades of our German section, the Spartakist Workers Party, last year published an article titled “Solidarity with the Greek Workers! For Class Struggle Against the German Capitalists!” (Spartakist No. 183, May 2010), which noted:<br />
<br />
“The chauvinist campaign against Greece is being set in motion so as to prevent the German working class from hitting on the idea of placing blame for the crisis at the feet of the capitalist system and its own rulers. The workers movement in Germany must mobilize in solidarity with Greek workers and all the other victims of the EU imperialists—after all, they’ll be confronted with similar attacks in the immediate future. The witchhunt against Greece also serves to split and weaken the multiethnic working class in Germany.”<br />
<br />
Today, despite the relentless bleeding of the Greek working people, the country remains mired in deep recession. The bankrupt capitalist class manifestly does not have any crumbs that it is willing to throw to dampen workers’ anger. Short of a struggle for working-class power, the workers’ struggles will continue to be frustrated. The perspective for Greek workers must be that of common class struggle with their class brothers and sisters—from Turkey to Germany and elsewhere around the world.<br />
<br />
As the TGG wrote in its leaflet: “What’s needed is a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a workers state that will lay the basis for building a socialist society. For that, you need to build a revolutionary workers party—a party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks—which will fight for a workers government. The TGG, Greek sympathizing section of the ICL, seeks to build such a party” (our emphasis).</div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-6910896671758820812025-06-26T12:14:00.000-04:002019-03-08T16:10:30.339-05:00* From The Voice Of NPR's Legal Reporter- The 2008-09 United States Supreme Court Session- 3 Key Decisions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<strong>Click on title to link to National Public Radio(NPR) Legal Reporter Nina Totenberg's take on some important legal decisions from the 2008-09 sessions. Let's make it easy-get rid of their capitalist 'injustice' legal system by getting of their whole system. Right? </strong></div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-11768706370434769902025-02-28T15:54:00.000-05:002019-03-08T16:11:56.077-05:00*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<strong>Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry, a report on the world wage scale, aptly termed sweatshop.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Markin comment:</strong><br />
<br />
Karl Marx said it long, too long ago- not a fair day's wage but abolish wages. He spent his life also saying, and more to the point for us- don't just analyze the world, do something about it. And you know what that means.</div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-60267366928240146882024-11-08T05:54:00.000-05:002019-03-08T16:23:37.729-05:00From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Democrats, Republicans: Parties of Capital-“Occupy Wall Street”:Capitalist Crisis Sparks Populist Protests-For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Bourgeoisie!- A Critique Of The "Occupy" Movement<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Click on the headline to link to the <i>International Communist League</i> (ICL) website. <br />
</b><br />
<b>Markin comment November 3, 2011:<br />
</b><br />
We have won a tremendous victory in Oakland. No, no the big dent in the capitalist system that we are all looking for but the first step. And that first step is to put the words “general strike” in the political vocabulary in our fight for social justice. This is Liberation Day One. From now on we move from isolated tent encampments to the struggle in the streets against the monster, the streets where some of the battles will be decisively decided. Yes, our first day was messy, we took some casualties, we took some arrest, we made some mistakes but we now have a road forward, so forward. <b>No Mas- The Class-War Lines Are Being Drawn- There Is A Need To Unite And Fight-We Take The Offensive-Liberation Day One-Defend The Oakland Commune-Drop All Charges Against The Oakland Protesters! <br />
</b><br />
<br />
P.S. (November 4, 2011) I noted above some of the actions were messy in Oakland. This was so partly because it was seen as a celebration as much as demand-ladened, hard-nosed general strike started as a prelude to anything immediately bigger (like the question of taking state power and running things ourselves) but also because people are after all new at this way of expressing their latent power. 1946 in Oakland, and anywhere else, is a long political time to go without having a general strike in this country. Even the anti-war mass actions of the 1960s, which included school-centered general strikes, never got close to the notion of shutting down the capitalists where they live-places like the Port Of Oakland. There are some other more systematic problems that I, and others, are starting to note and I will address them as we go along. Things like bourgeois electoral politics rearing its ugly head, keeping the thing together, and becoming more organizationally cohesive without becoming bureaucratic. Later. <br />
*********** <br />
<b>Workers Vanguard No. 989<br />
28 October 2011<br />
<br />
Democrats, Republicans: Parties of Capital<br />
<br />
“Occupy Wall Street”:Capitalist Crisis Sparks Populist Protests<br />
<br />
For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Bourgeoisie!<br />
</b><br />
OCTOBER 25—An amorphous group of protesters, ranging from student youth and jobless workers to veteran liberal activists, has now been camping out in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) for over a month. With its rallies and marches in New York City drawing from a few hundred to over 10,000 people, OWS has tapped into widespread anger over corporate profit-gouging, mass unemployment and stark economic inequalities. <br />
<br />
Similar occupations have spread to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and many other cities and towns across the country, even as police have repeatedly attacked and arrested large numbers of protesters. On October 15, hundreds of thousands turned out across Europe and elsewhere for solidarity demonstrations with OWS, which itself has drawn inspiration from the “Indignados” (indignant ones) in Spain and Greece. Today, hundreds of riot-equipped cops wielding flash grenades, tear gas and billy clubs surrounded the “Occupy Oakland” tent city at Frank Ogawa Plaza in the early morning hours. With helicopters hovering overhead shining a spotlight on the scene, the cops moved in, ripping apart the encampment and arresting more than 75 people. Drop all charges against the protesters, from Oakland to NYC! <br />
<br />
The OWS protests have touched a real nerve in large sections of the population three years into the deep, ongoing economic crisis. Homeless shelters are filled to capacity. College students and recent graduates are choking under a mountain of debt, facing an increasingly bleak future. Many workers who have managed to hold on to their jobs have been made to swallow lower wages, with their benefits shredded and their pensions looted by the bosses and bankers. With the trade unions taking it on the chin, many workers have greeted the OWS protests as an outlet for their own anger. Meanwhile, the bulk of the capitalist ruling class has made out like bandits, with the Obama White House, following George W. Bush, showering hundreds of billions in bailouts onto the banks and auto companies. Fed up with government lies, foreign wars, the ban on marijuana and worsening unemployment, one protester in Phoenix said, “All the world’s problems run downhill, and I’m at the bottom.” <br />
<br />
Many young occupiers are participating in their first political protest, and most enthusiastically embrace its democratic pretensions and “grassroots” origins, seeing the potential to do something, anything about what’s happening to themselves and so many others. While the OWS organizers pride themselves on not having a clear political agenda, affiliation or even a fixed set of demands, they do have a program: liberal reform of capitalism’s financial sector. Issuing patriotic appeals to this country’s purported democratic values, they raise slogans like: “We are the 99 percent,” “Tax the rich,” and “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Like the populists of more than a century ago, their program amounts to seeking to elect a government that would defend the interests of the little man against the “robber barons” of Wall Street. <br />
<br />
It is false that “99 percent” of the population share common interests. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny group of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. The working class is not just one more victim of capitalist austerity within the “99 percent.” It is the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system and rebuild society based on a centralized, planned economy. <br />
<br />
In our interventions in NYC and around the country, the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs are fighting to win militants to the Marxist understanding that the capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the poor, but must be shattered through proletarian revolution. Ending poverty, oppression and imperialist war requires workers rule internationally, opening the road to a world socialist society. We Trotskyists are dedicated to the task of building a revolutionary workers party to organize and lead that fight. Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the workers to power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution. <br />
<br />
Our Marxist outlook is diametrically opposed to the OWS program of liberal, bourgeois populism, which comes wrapped up in red, white and blue, as seen in the number of U.S. flags flying in Zuccotti Park. At a recent OWS General Assembly meeting, a Spartacist League spokesman drew opposition when he denounced the presence of U.S. imperialism’s banner, saying: “This is the flag that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki! This is the flag that bombed and attacked Vietnam! This is the flag that represents oppression to the people of the world!” <br />
<br />
Whatever the claims of the OWS organizers to the contrary, the dominant politics of the protests point straight to support to the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist exploiters. One Democratic official recently observed of the protests, “Sure, there’s been some crazy anarchy stuff, but overall, the Democrats like their message about Wall Street and accountability,” adding that “it overlaps with our own message.” In fact, with Obama channeling OWS grievances in his stump speeches, Democratic Party stalwarts like MoveOn.org are involved in organizing OWS actions for the purpose of bringing disenchanted voters back into the fold. Meanwhile, some Democratic Party strategists worry that signing on to the protests will alienate some of their financial backers. Key to mobilizing the workers in class struggle against the decaying capitalist order is the fight for their political independence from all bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens.<br />
<br />
Protest organizers propound the “belief that the American dream will live again” (as one OWS Web site posting said) and argue that the government, which is the executive committee of the ruling class as a whole, should do something good like regulate banks. This is a dead end for youth looking for revolutionary answers. American democracy is the democracy of the capitalist class, whose rule is based on brutal exploitation of workers, murderous oppression of blacks and other minorities and imperialist marauding around the world. As the 1960s militant Malcolm X remarked, “I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare” (“The Ballot or the Bullet,” 3 April 1964).<br />
<br />
American Populism and the Democrats<br />
<br />
Appealing to the common man against the financiers has a long history in American bourgeois politics. The 1892 platform of the Populist Party strongly indicted the “Gilded Age”: “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few unprecedented in the history of mankind.” The Populists did not desire to abolish but to moderate the despotism of the “few,” to curtail the powers and reduce the privileges of the magnates of industry and finance. The movement reached the peak of its influence in 1896, when the Democrats ostensibly adopted its aims and Populist leader William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic presidential nomination, losing in November to Republican William McKinley. <br />
<br />
The Populists were initially a multiracial movement, encompassing poor white and black farmers as well as small businessmen. But the heroic efforts of its organizers in the South were defeated when the local ruling class launched a wave of racist demagogy and violence. Many Populist leaders, such as Tom Watson in Georgia, turned against impoverished blacks and openly embraced racism. Many did this to carve out a niche in the Southern Democratic Party, which ruled over the Jim Crow system of entrenched racial segregation through police-state terror supplemented by the KKK’s extralegal violence. On the other hand, the Populist movement also included people who would become key figures in the labor and socialist movements.<br />
<br />
The Populist movement emerged in the period when the U.S. was preparing to enter the world stage as an imperialist power, one of a handful of advanced capitalist countries whose competition for spheres of exploitation around the world would lead to the devastation of two world wars and countless colonial wars. As Lenin described, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism: the economy is dominated by monopolies, with the capital of the large banks combining with the capital of industrial corporations. <br />
<br />
This crucial understanding is completely blurred by populist ideology. As we wrote in our 1997-98 series “Wall Street and the War Against Labor”: <br />
<br />
“Central to the liberal populist outlook is a belief that the capitalist class is divided into two classes, so to speak: those directly involved in producing and marketing goods and services, and those whose incomes derive from financial dealings. The former are regarded as at least relatively progressive, while the latter are deemed outright reactionary....<br />
<br />
“The common interests of all elements of the American capitalist class—whether Wall Street investment bankers, Midwestern manufacturers, Texas oilmen or California agribusinessmen—are qualitatively greater and more important than their differences. All want to maximize the exploitation of labor and to minimize the overhead costs of government social programs.”<br />
<br />
— reprinted in the 2009 Spartacist pamphlet, Karl Marx Was Right: Capitalist Anarchy and the Immiseration of the Working Class <br />
<br />
At the core of populist protest, yesterday and today, is the petty bourgeoisie, which is a heterogeneous and highly stratified social layer comprising, among others, students, professionals and small businessmen. Lacking social power and its own class perspective, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of offering an alternative to capitalism. As the Trotskyist James Burnham wrote in the 1930s, during an earlier period of economic crisis and mass discontent, “The middle classes are seeking a way out of their impasse. But they have no possible way out of their own. And at last they must, in whole or in a division, face the ultimate choice: to line up behind one of the two basic classes and its program, to swing to the side of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat” (The People’s Front: The New Betrayal, 1937).<br />
<br />
A case in point is Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that issued the original call for a Wall Street occupation. This “anti-corporate” outfit has received funds from the Tides Foundation—a clearinghouse for the Ford and Gates foundations. But Adbusters doesn’t just take money from fat cats; it also runs its own “grassroots capitalism”—the production of sneakers, which they hail as “ethical.” Ask the workers in Pakistan getting the pitiful local minimum wage as they produce these “no logo” kicks if it feels more humane to slave over hemp rather than nylon.<br />
<br />
The capitalist rulers have unleashed their police thugs on the “occupy” protests, even though this movement does not hinder the functioning of the profit system. It is an altogether different matter when workers cut off the flow of profits through strikes and other labor actions. When auto workers occupied plants in Flint, Michigan, in 1936-37, winning recognition of the United Auto Workers, they were part of a militant wave of labor struggle that gave rise to the CIO industrial unions. Those struggles were pitched battles between the workers on one side and the cops, company thugs and capitalist courts and government on the other. <br />
<br />
After decades of defeats for labor, most young activists view the working class as irrelevant to struggles for economic justice. Setting the stage for those defeats, the bureaucratic misleaders of the labor movement by and large abandoned the class-struggle methods that built the unions. In their role as the capitalists’ labor lieutenants, they tie workers to their class enemy by promoting the interests of U.S. imperialism and supporting the Democratic Party. <br />
<br />
The occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol earlier this year ended in defeat precisely because the union leadership refused to use labor’s strike weapon, instead diverting protest into a (failed) campaign to recall Republican politicians. The result is that the state’s public sector unions have been decimated. Facing a great deal of disillusion with President Obama, who is a Wall Street Democrat, a good section of the trade-union officialdom has endorsed the OWS protests, seeing in them a means of re-energizing liberal support for Obama in the 2012 elections. The same purpose drives pseudo-socialists like the International Socialist Organization and Workers World Party, whose hailing of the OWS protests is but the latest chapter in their history of reformist pressure politics. <br />
<br />
The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy<br />
<br />
No protest movement will convince the capitalist ruling class and its government to change their stripes and begin acting in the interests of the “people.” This country’s “democracy” was founded on the enslavement of black Africans, and to this day black oppression remains a fundamental underpinning of the American capitalist system. The “American way” has meant the genocidal extermination of Native Americans, waves of deportations of immigrants, bloody battles with striking workers and a long list of savage wars the world over, most recently the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and this year’s bombing of Libya. <br />
<br />
As opposed to the OWS organizers who endlessly speak about restoring democracy, Marxists understand that there is no “pure” democracy. As Lenin observed: “Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the ‘democracy’ of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918).<br />
<br />
In a speech to the OWS crowd, liberal ideologue Naomi Klein hailed the 1999 anti-globalization protests for condemning corporations that were supposedly “becoming more powerful than governments,” saying that this was “damaging to our democracies.” The fact that capitalist governments the world over have been bailing out failing industries and banks during the current economic crisis exposes the fallacy that corporations have superceded the nation-state.<br />
<br />
Klein sows illusions in a mythical golden age of “democratic” accountability. The reality is that for the capitalists, “democracy” serves as a veil to hide their class dictatorship, which they enforce through their state apparatus—armed forces, cops, courts and prisons. Cop brutality and the arrest of protesters are almost daily occurrences, giving a small taste of the terror daily meted out to ghetto and barrio residents. Yet the OWS organizers have continued to call on the “blue-collar police” to “join our conversation” and “speak of the crimes of your supervisors.” <br />
<br />
Neither is the problem simply one of “police misconduct.” All cops, whatever their background and rank, are the attack dogs of the capitalist class. An SYC speaker stressed at a recent OWS General Assembly, “Cops are not workers. They beat strikers, kill black people and arrest protesters.” <br />
<br />
Apostles of “Democratic” Counterrevolution<br />
<br />
Liberal ideologue Naomi Klein and pseudo-Marxist academic Slavoj Zizek—leading lights at the OWS protests—like to rail against China as an affront to “democracy.” In this, they are providing ideological service to Wall Street. <br />
<br />
The 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew capitalist rule, liberating the country from imperialist subjugation and leading to massive advances for workers, peasants and deeply oppressed women. However, the peasant-based revolution was deformed from its inception, putting into power a bureaucratic nationalist regime akin to that of the Soviet Union after its degeneration under Stalin. Today, despite major inroads by both foreign and indigenous capitalists, the core elements of China’s economy remain collectivized. State ownership of the banking system has promoted massive economic growth in China, mainly through investment in infrastructure. This stands in stark contrast to the profit-driven world’s dominant capitalist economies, which have been mired in crisis. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we fight for proletarian political revolution to replace the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy with a regime of workers and peasants soviets (councils) committed to the fight for world socialist revolution. <br />
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The current protests against Wall Street are deeply stamped with the “death of communism” ideology that has been propounded by the bourgeoisie and its ideologues since the restoration of capitalist rule in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92. Zizek, who sometimes spouts “revolutionary” verbiage when it serves his “bad boy” image in academia, lectured OWS protesters about how “Communism failed absolutely.” The core of his politics was seen when he hailed Obama’s 2008 election as “a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times.” <br />
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A measure of the bourgeois politics that define the OWS protests is the invitation offered by one organizer to former Polish president Lech Walesa to speak at Zuccotti Park. Walesa was the principal leader of Solidarność, which originated in 1980 out of workers strikes in the Polish deformed workers state but rapidly adopted an openly counterrevolutionary program for the restoration of capitalist rule. This was the only “union” beloved by the likes of right-wing U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his British counterpart, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. With the backing of the U.S. and European imperialists, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracies and the Catholic church, Solidarność became the principal force for capitalist counterrevolution in Poland. We denounced Solidarność at the time as a company union for the CIA, bankers and the Vatican. <br />
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The government led by Walesa that took power in 1989 dismantled Poland’s collectivized economy and implemented an economic “shock treatment” that destroyed the bulk of the social gains Poles had enjoyed under the deformed workers state—from virtually free health care to cheap, subsidized housing to pensions one could live on. In line with Catholic “family values,” the right to a safe and free abortion was abolished. Inviting Walesa to speak at Zuccotti Park was to invite a Wall Street stooge to…“Occupy Wall Street”!<br />
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Today the basic premises of authentic Marxism must be motivated against the false and prevalent misidentification of the collapse of Stalinism with the failure of communism. Against those who purvey “death of communism” and illusions in capitalist “reform,” we revolutionary Marxists tell the truth: the only road to eliminating economic scarcity is the fight for new October Revolutions. We have no illusions that this is an easy road. But the destructive anarchy of the capitalist mode of production will, if not overthrown, plunge all humanity into barbarism. The key task is the forging of a Leninist vanguard party, the necessary instrument for bringing revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat.</div>
american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-69316207288714016322024-03-18T15:52:00.000-04:002024-03-18T15:52:00.163-04:00“All The News That’s Fit To Print"-And Then Some-The Film Adaptation of Ben Hecht And Charles MacArthur’s “The Front Page” (1931)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">By Josh Breslin<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line <i>American Film Gazette</i> website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Allan Jackson was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Front Page, starring Adophe Menjou, Pat O’Brian, produced by Howard Hughes, from the play by Ben Hecht and Charles Mac Arthur, 1931<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">[Greg Green, the new site administrator here who I knew by reputation over at the on-line <i>American Film Gazette</i> where he made that website a major source of current and old-time film reviews and related stories, has given the writers in this space, the old guard, Allan Jackson the previous administrator’s base of support, and the so-called Young Turks who called for a vote of no confidence in his leadership alike, the opportunity to express their sentiments about this recent rather quick change-over in management. I have been busy finishing up a major story about a young guy, a guy named Steve McQueen but who at the time went by the name Eric Holden for reasons known only to himself, and who many years ago looked like he would be a world-beater at stud poker, a game he had been a natural at. When he came up though against the wily reigning king of the hill he let his hubris (and his dick) get the best of him in a big game in the Big Easy, in old time New Orleans, and sent him all the way back to cheap street, back to playing in gin mills in dink towns for milk money.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Thus I have not been on the inside of the controversy although I am ready to say a few words about the now, according to Zack James who should know, disappeared Allan whom I have known for many, many years going back to our first meeting days out West in the San Francisco Summer of Love, 1967 night. If we were in Cold War Russia Stalin 1950s time or even in our youthful radical ideologically pure 1960s time when we banished, maybe shunned is a better word I would be worried about Allan’s whereabouts but I am confident that he is just licking his wounds in some out of the way gin mill where they don’t ask questions and don’t take credit cards and has not been badly handled by the Young Turks as Fritz Taylor has insinuated on the basis of no facts.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Let’s get something straight first which may be, may have been confusing to casual readers, the Peter Paul Markin the now deposed site administrator is not the same Markin forever known as Scribe by his high school friends and by everybody else afterward when we all had monikers to reflect our desire to “reinvent” ourselves in those turbulent 1960s when we thought it safe to do so. The real Markin, let’s call him Scribe for reference is a guy I met out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967 when right after high school up in Maine I was kind of footloose and headed west to see what the whole thing was about. I went up to this psychedelically-painted bus parked in a small park on Russian Hill and asked this guy with long hair and longish unkempt beard for a “joint,” a marijuana cigarette. Without saying another word he passed me the biggest joint I had ever seen and then told me “don’t Bogart that joint” when you are done. We became, despite a few years age difference which probably didn’t matter as much then as now, fast and close friends, we had each other’s back in the working class lingo of the time. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">We both wound up travelling on the same Captain Crunch converted yellow school bus that I had seen on Russian Hill that day for the next two years until the Scribe got his draft notice and headed home, went into the Army, was a grunt in Vietnam, came back and was never the same. There is a lot more than that to what happened to him but if you check the archives here you will get plenty of stories about Scribe and how he fell down, how he couldn’t in the end relate to the “real” world, got so high on cocaine when that became the drug of choice amongst the brethren that he started dealing. Got big ideas about breaking out, making some serious easy street money but got nothing but two slugs to the head and an unmarked potter’s grave down in Sonora, Mexico.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Got missed every day since by me the last guy who saw him when we were living in Oakland together before he headed to Mexico and got missed by every guy he grew up with including a few writers here. Including Allan Jackson, whom I can now tell without revealing anything was, is the real name of the Peter Paul Markin who was the site administrator her for the past decade or more. He took that moniker to honor his, our fallen friend who whatever his short-comings and they were many taught us all a lot of stuff about living when he was in his prime. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I see I have talked more about Scribe Markin than Allan and spent more space than it will take to do this review so I will leave off until some other time but know this whatever short-comings old Allan had, and they were many, even if he did in the end go crazy to go back to those 1960s which formed us older guys it was only because he, we got old, got old and that is all. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Fourth Estate, you know the press, the free and unfettered press as they like to call themselves, has been on a bumpy ride of late. Has taken flak from goofs at the top of the pyramid like that guy Trump who may be trumped long before his tenure is over down to the man on the street who can’t understand why facts should matter in an argument and are more than willing to cry to the heavens about “fake news” to solve every doubt, to back up every prejudice in their sainted brethren souls (or is it soles). But if art either imitates or reflects life, and I think the latter is true then this muddle of a free press and its detractors has a long genesis. And gets a heavy workout in this 1930s original male cinematic version of the classic Hecht-MacArthur play <i>The Front Page.</i> (That by the way is the Ben Hecht of the dramatic poster art work in defense of the martyred Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti whom he fought desperately to save from the executioner’s chair in 1927). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">As Pete Markin always encouraged us to do when he was around taking a cue from his old his school friend and fellow contributor to this space Sam Lowell let’s see how this one played out as a good example of the tension between free press and license to lie. Hildy Johnson, played by Pat O’Brian, ace reporter for a big Chi town paper, fictional paper so names don’t matter but call it <i>Everypaper </i>if you like) was both fed up with the hours working the police blotter for little scraps of vicious news to circulate to a hungry audience that needed some entertainment after their own long factory shifts and in love with some twist who wants him to settle down and get a real job. Walter Burns, played rather strangely for a Midwest <i>Everypaper</i> editor by Frenchman Adophe Menjou, wants him to slave away at the new news story for him. That tension will run the gamut of the film as an expression of the “buddy” aspect of this film.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Here is the newspaper end. Everybody in Chi town is waiting eagerly for one smuck and loser, Earl Williams, to take the big step-off, to get a jolt in the state’s electric chair after having allegedly killing a Chi town copper. Of course the smuck didn’t do it and in any case the Governor has sent down a reprieve. That however doesn’t stop the presses. No, not at all because once loser Earl Williams escapes from that Chi town jail and every city official has egg on his face from the mayor down to the warden is scrambling like hell to find the bastard and mess him up good. Of course every newspaper in town in the times in this country when every hamlet and village had a least one hard copy newspaper and big Chi-type towns had plenty to fit whatever readership niche they were aiming for from high-brow <i>Tribune</i> efforts to police gazettes. Nevertheless high- brow or low newspaper, newspaper editor and cub reporter dreams of an exclusive. Hildy Johnson, maybe reluctantly, remembered that bride-to-be waiting for him, and Walter Burns are no exceptions. Even better they have one escapee Earl Williams in their clutches and if they can figure a way to get him out of the police blotter detail room and to a place where they can put even more egg on every city officials face so much the better. Watch this one to see in a funny way what was what in the days when newspapers, now under heavy assault from the Internet and social media, ruled the roost and gave out the news, fake or not.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-17789586926371927382024-03-14T14:35:00.000-04:002024-03-14T14:35:00.175-04:00The Clarinet Is Not The Only Instrument That Goes Rooty-Toot-Toot-With Myna Loy And William Powell’s “The Song Of The Thin Man” Based On The Dashiell Hammett Characters In Mind<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">The Clarinet Is Not The Only Instrument That Goes Rooty-Toot-Toot-With Myna Loy And William Powell’s “The Song Of The Thin Man” Based On The Dashiell Hammett Characters In Mind<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">By Bruce Conan<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">The Song Of The Thin Man, starring Myrna Loy, William Powell, Keenan Wynn, based on the characters Nick and Nora Charles created by Dashiell Hammett in the crime novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Thin Man</i>,<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">The general reader is probably not familiar with the name of the reviewer, Bruce Conan, in this publication because unfortunately it is an alias as has been a previous one used by the same person, Danny Moriarty. The reason that I have had to use these pseudonyms is to protect myself and my family, mostly my family as it turns out, against the wrath and vengeance of a nefarious criminal enterprise based out of London but apparently with tentacles internationally called the Baker Street Irregulars. This nasty band of cutthroats, pimps, con men, whores, bandits, petty thieves and murderers was formed in the distant past to venerate one Lanny Lamont, real name Lanny Lamont after exhaustive investigation, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes and who knows how many other names. They are said to practice blood rituals, have serious drug addiction problems just like their so-called deductive reasoning guru Lanny, and to be responsible for half the robberies and unsolved murders in London town over the last few decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">One might wonder why a notorious gang of dangerous felons and there hangers-on and wannbes would be harassing and threatening murder and mayhem toward a placid film reviewer and his precious family across a big ocean in America. Fair question. And the fair answer is that I have been on a steady, unswerving recent campaign to unmask their idol, their homeboy Lanny as a fraud and a two bit amateur parlor pink fairy tale detective. (I refuse to call him their preferred name of Sherlock and that has even further inflamed them although they know as well as I do that is his real name and that he was brought up in the slums of West London despite all that fake highbrow pronunciation and blather talk he carried on with when he was alive.) Worse, worse in their collective books I “outed” him and his paramour Doc Watson as a pair of diddling agents of the Homintern, closet homosexuals in a day when detectives with that predilection were not allowed into the profession under penalty of expulsion (now they can be same-sex married for all anybody cares including me) and longtime devotees of the utterly corrupt and venal Kit Kat Club where all those with frankly weird sexual proclivities ply their wares.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">With that burdensome background in mind I begged our current site manager Greg Green to let me do a review of the epitome of a real detective from that same cinematic time period who did not have Lanny’s nasty and counter-productive habits (really perverted habits but I am being kind). A guy who could figure two and two makes four while lapping up some high shelf booze and running his eyes suggestively up and down every stray dame he saw, and some not so stray. Of course that is our beloved Nick Charles and his lovely wife Nora along with that irrepressible mutt Asta in one of the series of films that William Powell and Myra Loy did together to light up the private detection firmament back in the day. Wrap up a case so it stays wrapped without help from incompetent coppers who would rather sit around with coffee and crullers. Not as Lanny always did hand the messy details over to the “on the take” boys at Scotland Yard. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">Take the Tommy Drake case as featured in the film under review <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of the Thin Man</i>. Nick was smooth as silk on that one, a be-bop daddy who took down the tooting town in the edge of the cool jazz age when the Duke and Count roamed the cities bopping the bop. Yeah, no question half the world, the male world, the gambling world had reason to do Tommy boy in no matter that he was the cat’s meow fronting for the band in the cream of big band era time. He was going to blow the gambling boat scene run by Phil Brant, you remember him the famous jazz aficionado who showcased a lot of new talent like Fran Page, Peggy Davis, Cindy Lowe and a host of other young torch-singers, the customers drank up his overpriced liquor and lost their shirts at the gaming tables when he had his latest gig for the big time provided by a big band jazz promoter, Mitchell Talbin. Yes, that Talbin who had all of New York café society crying jeepers-creeper for Charlie, Dizzy, the Monk and who saw in Tommy some of that glitter and gold-solid, man, solid. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">This is where it all falls apart for dear Tommy though. He is in hock up to his ears to a gambler for 12 K, big money then. Tommy puts the bite on that Talbin for an advance to pay off the debt and leave for greener pastures. No soap (no soap for a reason though not the one given by Talbin about chancy band acts and maybe it will snow in July). In any case Tommy winds up dead, very dead trying to jimmy the safe of his current boss Brant. Brant and his society bride married on the fly down in nowhere Atlantic show up at Nick and Nora’s the next morning looking for help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tommy death had Brant’s frame all over it. He is going down, going down for the big step off, the juice if the truth be known if Nick can’t save the day.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">After a few drinks, couple of dances with Nora and a swift few look sat the belles on the side just to keep thinks interesting he cracks the case wide open one night when Brant’s gambling ship reopens for business. (In one of the great cinematic private eye moves ever recorded Nick by sleight of hand is able to get a key clue, a piece of music with exonerating information for Brant right over in front of the town coppers who also are happy with coffee and crullers just like their Scotland Yard brethren. Sherlock would still be sitting in that rundown rooming house apartment he and Doc shared sucking on the old opium pipe wondering what to do next. Brant and his lovely bride that high society dame, the guy who Tommy owed the gambling debt to and his wife decked out in diamonds and that Talmin and his wife all prance in for the turkey shoot.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt;">You know Brant and his bride are off the hook since they went looking for Nick and Nora’s help. So it settles on the gambling guru and the jazz promoter. What if I tell you that dear sweet Tommy beside that gambling jones was sex-addled, was a skirt-chaser without limits on who he might get his claws into. Yeah Tommy would be too bright a boy to fool with a mobster’s wife, no percentage there. But a holy goof jazz aficionado no problem. So jealous jazz man Talmin bonked the now departed jazz band leader after his wife and Tommy’s lover covered Tommy’s gambling debt. In response after the jazz agent man confessed in open dance hall that he did the deed out of jealousy his dear wife plugged him rooty-toot-toot. Nice clean job for Nick and time for booze and bedtime. Touche Lanny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-53786962668597677952024-03-13T12:29:00.000-04:002024-03-13T12:29:00.169-04:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- With The Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four In Mind<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- With T</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">he Beatles performing <i>When I'm Sixty-Four </i>In Mind</span></b><b><span style="font-size: 18pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">A <i>YouTube</i> film clip of the Beatles performing <i>When I'm Sixty-Four</i> from the animated movie <i>Yellow Submarine.</i></span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">From The Archives Of Allan Jackson<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Many of my fellows from the tail end of the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">[You know I am not a religious man, haven’t’ been since I was a kid in the days before I went to the 8 o’clock Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church for the sole purpose of sitting a few rows behind Chrissie McNamara and watch her ass (as did the late Peter Paul Markin unbeknownst to me until many years later). Of course I can say that now since Chrissie and I have been together through thick and thin since high school days. But despite my infidel ways today I rejoice. Today I say praise be or whatever they say when glad tidings are upon us. Greg Green, the current site manager and Sam Lowell, an old friend of Allan’s as I am, have finally worked out an arrangement concerning the question of true and full attribution for this series. As of the next installment the old site manager none other than the previously exiled to who knows where Allan Jackson who played midwife to this series over several years and will be forever linked to the ideas behind the theme will have both full attribution (a by-line) and the ability to create new introductions to each sketch if he is so inclined. The only limitation which all agreed makes sense is not to restart the civil war over last year’s internal fight and stick to whatever the theme of the sketch is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">The “praise be” stems from the fact that after this final third party introduction I can go back to what I do best which is to sell cars, sell Toyotas, where I have built myself up to be Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts (and Chrissie Mrs. Toyota don’t forget). Which means that I can go back to raising funds to keep this venture afloat which I do better that the occasional writings that I have done in the past and which I have been forced-marched into doing too frequently of late in defense of old friend Allan against an impossible stream of rumors since he was “purged” from his position early last year after losing a vote of no confidence and Greg was brought in full-time. With this last intro I will have done the best I could to sort out the rumors from the reality. This last defense may be the strangest of all having to defend a straight-up guy like Allan from the rumor that he was in San Francisco dating a “drag queen” posing as Judy Garland and living high off the hog on Russian Hill bonking the opium pipe and stoned all the time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Along the same lines was the rumor that he was running a high-class international whorehouse in Argentina with his old lover Madame La Rue catering to the strange whims of Asian businessmen. There were others, mostly along those silly same lines, but this one last one will suffice to give an idea of what was essentially a smear campaign against the man. Supposedly he was in Frisco dating a transvestite who was connected with the opium trade and he was living high off the hog on Russian Hill stoned to the gills all the time. What are you kidding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Although I am a lapsed, very lapsed Catholic (just don’t tell Chrissie that since she is still a true believer and refuses to believe that the only reason I went to those endless Sunday Masses was to “sit behind her and watch her ass” even as she could believe that same fact about old Markin) I don’t swear much leaving that to my old friend and now “liberator” Sam Lowell but WTF on this drag queen Judy Garland opium den mandarin madness. Here is what I thought first when I heard this one thinking back to our high school days in the 1960s in hard scrabble macho “take no prisoners” days. Remember this is fifty years ago when every mothers, mothers like mine warned their sons to stay away from a place like Captain Kidd’s, an abandoned cruise ship down on Nantasket Beach where the “fags,” homos, drag queens and the like did their disgusting stuff” (even if we were not quite sure what they did or didn’t do until much later all we knew that it was guys with guys and guys acting like girls to put the most innocent spin on it).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">One episode down in Provincetown, then as now a haven for all kinds of sexual proclivities will tell the tale, ashamedly now, but a true tale. The summer after high school graduation a bunch of us from North Adamsville, all guys, including Allan, decided that we would go to “P” town and roust the “fags” or whatever name we called them at any particular time (certainly not gays that was for, ah, gay people, happy). Of course we fortified ourselves with drink, mostly hard stuff, on the long trip down. Somebody knew where the drag queens performed and we went there with the idea of isolating one of them and beating the hell out of whoever we could entice. I think Markin who had a certain boyish look before he lost it all after a year in Vietnam which knocked the soul out of him was the “decoy” as things went as planned. Some guy came by and asked him if he wanted to go out in the back of the bar for something. He left with the guy and we followed. You know what happened next and like I say Allan and I, Sam too never really got over it even if we believed for a long time “fags” were less than human.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">And that is kind of the point I want to make about this rumor. You can actually learn something in life, take a surprise or two also. Who would have thought that off of that youthful track record we were among the first to call for same-sex marriage equality in this publication and for a range of rights for the LGBTQ community in general. Who would have thought that we tried to move might and main to get Tran heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower and fellow soldier Chelsea (starting out as Bradley) Manning her freedom for several years before former President Obama did the right thing and pardoned her. Yeah, and we didn’t think anything of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Oh yeah, here is the real deal about Allan and that drag queen. Before Allan headed back east to Maine he stopped off at San Francisco to see an old friend from the neighborhood, one of the corner boys who as it turned out had a secret we never even suspected at the time. Only found out long after when I think Jimmy Jenkins was out in North Beach watching a drag queen show for kicks and somebody dressed like Judy Garland approached him and called his name. Jimmy, embarrassed to be seen there with his wife, couldn’t believe it was Timmy Riley. Jimmy brought back the news. So Allan’s visit was to our old friend Timmy Riley aka “Judy Garland” from the neighborhood who had had such a tough life not being who he/she was until San Francisco many years and bruises later. Allan had been slipping money her way for years. He was just looking in on his, our friend. Rumors, fucking rumors. Allan you are on your own now. Jack Callahan] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">************ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Many of my fellows from the tail end of the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When I'm Sixty-Four - The Beatles</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When I get older, losing my hair,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Many years from now</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Will you still be sending me the Valentine,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Birthday greetings, bottle of wine</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">If I stay out till quarter to three</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Would you lock the door</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Will you still need me, will you still feed me</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When I'm sixty-four.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">You'll be older too,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">And if you say the word I could stay with you.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">I could be handy mending a fuse</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When your lights have gone</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">You can knit a sweater by the fireside</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Doing the garden, digging the weeds,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Who could ask for more</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Will you still need me, will you still feed me</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When I'm sixty-four.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Send me a postcard, drop me a line</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Yours sincerely, wasting away</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Give me your answer, fill in a form,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Mine for evermore,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Will you still need me, will you still feed me</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When I'm sixty-four.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Ancient dreams, dreamed.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Yeah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde, frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled through the womb or some toddler’s crib maybe, at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window “the projects” wait on better times, get a leg up, don’t get left behind in the dawning American streets paved with gold dream but for now just hang your hat dwelling, small, too small for three growing boys with hearty appetites and desires to match even then, warm, free-flow oil spigot warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching, relentlessly marching as he, that older brother, went off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time for the time of his time, in this red scare (but what knows he of red scare only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles floating aimlessly in the clogging still air night.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">A cloudless day, a cloudless blasted eternal, infernal Korean War day, talk of peace, merciless truce peace and uncles coming home in the air, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball fields the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits of wildly-maned horses, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too, that nose-flattened brother, has been to foreign places, strange boxed rooms filled with the wax and wane of learning, simple learning, in the time of his time, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb aimed right at my head unnamed shelter blast fears, named, vaguely named, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hated stalinite jews killed fears, jews killed our catholic lord fears, and what did they do wrong to get the chair anyway fears against the cubed glass glistening flagless flag-pole rattling dark asphalt school yard night. Alone, and, and, alone with fears, and avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, sailors’ homes AND deaths in barely readable fine- marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards looking out on ocean homelands and lost booty. Dead, and the idea of dead, the mystery of dead, and of sea sailor dead on mains, later stream thoughts of bitch proctoresses, some unnamed faraway crush teacher who crossed my path and such, in lonely what did he do wrong anyway prison cells, smoking, reading, writing of dinosaurs die and other laments. Dead.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Endless walks, endless one way sea street water rat-infested fear seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells, swaying grasses in light breezes to the right, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat stinks to the left making hard the way, the path, the symbolic life path okay, to uptown drug stores, some forgotten chain-name drug store, passing perfumes, lacquers, counter drugs, ailments cured, hurts fixed and all under a dollar, trinkets ten cents baubles, gee-gads, strictly gee-gads, grabbing, two-handed grabbing, heist-stolen valentines, a metaphor in the making, ribbon and bow ruby-red valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet. Man emerging out of the ooze, and hope.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Walks, endless waiting bus stop, old late, forever late, story of a young boy’s life late, diesel-fueled, choking fumed non-stop bus stop walks, no golden age car for jet moves in American Dream wide-fin , high tech automatic drive nights, walks, walks up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year no fix rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles, you get the picture, pass trees are green, coded, secretly coded even fifty street rutted years later, endless trees are green super-secret-coded except for face blush waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now. For what? For one look, one look, and not a quick no-nonsense, no dice look, no time for ragamuffin boys either that would elude him, elude him forever. Such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance, no coded trees are green dance, either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school either, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name trees are green brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">City square, no trespass, no standing, standing, low-slung granite buildings everywhere, granite steps leading to granite doors leading to granite gee-gad counters, hated, no name hated, low-head hated, waiting slyly, standing back on heels, going in furtively, coming out ditto, presto coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no russkie Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped-up crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">A bridge too far, an unarched, unsteeled, unspanned, unnerved bridge too far. One speed bicycle boy, dungarees rolled up against dog bites and geared meshes, churning through endless heated, sweated, no handkerchief streets, names, all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, hard against the unnamed angst, hard against those changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I, too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-borning but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Stopped short. Who would have figured that one?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets. Diana, blonde Diana, cashmere-sweatered, white tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out; nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, a small-time after school soda split sit at the counter Doc’s drugstore date, or slice of pizza and a coke date at Balducci’s with a few nickels juke boxed in playing our song, our future song, a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall song, and dreams of I Want To Wanted sifting the hot afternoon air, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of local lore car parked submarine races and mysteries unfurled, ah, to dream, no more than to dream, walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no known even forty years later. Wow.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small-filtered, natch, no romantic Bogie tobacco-lipped unfiltered, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh-mown streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish, although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, hubert, tricky dick war-circus all hell broke loose thing then, or wanted to.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not for ancient robert frost to guide you… Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monktons, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas’ flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarcaderos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam tricky dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored antic newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggared time, right.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Lashed against the high end double seawall, bearded, slightly graying against the forlorn time, a vision in white not enough to keep the wolves of time away, the wolves of feckless petty larceny times reappear, reappear with a vengeance against the super-rational night sky and big globs of ancient hurts fester against some unknown enemy, unnamed, or hiding out in a canyon under an assumed name. Then night, the promise of night, a night run up some seawall laden streets, some Grenada night or maybe Lebanon sky boom night, and thoughts of finite, sweet flinty finite haunt his dreams, haunt his sleep. Wrong number, brother. Ya, wrong number, as usual.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">White truce flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against Persian gulf oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-58330836163271930622024-03-12T11:43:00.000-04:002024-03-12T11:43:00.185-04:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- For Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-</b><b>A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- For Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">From The Archives Of Allan Jackson<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">[Unfortunately despite what Sam Lowell thought was a last minute breakthrough in negotiations with what almost everybody who writes for this publication was previous site manager and perspiration king for this series Allan Jackson things are still bogged down with the current site manager Greg Green’s unwillingness to let Allan write some updated introductions to each posting (or not, depending on whether there is further need talk about some topic raised by the sketch). For now Greg’s position as far as I understand it is that Allan can have a straight by-line tab like everybody else for the duration of the series. Hopefully that last hurdle, that possibility of an updated introduction not at all uncommon when a publication, on-line or hard copy) is reissued or revised. Until then I will do, at Allan’s request and with Greg’s cooperation I might add, to scotch the floodgate of rumors that have surfaced over the past almost year now originally about Allan’s whereabouts and now more about what he has been doing with his time since then. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Hopefully Allan will get that introduction space he seeks and can bat down the rumors that have floated over his name particularly the most egregious ones (I only have time for those major dillies the minor ones he can tag if he feels it is necessary).The strangest one by far is the one that had him anywhere from Tibet to Argentina with the latter being the most prevalently named place running a high end brothel for Asian businessmen interested in taking a walk on the wild side, the kinky side, with his old flame Madame La Rue. (They never married but were close until she balked and figured with the three previous wives’ alimonies and kids’ tuitions she was better off running her own show-and she was right.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Not every young woman who came of age in the 1960s, maybe early 1970s, despite Allan’s somewhat naïve belief on very public display last year during his hysterical reaction to the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967 went the distance, kept the faith in the “newer world a-borning guys and gals like him have held onto ever since then. Despite the very real evidence that there has been a forty plus year counter-cultural backlash by the night-takers who got freaked out by the idea of the world turned upside down. Some people as in any social movement fall by the wayside or had been temporary fellow-travelers when the tide was running high and bailed out when the ebbtide hit. Or just had stopped by for a taste of something different on the way to whatever they were going to do anyway. That was Sissy Kelly, aka Madame La Rue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Josh Breslin had first met her when he (and Allan, Jimmy Jenkins, Sam Lowell, the late Peter Paul Markin, and Frankie Riley I think this was before I went out myself for a short while) were riding high as kites on a yellow brick road former school bus turned travelling caravan led by a guy everybody called Captain Crunch. Met her in Ventura at a county fair where she was running a fortune-telling scam (and giving an off-hand blow job on the side) to make ends meet. She was young, maybe too young for all we knew, very pretty if not beautiful although that was always open to question especially by Allan who deemed her beautiful and ready to roam once the fair was over. And if she did not love sex (and dope back then and later whiskey) she was inventive and willing to share her skills. So she travelled with Josh and the crowd for a while until Josh ran into a young woman who called herself Butterfly Swirl down in La Jolla and she switched off to Jimmy next, I think, I know it was not Allan he would be next after Jimmy. That next lasted for a while until the early 1970s when Allan after his bit in the military decided to get serious about the publishing business and Madame La Rue, Sissy, then also saw that she was meant for a different road than the newer world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">But they, Allan and Sissy anyway, always more or less stayed in touch if not regularly then enough not to worry about some unheard of strange fate. The way I heard the story was that Sissy headed toward Monterey where she worked the streets before landing in some brothel in Carmel which catered to rich businessmen mainly from Asia who were in the area to play golf at Pebble Beach and other courses along Seventeen Mile Road. That was when she approached Allan for some dough to start her own operation out of town toward Big Sur. Between her own work under the sheets and then her own brothel she was able to pay Allan back in a couple of years, maybe three. So Monterey, not Argentina, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong or wherever the rumors had them was where Allan went looking for dough after leaving Damask in La Jolla. Looking for a loan not to run a brothel, or to help run one, which would have been crazy for him to do but to seek the loan, He got it. And he got a little something else from Sissy Kelly which would make him smile all the way to Bar Harbor, Maine. Rumors! Jack Callahan] </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">A <i>YouTube</i> film clip of Hank Williams performing <i>You Win Again </i>to set the mood for this piece.</span></b><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">From The Pen Of Frank Jackman<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Josh Breslin had been since he retired a couple of years ago as a journalist writing for half the alternative and special interest newspapers and journals in the country, make that half the unread, mostly, newspapers and journals in those categories in something of a reflective mood. Not every day, certainly not on golf days with his golfing associates over at Dunegrass, when reflection over some missed chip or putt on the previous hole spelled the kiss of death for the round. Much better to keep an empty mind on those days and just hope enough muscle memory kicks in to survive the round. But enough of golf, enough of unread journals, hell, enough of retirement except as the cushion that Josh’s thoughts fell on one day when passing through his old home town of Olde Saco, a town farther north in Maine than the one where he now lived, on some family business.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">While there he passed by his old growing up house, as was almost always the case since it was located near a main town road which he would have to cross to get on to the main highway and not always in some fit of nostalgia. Or rather he passed the plot of land where the old home was situated, an old house that had been little better than a shack, a cabin maybe then, maybe especially when his three sisters came of age and hogged the single bathroom and stuff like that. A place which left little room for a single growing boy to attend to his own toilet, his own sense of space, to any sense at all. The house may have been a shack, no, he thought better say a cabin but it had been located on about two acres of land and in the intervening years, years well after his parents had passed on and his sisters like him had left the dust of Olde Saco behind the land had become valuable and now had been developed into an eight-unit condominium complex. Not that his parents, not that his father Prescott Breslin derived any real financial benefit from that development since the house had been sold when he needed to go into a nursing home after Josh’s mother, Delores, passed away. Had been sold well before there was a resurgence in the Olde Saco economy which had taken a beating when the MacAdams Textile Mills shut down and moved south to North Carolina in the early 1950s and had only recovered with some “high tech” start-ups using the old factory space well after Prescott passed on. The sale of that old house had broken his father’s heart despite its shanty condition at the end. The damn sale of the cabin in any case had not brought enough money. Not enough to cover all Prescott’s increasing medical expenses which Josh and his sisters wound up subsiding. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">And so the passing of that lot got Josh to thinking about how Prescott Breslin never drew a blessed break in his hard-scrabble life. Never drew a break although he was a hard-working man of the old school-“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”-when he had work. Got Josh to thinking about the early 1950s when he was coming of age, when he started even if unconsciously, or maybe semi-consciously, to feel that some new breeze was coming, some new breeze that was going to break through and unfreeze that red scare Cold War time. And while Josh’s horizons in those days centered on the emerging rock and roll, coming from some “new” Memphis hillbilly sources, some black as night rhythm and blues sources, some down and out urban blues sources, again black as night, that was leading the jail-break out then his father’s fate was being sealed in another way. See Prescott Breslin was an employee, a machine tender and mechanic at the MacAdams Textile factory that was heading south and he had no other resources to fall back on. That last thought was pure Josh though, pure Josh remembering back to those hard days. Prescott Breslin, as he would be the first to say, and had probably said it a thousand times, with a wife and four children had no time to worry about whether he had resources to fall back or not. Josh chuckled to himself over that one, yeah, that was pure Dad.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">As he travelled further along Main Street (really Route One but everybody called it Main Street since they had no real such street in the town) he passed by what in the old days was Millie’s Diner, now re-opened as Mildred’s, the one right across the street from the old textile plant where guys would go before their shift and grab a coffee and crullers, maybe grab a quick dinner if they were single, or maybe meet some sweetheart and talk before going off to work. He did not know this from personal experience but his father had once told him that right after World War II the plant was working three shifts and guys, and gals, were catching as much overtime as they wanted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Millie’s did not long survived the shutdown of the mill and had been abandoned for a number of years (like a lot of other businesses in that section of the town that were dependent on the mill-workers) but had re-opened about a decade ago with the same “feel” as Millie’s including a jukebox which played current stuff but also stuff from back then, stuff that hard-working guys and gals would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in to listen to whatever was “hot” in those days. Josh knew all of this because a couple of years before he had been contacted by an old high school classmate, Melinda, Melinda Dubois (the place was crawling with French-Canadians including his mother, nee LeBlanc), who had read some old article of his and got in touch to invite his up for a class reunion. During that previous time in town Melinda had taken him around town and showed him what had changed and told him the story of Millie’s resurrection as Mildred’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Something that day, probably the sight of the old homestead, maybe just the thought of Millie’s where sometimes when his father had been making good money he would take the family for an out of house dinner and where Josh on occasion had stopped in to play the jukebox and have a Coke while looking furtively around for any stray girls, prompted him to stop and go into Mildred’s for a coffee and maybe a piece of pie (that pie an iffy thing what with him and his new weight problem but he thought why go into a diner if you are not going to have something that is “bad “ for you). As a single he sat at the Formica-top counter complete with red vinyl-cushioned swivel stool to sit on and a paper placemat and utensils in front of him waiting for the smiling waitress to take his order (a career waitress as is usual in diners, middle-aged, her white uniform a little tight trying to look younger, pencil in her hair for ease of taking orders, chewing gum but friendly until you placed your order and then either still smiling or a frown if you only order coffee and, not the young college girls and guys you find in better restaurants marking time with a job to help defray college expenses or for “walking around” money). He placed his frowning order, coffee, black, and a piece of apple crumb pie with, yes, with ice cream (bad, indeed).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">While Josh waited for his order he thumbed through the panels on the jukebox machine that was placed between him and the next placemat. And as if by some strange osmosis Josh came upon Hank Williams’ <i>You Win Again,</i> his father’s favorite song when he was young. (His father been in a pick-up band for a while working a circuit and along the Ohio River.) Josh put his quarter in to play that one selection (yeah, times have changed even in jukebox land, no more three for a quarter ) and as Hank moan’s his lovesick blues that triggered Josh to start thinking about his father and where he had come from, where he would have picked up those country tunes in his DNA. And then he thought of that hard time when his father was so discouraged about his prospects when the mill had closed down temporarily and then when the final word had come that it would be closing for good and would play that song repeatedly as if to try and ward off some evil spirits. He could remember his father’s voice like it was yesterday as he sat beside him in Millie’s: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> “Jesus, it’s been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill keeps screaming at us. And also telling us not to trespass under penalty of arrest, Christ, after all the sweat we have given the damn MacAdams family. I still haven’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I don’t even have a high school diploma, not even close since I only went to eight grade and then to the mines, to do anything but some logging work up North when they need extra crews,” That is what Prescott Breslin, Josh sitting silently beside him, had half-muttered to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between the two, and by many previous parties on those self-same stools, took place, of course, right at Millie’s Diner right across the street from the closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Just then Prescott, hey, no Pres, or PB, or any such thing, not if you didn’t want an argument on one of his few vanities, fell silent, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as he thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that came creeping through his brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, first told him the plant was shutting down for good and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from his eastern Kentucky roots. Then it was just a second of self-doubt but now the thoughts started ringing incessantly in his brain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that he had worked in his youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, girls and one boy with Delores. Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and played <i>Will The Circle Be Unbroken</i>, a song that his late, long-gone mother sang to him on her knee when he was just a tow-headed young boy. That got him to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when eight kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on the table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girl’s stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Then Prescott thought about the Saturday night barn dances where he cut quite a figure with the girls when he was in his teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. He was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Uncle Eddie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And he heard, just like now on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through <i>Will The Circle Be Unbroken</i> that closed most Saturday barn dances.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">As Millie asked him for the third time, “More coffee” he came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, he said no to himself with that same kind of December resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again he let out his breathe and said to himself one more time- “Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, Jesus, but Delores, the four kids, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">And as if to put paid to that resolve, as Josh made a funny face in recognition, Prescott had put a coin into the jukebox and played <i>You Win Again</i>, which he always said brought him good tidings, or at least made him feel better. A few minute after the song was completed and he and his father were ready to leave after saying good-bye to Jack Johnny Dubois came through the door and yelled, “Hey, Prescott, Jack, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months work clearing some land up North for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, he was going too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-52014145718573373692024-03-11T17:14:00.000-04:002024-03-11T17:14:00.167-04:00Better Watch Out If You Want To Get Back To The Garden-The Film Adaptation Of Patricia Highsmith’s Novel –“A Kind Of Murder” (2016)-A Film Review <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Better Watch Out If You Want To Get Back To The Garden-The Film Adaptation Of Patricia Highsmith’s Novel –“A Kind Of Murder” (2016)-A Film Review<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Leslie Dumont<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: 18pt;">A Kind of Murder</span></i></b><b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">, starring Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Biel, Haley Bennett, Eddie Marsan, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel <i>The Blunderer</i>, 2016<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">I remember once at a lecture, or maybe it was a forum, a military officer, maybe a colonel, you will have to ask Sam Lowell or one of the military veterans who write at this publication about military rank mentioned that humankind’s DNA was hard-wired for war. Whether that was true or not or the officer was just trying to justify his military career as a leader of some special forces-type operation, rangers I think, is open to some serious discussion. What is not open to discussion though is a similar idea-that humankind is hard-wired for murder, murder one, murder most foul as Agatha Christie would say. Obviously even if this is true going all the way back to Cain slaying Abel for dimes and donuts, maybe before, then the impulse in most of us is deeply suppressed or else we as a species would have gone extinct a while back.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That is not to say that we are not all capable, very capable of thinking, thinking hard about doing in somebody who has bothered us in some way. May have even fantasy planned out some aspect of the avenging angel angle and then let it go because something more pressing came up, or you needed to go to the bar or bathroom. That is the premise behind this film <i>A Kind of Murder</i>, a film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel <i>The Blunderer</i> on the part of one of the characters-the wishing that somebody would die to alleviate some kind of sorrow aspect.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Today we are, unfortunately, inured to murder, murder most foul, what with the blanket 24/7/365 cable-social media overkill coverage of every gruesome tragedy but back in the early 1960s such events took on outraged proportions. Take the case of Walter Stackhouse, played by Patrick Wilson, a successful architect living the good life and his wife Clara, a bundle of post-World War II anxieties and traumas. Not a trouble in the world really but dear Walter has had it up to his elbows with Clara’s incessant unhappiness. He wants her out of his life, would like to see her dead really. Fair enough although divorce would be a better call. Except if he divorces her she will get even with him by, well, by killing herself. And she had attempted to do in the past already. Sadly she will eventually wind up dead, wind up committing suicide jumping off a bridge in of all places Saratoga Springs, the summer watering hole of the Mayfair swells in the old racing days.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That is one take on the man and wife situation. Here’s another and see if you can see a little pattern form, a little something to hang your hat on. Another guy, a Walter Mitty type guy, Marty, Marty Kimell, played by Walter Mitty-ish Eddie Marsen-you know the guy who ran that bookstore in Newark where nobody seemed to go in and browse had a wife problem too. A nagger unto eternity and so one day she winds up dead, very dead outside of poor Harry’s Rainbow Diner a bus stop on the way to Saratoga Springs. Poor Harry though since sweet Clara was last seen before she took her leap of faith after last being seen at Harry’s when she was taking the bus to see her mother. Evil times in the North Country no question.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">So follow me. Two deaths, two dead wives, two not sorry husbands whoever their public sentiments hell even a two bit suburban copper could figure out the prime suspects-the hubbies did it even on the alleged suicide. That is the percentages, no question. That the way the copper played it hard and loose before the Warren Court pulled some of his antics up short. That is the way things played out anyway once Walter, poor shmuck, started playing footsie with some beatnik torch-singer, Ellie played by Haley Bennett, from the Village in the days when jazz and poetry ruled the roost in those environs before the folk minute burst onto the scene. Walter also had ambitions as an amateur sleuth, a writer of short story thrillers, just in case the architect business went south. He got interested in that Walter Mitty-ish guy case once he figured out that all signs pointed to the guy doing in the wife. So he played cat and mouse with the guy. Wrong move for two reasons that Walter Mitty guy was an American psycho and that ain’t no lie and with Walter mucking about even a two bit cop can see big time promotions by solving two wife murders for the price of one. Simple. But the only lesson that the rest of us humankind should draw here is hold off wishing you want to see somebody dead just because that would be the best situation for you. Simple too. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-60912197581134264262024-03-11T15:06:00.000-04:002024-03-11T15:06:00.174-04:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-“The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1960s Beach Blanket Saga.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-</b><b>“The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1960s Beach Blanket Saga.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">A <i>YouTube</i> film clip of the Falcons performing <i>You're So Fine.</i></span></b><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">From The Archives Of Allan Jackson</span></b><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">[Back again since the negotiations between Sam Lowell and current site manager Greg Green have stalled out for now. Sam is fervently negotiating with Greg to get Allan Jackson the previous site manager full attribution and more for his relentless work on this series several years ago when the series was originally posted. A hard sell although by general agreement of both those who had supported Allan like me and those who had opposed like Sam are anxious to see Allan get his just due as that will affect their rights as well which is maybe the real sticking point. Rather than going piece-meal with what is happening on that front I will continue, at Allan’s request, to shoot down the vast swirl of rumors that have surfaced around his name once he went “underground” after his departure (a departure now recognized by all, just ask Sam, as a “purge”).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">I have already swatted down the vicious rumor that Greg had Allan “done in,” meaning according to one far-out “conspiracy theory” take that Allan was probably buried out in some arroyo with the stage-brush tumbling over his head out West someplace where they don’t ask so many questions. Swatted down to my relief, Sam’s and probably all the older writers who knew him in his radical 1960s days after that shattering hitch in the Army during the Vietnam War, a rumor that he had for filthy lucre been “turned” and was writing copy for various Mormon publications out in Utah and later tried to mea culpa beg his way on to Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senatorial campaign after ancient Orrin Hatch decided to give up the ghost. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Couldn’t swat down the big rumor that he was shacked up with some twenty-something surfer girl, a young woman whose name is Damask which tells you quickly all you need to know for now about this California-bred blonde, out in La Jolla who was teaching him to surf and be her “sugar daddy” or something like that since that was actually true although the whole thing was blown way out of proportion about the sugar daddy part if you knew anything about Allan’s finances with three ex-wives to send checks to a few of his younger kids since creating a serious drain via their college tuitions. The latest we heard from him after we were able track down Allan up in Bar Harbor, Maine was that he was working like seven dervishes to bring her East to check out the surf. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">More recently, and frankly more ominously, Allan’s name had been attached to the Perez cartel, the big Mexican-based cartel (at least at last report that is where the operation was based) which was not above murder and mayhem to get the “product,” these days cocaine and heroin, to the United States market. This was serious stuff not only for what is left of Allan’s fairly well established and positive professional reputation but for his personal legal situation if such a rumor was true. As usual, once we asked him about the matter, the whole thing had once again been blown out of proportion and it never really came to anything once Allan realized that he would be their “mule” forever after he took the first bite. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">I mentioned a minute ago Allan’s generally fraught with peril financial status along with that big desire to bring his lady friend Damask East. Along with no current income Allan said he got a little desperate especially when Damask, who had never been East before, kept pressing him to bring her East. For most of Allan’s adult life he has been a pretty straight legal arrow whatever desperate situations he might find himself in. Of course we all smoked, snorted, swallowed whatever dope was around when we were younger, back in those 1960s days when in some places you could get “high” just breathing in the air, dealt a little to keep the wolves from the door too when necessary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">This thing with Damask had kind of unhinged him a bit figuring this was his last serious grab at the brass ring of romance. Somehow through an old connection (a guy who wrote with him in the days when they both worked for the now long-gone alternative newspaper <i>The East Bay Other</i> whom he had keep in touch with), who knew a connection who knew a connection which is the way such things go he got “connected” with a guy down in Tijuana who represented the Perez cartel. Basically the deal was that he would “mule” some stuff up from Mexico for a while, take a cut and that would be his way to get out from under. When he laid it out for us it sounded pretty good what with the idea of using an old seemingly harmless white guy tourista to run the stuff across the border. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Stop. Before the thing went to the starting point Allan backed off, backed way off. Reason? The reason which both Sam and I knew the minute he mentioned that he had backed off. Memories of the fate of our old still missed like crazy Scribe, our old friend from the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville Peter Paul Markin (whose name Allan used for years as an on-line moniker here and elsewhere in his honor) who when he saw the writing on the wall about our dashed hopes of a newer world in the 1960s were going down without a fight got seriously in cocaine. Got so serious he made the fatal mistake of trying to put some gringo idea of making an independent big drug buy down in Sonora in Mexico and got blown away by some bad guys and a potter’s field grave for his foolishness. With that in mind Allan just told Damask that they were through unless she could wait until he got some cash together after he went back East to see what he could put together. As it turned out Damask was not only a wait person at Dave’s Diner out there in La Jolla and a surfer girl but was working on her master’s degree in physical therapy so was not some teeny-bopper (our old time expression) airhead. Surprised Allan when she said she would wait. Pretty good, huh. Jack Callahan]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">No question that Jimmy Callahan and his corner boy comrades, including me, from the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out up the Downs from the day high school got out for the summer in the early 1960s drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. One day recently he had been thinking back to those times, back a half century at least, as he walked along the beach at Big Sur and had been telling his girlfriend, Miranda, that his love affair with the sea started almost from the day he was born near that beach, a beach that still held his sway although he had seen, and was seeing right there with her better beaches since then. (As far as that girlfriend designation goes with Miranda Jimmy always wondered what the heck do you call somebody whom you are not married to but are intimate with who is along with you pushing the wrong side of sixty, so Jimmy simple girlfriend it is until somebody comes up with something better that “significant other,” “consort,” or “partner”.) The old Adamsville beach with its marshlands anchoring each end, its stone-laden sands uncomfortable to sit on, its rendezvous teen meet-up yacht clubs, its well-sat upon seawalls, and its thousand and one night stories of late night trysts in fugitive automobiles and while on skimpy beach blankets, its smoldering fried clams at the Clam Shack fit for a king or queen, its Howard Johnson’s many-flavored ice creams still held memories wherever he was in later life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Although from what Red Rowley, an old corner boy comrade, had told Jimmy a while back when they had touched base for a minute in Sweeney’s Funeral Parlor over in landlocked Clintondale a couple of towns away after the death of a Jimmy family member the old beach had seen serious erosion, serious stinks and serious decay of the already in their day ancient seawalls and no longer held the fancy of the young who back in the day wanted to go parking there at night to “watch the submarine races.” Also no longer served as a coming of age spot for winter-weary guys watching winter-weary well-tanned girls in skimpy bikinis between the yacht clubs hot spot for such activity. In fact Red said that last time he checked on a hot July summer’s day at high noon nobody, young or old, was in that sacred spot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Red Rowley who was the youngest boy in the Rowley household and who had been afraid of girls, not gay afraid, but just afraid of girls and their ways had like a lot of Irish guys who took their stern religious upbringing too seriously never married and had stayed in town the whole time, stayed in the same house, and once his mother’s health declined after his father died never thought to leave. So Red could, as an old fixture like the street lights, see what changes had occurred around town. And he would ask young people, some of who were interested in talking to him, what they were up to, what they knew about the old time customs of the high school and of the town.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Hell, Red said, the young guys in the neighborhood didn’t know what he was talking about when he mentioned “watching the submarine races,” that old code word for getting in the back seat of an automobile (or if car-less and desperate on a skimpy beach blanket against that stony sand) with a girl and seeing what was what, coming up for air to check for any midnight submarine sightings. One guy even asked how one could see a submarine at night if one was in the neighborhood of the beach. Jesus. Also they, and here Red meant both sexes, had no idea on this good green earth that those now old tumble-down yacht clubs in dire need of serious paint jobs after the slamming of the seas and the furious winds had done their work had been the site of many a daytime planning for the night heat sessions. Were clueless that guys would ogle girls there, thought it kind of, what did one of them, one of the girls, call it, yeah, sexist. Jesus doubled. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Red, by the way, was one of those ancient Irish Catholic corner boys who had stayed in town to help mother in order to have clean socks and regular six o’clock suppers without the bother of matrimony but also like Jimmy, hell, like me and every guy who breathed their first breaths off an off-hand sea breeze, also stayed to be near the ocean too. But Red had mainly watched the town change from an old way station for the Irish and Italians to the South Shore upward mobile digs further south to a “stay put” moving from the big city immigrant community which he was not particularly happy about since he could not speak any of the new languages (frankly in high school he had serious trouble with the English language) or understand the cultural differences when they, the collective mix of immigrants none from European homelands, did not bend at the knees in homage on Saint Patrick’s Day. But Red’s trouble with the new world of America (not really so new since these shores since the sixteen hundreds had seen wave after wave of immigrants just back then they had been from Europe, or had been Africa branded), or the real condition of Adamsville Beach was not what had exercised Jimmy on that trip to Big Sur with Miranda but about the old beach days, the now fantastic beach days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Jimmy had chuckled to himself when he told Miranda- “Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? You know to connect with old King Neptune, our father, the father that we did not know, who would work his mysterious furies in good times and bad. Or to connect as one with denizens of the deep, fishes, whales, plankton, stuff like that. No.” Then he went down the litany of other possible motives just as a little good-humored exercise. “Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? The fleet of small sailboats that dotted the horizon in the seemingly never-ending tacking to the wind or the fewer big boats, big ocean-worthy boats that took their passenger far out to sea, maybe to search for whales or other sea creatures? No.” “Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day?” Jimmy, a blushed red lobster in short sunlight who was sensitive about that red skin business declared a loud No, although Red, Frankie, Peter, and Josh, his other comrade corner boys less sensitive to the sun would have answered, well, maybe a little.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Jimmy said that he soon tired of those non-reasons, this little badger game, and got to the heart of the matter, laughed to himself as he thought and then mentioned to Miranda-“Come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. They, every self-respecting corner boy who could put towel and trunks together, which meant everybody except Johnny Kelly who had to work during the day in the summer to help support his mother and fatherless younger brothers and sisters , were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls [young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-woman’s liberation time] sunning themselves like peacocks for all the world, all the male teenage North Adamsville world, the only world that mattered to guys and gals alike, to see. Had been sunning themselves in such a manner since bikinis and less replaced those old-time bathing suits that were slightly less cumbersome that the street clothes you saw in your old grandmother’s scrapbook. And guys had been hormonally-charged looking at them that long as well.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">“Here is the catch thought,” Jimmy continued. “They, and they could be anywhere from about junior high to the first couple of years in college although they tended to separate themselves out by age bracket were sunning themselves and otherwise looking very desirable and, well, fetching, in not just any old spot wherever they could place a blanket but strictly, as tradition dictated, tradition seemingly going back before memory, between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. So, naturally, every testosterone-driven teenage lad who owned a bathing suit, and some who didn’t, were hanging off the floating dock right in front of said yacht clubs showing off, well, showing off their prowess to the flower of North Adamsville maidenhood.” And said show-offs included, Jimmy, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working early mornings at the old A&P Supermarket and did not show until later in the afternoon), his faithful scribe, Pete Markin (who seemingly wrote down for posterity every word Frankie uttered and some that he did not, and others including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. And me too. It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that Jimmy had suddenly thought about when he had driven pass the old beach one day to confirm Red’s recent beach judgment and wanted to relate to Miranda as the over the top waves pummeling the scarred rock faces in the secluded reaches of Big Sur to give her an idea of what the sea meant to a lot of guys he knew. If, in the Jimmy telling, it all sounds kind of familiar, too familiar even to old time non-corner boys, to those who do not live near the oceans of the world, to the younger set who may have a different view of life than what carried the day back then, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">This is how it all started though:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">“The next girl who throws sand in my face is going get it,” yelled Johnny Silver to no one in particular as he came back to the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy beach front acreage just in front of the seawall facing, squarely facing, the midpoint between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. “For the clueless,” and Jimmy assumed Miranda was in that vast company so he told pains to spell it out, “the corner boy world in North Adamsville, hell, maybe every corner boy world everywhere meant that you had certain “turf” issues in your life not all of them settled with fists, although an issue like some alien corner boy looking the wrong way at one of the Salducci girls could only be resolved that way.” But mostly it was a matter of traditions, traditional spots which the “unwritten law” held for certain groups and the spot between the boat clubs was theirs, and had been the “property” of successive generations of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys since at least the end of World War II when Frankie Riley’s father and his corner boys, some very tough boys transplanted from South Boston to work in the shipyards and some restless guys who had like Frankie’s father served in the war but were not ready to settle down “claimed” the spot.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Johnny, after having his say, fumed at no one in particular as the sounds of Elvis Presley’s <i>Loving You</i> came over Frankie Riley’s transistor radio and had wafted down to the sea, almost like a siren call to teenage love. Then one of those “no one in particulars,” Pete Markin replied, “What did you expect, Johnny? That Katy Larkin is too tall, too pretty and just flat-out too foxy for a runt like you. I am surprised you are still in one piece. And I would mention, as well, that her brother, “Jimmy Jukes,” does not like guys, especially runt guys with no muscles bothering his sister.” Johnny came back quickly with the usual, “Hey, I am not that small and I am growing, growing fast so Jimmy Jukes can eat my… ” But Johnny halted just in time as one Jimmy Jukes, James Allen Larkin, halfback hero of many a North Adamsville fall football game running opponent defensive players raggedy in his wake, came perilously close to Johnny and then veered off like Johnny was nothing, nada, nunca, nothing. And after Jimmy Jukes was safely out of sight, and Frankie flipped the volume dial on his radio louder as the Falcons’ <i>You’re So Fine</i> came on heralding Frankie’s attempt by osmosis to lure a certain Betty Ann McCarthy, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, his way Johnny poured out the details of his sad saga.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Seems that Katy Larkin was in one of Johnny’s classes, biology he said, and one day, one late spring day Katy, out of the blue, asked him what he thought about Buddy Holly who had passed away in crash several years before, well before he reached his potential as the new king of the be-bop rock night. Johnny answered that Buddy was “boss,” especially his <i>Everyday</i>, and that got them talking, but only talking, almost every day until the end of school. Of course, Johnny, runt Johnny, didn’t have the nerve, not nearly enough nerve to ask a serious fox like Katy out, big brother or not before school let out for the summer. Not until that very day when he got up the nerve to go over to her blanket, a blanket that also had Sara Bigelow and Tammy Kelly on board, and as a starter asked Katy if she liked Elvis’ <i>That’s When The Heartache Begins</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Katy answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal) that it was “dreamy the way Elvis sang it, but sad when you think about all the trouble guys bring when they mess with another boy’s girl.” Then Johnny’s big moment came and he blurted out, “Do you want to go to the Surf Dance Hall with me Saturday night? Crazy Lazy is the DJ and the Rockin’ Ramrods are playing?” And as the reader knows, or should be presumed to know, Johnny’s answer was a face full of sand. And that sad, sad beach saga is the end of another teen angst moment. So to the strains coming from Tammy’s radio of Robert and Johnny’s <i>We Belong Together</i> we will move along.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Well, not quite. It also seems that Katy Larkin, tall (too tall for Johnny, really), shapely (no question of “really” about that), and don’t forget foxy Katy Larkin had had a “crush” since they had first started talking in class on one John Raymond Silver if you can believe that. She was miffed, apparently more than somewhat, that Johnny had not asked her out before school got out for the summer. That “more than somewhat” entailed throwing sand in Johnny’s face when he did get up the nerve to ask. And nothing else happened between them for the rest of the summer, except Johnny always seemed kind of miserable when he leaned up against the wall in front of Salducci’s to confer with his corner boys about life being kind of crazy. But get this- on the first day of school, while Johnny was turning his radio off and putting it in his locker just before school started, after having just listened to the Platters <i>One In a Million</i> for the umpteenth time, Katy Larkin “cornered” (Johnny’s term) Johnny and said in a clear, if excited voice, “I’m sorry about that day at the beach last summer.” And then in the teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, “You are taking me to the Fall All-Class Mixer and I will not take ‘no’ for an answer.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Well, what is a guy to do when that teenage girl imperative, hell, maybe all women imperative voice commands. After that Johnny started to re-evaluate his attitude toward beach sand and thought maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny had grown quite a bit that summer and it turned out that Katy Larkin was not too tall, not too tall at all, for Johnny Silver to take to the mixer, or anywhere else she decided she wanted to go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Here is what Jimmy told Miranda that Big Sur day to put a philosophical twist on the whole episode fifty years later. After stopping his car toward the middle of Adamsville Beach, the place between the two yacht clubs where he and the Salducci corner boys hung out, the two clubs whose appearance that day spoke to a need of paint and other fixing up, the place that had stirred his memoires that day Jimmy Callahan thought Red had it all wrong, all wrong indeed, it had nothing to do with the condition of the clubs, the beach, the sand, the waves or the boats. Mr. John Raymond Silver and Ms. Katy Silver (nee Larkin), now of Naples, Florida, are proof of that statement. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-76970302761378017102024-03-11T14:52:00.000-04:002024-03-11T14:52:00.165-04:00In The Glory Days Of The Cold War Night-Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up –Timothy Dalton’s “The Living Daylights” (1987)-A Film Review<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">In The Glory Days Of The Cold War Night-Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up –Timothy Dalton’s “The Living Daylights” (1987)-A Film Review<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Seth Garth<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton, Maryam d’Abo, 1987<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">No question guys like John LeCarre, Tom Clancy and the creator of the Bond, James Bond series Ian Fleming although not all the storylines in the long-running series have had tough sailing since the demise of the arch-villain Soviet Union back in 1991-92. Sure there has been plenty of international dramatic tension possibility since, the “war on terror,” the drug trade, cyber-theft but nothing like those glory days when the smooth as silk and just as deadly good guys wore white hats if only metaphorically and the ham-fisted, can’t shoot straight bad guys wore black, no. red and you had something like the world on the edge with every action-and reaction.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Just look at the difference let us say with a non-descript plot against some holy goof outfit (which also cannot shoot straight) in a post-Soviet demise Bond flick like 2015s<i> Spectre </i>and the action in the film under review, <i>The Living Daylight</i> with late Soviet era-Afghan War as a backdrop. You knew who to root for, or thought you did when the action turned to the Afghan situation later in the story. (That “thought you did” courtesy of the hard fact that those “allies” the mujahedeen turned out to be some nasty Taliban guys when the dust settled later in the beginning of the 21<sup>st</sup> century). <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Of course the attentive reader is wondering not so much about plotline as the burning question of the day-who is the real James Bond. Much cyber-ink has been spilled in this space between the lovely Phil Larkin and the pretty boy youngster William Bradley as they have gone into hand to hand combat over whether their respective choices ruggedly handsome Sean Connery for the former and pretty boy Pierce Brosnan for the latter. Here we have another entrant Timothy Dalton who I would while I don’t want to get in an ambush by either partisan does not measure up to their respective choices. Doesn’t portray the rugged individualism of Connery or the charm the pants off you of Brosnan.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">But to the story as Sam Lowell always liked us to get to before the reader wondered why he or she spent their precious time reading a film review like this. This is straight up KGB (even those initials today sent shivers up and down the spine thinking about Siberian exiles or being shot in Lybinaka dungeons) versus M-led MI6 and James Bond agent stuff. Seems the bad ass KGB’s new leader is reviving the old policy of death to spies when caught. Meaning some MI6 agents have been wasted forthwith. his though is just a ruse for a corrupt Soviet general “on the take” to whoever will pay the graft in money, dope or armaments to work his plan to make huge profits off the Afghan opium trade and buy arms to supply whoever has the dough and need for such arms.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">This Soviet general is really kind of clever, for a while, as he fakes a defection to the West to put the whammy on the new KGB leader who is actually a reformer of sorts maligned by that renegade general. Has the help of his angel-faced girlfriend Kara, played by Maryam d’ Abo (nice name) who also plays a mean classical cello. This is the ruse Timmy, oops, James must breakup at whatever costs. First he has to realize, which he does in short order, that this general’s flight is bogus. Second he has to gain the confidence of Kara to set the trap to grab this bad ass general who is ready to do business with a don’t give a damn American arms dealer who will sell anything from firecrackers to nuclear weapons to whoever has the dough.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Naturally in these thrillers we see the latest in what Q-MI6s master technie has put together, see whatever three hundred actions per minute put Bond (and Kara) in harm’s way across Vienna, the Alps, Tangiers, Afghanistan and who knows where else before that bad ass general and that amoral arms dealer bite the dust. Naturally as well there has to be the little dance between Bond and Kara before they go under the sheets that everybody knows from the minute she shows up on screen is going to happen. Well at least unlike in the past where the women who fall all over whatever Bond is in play are strictly eye candy Kara can play that mean cello too. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-80530693377683923822024-03-08T10:28:00.000-05:002024-03-08T10:28:00.183-05:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Gary Ladd Danced The North Adamsville High School Be-Bop Hop Dance Night Away <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-</b><b>When Gary Ladd Danced The North Adamsville High School Be-Bop Hop Dance Night Away <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">From The Archives Of Allan Jackson<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">A <i>YouTube</i> film clip of The Shirelles performing their 1960s teen angst classic <i>Mama Said</i></span></b><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">[As of this introduction negotiations between Sam Lowell and current site manager Greg Green around full credit attribution, including 2018 updated introductions and reflections, for previous site manager Allan Jackson are still on-going. There has been something of a groundswell by both older writers who have longtime relations with Allan going back to high school days in their collective 1960s growing up and coming of age in the working class Acre section of North Adamsville and the younger writers who led the charge to have Allan replaced after he lost a vote of no confidence. Probably all are, not unimportantly, worried about their attribution status on a site that is committed to free usage, fair usage and common copyright. In the meantime old high school friend Allan had asked me to respond to any rumors that might surface, have surfaced until he can respond on his own (assuming Greg does the right thing after having done the wrong thing by having somebody else “front” for the series. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">I have already mentioned in a previous introduction rumors that Greg Green had somehow done Allan in, done to him what was characterized as physical harm after the internal struggle which led to Allan’s demise. That far-fetched notion like this was some Stalin-Trotsky fight flight of imagination probably fueled by the older writers who lived and died for such drama back in their 1960s radical pasts. It turned out Greg had put the word out to the media world that Allan was “hard to work with” almost as much a kiss of death as any physical action. That blown-up rumor led to another which proved to be partially true that Allan was out in American Siberia in Utah and that he had sold out to the Mormons and to U.S. Senatorial candidate Mitt Romney to get a job after Greg had “black-listed” him in the major markets. That turned out to be pretty true as Allan did to make his daily bread attempt this end-around. The close-knit Mormons kind of laughed it off given Allan’s reputation for skewering old Mitt back in in 2008 and 2012. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Allan never had a reputation say like Josh Breslin and Sam Lowell despite his three ex-wives as a womanizer, as a skirt-chaser and especially not as a chaser of younger women so the rumor that he had been holed up in La Jolla out in California with some twenty-something part time waitress met at a diner who was teaching him how to surf and who knows what else did not ring true. When, concerned about his whereabouts in the aftermath of the internal fight, Sam and I tracked him down to old haunt Bar Harbor in Maine we were incredulous when he confided in us that he had done so and that once he raised some cash he was going to bring her out to Maine and see if she liked Eastern surfing. Yes, you can say we were dumbfounded although Allan’s respond was “what of it” both parties were of age and that was that. Christ he has daughters older than that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">What happened as Allan was at pains to lay out once he saw our discomfort was that after the Utah stuff fell through he kind of had given up hope. He knew that Mormon- Mitt Romney thing was a longshot, he knew they took care of their own in such matters and he had heaped as much scorn as anybody on the perfidious Mitt who would say anything, do anything to take his main chance as he saw it. We laughed when Allan, gallow’s humor Allan, mentioned that had he fallen under the wheel and gotten a job he very well might meet some Stalin-like end from those sanctimonious bastards, hell, their whole history of survival in Utah was by running everybody else off-by nay means necessary. Once he saw the writing on the wall and not wanting to head back East he headed to Southern California, toward Carlsbad where he and one of his wives, Mimi Murphy if I recall, had had a time share. Once he got to Carlsbad though he saw too many old memories on the waves and headed further south to La Jolla. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">One day, hungry, he went into Dave’s Diner, a locale we all know both from back in the 1960s when we were all riding on the yellow brick road bus in the Summer of Love, 1967 with Captain Crunch (that whole thing is a long story and one of the sketches in this series will deal with it so let’s move on) and from later golfing outings at near-by Torrey Pines. Dave’s was the spot to get a good meal and look at the eye candy for waitresses (now wait staff but still eye candy) who were classic Southern California corn-fed blondes who a couple of generations before had forbears from places like Oklahoma and Iowa when things where bad there and were strictly from hunger. Now these sleek blondes had lost that look and had the surfer girl look we remember from back in the Beach Boys days except now the surfer girls don’t wait on the beaches for their surfer boys to get that perfect wave but go for it themselves. Make enough to stay alive and surf at jobs like wait-staffing to pursue the dream. Dave’s in any case a good tipping crowd-or else per Dave who still hustles hamburgers on the back of the house stove once in a while. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">It was kind of a slow day when Allan stepped up to the counter stools which are a god-sent for singles when Damask, his blonde, blue-eyed wait person who was tending the counters which truth be told was where in the real tips came from by single guys mostly and not that six person booth with about a three dollar tip for a hundred dollars’ worth of meals asked him if he would like coffee before making his meal selection. He told her that while he once loved coffee he couldn’t deal with it anymore because his system couldn’t take it. That got Damask started on her own inability or desire to drink coffee and made Allan laugh when she said they would put Starbuck’s out of business. That kind of back and forth went on throughout the meal. Along the way Damask mentioned although Allan already had an idea that she loved to surf and did he know how. No, Jesus, no he blurted out although that only elicited a response from her about wouldn’t he like to learn. One thing led to another and out of the blue he flat out asked her if she would like to have dinner with him giving her the sad story about his being down in the dumps and could use the company.(Allan would mention that he now knew how old friend “forever young” Phil Larkin felt a couple of years ago when he wound up with some young thing which formed the basis for a few stories in this series). Just for the company, that was all. To his surprise she said that it would be nice to go to Scudder’s, another local hot spot although very pricey. Done (thank god for credit cards and 401ks said Allan). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">As it turned out Damask was both a surfer and a graduate student in physical therapy at U/Cal-San Diego up the road and while totally clueless about many things, many 1960s things which Allan had the good sense to not go on and on about she loved literature and they had a grand old time that night. As they went their separate ways from Scudder’s (a good idea on Allan’s part showing that he still knew a thing or two after three marriages about keeping woman feeling safe around him) Damask mentioned that she was going surfing the next day and maybe he could come by the beach around nine and she would show him some surfing stuff. Bingo. (Neither Sam nor I had the heart to look askance at Allan when he mentioned her name without a bit of irony since when we were growing up Mary, Betty, Janice, Sandra and maybe something as exotic Mary Beth formed the female names world).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">As for what happened to have Allan once again foot the bill for some love interest and Damask accepting his invitation East (where she had never been unlike us who were all crazy to go to California when we were younger) outside whatever surfing tips she taught him that will have to wait until he can “tell the tale” himself (our old neighborhood expression concerning exploits with women based on each and every one of us lying like crazy about what did, or did not, happen under the covers). Jack Callahan]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Saturday night from seven to eleven, any third Saturday of the month from September to May, every red-blooded teen boy and girl in the 1961 North Adamsville High School be-bop, be-bop night could only be in one locale, or want to be. That was the night of the monthly seasonally-themed high school hop. The Fall Frolic, Pumpkin Ball, Mistletoe Magic, Frozen Frolic, and so on themes with hop at the end to give the old-timey innocent high school feel to the night in a town which had had such dances since the school’s founding in the 1920s, although the term “hop” had been of more recent vintage reflecting the effect that such cultural phenomena as the afternoon television program <i>American Bandstand</i> and Danny and the Juniors classic song <i>At The Hop</i> had invested the word with significant teen meaning. More importantly this monthly hop, unlike the more exclusive Autumn Leaves, Holly Hock and Spring Fling dances which were meant solely for juniors and seniors and their guests and which were not designated hops or any other such shorthand reflecting the new rock and roll breeze that had been stirring through the nation for some time by then, anyone, even freshmen and sophomores, could ante up the dollar admission and dance the night away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">The large attendance of wallflower-like freshman, girls and boys alike, all red-faced, all sweaty palms, all trying to look nonchalantly like they had been going to these things for ages to hide their wallflower fears who were hanging off the walls in the transformed festooned gym and of sophomores, a little more self-assured and hovering around the bleachers which had been extended to provide some seating, but still worried about whether they, the boys, had put on enough underarm deodorant, had swigged enough mouthwash, had combed enough parted Wild Root-infested hair, and the girls, whether that stolen mother’s perfume would seem too strong, their permed hair was still in array and that that padded dress showed their figures to good effect were witness to the fact that anyone, sweaty palms or not if they had enough moxie could dance the night away. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Well almost everybody in attendance had the chance to dance the night away. And that had been the dilemma confronting one freshman, Gary Ladd, he the “wallflower” way off to the side of the gym almost into the wall if you didn’t think you had seen him on one of the third Saturday nights in question. And right next to him is another guy, me, hair-slicked, underarm-protected, Listerine-inhaled, his best friend since junior high days when I moved to town from Clintondale and we have since tried to defend each other against the hardships of American wayward youth times, times when we both would have rather just that moment had cool sunglasses on to stifle our fears. But let’s get back to Gary because the night I am referring to was his night after some many failed efforts and my story can be simply stated. I will wind up going home at intermission kind of defeated since nobody, nobody at all had asked me to dance, believing that I had not put enough deodorant on, enough Wild Root or swilled enough mouthwash and had been defeated by the ever-present bane of the wallflowers-personal hygiene.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">[I would find out a couple of days later when I mentioned my defeat to Emma Wilson in History Class that most of the freshman girls that she knew kept an arm’s distance from me not for personal hygiene, some girls thought that I was “cute,” but no girl, no self-respecting girl could permit herself to be barraged by the two thousand odd-ball facts that I would spew out in order to impress them during the dance. I have seen decided to take her comment under advisement. But back to Gary.] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">What had been bothering Gary, though, we might as well have our moment of truth right up front since this is a confessional age and the truth would have come out anyway, is that he can’t dance. Can’t dance a damn, to hell, heaven or any place in between. Couldn’t dance in junior high when I tried to shadow-box teach him a few steps and when the moment of truth came he almost broke poor, beautiful Melinda Loring’s big toe. Such a reputation in a small town is hard to break. My corner boy’s problem: two- left feet. Two left-feet despite the more recent best efforts of one Agnes Ladd, North Adamsville Class of 1961 Vice President, whose own feet have taken a terrible beating, and has earned some kind of medal for service above and beyond the call of duty, trying to teach little brother Gary the elements of the waltz, the fox trot, and hell, even two feet away from your partner rock and roll moves and the twist to no avail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">All of this teaching done under the cover of tight security since Gary had sworn Agnes to secrecy about their doings. Agnes, for her part, one of the smartest and most popular girls in the senior class, had no intention of telling anybody that she was talking to, much less teaching dance to a freshman even if it was her own brother. Those are the school conventions, and nobody, nobody who is smart and popular is going to defy conventions like that. The freshman, as Agnes told Gary, would have their day in a few years and would in turn snub their subordinate freshman. That is the way it is. But Gary, no twerp under his two left-footed exterior, has always, as he put it, exercised his democratic right as a freshman in good standing to be at these universal dances, come hell or high water.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">But that night, that warm April Bring Spring Hop night I am talking about, things were destined to be a little different as Gary has already staked his place against the far wall (the wall farthest away from the girl “wallflowers” just in case you wanted an exact location. Mostly wallflowers, boy or girl, although not me, were keeping their respective distances on the odd chance that someone may actually come up and ask them to dance. First off this month, unlike most months when some lame student DJ from Communications class spins platters on a feisty school record player, the local craze rock band sensations, The Rockin’ Ramrods, were performing live on the makeshift bandstand and were guaranteed to have everybody who gets to dance rocking before they are done, including Gary and me who are scared but still hopeful. Just that minute as Gary shifted his weight and places his back to the wall they were tuning up before their first set of three with the appropriately named <i>Please Stay</i> by the Drifters. Secondly but in line with that Gary hopeful, a new girl in town, Elsie Mae Horton, had told Gary that she would be coming to the hop, her first since moving to town a couple of months before. Naturally the mere fact that she said she would come was an added reason why Gary was there all that exercising democratic rights stuff be damned (and also why he had tortured his sister Agnes to try, try in vain, to teach him some dance steps). See Gary has the “bug” for Elsie Mae, Yeah, as I well know since I had taken a failed and fruitless run at her with my two thousand facts in Civics class and had gotten the deep freeze, he is smitten.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Now this Elsie Mae is maybe, on a scale of one to ten, about a six so it is not looks that had Gary (and about six other guys, five and me), well, smitten. An okay body, fair legs, nice brown hair and eyes, a so-so dresser like I say a “six” (and Gary agreed with me although in that department although if you see Elsie Mae I never said that, nor did he). See what Elsie Mae has is nothing but smarts, book smarts which is how I made my approach to her in Civics class talking about this book we were reading about President Andrew Jackson and how he broke the back of the aristocrats like the Adams family who wanted to keep political power in the hands of some self-selected elite, themselves and forget the guys going west, yeah I know not exactly the smoothest move. Idea smart too which enthralled Gary since he likes to talk about novels and such which is what Elsie Mae was into, talk smarts you name it smarts and one of the sweetest smiles this side of heaven. And, as Gary found out early on in one of their shared classes, very easy to talk to about anything, if she wanted to talk to you. Yes, he is smitten; the only unknown in his mind is whether she can dance good enough to stay out of his way if it comes to that. That is if he gets up the nerve to ask her. And as the Ramrods started their first set with Gary Bonds’ <i>School Is Out</i> (praise be) he noticed her coming in the door. Heart pounding he started sinking into the wall again. As they finished with Brother Bonds the Ramrods start in on The Impressions’ <i>Gypsy Woman</i> before Gary realized that Elsie Mae has drawn a bee-line straight for him and was standing right in front of him, turning a little red after he did not greet her. “Oh, my god,” Gary whispers under his breathe, “she is going to ask me to dance. No way.” The usually easy to talk to Elsie Mae though said nothing, nothing but turned a little redder as the Ramrods covered the Pips <i>Every Beat Of My Heart</i> (nicely done too). She stood there waiting for Gary to ask her, if you can believe that. Well, two-left feet or not, he did ask her. And she smiled a little smile as she “accepts.” Relief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Needless to say when they did their dance, The Edsels’ <i>Rama Lama Ding Dong</i>, it was nothing but a disaster. A Gary disaster? Yes. Although you can use fake moves galore on such a tune Gary, maybe nervous, maybe just trying to show off started moving all his arms all over the place so he looked from my wall position like one of those devilish Hindu gods with a ton of arms. And while in motion he hit Ella Mae a couple of times, not hard but not cool either. Once she came close to him and he moved back into another couple, a senior couple and I thought the senior, Bill Daley from the football team, was going to level poor Gary but he just moved away with his date with the meanest look of scorn I had seen in a while. So disaster was the right word. But here is the funny part. Elsie Mae Horton, formerly of Gloversville, a town in farm country a few miles away and known for the Gloversville Amusement Park on Route 9 and nothing else really, and new to North Adamsville so of unknown dance quality, had two-left feet too. When she had been closing in on Gary it was because she had lost her balance and was ready to careen into him. Get this though. When the dance was mercifully finished, and the two had actually survived, Elsie Mae thanked Gary and told him that he was a wonderful dancer and said she wished that she could dance like him. Whee! Here is the real kicker though. Elsie Mae had also been taking dancing lessons on Saturday mornings at the YWCA, unsuccessfully. Dancing lessons solely so that two-left feet Elsie Mae Horton could dance with Gary Ladd. See, she was “smitten” too. And so if you did not see Gary or Elsie Mae at the Mayfair Dance last month you have now solved that mystery. That night they were sitting, sitting very close to each other, on the seawall down at Adamsville Beach laughing about starting a “Two-Left Feet” Club. With just two members.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">[As for my fate that night I went to the hop with Emma Wilson. See after she clued me in to what was what I ran into her at the library and we talked, or rather she talked, not two thousand facts, talked but talked. And I let her. And she asked me to escort her, her word, to the hop.] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-89866580146468307692024-03-08T10:07:00.000-05:002024-03-08T10:07:00.170-05:00Coming Of Age In The New Millennium-Kristine Stewart’s “In The Land Of Women” (2007)-A Film Review <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Coming Of Age In The New Millennium-Kristine Stewart’s “In The Land Of Women” (2007)-A Film Review<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Josh Breslin <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">In The Land Of Women, starring Meg Ryan, Kristine Stewart, Adam Brody, 2007 <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">You know getting old, getting older, whatever you want to call it sucks. Take the genesis of this film review of <i>In The Land Of Women</i> for example. When Greg Green the site manager (and overall editor) asked if I wanted to do this film review I thought he said it starred Adrian Brody. I immediately agreed since I have liked Adrian Brody as far back as when he did that role as rock and roll record producer Leonard Chess in <i>Chess Records. </i>It was not until I saw the film credits as I was watching the start of this movie that I realized that this was a different Brody. Well in for a dime in for a dollar so I watched the thing, although in parts that was a close thing since while I have written many articles about my “coming of age” experiences I don’t necessarily like to see such plotlines in the cinema. So I am paying penance for some silly borderline senility. Hey, I told you getting old sucks, didn’t I.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Strangely, and maybe not by intent, there are actually five coming of age stories running through this plotline, at least five that were developed enough to recognize. Let’s start with twenty-something Carter, the ADAM Brody role, a writer who had been dumped by his La La Land celebrity starlet girlfriend and decided to go to clean air suburban heartland Michigan to see his aging morbid and cynical grandmother who lives in fear of dying, or something like that (a bit of a different coming of age agreed but part of the general life cycle) and get a fresh start. While in the neighborhood he strikes up a series of conversations with a maybe forty-something woman neighbor of Granny’s Sarah, played by foxy Meg Ryan, who has two daughters one a tween and one a teen, Lucy played by a younger fox Kristine Stewart, and an errant husband having an affair off to the side. (By the way the guy no great shakes was a fool to drop Sarah for some floozy and she was well rid of him.) Sarah was facing the hard coming of middle age fact of breast cancer not unfortunately uncommon among women of her age group. The two daughters, the too precocious tween facing coming puberty and Lucy facing sexual choices straight up round out the theme. So five and that is that. (I didn’t include that errant dad who probably was facing his own male attractiveness age question, the teen guy Lucy winds up with in that same weird sexual choices night as her or that ex-girlfriend of Carter’s who had her own quest to look into since as I said they were never really developed).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">As my old friend and fellow writer here likes to say with that preview “here is the skinny.” Out in Michigan after seeing what kind of hell he was going to have to deal with tending to dear deranged Granny he strikes up that friendship with older woman Sarah who lives across the street. No question she is attracted to him and he to her a bit but with her medical problems you know a twenty-something guy on average is not going get tangled into that mess (and then there is that errant husband who may come back to the roost one day). That thing plays out a bit and meanwhile young impressible but smart younger women Lucy seems to be ready to take dead aim at him as some kind of rock she can hold onto since she is in the inevitable “mother doesn’t understand her” stage and as is well worn information by now dad is off with some mistress. (Carter’s mother gave us the key to what is what with the lad when she said to him before he headed East that he had always been attractive to women. Hell even the tween was head over heels for the guy.) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Things bump along for a while with Sarah taking her treatments, Lucy trying to figure out the sex stuff on her own without mother’s help, and Granny going over the top with her ranting on and on about dying. Through all of this Carter is writing and in a way getting some mature insights and getting over that worthless ex-girlfriend. In a film which is about the land of women that seems odd that he would get his issues resolved as a central outcome but so be it. As Kenny Klein always said “it’s all good.” Sarah comes to terms with her cancer and her relationship with Lucy, Lucy finds some streak of happiness with a soda jerk, sorry showing my age, an Orange Julius server, and comes to terms with her mother and that tween, well, she will have to wait until the hormones settle down. As for Granny maybe she knew herself best of all even if only in the negative. She dies on camera. I don’t know if I can recommend this one in a serious way but what the heck I did the review and I didn’t crucify ADAM Brody for my own mistake. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-65762062103644137212024-03-07T12:05:00.000-05:002024-03-07T12:05:00.168-05:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The “Last Waltz”- The Never-Ending Classic Rock Review Tour<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 18pt;">The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">The “Last Waltz”- The Never-Ending Classic Rock Review Tour<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">From The Archives Of Allan Jackson<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">[The attentive reader of this series may know already that there was an agreement negotiated by his (and my) old high school friend from their growing up days in the working class Acre section of North Adamsville Sam Lowell and the current site manager Greg Green about publicly acknowledging Allan Jackson, the previous site manager, as the driving force behind this classic days of rock and roll at the creation in the mid-1950s series. The “compromise” (thus far) is that Allan is now amorphously acknowledged to have had the works in his archives without specifying that the whole collection was of his inspiration and perspiration. What even the most attentive reader cannot know is that Sam has been in further negotiations with Greg about giving Allan full public credit with a by-line and including updated introductions by him.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">The hook? Here is where politics in the Machiavellian raw, left-wing or not comes into play. Greg owes Sam a “favor.” Essentially Greg owes his job to Sam’s decisive vote in the fall of 2017 when there was a fierce internal struggle at this publication over its future direction and Sam sided with the younger writers to what everybody agrees was a purge of the Jackson leadership after many years of hard copy and on-line publication. To show what kind of guys we are dealing with (who I have been dealing with for fifty years so am not surprised at anything these two do) when Allan found out that Greg had initially rebooted the series using another old friend of ours Frank Jackman as a “front” he went crazy with rage. But also contacted Sam on the sly to get attribution for him on the series.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">You have to know that these two had cut their teeth in politics back in their radical past 1960s when nobody thought anything of backstabbing one day and then going out for a long round of drinks the next to understand that even though Sam lost him his job, threw him to the exile woods by-gones were by-gones. Amazing. The hook on Greg’s side was that Sam now knew that Greg had been instrumental in “doing Allan in” in the publishing business after he went into exile. He had put the mark of Cain, had put the kiss of death on Allan telling all who inquired about Allan’s employability that he was “hard to work with.” That would explain as Sam and I found out after we discovered where Allan was hiding out up in old haunt Bar Harbor, Maine the source of a million wild rumors about his fate which will be discussed further below and in a couple more introductions since we, Sam, Allan and I, want the reader to read the sketch more than try to fathom the byzantine politics of the publishing business. In any case Sam and Greg are still negotiating about where Allan will ultimately land in this space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">One of the most persistent rumors after Allan went “underground” (he, they, we are still addicted to the expressions and attitudes of those by-gone 60’s) was that he was in America Siberia out in Utah sucking up to the Mormons in order to get a by-line, to get work and later after U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch announced his retirement and Mitt Romney declared his candidacy that he attempted to get on the campaign as a press secretary or speechwriter. Sam, Phil, Josh, all the older writer here and some others who don’t but have known Allan for a long time dismissed the whole scheme out of hand especially knowing how he had skewered Mitt as a chameleon, a charlatan who would sell his soul if he had one to the highest bidder to get whatever political office he was looking for in 2008 and 2012 when he ran for the roses. Strangely that rumor proved to be the truest one of all although as usual not exactly as the rumor mill had it. Once Greg put the kiss of death on Allan with that “hard to work with” mantra he was frozen out of the East Coast media hub. Having spent time in California in his younger days he headed out there but also faced a stone wall trying to get a job, any job. Here is where the personal and the political sometimes come into conflict. Allan, despite his age and longtime in the business had over the years accumulated three ex-wives and a parcel of kids, mostly nice and bright and college bound. He is still paying alimony and costs of tuition so he needed, needs money. Hence his bright idea that he would go to out of the way Utah and try to hustle some work.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">The basis of that idea that he could get some work from the hard shell Mormons came from a couple of articles he had done during one of the Romney runs for President concerning the ritual of their wearing white underwear and a secret admiration for either Romney’s grandfather or great-grandfather who had five wives at one time and survived tell the tale in the days when the Mormons were seriously polygamous. He did write am OpEd piece for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Salt Lake Star</i> which got printed and some good comments on the sly from a couple of Romney’s aides who thought the polygamy article was “cute.” Of course none of that went anywhere since the secret of Mormonism, of Romney, is that you keep it in the family, hire Mormons. Allan would never have survived a vetting in any case either about his radical past or some other articles about old Mitt which put had put him on the skewer and lit the fire. More later but read this sketch now. Jack Callahan]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Sam Lowell had several years before, maybe in about the middle of 2010, done an extensive survey of a commercially-produced </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Oldies But Goodies </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">series<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>(this series had fifteen separate CDs, more about its mass in a minute, in twenty to thirty song compilations and had torn his ear off from the endless listening. He had begged for a little gangsta hip-hop to soothe his ravaged soul although he was strictly a white-bread blues guy around that kind of music, around black-burst out roots is the toots music) and he had selected one song in each CD to highlight the music. He sought to highlight in particular the music that he and his corner boys, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Pete Markin (also known as the “Scribe” for his endless “publicity” for the group, especially the fountain of wisdom put forth by one Frankie Riley, who later when the drug craze hit full blossom in the late 1960s went over the edge down in Mexico trying to rip off a couple of bricks of cocaine from the hard boys and Pete got two slugs and a face down in a dusty Sonora back alley for his efforts), Jimmy Jenkins, Rats McGee, Johnny Callahan, and other guys like Luke the Juke, Stubby Kincaid, and Hawk Healey who walked in and out of the group at various high school points, had grown up with. Better, had come of age with the music in Adamsville, that is in Massachusetts (Sam had been born in Clintondale a few towns over before moving to Adamsville, a similar town, in junior high school and taken under Frankie Riley’s corner boy wing but had decidedly not been corner boy in that town for the simple reason that there were, unlike in Adamsville at Doc’s Drugstore and later Benny’s bowling alleys, no stand-out corner to be a corner boy in, for good or evil). Yeah, the music of the great jail-break rock and roll 1950s and early 1960s when Sam and the guys came of age had driven his memory bank at that time, some of that material had been placed in a blog, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rock and Roll Will Never Die</i>, dedicated to classic rock and roll music (the classic period now being deemed to have been between about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s although Sam flinched every time he heard some young guy, some guy who might be an aficionado but was nevertheless not splashed by that tide, called his time the “classic age,” yeah, that rubbed him raw).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Sam had received some comments at the time, mostly from his generational brethren inquiring about this or that song, asking about where they could get a copy of the song they were seeking and he would inform them of the monstrous beauties of YouTube if you could stand the damn commercials that notoriously plague that site to get to your selection, especially Elvis and Jerry Lee stuff. Asked about whether he knew where a 45 RPM vinyl copy could be had, had at any price, a tougher task and asked about the fate that had befallen various one hit johnnies and janies whose single song had been played unto death at the local hang-out jukebox or on the family record player thus driving some besotted mother to the edge. Many though, with almost the same “religious” intensity that Sam brought to his efforts, wanted to vividly describe how this or that song had impacted their lives. Sam had presumed then, presumed a passing fancy but a few apparently had been in a time warp and should have sought some medical attention (although Sam was too much the gentleman to openly make that suggestion). A lot of times though it came down purely to letting<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sam know what song did they first dance to, a surprising number listing Bill Haley’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rock Around The Clock</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Danny and the Juniors <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At The Hop</i> as the choice, surprising since that would have meant a very early introduction not only to rock and roll but to the social etiquettes of dancing with the opposite sex, to speak nothing of the sweaty palms, broken nerves and two left feet which blocked the way, which Sam had not done until he was a freshman in high school. Or what song in what situation had they gotten, or given, their first kiss and to whom, not surprisingly in the golden age of the automobile generation that frequently took place in the back seat of some borrowed car (a few over-the-edgers had gone into more graphic detail than necessary for adults to go into about what happened after that kiss in that backseat). Yeah, got in the back seat of some Chevy to go down to the local lovers’ lane (some very unusual places, the lovers’ lanes not the backseats which were one size fits all) Or had their first fight and make-up to, stuff like that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">As the shelf-life these days for all things Internet is short Sam thought no more about that series, the article or the comments until recently when a young guy (he had presumed a young guy since most devotees of classic rock fall into that demographic, although his moniker of Doo-Wop Dee could have signaled a young woman) who had Googled the words “rock and roll will never die” and had come upon the blog and the article. He sent an e-mail which challenged Sam to tell a candid world (Sam’s expression not Doo-Wop Dee’s who probably would not have known the genesis of that word) why the age of the Stones, Beatles, Animals, Yardbirds, etc., the 1960s age of the big bad guitars, heavy metal, and big backbeat did not do more for classic rock than Elvis (Presley), Chuck (Berry), Roy (Orbison), Bo (Diddley), Buddy (Holly), Jerry Lee (Lewis) and the like did all put together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Well Sam is a mild-mannered guy usually, has mellowed out some since his rock and roll corner boy slam bang jail-break days, his later “on the road” searching for the great blue-pink great American West night hippie days and his later fighting against his demon addictions days (drugs, con artist larceny, cigarettes, whiskey, hell, even sex, no forget that, drop that from the addiction list) and he had decided, not without an inner murmur, to let the comment pass, to move on to new things, to start work on an appreciation of electric blues in his young life. Then one night late one night he and his lady friend, Melinda (and the reason to forget about that sex addiction stuff above), were watching an old re-run on AMC (the old-time movies channel, featuring mostly black and white films also a relic from his youth and his high school time at the retro-Strand Theater that existed solely to present two such beauties every Saturday afternoon, with or without popcorn) and saw as the film started one ghost from the past Jerry Lee Lewis sitting (hell maybe he had been standing, twirling whirling whatever other energy thing he could do back then to add to the fury of his act) on the back of a flat-bed truck, piano at the ready, doing the title song of the movie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">High School Confidential</i>, and then and there Sam had decided that he needed to put old Doo-Wop right. The rest of the movie, by the way, a classic 1950s cautionary tale about the pitfalls of dope, you know marijuana automatically leading to heroin, complete with some poor hooked girl strung out by her fiendish dealer/lover, and of leading an unchaste life, you know that sex addiction stuff that Sam had not been addicted to along his life’s way, as a result was actually eminently forgettable but thanks Jerry Lee for the two minute bailout blast. Here is what Sam had to say to his errant young friend and a candid world:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">First off the term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. But that expression will also give Doo Wop and anybody else who asks an idea of the huge amount of material from the classic rock period, like I said in my blog sketch from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, which was good enough, had rung our running home after school to check out the latest dance moves and the cute guys and girls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Bandstand </i>hearts enough, to make the cut. (And that really was true, out of over four hundred songs at least one hundred, a very high percentage, could have had a shot at the one hundred best popular songs of all times lists. When I had started that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oldies But Goodies</i> series a few years ago in a fit of nostalgia related to reconnecting with guys like Frankie Riley, Johnny Callahan and Frank Jackman from the old hometown I had assumed that I had completed the series at Volume Ten. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I then found out that this was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. I flipped out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Thereafter I whipped off those last five CDs in one day, including individual reviews of each CD and a summing up for another blog, and was done with it. Working frantically all the while under this basic idea; how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in those compilations. How many times could one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough! Until Doo-Wop decided that my coming of age era paled, paled if you can believe this, in comparison to Johnny-come-lately rockers like Mick and Keith, John and Paul, Jerry, Neil, Roger and the like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">No, a thousand times no, as right this minute I am watching a YouTube film clip of early Elvis performing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Good Rockin’ Tonight</i> at what looks like some state fairgrounds down south and the girls are going crazy tearing their hair out and crying like crazy because the new breeze they had been waiting for in the death-dry red scare Cold War 1950s night just came through and not soon enough. If Doo-Wop had paid attention to anything that someone like Mick Jagger said all the over whelming influence, the foundation for their efforts it might have held his tongue, or been a bit more circumspect. Guys like Mick, and they were mainly guys just like their 1950s forebears know that much. Yeah, it was mainly guys since I admit the only serious female rocker that I recall was Wanda Jackson whereas Doo-Wop’s time frame had Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, just to name a few. If he had argued on the basis of female rockers I would have no argument that the 1960s was a golden age for female rockers but his specified only the generic term “rockers.”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Like I said part of what got me going on the re-tread trail had been that nostalgia thing with my old corner boys and all our nights dropping dimes and quarters in Doc’s or Benny’s jukeboxes, listening on our transistors until our ears turned to cauliflower, and swaying at too many last change dance to mention but I also had been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere at the time on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s. You know the age of our own Jack Kennedy, the age of the short-lived Camelot when our dreams seemingly were actually within our grasp, and of the time we began realizing the need for serious struggles against all kinds of wars, and all kinds of discriminations, including getting a fair shake for the working people, those who labor, the people who populated our old time neighborhoods, our parents for chrissakes, in this benighted world. But here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing as the former.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s were truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oklahoma, South Pacific</i> and the like and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the transistor radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a transistor radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please. Or look it up on Wikipedia if you are too embarrassed to not know ancient history things. Join the bus.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all staid arm in arm music that one’s parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. Think Elvis almost any place where there were more than five girls, hell more than one girl, or Jerry Lee and that silly film high school cautionary film that got this whole comment started where he stole the show at the beginning from that flatbed throne or Bill Haley just singing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rock Around The Clock</i> in front of the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackboard Jungle</i>. Here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that wallflower fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, that left many a sad sack teenage boy, girls can speak for themselves, waking up in the middle of the night with cold sweats worrying about sweaty hands, underarms, course breathe, stubble, those damn feet (and her dainty ones mauled), and bravery, bravery to ask that she (or he for shes) for a dance, especially the last dance that you waited all night to have that chance to ask her about, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">So what still sounded good to a current AARPer, and perhaps some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such 1950s compilation “speak” to (and some early 60s songs as well). Carl Perkins original <i>Blue Suede Shoes</i> (covered by, made famous by, and made millions for, Elvis). Or the Hank William’s outlaw country classic <i>I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry</i>. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Buddy Holly’s <i>Peggy Sue</i> (or, like Chuck Berry and Fat Domino from this period, virtually any other of about twenty of his songs).</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">But what about the now seeming mandatory to ask question the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seemed to be included in each of those CD compilations? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, ask a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here Elvis’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One Night With You</i> fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful, snappy timing and voice intonation. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you? Touche Doo-Wop!</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-10460734319033965382024-03-06T15:15:00.000-05:002024-03-06T15:15:00.190-05:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s- Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- </b><strong><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s- Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">A <i>YouTube</i> film clip of Johnny Ace performing his classic <i>Pledging My Love</i>.</span></b><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">[I am sure the attentive reader if he or she has been following this great stone-etched series about one sliver of the 1960s, a time whose demographics component is ebbing more quickly that we would like has noticed the attributions of the past few sketches in the series has shifted from Frank Jackson to the real originator and guiding light of the project the former site manager here Allan Jackson. The resulted from an agreement between the new site manager Greg Green and one of Allan’s oldest friends Sam Lowell after Allan went crazy when he found out that he was effectively a “non-person” around here and Greg was using a replay of the series to pacify the old readership base after a few foolhardy experiments trying to reach the youth panned out miserably. Go back into the archives dated February 10, 2017 to get the whole story on what had happened in the dispute that brought Allan low after years as king pin and cranky muse if a man can be a muse and these days why not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">What I bring today is news that Allan is still alive and kicking despite a lot of rumors that he had bit the dust and other unsavory things some of which actually were true although distorted a bit as such things will when the rumor mills fly. I, and Sam Lowell as well, traced Allan to Bar Harbor, Maine his old stomping grounds as he got older after contacting his third ex-wife to see if she had gotten a recent alimony check from him. She had and through her we were able to piece together that he was not out West, not then anyway although he had been in the immediate aftermath of the “purge” but in Maine once she mentioned that he had asked her to “come up” to see him. That was all we needed <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Well not quite all since as part of that internal struggle at this publication there might have been some residual bad blood against Sam Lowell on Allan’s part despite Sam’s intervention with Greg to get Allan some recognition on this series. See Sam, who goes all the way back to junior high days with Allan whereas I only met him in high school through the Scribe, had cast the deciding negative vote in that line-up of sides. Had sided with the younger writers under the understanding that the “torch needed to be passed” and that expecting guys and gals who were not born or who were in elementary school to “give a fuck” (Sam’s term) about the 1960s to the exclusion of other interests was bizarre and counter-productive. When we did get to Bar Harbor, to a condo Allan was renting, all that fell away. Allan and Sam, far more than me who married a bit early and got caught up with family life and starting a Toyota dealership, were used to the vagaries of the radical faction fights in the 1960s and he had the good graces to accept his defeat and his “purge.” Everybody, every old writer, agreed that it was a purge and so it will be henceforth recorded that way as we stream through this series.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">What Allan did not take with good graces was what Greg did in the aftermath of the internal fight as he told us one night at Dougie’s his, our favorite bar in the town. Greg had come over from <i>American Film Gazette</i> in 2015 to take over the day to day operations and “won” the prize full-time when Allan was defeated. Allan had picked him because he had worked there at one time and was impressed with Greg’s skills as manager. The internal struggle was so fierce, so personal that Greg became a bit unhinged afterward, was bitter. Allan, who still felt he had something left in the publishing world (and still needed checks to ex-wives and tuitions for the last of his brood) went to New York and then California looking for work, basically anything to keep the wolves from the door. No sale. Reason? One Greg Green had put the whammy on him, had put the kiss of death on him in a cutthroat industry, said Allan was “hard to work with” So in a funny way, a funny modern way, Greg did play the old time Stalin role in the Stalin-Trotsky dispute to the death. That is the way we all read the thing after a half dozen high shelf Dougie whiskeys anyway. More later read this sketch now. Jack Callahan] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">No question if you were alive in the 1950s in America, and maybe in other countries too for all I know but I think that this is truly an American phenomenon, alive meaning of course if you were young, say between twelve and twenty- five no older because then you hovered too close to being parents and hence, well hence, square the golden age of the automobile met the golden age of <i>al fresco</i> dining, okay, okay low end pre-Big Mac dining. Sorry, I got carried away. Golden Age eating outdoors, well, not really outdoors but in your Golden Age automobile at the local drive-in restaurant (not drive through like today but that may have been true too).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">See the idea was that a young guy, maybe a guy who was a wiz at fixing up cars and who had retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted some broken down wreak and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or Dodge or some nerdy young guy who had two left hands and had borrowed his father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring his date to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in that car all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. And be seen in that “boss” car or in the case of the father-borrowed car just to be seen with his date. Be seen by the million and one young guys, maybe guys who were also wizzes at fixing up cars and who had also retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted some broken down wreak and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or ‘59 Dodge or some nerdy young guys who had two left hands and had borrowed their father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring their dates to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in those cars all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. Also to be seen and to be placed in the high school pecking order accordingly. Or if not in high school (but also not over twenty-five remember) to be paid homage for surviving that chore, and for knowing the ropes, knowing the signposts in the drive-in restaurant night. </span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Once my old friend Jack Lowell had put golden age automobile and golden age dining out together one night, really early one morning, when he was feeling a little melancholy for the old days, and when he had had too much whiskey, all that needed to be added was to say that Eddie, Eddie Connell, would have been out, out once again some night, some weekend night more than likely with his everlovin’ Ginny, Virginia Stone, in the Clintondale 1950s be-bop night, having a little something to eat at the Adventure Car Hop, that burgers and fries eternal youth night out dining combo (did I mention a Coke or Pepsi, if I did not then those were the standard drinks to wash those hard-hearted burgers and those fat-saturated fries down) after a hard night of dancing to the local rockers down in Hullsville and afterward a bout down at Adamsville Beach located a couple of towns over and so filled with Clintondale and other young couples seeking some privacy from watchful town eyes, in the “submarine race” watching night.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Jack had good reason to want to talk about his best friend back then Eddie, about his “boss” ’57 two-toned, white and green, Chevy, and especially about his girl, his Ginny, since in the love wars Ginny had thrown him over for Eddie, had chosen Eddie’s souped-up car over Jack’s walking feet when the deal went down. Yeah, Eddie and Jack had still remained friends, had still been simpatico despite the girl mess-up. See just before the Ginny swap Jack had taken Ellen Riley, formerly the head cheer-leader at Clintondale High back in 1955, the year they all, Jack, Eddie, Ginny, and Ellen if you are keeping count, had graduated away from Eddie. So all was fair in love and war. Although Jack had thought it was just slightly unfair that Ellen had subsequently thrown him over, Jack the struggling college student with no dough and no car just like he had been in high school, for a guy from Hullsville because she did not want to wait to get married until after he graduated and she empathically was tired unto death of walking (or worse, riding that clunky old Eastern Transit bus which was always late and did not run after midnight just in case they had something going down at the beach or after the Hullsville dance got out) when her father handed down car had gone to the graveyard and they had no car between them. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">But maybe Jack had better fill a candid world in on a couple of things to back up why he wanted to talk about Eddie and Ginny that night. Was feeling just a little pang after all those years for having let Ginny go so easily. Jack and Eddie had known each other since the old days at Clintondale North Elementary and had been through thick and thin together (that “thin” usually revolved around girls, starting with Rosalind in the fifth grade who had eventually thrown them both over for a kid, Ricky Kelly, Jesus, wimpy Ricky Kelly, in the sixth grade). In high school they had drifted apart for a while when Eddie decided that since he was no student that he would take up automotive mechanics and Jack with two left hands pursued the college course. Drifted apart until come sixteen Eddie, who proved to be a an ace mechanic, a natural, had fixed up some old Hudson that he found in the junkyard and made it a “boss” (Jack adamantly refused to define that term “boss” for that candid world since some things are, or should be, self-evident). That vehicle had been a “fox” lure (girls, okay) all through high school for both young men, except those times when Eddie wanted to take his girl of the week to Adamsville Beach and wanted to use the back seat alone with said honey. And then go to the Adventure Car Hop for a little something to eat before taking her home.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">That all worked well enough in high school since neither young man had any serious relationships. Then after high school the workaday world hit Eddie and he took a job at Duggan Brothers Garage and Jack went off to the local college, Gloversville State, on a scholarship while continuing to live at home. One night when Jack was a sophomore at Gloversville he and Eddie, Eddie with the ’57 “boss” Chevy then, went to a rock and roll dance down in Hullsville arranged for those still under twenty-one and who could not legally drink (of course there was more booze than you could shake a stick at out in the parking lot which faced Hullsville Beach but that is a another story) and that is where Jack met Ginny, a former classmate whom he had not known in school because, well, because as she told him that night she did not then have anything to do with “corner boys,” so had met her, had talked to her, had danced with her and afterward they and Eddie and a girl he picked up at the dance, not Ellen, had gone to the Adventure Car Hop for the first time together to grab a bite to eat before going home. Strangely Ginny, although she grew up in Clintondale, had never been there before considering it nothing but a male “hang-out” scene (which at some level Jack admitted to her was true).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">And so started the love affair between Jack and Ginny, although according to Jack the thing had many rocky moments from the start on the question of Jack, poor boy Jack, not having his own car, having to either double-date with Eddie, whom she did not like then, or worse, walk when Eddie had his back seat wanting habits on. And her carping at Jack for not wanting to quit college to get married and start a family right away (Ginny had not gone on to school after high school and went to work in Boston for John Hancock Insurance where she was moving up in the organization). And that went on for a while. Meanwhile Eddie had taken up with Ellen, whom he had not known in high school either, nor had Jack, because as she told Eddie “she was into football players with a future, not grease monkeys.” She saw the error of her ways when she had brought her car in for repairs and Eddie worked on the car, and on her. She was going to Adamsville Junior College right down the road but she saw something in Eddie, for a while. Then, although they all had double-dated together she “hit” on Sam one night, wound up going to bed with him a few weeks later down in Cape Cod, where she shared a cottage with six other college classmates for the summer, when Eddie had to go out of town for a couple of weeks to a GM training school and that was that. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Of course once the news got around, and in small city Clintondale that did not take long, especially with those summer roommates of hers, of Jack and Ellen to reach Ginny, and Eddie all bets were off. Ginny brushed Jack off with a solo telephone call to him in which she terminated their affair after about three sentences with a “I don’t want to discuss it further, I want to end this conversation,” yeah, the big brush-off. Ellen told Eddie that they were done and while he feigned being hurt about it the truth was that he had not been all that happy with her of late, thought she was drifting away from him when she decided against his protests to go in on that summer cottage. And so they parted, although Eddie was a little sore at Jack for a while, as usual when they mixed it up with their women. One day Eddie saw Ginny waiting for the bus, that damn Eastern Transport bus, one afternoon and took her on the “rebound” (although don’t expect him to use that word about or around Ginny, just don’t). Ginny, for her part, decided that Eddie wasn’t so bad after all, and he did have that “boss” car and when they talked about it one night after they had hit the silk sheets was not adverse to the idea of marriage. And so their thing went in the Clintondale night for a while. Let’s hone in on what Eddie and Ginny were up to that long ago night Jack talked about when he got the blues about the old days, okay. </span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Two hamburgers, all the trimmings, two fries, two Cokes, Sissy,” rasped half-whispering Eddie Connell to Adventure Car Hop number one primo car hop Sissy Jordan. Eddie and Sissy had known each other forever. Sissy had been Eddie’s girlfriend back in junior high days, back in eight-grade at Clintondale South Junior High when he learned a thing or two about girls, about girl charms and girl bewilderments. And Sissy had been his instructor, although like all such early bracings with the opposite sex there was as much misinformation and confusion as intimacy since nobody, no parent, no teacher, and no preacher was cluing any kids in, except some lame talk about the birds and the bees, kids’ stuff. Things, as happens all the time in teen love, had not worked out between them. Had not worked out as well because by ninth grade blossoming Sissy was to be found sitting in the front seat of senior football halfback Jimmy Jenkin’s two-toned souped-up Hudson and Sissy had no time for mere boys then. Such is life. </span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">For those who know not of Adventure Car Hop places or car hops here is a quick primer. These drive-in restaurants in the 1950s were of a piece, all glitter in the night (they lost a lot of allure seen passing by in the day and could have been any diner USA at those hours), all neon lights aglow that could be seen from a mile away as you headed out Route 3 from Clintondale Center, a small shopping area eventually replaced as the place to shop by the Gloversville Mall. The neon lights spelling out Adventure Car Hop super-imposed on an outline of a comely car hop also in neon meant, well, meant adventure, mystery, oh hell, sex. So any given Friday or Saturday night and in summer almost any night you would see the place packed with all kinds of youth cars in each striped slot. In summer the walkers, and almost every kid, girl or boy, had done the walk there before coming of car age could sit and eat their meals on the wooden picnic tables the management provided. In winter they could go inside and sit at the vinyl-cushioned booths and order their meals while listening to the latest hits on the jukebox. Or if single, and that was rare, there were swiveling red vinyl-topped stools to sit at. Sit at and view Mel, Lenny, or Benny (the owner) pulling short order cook duty behind a metallic counter and view as well, get an eyeful if you thought about it, of the really comely car hops doing their frenetic best to keep up with the orders (and since space was at a premium avoid bumping into each other with big orders of drinks on their trays). Really thought if you went from Bangor to LaJolla you would see the same basic set-up so you would never have to worry about a place to go at night at least anywhere in America where ill-disposed parents would not be found in those precincts. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">The Adventure Car Hop, the only such place in town and therefore a magnet for everybody from about twelve to twenty-something was (now long gone and the site of a small office park) nothing but an old time drive-in restaurant where the car hop personally took your order from you while you were sitting in your “boss” car. Hopefully boss car, although the lot the night Jack thought about how Eddie and Ginny graced the place had been filled with dads’ borrowed cars, strictly not boss, not boss at all. Sitting with your “boss” girl (you had better have called her that or the next week she would be somebody else’s “boss” honey). And the place became a rite of passage for Jack’s youngest brother Sam several years later even though the family had moved to Adamsville by then. That luscious car hop would return to you after, well, it depended on how busy it was, and just then around midnight this was Adventure Car Hop busy time, with your order on a tray which attached to your door. By the way families, parents alone without children, or anybody else over twenty-something either gave the place a wide berth or only went there during the day when no self-respecting young person, with or without a car or a date, would be seen dead there, certainly not to eat the food. Jesus no. </span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Now Sissy, a little older then than most Clintondale car hops at twenty-two, had turned into nothing but a career waitress, a foxy one still, but a waitress which was all a car hop really was. Except most car hops at Adventure Car Hop were "slumming” through senior-hood at Clintondale High or were freshman at some local college and were just trying to make some extra money for this and that while being beautiful. Because, and there was no scientific proof for this, but none was needed, at Adventure Car Hop in the year 1959 every car hop had been a fox (that beautiful just mentioned), a double fox on some nights, in their red short shorts, tight white blouses, and funny-shaped red and white box hats. And Sissy topped the list. Here though is where Sissy made a wrong turn, made her a career waitress (and made Eddie feel sorry for her, or at least sorry for losing her instruction back in ninth grade to some damn old football player). She had let Jimmy Jenkins have his way with her too many times, too many unprotected times (again in the ignorance 1950s, in Clintondale at least, the fine points of contraception, or even cautious use of rubbers was a book sealed with seven seals mostly), and when she was a senior at Clintondale High back in 1955 (and Jimmy was up at State U playing football and also having off-hand quite ignorant sex with a few adoring college girlfriends on the side). So that year she had had to drop out of school to have a baby (Jack said they called it “gone to Aunt Ella’s” and once a girl was not seen for a while someone would use that term and that was all that was needed to be said, except the occasional sighing about a good girl gone wrong or scorn from the prissy girls who allegedly were saving “it” for marriage). But see Jimmy, caddish Jimmy, left Sissy in the lurch, would not marry her or provide for the child (what the hell he was a student, he had no dough even if he had been willing to do the honorable thing, which he was not) and so she never went back to finish up after that visit to Aunt Ella. She had latched onto the job at Adventure Car Hop to support her child since Benny could have cared less about her maternal status as long as she showed those long legs, those firm breasts, those ruby-red lips and those dazzling blue eyes to great effect in those shorts and tight blouse that kept the boys coming in, even the boys with dates. Yeah, so he could care less for as long as she could keep eyes turned her way. But the story, an old story in town since there were a couple of “role models,” Jenny and Delores working at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on East Main who followed this career path after having children out of wedlock. And thus all the signs told that career waitress was to be Sissy’s fate, maybe not at that place but probably she would wind up at Jimmy Jack’s or some truck stop diner on the outside of town with a trying too hard too tight steam-sweated uniform, stubby pencil in her hair, a wad of gum in her mouth, still fending off, mostly fending off except when she got the urge or felt lonely for a man, lonesome trucker advances. </span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">But back to the 1959 be-bop night, the be-bop Friday or Saturday night when those car hops, those foxes, were magnets for every guy with a car, a boss one or a father’s car it did not matter but without girls filling the seats, especially the front seat, hoping against hope for a moment with one of those car hops. And for car guys with girls in those front seats looking to show off their girls, claiming they were foxier, while sneaking furtive glances toward the bustling car hops, even than the car hops, if that was possible, and it usually wasn’t. Although under no conditions let them know that if you wanted a date next week and not the freeze-out not home treatment. More importantly, to show off their “boss cars.” And playing, playing loudly for all within one hundred yards to hear, their souped-up car radio complexes, turned nightly in rock heaven’s WJDA, the radio station choice of everyone under the age of thirty.</span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">As Jack honed in on that remembrance night on Eddie's super-duplex speaker combo The Dell-Vikings were singing their hit, <i>Black Slacks</i>, and some walkers were crooning along to the tune. Yes, if you can believe this, some guys and girls, some lame guys and girls, not junior high kids who couldn’t drive anyway but over sixteen high school students actually walked to the Adventure Car Hop to grab something to eat after the Clintondale Majestic Theater let out. They, of course, ate at the thoughtfully provided picnic tables although their orders were still taken by Sissy’s leggy brigade. Nicely served by those tip-hungry car hops just like real customers with a glimmer of nighttime social standing, although they were still nothing but lamos in the real night social order.</span><o:p></o:p><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">But, getting back to Eddie and Ginny, see Sissy would have known something that you and I would not have known, could not have known, just by the way Eddie placed his order as The Falcon’s doo wop serenade, <i>Your So Fine</i>, blared away from his radio in the fading night. Sissy knew because, being a fox she had had plenty of experience knowing the drive-in restaurant protocol after the battles had subsided down at Adamsville or Hullsville Beach “submarine watching” night, including with Eddie in the days, the junior high days when she and Eddie were nothing but lamo car-less walkers. And what she knew was that Eddie and Ginny, who had been nothing but a “stick” when Eddie and she were an item, a stick being a girl, a twelve or thirteen year old junior high school girl with no “shape,” unlike Sissy who did have a shape, although no question, no question even to Sissy Ginny had a shape now, not as good as hers but a shape good enough to keep Eddie snagged, had been "doing it” down at Hullsville Beach. Doing “it” after spending the early part of the evening at the Surf, the local rock dance hall for those over twenty-one (and where liquor was served). The tip-off: Eddie’s request for all the trimmings on his hamburgers. All the trimmings in this case being mustard, ketchup, pickles, lettuce, and here is the clincher, onions. Yes, Eddie and Ginny are done with love’s chores for the evening and can now revert to primal culinary needs without rancor, or concern.</span><o:p></o:p><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Sissy had to laugh at how ritualized, although she would never have used such a word herself, may have not been up on her sociological jargon, to describe what was going on in the youthful night life in Clintondale (including the really just slightly older set like the clients of the Surf rock club, Eddie and Ginny, who had learned the ropes at Adventure Car Hop way back when). If a couple came early, say eight o’clock, they never ordered onions, no way, the night still held too much promise. The walkers, well, the walkers you couldn’t tell, especially the young walkers like she and Eddie in the old days, but usually they didn’t have enough sense to say “no onions.” And then there were the Eddies and Ginnys floating in around two, or three, in the morning, “done” (and the reader knows what “done” is now), starving, maybe a little drunk and ready to devour Benny’s (who was doing short order duty that night since Mel had called in sick, “rum” sick Benny called it) cardboard hamburgers, deep-fried, fat-saturated French fries, and diluted soda (known locally as tonic, go figure) as long as those burgers had onions, many onions on them. And as we turn off this scene to the strains of Johnny Ace crooning <i>Pledging My Love</i> on Eddie’s car radio competing just now with a car further over with The Elegants’ <i>Little Star</i> Sissy had just place the tray on Eddie’s side of the car and had brought his order and placed it on the tray, with all the trimmings.</span><o:p></o:p><br />
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-39725518415031406262024-03-06T14:59:00.000-05:002024-03-06T14:59:00.169-05:00Elvis Is Not In The House-Nor Is His Kin-Kevin Cosner’s “3000 Miles To Graceland” (2001)-A Film Review <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Elvis Is Not In The House-Nor Is His Kin-Kevin Cosner’s “3000 Miles To Graceland” (2001)-A Film Review<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">DVD Review<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Laura Perkins <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">3000 Miles From Graceland, starring Kevin Cosner, Kurt Russell, Courtney Cox, 2001<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">I suppose that it will never happen even beyond the grave that a multitude of sins will not be laid at the door of the “King,” of Elvis, of Elvis Presley (those three designations reflecting the generational divide the first from those washed clean by the rising tide of rock and roll, now called classic rock and roll, lifted high on the Elvis tide by his generally acknowledged kingship of the genre, the second reflecting his latter day career as a garishly costumed Vegas lounge lizard act, sorry, for sweated mothers who never got over those hips swaying to and fro, and the third the clueless who need a last name to place him as some old fogy relic with wickedly silly sideburns and drawl plus swivel hips which their grandmothers still sweated over). When I was growing up, coming of age, meaning unlike for my long-time companion and fellow writer in this space Sam Lowell, not about going out to confront the great big raucous world but the more personal coming into young womanhood, getting “my friend,” my period Elvis meant in my household playing “the devil’s music,” making all the young women sweat, and not so young women too, making them think the “s-x” word (a term never ever expressed in that household. Yes, Elvis and those impossible swaggering hips making a young girl think who knows what thoughts and that hair and those songs which he seemed to be singing directly to me (whoever “me” was) was more than our proper mothers could handle without recourse to some strictures, and it was always mothers in such situations out on the farms in upstate New York where I grew up about twenty miles outside of Albany. Didn’t figure that the King would show up on television, on the freaking bland <i>Ed Sullivan Show,</i> and let the whole world know that Uncle Ed had given his blessing. Then he, the King, moved on to the Army, or died, or something like that and we, we young womanhood, moved on to the next crooner who was singing directly to the “me.” <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That was the King live but today in the film under review, <i>3000 Miles From Graceland</i>, Graceland signifying the King’s homestead in Memphis and Holy Grail pilgrimage location even to this day for that clueless generation, he has to take the rap for “fronting” for a major armed robbery of one of the casinos in Vegas a town where last he dwelled on stage. The action centers on the seemingly endless fascination with his look, his image and his persona by a coterie of devotees, good and bad, at the annual Elvis impersonation festival which draws fervent crowds to worship once more at the shrine (and spent serious dough at the gambling tables).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">So that is the draw that is the effect of the Elvis phenomenon, the storyline, the “skinny” as Sam says when reviewing films and I have picked up the term to announce a summary of the action for the readership to mull over when checking out older films. Before that though, since it struck me as funny, how I got this assignment in the first place. I had been complaining, complaining in the public prints, that I had to deal with current site manager Greg Green’s one time idea to reach a younger audience by reviewing every possible <i>Marvel</i> and <i>DC</i> comic book super-hero come to the big screen in the universe. Although I was not alone in looking at the whole project with a very jaded eye I was one of the ones who complained in public and thereafter got a few better assignments (like a long sought after go at a Humphrey Bogart starring black and white film to gain some bragging rights with Sam who made a good career out of specializing in such fare).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Then “politics” came into play when Greg asked for a return of the favor asking me to review this film. He did not want Sam, really the natural choice for anything Elvis as far as music and growing up times in his old working class North Adamsville neighborhood went, to do it for he would get a long screed about that growing up scene and about two sentences on the film. Greg wanted a woman’s touch, a woman’s view, but also a woman who had been through the wringer with Elvis in her youth. With that “left-handed” compliment from Greg I agreed to do this one. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Other than the Elvis/Graceland hook I knew nothing about this film except most of the actors so I was somewhat shocked by the gratuitous and seemingly non-stop violence displayed from almost the beginning of the film which was way over top even in modern day cinematic terms. Greg has made a point of stating publicly that he screens all the films before he makes his assignments (a trait he developed in his long years at <i>American Film Gazette </i>coming here). I am not so sure about that preview here, certainly why I would be picked to do this one which under other circumstances I wouldn’t touch in a million years.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Here goes. Murph, Kevin Cosner’s role, a serious cinematic psychopath if there ever was one and somebody to avoid like the plague on screen or in real life, and Michael, played by Kurt Russell both ex-cons are part of a six man team who are intent on robbing not a bank like the legendary bank robbery Willie Sutton is rumored to have said because “that is where the money is” but a high dollar casino in Vegas where the money also is when you think about it during Elvis Impersonation week. Nice idea, a one of a kind idea unlike that boring bank stuff that every hardened criminal takes a run at, so that the whole armed to the teeth crew has cover as Elvis impersonators like half the guys in town just then. The whole scheme actually works but here is where the over-the-top violence gets its first serious work-out. Unlike such cons as Danny Ocean (either the Frank Sinatra or George Clooney version will do) and his crowd of master criminal technicians worked out this one turned into an old Wild West shoot-out with murder and mayhem as much the loot part of the project. (One gets in the aftermath of the Vegas massacre of 2017 where a lone gunman wreaked havoc on the crowds a gruesome idea about the power of assault weapons to create horrible “killing fields” and I wonder if anybody short of an ardent NRA aficionado had a very queasy feeling like I had after this cinematic shoot-out.) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">The rest of the film essentially aside from the on-going violence at every turn even where it would not make sense except to an American pyscho like Murph (who also thought he was the long lost son of Elvis so you know how scarred he was by whatever life had passed his way) was done under the title of there being “no honor among thieves” (or as Sam would say in one of his reviews of those old time film noirs there is honor more in the breech than the observance). Once it got to be split the dough time Murph got ugly, wasted every one of his confederates (except the pilot who had gotten them out of the hell-hole casino). Or tried to. Michael sensing Murph’s, ah, instability donned a bullet-proof vest which saved him. From that point on it is strictly con against con to see who will get to keep the whole pile (some three million not bad even today for guys who seemed to be otherwise unemployable). <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Well maybe not strictly con against con because apparently even in a blood- bath saga Hollywood cannot resist evoking the “boy meets girl” story in some form. Before going off to battle the casino cash till with his erstwhile confederates Michael had met and bedded a fetching dish, Cybil with a “C,” played by very dishy Courtney Cox, and has tangled with her wayward young wannbe hoodlum son. As a single Mom she has her claws out once she knew that Michael had help pull the biggest heist she had ever heard of. That starts the merry-go-round (and the growing love interest between the bedmates and Michael’s growing paternal feeling toward that sullen youth) where who has the dough, who doesn’t have the dough and how to get it from the other might or main runs the chase (including an independent run by Cybil with a “C”) until the final war zone-like shoot-out (which reminded Sam of the fire-fights in Vietnam) between the coppers and Murph who goes down in a frenzied blaze of glory (with Michael on the side but unhurt by the action again due to that handy bullet-proof vest). A bit strangely since Michael has a fistful of criminal code violation on his own hook the love-bugs survive to live another day. This one may get the NRA’s seal of approval but in the light of the mass shootings since 2001 a thumbs down here. By the way Elvis should sue. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-79300687594987801032024-03-05T17:11:00.000-05:002024-03-05T17:11:00.165-05:00The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Rolling Stones In Mind<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-</span></b><b><span style="font-size: large;">Just Before The Sea Change - With The Rolling Stones In Mind</span><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">A <i>YouTube</i> film clip of the Dixie Cups performing their 1960s classic (who brought the house down with this number about 15 or 20 years ago at the Newport Folk festival of all places to show an example of a song with staying power <i>Chapel Of Love</i></span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;"><b>From The Archives Of Allan Jackson<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">[In a recent introduction part of this series, see archives dated February 28, 2017 on the subject of 1960s icon writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters who set a certain tone for part of what that whirlwind decade meant to those in the Generation of “68, I noted that after some exhaustive investigation I had found out where the previous site manager of this publication, Allan Jackson, my old high school friend and a founder of the hard copy edition of this space as I was, was hiding out. The reason that was important was that we had lost contact with him in the aftermath of the vicious internal struggle where he was essentially “purged” after he was given a vote of no confidence mainly by the younger writers who though he had gone off the deep end last year in demanding wall to wall coverage of the 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary commemoration of the famous Summer of Love in 1967 centered in San Francisco and environs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">When Allan went “underground” to use a term of art used in the 1960s for a lot of situations when people dropped off the face of the earth it seemed the rumors flew high and wide since he cut communications with all his old high school and 1960s friends who whose writing and adventures had formed one of the bases for this publication. Some rumors mentioned that he had been done away with in some nefarious way by the incoming new site manager Greg Green and his hand-picked Editorial Board. As I have mentioned before that seemed ludicrous on its face like this was some kind of replay (as farce as Karl Marx once said about second time around events) of the infamous Stalin-Trotsky war to the death which all the older guys were always knee-deep talking about in their radical 1960s pasts. (That Board by the way mandated by the younger writers to avoid some of the problems caused by Allan’s increasingly single-minded devotion to “re-living” the 1960s especially in the decisive 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the myriad events that dotted the landscape of 1968.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">A persistent rumor had him turning tail and placing himself in self-imposed exile out in the American Siberia Utah sucking up to the Mormons in order to get a by-line in one of their dink publications. Things got so out of hand that he had been alleged to have written reams of trash about the virtues of their wearing white underwear and the hardships of having five wives at one time. Worse, worse of all sucking up to a lizard, a chameleon like Mitt Romney who is running for U.S. Senate out there in order to be his press secretary. It got worse in the rumor mill as he was alleged to be living with, living off of some twenty-something part-time waitress surfer girl out in La Jolla who had a father fixation and who was “doing the do” an expression from the old days every chance she got with him and was teaching his to surf to boot. In a more sinister vein which could bring him big legal and maybe bang-bang troubles he was alleged to be putting together a big drug deal on credit with some guys down in Mexico who were looking to make a name in the States. Along the same lines was the rumor that he was running a high-class international whorehouse in Argentina with his old lover Madame La Rue catering to the strange whims of Asian businessmen. There were others, mostly along the same lines, but one last one will suffice to give an idea of what was essentially a smear campaign against the man. Supposedly he was in Frisco dating a transvestite who was connected with the opium trade and he was living high off the hog on Russian Hill stoned to the gills all the time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">The way we, Sam Lowell and I, as I said among his oldest friends from back in the old Acre working class neighborhood in North Adamsville where we all grew up and came of age was simplicity itself. We checked with his third ex-wife Mimi Murphy to see if he had sent her an alimony check. He had and since he was still sweet on her (she had left him for a younger guy when he got too wrapped up in the 1960s for her taste) he told he not only about the purge which she actually already knew about from Josh Breslin but where he was to see if she wanted to “come up to see him” in his hours of despair. That “come up to see him” a telltale sign that he was not on the West Coast but up in Maine, up in Bar Harbor where he always went when things were tough. Had owned a house there until his parcel of kids from those three wives started college and he almost went bankrupt before he bailed out of that place to pay the freaking tuitions. So Sam and I headed up to see him, see what the real story was. More later except some of those rumors were actually at least partially true. That should keep things interesting. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities that he would rather not forget. That is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from Wattsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. It was not like he was some kind of soothsayer, could read tea leaves or anything like that but in his senses which were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll kind of drove his aspirations and that music had the cutting edge of what followed later, followed by about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">That fascination had occupied Eddie’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haines and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">One night when he was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care where she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Eddie Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Eddie became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound. Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">So Eddie was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in Wattsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Eddie would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.” So Eddie had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of <i>On The Road </i>on the <i>Steve Allen Show</i> that they severely disapproved on the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Eddie played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother). Then came 1964 and Eddie was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">That is where Eddie had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Eddie knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid. Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his conference trip, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in Wattsville households (and not just Wattsville households either but in places like North Adamsville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where guys were wating for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">And not just about hair styles either. But about trips to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat” except on television was yesterdays’ news). Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Eddie be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his <i>Mr. Lonely</i> or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his <i>It’s Over</i> and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her…</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up it anyway, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And Eddie and that damn Peter Dawson, who used to be so nice when they all hung around together at Jimmy Jacks’ Diner (corner boys, Ma, that is what we were) and you at least knew they were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If Eddie’s father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as Eddie is. Worst though, worst that worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving Wattsville, defenseless against the communists with his talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t he have just left well enough alone and stick with his idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s <i>We’ll Sing In The Sunshine</i> or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and <i>Her Walk On By</i> instead of getting everybody upset."</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors and mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Eddie’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what is going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Eddie was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just North Adamsville mothers either) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. "And that Eddie (“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie), and his new found friends like Peter Paul Markin taking her to those strange coffeehouses instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">And endless talk about the n-----s down South and other trash talk. Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Paul Markin sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when head South this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. They have already purchased their tickets as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet other heading south. Pete Paul turns to Edward and says, “Have you heard that song, <i>Popsicles and Icicles </i>by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Yes, we are still just before the sea change. Good luck, young travelers.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-26713367847170872212024-03-05T11:55:00.000-05:002024-03-05T11:55:00.162-05:00I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VI-“Bumbling Up The Fight Against The Fascists”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon” (1942)-A Film Review <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VI-“Bumbling Up The Fight Against The Fascists”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon” (1942)-A Film Review</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Bruce Conan<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">[Readers who are familiar with this series of short film reviews in the struggle to debunk the legend of the wiseass, sullen fake amateur private detective who went by the name of Sherlock Holmes but who used the moniker Basil Rathbone and whose real name was Lanny Lamont which will be explained below need go no further and can skip to the skimpy review below the end bracket. For those others who are clueless about the hopped up public relations created bumbling Holmes-Watson legend please read on to get caught up on one of the biggest scams in the history of private detection. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Let’s get a couple of items straight from the get-go which will make what appears to be an exercise in futility on my part trying to overturn a massive fraud on the cinematic and literary public seem more necessary and vital to clear the air.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">First if you look at my moniker in the byline above you will notice that I have used the name Bruce Conan. That alias of course, actually of necessity, had been forced on me by the notorious and nefarious group of blood-thirsty cultists who go by the name of the Baker Street Irregulars who seek my demise, my death according to some reports, for exposing their bloated homosexual hero (and his partner Doc, Doc Watson, the M.D. not the famous legendary blind bluegrass performer) for the bumbling fool that he is.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">On the first five of these so-called film reviews (out of what I thought would be twelve but have recently found out are fourteen films thus cutting my chances at completion down severely if I am not done in by some night-taker from that Irregular clot of inhumanity well before that) I was forced to use another moniker, Danny Moriarty. Yes that was in honor of the unjustly maligned heroic foe of Sherlock’s Professor Moriarty who it turned out was nothing but a fall guy for a dope and burglary ring that Holmes was running to keep up his opium-addled lifestyle. Unfortunately in the debunking business, in the whistle-blowing business you have to take some risks if the truth will out and somehow these determined holy goof cultists were able to figure out where I was and more ominously where I had sent my family for safe-keeping. Hence the new moniker and maybe another one or two before I am through to throw this menace off the scent while I get my family to other quarters and do my expose business. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">The second point. Readers, some irate although I think that they are just fronting, trolling would be the word in cyberspace times, for the notorious, nefarious Irregular cultists, have lambasted me for putting so much material in brackets throughout the review. Points about Holmes’ place in the private detection pantheon and that charged accusation of being back then when the times took a very different social-and legal- view on the subject of having a homosexual affair with Doc which explained some of the bumbling, the piling up of bodies, and the contempt for his fellow humans before somebody else laid the bad guys low. Somebody else covered up his mistakes. To the extent that I think those anonymous readers have a point, whoever they are, I have decided to put the whole analysis here in one place. And as I have mentioned at the beginning the reader can move down past the end bracket to the obligatory although hardly pressing review or push on to find out the truth about a guy they might have thought that they admired at one time when they were kids. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Genesis first. I had originally been assigned this series of film reviews by the previous site manager, Allan Jackson, who knew that I had done a series of reviews of films and books about two really legendary private detectives, the gold standard of the profession, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe whom I had spent many a youthful Saturday afternoon watching on the screen and many a youthful night reading and re-reading up in my bedroom. I had noted, and Allan seemed to agree, that these professional private detectives were the epitome of what was what among such career detectives. Without going into great detail here I noted that what made them special was their grit, their lack of fear, their ability to take a punch or a slug for the cause and keep their heads when the obligatory femme fatale came knocking on their doors. Went under the silky sheets with female danger while tilting some windmills to grab a little rough justice in the world be it for a partner like Miles Archer or a broken down old man like General Sternwood with a couple of wild daughters who were ready for anything from those silky sheets to murder, murder one when you think about it. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">When Allan gave me the original assignment I was actually doing a series of film reviews for another Hammett detective Nick Charles, and the indispensable Nora of course, so I begged off for a while. Then came a big internal shake-up at this publication which I will not bore the reader with the details of and the emergence of Greg Green as the new site manager. Greg noting that old Allan assignment schedule was very interested in doing the Holmes series as well and so here it was all set up.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">I originally went about my business of the first Holmes review with no particular animus toward the man although I cringed a bit at his condescension toward other mere mortals based on the flimsiest motive that he was some kind of king hell deductive reasoning guru. He seemed at the time to have the truly bumbling Doc, Doc Watson, under his spell and moreover to have his number as a punching bag incompetent to make his own mistakes seems trivial in comparison. Then I started to analyze what his modus operandi really was. To see the holes in his deductive reasoning methods against real pros like Spade and Marlowe, hell, even lady’s man Miles Archer and half-drunk Nick Charles looked good in comparison. What I noticed from the very first film was that once he was on the case he let the bodies pile up before the villains were caught. Caught not by him but by third parties. Cops and an occasional civilian. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That wasn’t so bad, even bad boys Sam and Phil were not virgin pure when murder was in the air although they always brought the bad guys to justice on their own hook. Then I noticed that Holmes, I will call him Holmes since that is what he conned the world into believing was his name and maybe he was right to do so with a Christian name of Lanny Lamont to live down, that he was totally incompetent with a gun, could not “fucking shoot the side of a barn” as my sainted mother used to say. Then Holmes started to take his act to foreign countries and that was the limit.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That is when I had to put my foot down and expose this nasty little bugger. Here is where the fake legend really got its start. Where whatever public relations guys Lanny, I mean Holmes, hired to build up his reputation in the prints went over the top. It was one thing for Holmes to get outsourced for jobs over the incompetent, venal, and corrupt coppers at Scotland Yard. Everybody knows the coppers there were on “the take” and I have since come to understand they have been paid off by the Baker Street Irregulars to see no evil when those cretins go about their blood rituals. And look the other way when they threaten me with murder and mayhem for tarnishing the image of their Nancy boy Holmes. I got that information by the way from a few ex-Irregulars who left the organization repelled by the blood rites and by the extortionate crimes committed to keep them in dough. It is another, however, to think that His Majesty’s MI6, its foreign spies, its James Bonds, was going to let Holmes within five hundred miles of any espionage case against the Hitlerite plague that was darkening the doors of Europe. The most bitter taste in my mouth was when he let an innocent fourteen year old serving girl get murdered while he on some landudum high. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Everybody knows that real professional private detectives back in the day not only knew how to shoot, knew enough to keep innocent young girls from harm’s way, kept their own counsel in attempting to bring a little rough justice in the world but were committed skirt-chasers. Expected a little something more than another boy-scout merit badge in the fight for that rough justice. Nobody ever heard of a private detective who was not a womanizer. After the first film review I noticed that Holmes never looked at a woman, that he only seemed to be intimate with his teddy bear Doc, his roommate as it turned out and bedmate when they were on foreign cases. Once when he was captured by some bad guy and being held with a great looking young woman I noticed he never even looked at her. Sam or Phil would have looked her upside down and been grinning thinking about those silky satin sheets.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That slap against his manhood, his manliness, on top of all his other failures of nerve is what committed me to his exposure. I have taken more than my share of abuse from those criminals in the Irregulars who have started a smear campaign against me as being anti-gay, you know homophobic, against same-sex marriage and every other libel and slander they could produce in their insidious attempts to discredit me as I de-fang Holmes. Apparently, according to those ex-Irregulars who have come forward with information, there is a big internal battle between those who want to proudly “out” Holmes as a member of the Homintern pantheon and those who want to keep things hush-hush and go about their high-end criminal enterprises without the glare of such publicity. The latter clot seem to have become ascendant. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Today there are probably a million gay private detectives and nobody thinks anything of the matter least of all me. Probably there are half a million gay partners and gay married private detectives although I don’t know if anybody bothers to keep such figures. But back in the day there were different social-and as I said before legal strictures against the “love that dare not speak its name,” against private detectives who were “light on their feet,” were “fags” and were keeping house with another man. So no way could Holmes, or Holmes and his paramour, qualify as real private detectives. That is the icing on the cake that is the way things were. And that explains why Holmes didn’t take look one at that good-looking young women he shared temporary prison with. As I keep saying a fake, yesterday’s news. Enough said.]<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose <i>Our Lady of the Flowers </i>did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again I think through another cyber-attack error they had met at the <i>Whip and Chain</i> tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1942</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">It almost seems criminal after crucifying Lanny Lamont aka aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes above to bother running yet another bummer summary of one of these fake news cinematic storylines, here <i>Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, </i>which probably were made up on Fleet Street anyway at the behest of those nefarious Irregulars who through their media connections in the notorious Kit Kat Club, the haunt of the wild boys since about King George III, can get any libel published without recourse but I will simply use this as case number six in the struggle to topple Holmes and his ill-gotten fame.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Although Bond, James Bond, would sneer and M, the head of MI6, of British Intelligence would have heads rolling at 10 Downing Street somehow in the middle of World War II there was nobody available but a rank amateur key-hole peeper and known pervert Holmes to carry back some information and a key scientist who had developed a secret weapon that would change the war, would put Hitler to ground once the thing got into production. Assuming it worked, which it did. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Of course the bloody British are all over the discovery and probably expected to use it on their colonials after a shortened war bout with the Germans on the plains of Europe. Fortunately heroic Professor Moriarty was onto the scheme, on to it as long he lived anyway before falling afoul of Holmes and a martyr’s death. The scientist who created the invention, the bombsight which would help decimate cities, towns, villages was a control freak (as I found that decimation did happen in Africa after the war when “the natives got uppity” and the “bloody wogs in India too when the British were still trying to hold onto the edges of empire). He divided up his secret into four parts to be worked on by four different unscrupulous Nazi-like scientists who did not know each other and did not know all the moving parts.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Fortunately despite Holmes’ best efforts the good Professor was able to thwart him in his efforts to piece together the four separate parts which Holmes had been given an inkling about since that mad scientist had given a code to his girlfriend in case anything happened to him or in the more likely case that he forgot the separate parts by being too clever by half when he divided everything up. Moriarty had the dastardly scientist in his clutches away from the nefarious British agents who were after the secret formula. Needless to say when Holmes went to that girlfriend’s “flat” (apartment) to grab the illicit code he did not take peek number one at her and she was if anything lovelier than the good-looking young woman he had scorned in Washington on another caper. Yet another example as if any more were needed about where the man’s proclivities were directed. Needless to say as well that Holmes would stop at nothing to do in poor Professor Moriarty and he laid a very devious trap for our good fellow which he fell into and went to his death. RIP, Professor, RIP. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-65452079791090216282024-03-05T10:35:00.000-05:002024-03-05T10:35:00.166-05:00Asgard Is In The Ninth House-Once Again Down Valhalla Lane-Chris Hemsworth’s “Thor: The Dark World ” (2013)-A Film Review<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Asgard Is In The Ninth House-Once Again Down Valhalla Lane-Chris Hemsworth’s “Thor: The Dark World ” (2013)-A Film Review<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Laura Perkins<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Thor: The Dark World, starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tim Hiddleton, Marvel Comics, 2013<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">No, I will not as I did in the first review of the seemingly going on forever Marvel Comic Viking saga <i>Thor</i> moan and groan in public about having to dirty my hands with this kids’ stuff boys’ comic book super-hero fantasy adventures. Not because as a result of that very public wailing I got to get my feet wet in film noir even if on the edges and not the heart of the Bogie, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Lauren Bacall, Glenn Ford, Queen Gloria Grahame Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Jim Turner, Jim West treasure trove which my longtime companion Sam Lowell, a fellow writer here, mined for years and kind of was smarty pants about the matter. Now after reviewing <i>Beat The Devil</i> I can have my little bragging rights, can hold my head high. No, the hook here is what was left undone, was not finished in that first film review. The inevitable boy meets girl aspect which Hollywood, Bollywood, Indies, have also mined since moving pictures started well over a century ago now taking the lead from the novel and before that probably unto the Greek calends. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That unresolved “boy” hunk (still sorry Sam) Thor, played by hunk Chris Hemsworth (once again giving a beefcake shot for all the women, young and old, to feast on if so desired) “girl” Earthling Jane, although not Plain Jane by any means, played by Natalie Portman last seen by me playing in <i>The Black Swan</i> who have been separated, planetary separated when Thor in defense of the realm of hometown Asgard tore up the bridge to Earth to thwart brother, adopted brother as it turned out, Loki from invading other worlds in his quest to be king of the hill on the cheap. That left the two inter-planetary sweethearts in a bind and it did not take a rocket scientist or even a third rate screenwriter to know that another film would issue to resolve that little dilemma.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">So the Jane-Thor search for eternal blest will drive this one even more so than the first Thor-ian (sic, maybe) vehicle. Naturally this interplanetary romance will have to play out to a fight against the dark forces that guys like Thor and his small band of trusty devotees are always having to thwart. (Just as an aside I find it very interesting that ancient Thor from way back when doesn’t give a damn about taking an Asgard girlfriend like Lady Sif the one woman warrior in his cohort and who would certainly have liked to have gone under the silky sheets with him or say a female Frost Giant or any other dame from the nine realms but that is just an aside. I won’t even comment on how easily Thor from “primitive” Asgard has no problem with traversing say modern New York City or London and conversely Jane when she finally gets to meet Thor’s parents on backwater Asgard) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Here’s the “skinny” (I have already given the origin of that expression from Sam so that is that). Thor is sulking for his Janie, Loki is back in chains from his craziness on plundering Earth and Jane is looking, desperately looking for a way to get back to Thor. Simple. The trick will be done through the revival of an ethereal substance Aether produced by the Dark Elves which will sent the nine realms into darkness, into the abyss if it once again gets in wrong hands. The vehicle to do this, that Aether, is, oh well, Jane who is infected with it. Thor finds about it and gets down to Earth Asap on that bridge that links all the realms which has finally been repaired. Finding radioactive Jane they are transported to Asgard (to meet his folks I think but supposedly to fight the menacing Dark Elves and their malignant leader who will stop at nothing now that his magic elixir is back on the radar).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">All of this preliminary madness starts a series of battles between Thor and his trusty band and the Dark Elves and leader over various planetary and spacial locations including a minute alliance with Loki to get rid of the really bad guys. Loki “dies” honorably in battle and that is that but you know that cuckoo would do anything to get that coveted Asgardian throne. Eventually the Dark Elves are defeated, their leader wasted and the Aether out of bad guy hands. For now. Thor declines the throne offered by his “father” who turns out to be Loki and so it goes. Thor and Jane, well, they are back together on Earth but they still haven’t gotten under the silky sheets which makes me think that there will be yet another sequel. (Which turned out to be true as the third installment which I will not review, will not in a thousand years came out in 2017). I think I have had enough of this crowd, even hunk Thor. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-13247191566806972892024-03-04T16:49:00.000-05:002024-03-04T16:49:00.168-05:00If You First Practice To Deceive-Humphrey Bogart’s “Beat The Devil” (1953)-A Film Review <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Laura Perkins<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Beat The Devil, starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, directed by John Huston who co-write the screenplay with Truman Capote and thus the gold standard on this sent-up of noir-ish films, 1953 <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Sometimes I am more than willing to steal and idea from a fellow writer. Not in this case, the case of my fellow writer here Leslie Dumont, an idea for a story or review but a ploy to get something I wanted, or getting rid of something I didn’t want. My last film review if you can believe this was of the Marvel Comics cinematic version of the comic book character <i>Thor</i>. Without going into the gory details of how this came to be for an elderly adult writer who never had the boys’ fetish for comic book adventures and fantasies let me just say that it came to pass when our new site manager had a half-bright idea about reaching younger audiences and force-marched the whole staff into writing films reviews galore on the genre. Leslie’s story was a bit different in that she complained, complained publicly, that she was given five, count them, five “women’s films” in a row and though she was being type cast as such. The complaint, the very public complaint, got her a nice assignment thereafter. I took the same tact with this comic book super-hero tripe. And now I have a real review with a minor classic of the spook genre, <i>Beat The Devil</i>, with the likes of John Huston as director and screenwriter, Truman Capote as screenwriter as well and, most importantly, Humphrey Bogart as lead actor along with Gina Lollobrigida and Jennifer Jones. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That Bogie as “most importantly” is most important for me personally since this is in a sense a notice that I have arrived. My longtime companion fellow film review writer Sam Lowell has earned a certain fame as an expert in film noir, in the private detective branch especially with films like <i>The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past, Lady In The Lake</i> and the like in which Bogie played a central role. Sam would regale me with all kinds of quaint tips about what was what in those films and why he spent what he considered a worthwhile youth watching them mostly in revival theaters and retrospectives since even he is not old enough to have seen then in the original runs. Now I get to review maybe not the best Bogie vehicle but a good one as he closed out his worthy career. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Here is as Sam always said in his by-lines and I have picked up because I like the sound of it “the skinny.” This is about the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” a group of four, count them, four unsavory characters who are trying to corner the uranium market in 1950s Africa, a time when most of Africa was still colonial or close to it. Bogie comes into the act as the respectable if broke American businessman drawn into the scheme because he needs some dough, needs it badly to keep him and scratching wifey, played by Gina in clover-or else. This motley crew and a few others like the British couple of which Jennifer Jones is the flirty flighty wife are waiting on Italian shores for a ship to be ready to take them to the African shores and to those ill-gotten riches. Nothing goes right as to be expected in a spoof, a comedy of errors and mistaken intentions, especially by the leader of the cabal Ferguson (played by Robert Morley who did not evoke shades the “Fat Man” Sydney Greenstreet as the jovial but deadly treasure-seeker in <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> if as so critics contend this is a spoof of that classic) who suspects the Brit of trying to beat him to the punch in Africa, the imprisonment of that Englishman by the captain of the ship and the eventual fact that the wily Brit does grab the brass ring in the end.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Leaving Bogie laughing the laugh of the conned, very conned and our brigands under arrest. Like I say not the best Bogie, that would be The Maltese Falcon (also a Huston directed film), the super-classic <i>Casablanca</i> and the 1940s steamy with their clothes on <i>To Have and Have Not</i> with paramour Lauren Bacall. Still I can brag in the family that I did a Bogie film review and worked a con to get it. Not bad, huh. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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american left historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882945935118479402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22658920.post-60449766838881002502024-03-04T16:31:00.000-05:002024-03-04T16:31:00.178-05:00For Georgia O’Keeffe At Peabody-Essex (2017) Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">For Georgia O’Keeffe At Peabody-Essex (2017) Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">By Lenny Lynch<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Defiant, independent, no lover of men, boys either as she put it fore-square in her late Victorian high school yearbook (making me wonder if she was not some preternatural Frida Kahlo taking her pleasures where she found them but the sever looks with that hard-press bun of a hairpiece done about six ways to severity make me think that she lived for her art and thought about sex through her fleshy vaginal lush flowers. And so she went to see William Merritt Chase the godfather of many of her generation. Went too a-skimming to that oasis of modernism and protest art politics the Art Student League in New York City then Mecca on the rise (ASL making me think that it was a popular front invention of those devious American-born Stalinists with their hands deep in the pie but no that institution stands on its own although when you look at the roster from Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollack and beyond makes you wonder-good wonder, the wonder of Scotty Fitzgerald’s lonesome Dutch sailors as they coursed Long Island Sound and saw, hell, saw the fresh green breast of a new land. Pity later-okay. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Hit the town running pushing into old Stieglitz’s workshop, what did he call it oh salon, he onto something about art once the camera took pretty pictures out of an artist’s hands (took praise be ugly pictures too picture old dusty Okies travelling, sideshow geeks, drag queens working too hard to be Miss Judy Garland, gay lovers in secluded closets before the Stonewall wash us clean, holy goofs and con men, things blowing up, things being blown up but mainly the human comedy to make one think that something somewhere went awry) and left the field shattered dumping those picture perfect pantries filled with precise foods, prefect flowers in season or out, and brilliant baskets of fruit, my god, millions of brilliant baskets of fruit, grapes gleaning pearl-like. No the times, like all times, required something more and Ms. O’Keeffe was showing just a glimmer of that understanding when she went to upstate New York and painted red, blue, green barns, and the like showing us a new pastoral. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">But forget all that. No, put it in the past once she headed Western, an Eastern girl born for the West just look at those later photographs of her like some wizen Earth Mother pioneer stock come a-blazing to tame the land to her brush. Make desert-forsaken whitened cracked cattle bones and sagebrush come alive in the new dispensation. Made that homestead Ghost Ranch (dude ranch so figure we are close to Professor Turner’s closing of the frontier Clark Gable will do the rest come <i>The Misfits</i> time) come alive with Western-strewn colors all siena brown, mojave yellow, death valley red. Did it with some style too, something to look at in big gallery art museum walls. Something to ponder about living for your art and be damned with the rest. Be damn with the men, boys too. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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