The Face (book) Photo That Launched A Thousand Clicks- Or “Foul-Mouth” Phil Hits Pay-Dirt-Finally

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Facebook for those three or four people who have not gotten the word about this new form of "social-networking" yet.

Peter Paul Markin comment:

Yes, I know. I know damn well that I should not indulge my seemingly endlessly sex-haunted old-time corner boys. After all this space is nothing but a high-tone “high communist” propaganda outlet on most days- the good days. I should, moreover, not indulge a “mere” part-timer at our old North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out be-bop night “up the Downs” like one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. (For those who do not know what that reference refers to don’t worry you all had your own “up the Downs” and your own corner boys, or mall rats as the case may be, who hung out there.) Despite his well-known, almost automatic, foul mouth in the old days Phil had his fair share, more than his fair share given that mouth, of luck with the young women (girls, in the old days, okay). I am still mad at him for “stealing” my old-time neighborhood heartthrob, Millie Callahan, right from under my nose. (And right in the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church after Mass to boot. If he is still a believer he stands condemned. No mercy. As for me, an old heathen, I was just glad that I stared at her ass during Mass. I stand condemned anyway, if things work out that way).

Well, that was then and now is now and if you read about “poor” Phil Larkin’s trials and tribulations with the ladies recently in a post here entitled -“Sexless” sex sites” you know that his old Irish blarney ( I am being kind to the old geezer here) had finally given out and that he was scoreless lately. That is he was scoreless as of that writing. As Phil pointed out to me personally as part of our conversations while I was editing his story he felt that he would have had better luck with finding a woman companion (for whatever purpose) by just randomly calling up names in the telephone directory than from that “hot” sex site that he found himself embroiled in. And, in an earlier time, he might have been right.


But we are now in the age of so-called “social networking” (of which this space, as an Internet-driven format is a part) and so, by hook or by crook, someone placed his story (or rather, more correctly, my post from this blog) on his Facebook wall. As a result of that “click” Phil is now “talking” to a young (twenty-something) woman graduate student from Penn State (that is why just a few minutes ago he was yelling “Go, Nittany Lions” in my ear over the cell phone) and is preparing to head to the rolling Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania for a “date” with said twenty-something. Go figure, right? So my placement of this saga, or rather part two of the saga (mercifully here will be no more), is really being done in the interest of my obscure sense of completeness rather than “mere” indulgence of an old-time corner boy. As always I disclaim, and disclaim loudly for the world to hear, that while I have helped edit this story this is the work of one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin, formerly of North Adamsville and now on some twisted, windy road heading to central Pennsylvania.

Phil Larkin comment:

Jesus, that Peter Paul Markin is a piece of work. Always rubbing in that “foul-mouth” thing. But I guess I did get the better of him on that Millie Callahan thing back in the day and he did provide me a “life-line” just now with his posting of my story on his damn communist-addled blog. It is a good thing we go back to “up the Downs” time and that I am not a “snitch” because some of the stuff I have read from him here should, by rights, be reported directly to J. Edgar Hoover, or whoever is running the F.B.I., if anybody is. We can discuss that another time because I don’t have time to be bothered by any such small stuff. Not today. Not since I hit “pay-dirt” with my little Heloise. Yes, an old-fashioned name, at least I haven’t heard the name used much lately for girls, but very new-fashioned in her ideas. She is a twenty-five graduate student from Penn State and I am, as I speak, getting ready to roll out down the highway for our first “in person” meet.

You all know, or should be presumed to know to use a Markinism (Christ, we still call his silly little terms that name even forty years later), that I was having a little temporary trouble finding my life’s companion through sex sites. I told that story before and it is not worth going into here. [Markin: Fifty years Phil, and every other guy (or gal) from the Class of 1964. Do the math. I hope you didn’t try to con Heloise with that “youthful” fifty-something gag-christ, right back to you, Phil.] Let me tell you this one though because it had done nothing but restore my faith in modern technology.

Little communist propaganda front or not, Peter Paul’s blog goes out into the wilds of cyberspace almost daily (and it really should be reported to the proper authorities now that I have read his recent screeds on a Russian Bolshevik guy named Trotsky who is some kind of messiah to Markin and his crowd). So a few weeks ago somebody, somehow ( I am foggy, just like Markin, on the mechanics of the thing, although I know it wasn’t some internet god making “good” cyberspace vibes or anything like that) picked it up and place it (linked it) on his Facebook wall ( I think that is the proper word). Let’s call him Bill Riley (not his real name and that is not important anyway) Now I don’t know if you know how this Facebook thing works, although if you don’t then you are among the three, maybe four, people over the age of five that doesn’t.

Here’s what I have gathered. Bill Riley set up an account with his e-mail address, provided some information about himself and his interests and waited for the deluge of fan responses and “social-connectedness” (Markin’s word). Well, not exactly wait. Every day in every way you are inundated with photos of people you may know, may not know, or may or may not want to know and you can add them to your “friends” pile (assuming they ‘confirm” you request for friendship). Easy, right?

Well, yes easy is right because many people will, as I subsequently found out, confirm you as a friend for no other reason than that you “asked” them to include you. Click- confirm. Boom. This, apparently, is what happened when Bill “saw” Heloise’s photo. (I found out later, after “talking” to Heloise for a while, that she did not know Bill Riley or much about him except that he has a wall on Facebook. So the weird part is that Bill “introduced” us, although neither Heloise nor I know Bill. This has something Greek comedic, or maybe a Shakespeare idea, about it, for sure.). In any case Heloise, as a sociology graduate student at Penn State, took an interest in the “sexless” sex site angle for some study she was doing around her thesis and, by the fates, got hooked into the idea that she wanted to interview me about my experiences, and other related matters.

Without going into all the details that you probably know already I “joined” Bill Riley’s Facebook friends cabal and through him his “friend” Helosie contacted me about an interview. Well, we “chatted” for a while one day and she asked some questions and I asked others in my most civilized manner. What I didn’t know, and call me stupid for not knowing, was that Heloise not only was a “friend” of Bill’s but, unlike me (or so I thought), had her own Facebook page with photos. Now her photo on Bill’s wall was okay but, frankly, she looked just like about ten thousand other earnest female twenty-something graduate students. You know, from hunger. But not quite because daddy or mommy or somebody is paying the freight to let their son or daughter not face reality for a couple more years in some graduate program where they can “discover” themselves. Of course, naturally old cavalier that I am said, while we were chatting, that she was attractive, and looked energetic and smart and all that stuff. You know the embedded male thing with any woman, young or old, that looks the least bit “hit-worthy.” (Embedded is Markin’s word, sorry.)That photo still is on Bill’s wall and if I had only seen that one I would still be sitting in some lounge whiskey sipping my life away.

Heloise’s “real”photos, taken at some Florida beach during Spring break, showed a very fetching (look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know that old-time word means) young woman that in her bikini had me going. Let’s put it this way I wrote her the following little “note” after I got an eyeful:


Hi Heloise - Recently I made a comment, after I first glanced at your photo wall, that you looked fetching (read, attractive, enchanting, hot, and so on). On that first glance I, like any red-blooded male under the age of one hundred, and maybe over that for all I know, got a little heated up. Now I have had a change to cool down, well a little anyway, and on second peek I would have to say you are kind of, sort of, in a way, well, okay looking. Now that I can be an objective observer I noticed that one of your right side eyelashes is one mm, or maybe two, off-balance from the left side. Fortunately I have the “medicine” to cure you. If you don’t mind living your hideous asymmetrical deformation that is up to you. I will still be your friend. But if you were wondering, deep in the night, the sleepless night, why you have so few male Facebook friends or why guys in droves are passing your page by there you have it. Later-Phil.

The famous old reverse play that has been around for a million years, right? Strictly the blarney, right? [Markin: right, Phil, right as ever]. That little literary gem however started something in her, some need for an older man to tell her troubles to or something. And from there we started to “talk” more personally and more seriously. See I had it all wrong about her being sheltered out there in the mountains by mom and dad keeping her out of harm’s way until she “found” herself. No, Heloise was working, and working hard, to make ends meet and work on her doctorate. Her story, really, without the North Adamsville corner boy thing, would be something any of us Salducci’s guys would understand without question.( I was not a part-time corner boy by the way, except by Frankie Riley’s 24/7/365 standards and The Scribe’s). [Markin: Watch it, Phil. I told you not to use that nickname anymore.] I’ll tell you her story sometime depending on how things work but right now I am getting ready to go get a tank full of gas and think a little about the photos that launched a thousand clicks.

Markin comment:

Phil, like I said to Johnny Silver about what people might say about his little teeny-bopper love. Go for it. Don’t watch out. And like I said before we had better get to that communist future we all need pretty damn quick if for no other reason that to get some sexual breathes of fresh air that such a society promises.

Reflections On Old Time (Old Times, 1960s Version) Methods Of Making Revolutionary Propaganda- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for mimeograph machines (and links there for other ancient propaganda agents, machine section). Kudos to Wikipedia on this one.

I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era GI anti-war movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League) to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with that war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).

That commentary centered on a comparison of the old-fashioned way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine (and other now exotic machines) and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called "good old days" when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that held true not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather without resolution no in our favor), was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time, the early liberal parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 as well).

One of the most poignant moments in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life for me was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. There he described a crude hectographic method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of 1960s work than today’s high-speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. Trotsky noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch! That provided an additional image, an image of something that also might have been used in the 1960s night if a machine broke down, or got cranky, that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.

A picture, or rather pictures, come to mind just now very similar to the one Trotsky described in his memoir, all due technological advances between his time and ours considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971, Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building still findable in any medium or large-sized city, if you look hard enough. Long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce-work private detectives, penny-ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell, for the rent (discounted usually, depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses).

Or some clean, always clean, back room, down-stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s disdain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available, if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long-in-the-tooth old-time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t quite get him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels,” but on the right side of the angels.

And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time, or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, and to produce the latest newsletter to spread the word. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing,” that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-"spell check" days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about making sure it was only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused, media-icon-obsessed, Marshall McLuhan message age, couldn’t take more than one sheet. Right? Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”

Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris, take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning already before they were done, New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… But enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here, is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.

Let me finish by reiterating something I said in one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty [referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know," know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on your hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friends, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for that damn wall poster paste.