This 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
Monday, September 16, 2013
We Urgently Need 100, 000 Signatures-Sign The On-Line Petition-President Obama Pardon Private Manning -Free Private Manning- The Heroic Whistle-Blower Now!
Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo. The Struggle Continues …
The draconian 35 years sentence handed down by a military judge on August 21, 2013 marked a new focus on the campaign to free Private Manning. The central theme of the day and of the new campaign is –“President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning.” An immediate task is to begin organizing around the call by Amnesty International and the Private Manning Support Network to sign an on-line petition directed to the President. The goal is to get 100,000 on-line signatures by September 20, 2013 to make our case loud and clear. All pardon petition efforts should focus on the on-line petition to send that message as one voice.
Below is a link to the Amnesty International/Private Manning Support Network to sign the on-line petition. The process is a little more cumbersome than other such petitions, including having to set up an account with an e-mail but the struggle to free Private Manning is worth the extra time and effort for all the light shed on the governmental cover-ups and other nefarious actions exposed.
Call (202) 685-2900- Major General Jeffery S. Buchanan is the Convening Authority for Private Manning’s court martial, which means that he has the authority to decrease the sentence, no matter what the judge imposed. Ask General Buchanan to use his authority to reduce the 35 year sentence handed down by Judge Lind.
Please help us reach all these important contacts: Adrienne Combs, Deputy Officer Public Affairs (202) 685-2900adrienne.m.combs.civ@mail.mil-Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, Public Affairs Officer (202) 685-4899michelle.l.martinhing.mil@mail.mil The Public Affairs Office fax #: 202-685-0706
The Public Affairs Office is required to report up the chain of command the number of calls they receive on a particular issue, so please help us flood the office with support for whistleblower Chelsea (Bradley) Manning today!
We Need 100, 000 Signatures-Sign The On-Line Petition-President Obama Pardon Private Manning - Free Chelsea Manning- The Heroic Whistle-Blower Formerly Known As Bradley Now!
Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo. On August 22, 2013 David Coombs announced that as of that date Private Bradley Manning, the unjustly imprisoned heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower soldier, wants to be called Chelsea and to be referred to by use of the feminine pronoun. How this change affects the language used in campaigns after the Amnesty International/Private Manning Support Network’s petition to President Obama remains to be seen but for now we will use Pardon Bradley Manning. Here is a link to announcement-
The draconian 35 years sentence handed down by a military judge on August 21, 2013 marks a new focus on the campaign to free Private Manning. The central theme of the day and of the new campaign is –“President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning.”An immediate task is to begin organizing around the call by Amnesty International and the Private Manning Support Network to sign an on-line petition directed to the President. The goal is to get 100,000 on-line signatures by September 20, 2013 to make our case loud and clear. All pardon petition efforts should focus on the on-line petition to send that message as one voice.
Below is a link to the Amnesty International/Private Manning Support Network to sign the on-line petition. The process is a little more cumbersome than other such petitions, including having to set up an account with an e-mail but since they (and you know who the they are (first letter N) have all our e-mail addresses anyway push on. This is for Chelsea (Bradley).
Government bypassed 4th Amendment to seize Manning supporters’ electronics:
The American Civil Liberties Union writes,
We are releasing new government documents that provide rare insight into how the government uses its powers at the border to search and seize Americans’ electronic devices. The documents, obtained by our client David House as a result of his lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, demonstrate how the government is abusing its border search authority to evade constitutional restrictions on its surveillance powers. (You can see the documents here.). House was stopped at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport coming back from vacation in November 2010. At the time, he was working with the Bradley Manning Support Network, which was raising funds for the legal defense of the soldier who has since plead guilty to providing classified documents to WikiLeaks.
Benedict Cumberbatch on Chelsea Manning “I think what she did was incredibly brave.”
When asked about Pvt. Chelsea Manning’s case and sentence, British actor Benedict Cumberbatch said, “I think what she did was incredibly brave.” Cumberbatch spoke to Buzzfeed while at the Toronto Film Festival promoting his new movie “The Fifth Estate,” in which he played WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Margaret Talbot writes for the New Yorker Magazine’s blog about what prison could look like for Chelsea Manning as a transgender woman on a quest to receive hormone therapy:
To many people—those who aren’t crazy about the idea of providing prisoners with health care at all, let alone health care for gender dysphoria, or those who consider Manning a traitor and thus deserving of whatever indignities can be heaped upon her—that’s no surprise and just as it should be. But that kind of blanket denial of treatment is very much at odds with principles established for non-military prisons.
***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-The Stuff Of Dreams-Take Three
Hey, Inspector Tim Riley here. I guess by now you have all read in the Examiner or heard on the radio about how Sam Sutter, who we want for questioning about a couple of things, a couple of shootings and why, has flown the coop. This is a tough one, personally, see Sam was my old friend from when he was on the San Francisco police force with me several years ago, back in the rough and ready early ‘30s when this town was wide open. When you could get all the illegal liquor, women, dope, graft, whatever as long as you had the kale, the dough. A time when life was cheap, when if you were not tough and rough you didn’t have Chinaman’s chance of surviving, nice life surviving anyway. He, fresh out of college, U. of San Francisco if I recall correctly, and I fresh out of the academy the first in my family to make the civil service list and proud of it, were assigned to the D.A.s office where we had our hands full, no, more than our hands full with every desperado who headed west when things went south back east and we had to clean up the mess, or at least keep things in check.
Sam pulled my chestnuts out of the fire more than once when I was more rum brave and foolish than smart running up again Jimmy Clancy’s gang. We were chasing windmills in those days going to clean up the whole world during our tenure although Sam and his college training (and maybe that one year of law school over at Hastings before he decided he wasn’t cut on to be somebody’s mouthpiece) always was reining me in trying get me to pace myself. I got wind that the Clancy gang was unloading unbonded liquor over by the Sutro Baths and went out there along to make the bust one night. Sam came out guns blazing and saved me when things turned hot but it was close. He helped me another time when I was down at the Embarcadero and I was at the short end of the stick against Hymie Swartz’s boys when I tried to serve a silly summons on old Hymie. But enough of cutting up old torches, after all this is about Sam and his troubles, his big troubles. I kept in touch with Sam over the years even after he went private. Yeah, a private snooper, oops, sorry, private detective, taking any case that interested him, and sometimes when the rent was due, some client “forgot” to pay the bill for services rendered leaving him short, or some dame was giving him that old come hither look instead of dough , anything that came through his door, no questions asked. Hell, not that long ago he and I worked a couple of cases where our investigations met. The Roma gang, yeah, the big drug and numbers guys, was spreading its wings into the Bay Area trying to take over the rackets from old man Clancy and his son, Billy, and we were on the inside of that one and Sam was working a missing waywarddaughter case, a Clancy daughter,and our paths crossed. Crossed amid some old time gunfire which we had to shoot our way out over on Bay Street, down by the park. Jesus. He bailed me out of a couple of other tight spots when the mobsters weren’t taking kindly to the idea of a collar and were throwing lead my way so I don’t know what got intohim. I don’t know why he flew the coop, why he left his partner Miles Regan, to take the heat after he left. Who am I kidding. I know exactly, extremely exactly why he left, why he flew the coop. A dame, the whiff of perfume, the feel of satin sheets, you get it, right, get it if you are a guy. I got a few looks at her as we were honing in on the case afterit came to our attention that a couple of gunsels were unaccounted for, unaccounted for that is lying face down somewhere, and Sam’s name came up on the ticket. He gave us the runaround like he sometimes did when he was working at close quarters for a client, that thing about confidentiality that he hid behind when it was to his advantage. I could see why he might run amok with her but still he had plenty of dames, good-looking dames with dough, and no strings attached. One dame, a looker too, some soap heiress from back East, wanted to set him up in his very own suite, with car and expenses attached after he pulled her out of some opium den before she went off the deep end and lost all her jack through disinheritance. The scheme sounded like he was to be her pet poodle and so, no way, but he thought about it. There were a couple of others too maybe not the lookers like the soap dame but with dough and with plenty of tough guys wanting to go around. All I know this time, with this dame, is the note he left for me at his office desk that Miles passed on to me- “the stuff of dreams, I got to go for it, Tim. Good luck.” Hell, I better back up and tell you what I know, the facts, and maybe you can make something out of what he wrote to me. Like I say Sam and Miles ran a private detective agency over on Post Street. Miles mainly did the divorce work, key-hole peeper stuff since that was what he was built for, a pretty boy, a skirt-chaser, although he was married, very married from what I heard. Miles stuck around for gratitude time and I heard did pretty well with lonely gay divorcees whatever his wife might think. Sam, frankly, not as a good-looking a guy as Miles, Miles and all his feathers, but built and tough, which some dames definitely go for, did the real work, the missing jewelry, the runaway husband or wife, the quick notice body guard stuff, and when necessary the ransom stuff that took a few brains to figure out like with that soap dame. Remind me to tell you about that one sometime when I have time, when we get Sam in our mitts because it was a beauty. The kidnappers never knew what hit them and our soap dame walked away from that mess just as nice as you please. And knew how to show a tough guy her appreciation.
No job was off-limits except that it had to be legit, legit at least in Sam’s calculating mind. So he made a living at it after he left the force. He said to me after he left the D.A.s office when the Madera case blew up in our faces, when a couple of coppers got killed because we didn’t have enough intelligence about the operation when we moved in, that he got tired of chasing windmills trying to bring law and order to the Wild West for peanuts when he could make some decent dough on his own and without the bureaucracy crabbing on him all the time. And maybe he had a point, maybe he was right, except I am married and have three hungry kids and so I couldn’t, wouldn’t think of leaving the force. Yah, and too I am still proud to be on the force, to be the first in the family to make the civil service list. Sam had bigger dreams, dreams he kept hidden, hidden from me anyway. So Sam was ready, ready as hell, when she came through the door.
She being Mary Kelly, but who knows what her name really was.She used Brigitte O’Shea on me the first time I met her. That first time I got a good look at her when we were trying to figure out what Sam was up to. She had a passport with the name Helen Dewar on it and later, through Interpol we found she had used Susan Gross, Minnie Smith and Sarah Miles according to her rap sheet so who knows. Lets’ call her Mary because that is what Sam called her, okay. She came through Sam’s office door like a whirlwind. One of those dames whose every movement is calculated for effect, calculated to get some guy to do something daffy, pretty please. Good-looking too, Irish of course, a tall rangy one, taller than Sam, a little too thin for me but a looker, with long brunette hair, blues eyes, the works, and afigure that cried out come hither. A woman who would not have to carry her own luggage, not for long, as my old Irish grandfather used to say.
The time I saw her I would say though that maybe had had a couple of scrapes with cheap street recently but maybe that was me thinking that later when stuff came out about who she was and where she had been . Forget that, okay, forget the cheap street stuff because that stuff wouldn’t mean anything to Sam when she got his wanting habits on. And he got his own wanting habits on, that damsel in distress sensor that beamed in his head even in the old days back on the force when he was nothing but a flat-out skirt-chaser.If I know Sam it was the perfume, the scent, whatever she was wearing combined with her looks that got him, that and the story she had to tell.
And what a story. Apparently she was a chronic lying because she told about six versions of the same story with different twists from what Sam said to Miles before he left and from what little he told me when a few things were going awry in his life before we losthis trail. Sam, despite his reputation for chasing windmills, was cynical enough not to believe any of Mary’s stories too much, although that didn’t slow him down grasping for her favors once he got a whiff of that scent. I bet it was gardenia, it had to be; because I know for a fact that he almost felt off the deep end before when he was on the force after he ran into a woman, Hazel James, smelling of gardenia, who murdered her husband and he was ready to jump through hoops for her saying it was self-defense. All the evidence drifted toward the hard fact that she had shot that dear husband while he was drunk and passed out on the floor. Sam also neglected, or tried to neglect, the little fact that he was having an affair with her after she shown up one day in our office claiming that the dead husband was beating her up. So, yah, I bet six-two-and even that it was gardenia.
Mary told him a story, a story about a statue that she had lost, a very valuable statue that she had purchased in the Orient, in some Hong Kong antique shop, and had been stolen from her room at the Grand Hotel in Shang-hai by a ring of high-end thieves one foggy night.She had been on their trail ever since and had gotten wind that they were in town and she wanted Sam to go with her to negotiate for the return of the statue. Now I still don’t know if the statue thing, the value of it was hooey, or real. All I know is that a couple of guys are dead, Sam is gone, and I am left trying to pick up the pieces so I assume the thing was valuable. A small old time statue, with jewels on it, lots of jewels, in the form of a Buddha.
So Sam and Mary meet this gang, the leader anyway, a guy named Sid Green, a guy known to us from Interpol, a bad character, drugs, kidnapping, art thefts, that kind of thing, and left no loose ends from what we knew, and a couple of his bodyguards, at the Imperial Hotel over on Mission Street down by the bay. Sam did the talking, the hired- gun talking knowing who he was dealing with, but there was no go, no negotiations because after China Sid now knew that the damn thing was even more valuable than Mary thought. Supposedly there was a ton of stuff inside, rare, very rare, almost extinct jade that made the jewels on the outside seem like costume stuff.So no go.
What Sam also found out, found out to no effect as we now know, was that Mary had previously been an associate of Sid’s, a close associate in the days where she was his queen of the married man blackmail scams. They had had a falling out because she was trying to run her own operation, trying for her own stuff of dreams once she got onto the fact that she was smarter and better organizer that Sid. But now she was trying to grab that statue anyway she could, for herself to get a little capital to pull her own scores. And grab it for Sam, of course, now that along the way between the different versions of her story, they had shared some satin sheets together. Nothing happened that night, no shoot-outs, but the no go signaled on both sides that some nasty business was coming down.
The first nasty business was a couple of days later when Sid sent one of his gunsels, a punk kid named Elmer to eliminate Sam and Mary, eliminate for good over at his place. All this Elmer got for his efforts was a quick Sam R.I.P.That action reopened negotiations or so Sam and Mary thought when Sid sent a message that he wanted a truce. Sid arranged for another meeting at the Imperial Hotel to reevaluate the situation under the new circumstances, the one less bodyguard circumstances he said. The new circumstances though turned out to be a planned ambush down the corridor from Sid’s suite. All that got was another gunsel, Willy Proust, a local rat, who we had a rap sheet on as long as your arm, another Sam R.I.P.After the gun smoke settled Sid alone now in his suite was easy pickings for Sam and Mary. They just took the statue from Sid’s table while he watched, watched with a bemused smile. They left, slamming the door behind them, with the Buddha in tow.
Here is where things get squirrely though. Once they got back to Mary’s place and checked out the insides they found that the material, the jade, had been replaced with fake jade, some glass really. See Sid, the savvy old con, had pulled a switch, just in case. Needless to say Sid has since flown the coop for parts unknown. Sam at that point was ready to call it quits, ready to come in and talk to me about everything. He did some over the phone, giving me a lot of the stuff that I am telling you, and I told him to come on in on his own.Then something happened, something happened to Sam, because I never heard from him again, except that note, that “stuff of dreams” note he left at his office. I figure Mary did one of her come hither acts, maybe did a couple of things to him in bed that she had picked up in the Orient, Kama Sutra stuff or whatever they call it, and got him all steamed up and so he threw in his lot with her. Or maybe he just got tired of living on cheap street, on somebody else’s sorrows. He, they, according to our sources which may have it all wrong had been variously seen in Hong Kong, Istanbul, and Vienna. Wherever Sam is and for whatever reason he blew town I hope, I hope like hell, that it isn’t me that has to bring him in.
From The Roy Bluff –Laura Perkins Trilogy -She Belongs To …
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
When a writer for Rolling Stone or one of those music-oriented magazines you see flooding the newsstands and supermarket check-out counters asked Ben Freed, the longtime road manager for Roy Bluff, the famous hip-hop-infused folk rocker, off the record, on his take on the Roy Bluff-Laura Perkins flare-up he answered like this:
Sure I knew Roy Bluff on his way up, and Laura, Laura Perkins too when she came on the scene to help build his legend, but I will speak of her later. I knew that if he kept plugging away with his lyrics, his lyrics that spoke to our weird times, the late ‘90s, to the time of the seemingly end-time great plague in this world, wars, injustice, inequality, that he would break through the thickets of the music business and rise to the top, kicking ass and screaming all the way. I knew that if Roy just kept to his words, to his music, and left the other stuff alone he would be immortal. That other stuff being a huge reservoir appetite for high shelf whiskey, high-grade dope, mainly marijuana but later, cocaineand some opium, and any grade women. But that was what made him Roy, the other stuff, and it was not until later that I realized that without the other stuff, without living on edge city, without the high-wire act of his life that he could not produce those words that spoke to us. Nada, nothing.
Now the Algiers was a smaller club than he would play on tour although frequented by serious music aficionados and some hanger-on second level celebrities, you know Village-wise artists and musicians like Manny Ray and The Kinksters and off-Broadway denizens like Mike Ester and Fiona Florin. During the break between sets Roy headed for the bar and his couple of shots of then low-shelf whiskey and a beer chaser. I, sitting at the bar, offered to buy him a drink in appreciation for what was a good performance, one that touched me at points, one that “spoke” to me in ways that mainline hip-hop artists did not at that point. He accepted and we talked further and then we talked later after the show when he again hit the bar. The long and short of it was that after a few nights of that at the Algiers I became something of a roadie for him (unpaid at first and then when he hit overpaid). So yeah I knew Roy for a while, a while before he hit it big, and before he met Laura on the way to hitting big. Roy, as everybody knows is more that capable of speaking, of defending himself and his actions, small and large, infantile and immortal.
Laura deep down was another story, and many a lonely Roy-ing night (a term we shared for the care and protection of one Roy Bluff and his frailties) we shared a bottle or a joint and commiserated over that man. One night, one night in Kansas City, after the show at the famous Hi-Hat Club, and after a particularly tough Roy-ing period for Laura when, against all good judgment, he had almost hit her when she tried to temper his furies she laid out some stuff for me about their relationship, about how it started and so I want to tell you my take on her story, on her flaming love for the Roy.And yes I had a thing for Laura, still do as little good as it does me, so let’s get that off the table right now. Here goes:
As always with Laura she was a little hesitant even after a few drinks to speak openly of her troubles, her sorrows, having been brought up in a tight-lipped Irish-Catholic household just outside of Yonkers. Tight-lipped as I knew from my own experiences with my maternal grandparents was that you did not air your dirty line in public. And so Laura hesitated although she knew, or should have known, that I had strong evidence either by not being blinded by Roy or that he told me in his more lucid (read: not drunk or stoned) of what was, and was not, happening between her and Roy.
She started out talking about a diary that she had started keeping the previous few months out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over. She pulled it out of her purse because she said she wanted to look up some stuff that she might have forgotten or had put a certain way as she wrote it out so that I would know what she felt at the time.As she read aloud to me one entry she laughed, a gorgeous Laura laugh, an infectious laugh she had when she was in high spirits and that everybody took shelter under. She laughed that she had like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature, needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about sex. She had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her. I blushed a little when she detailed some of her early sexual explorings, although she only made a couple of explicit references, metaphor unlike with Roy, Roy when non-lyric producing, who swore and talked obscenely almost automatically, being her forte in talking about sex.
So mainly she kept the diary because she felt she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and an acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, sister, snow you know), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.
Laura made it clear, painfully clear, and drew a circle in the air as if to make sure there was no mistake about her feelings Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and Laura needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. Laura said that as she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. Nights then when she was not “blue,” Roy Bluff blue.
Laura spoke of how she remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. I thought as she mentioned it a typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before. I had used a variation on that theme myself when younger, maybe high school younger, testing some young thing, testing just to be testing like testing the limits of outrageous behavior was the be-all and end-all of any relationship. It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in Roy’s head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced to her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.
Roy went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. The she confided in me something she did not think I knew. Roy Bluff is not his real name, although out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name was Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, musical performance concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man,
[What Laura did not know which I did, and which she did not find out until later, after the night our talk was thatRonald Smith was not Roy’s real name either but Zebulon Jordan. The way I found out about it was the night, the first night he was busted he tried to use Ronald Smith when I attempted to bail him out and the hick cops in Louisville couldn’t find the name at the address given and were going to hold him over. He coped to the Jordan that night. All of which is neither here nor there since now he has had his name legally changed to Roy Bluff.]
So it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter.
Roy continued on that line about the women as he stated that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. That was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.
Later full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called his “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best out of him. And waxing a little poetic he said wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the Butte snows at bay, Laura laughed as she said this, make love that night.
She said Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late Usually he would bring it up to settle himself down at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. As he set himself up for the day’s work, actually night’s work since he would be giving a concert later that evening, he would start. The maybes, as I knew because more than once he had used me as a sounding board, being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin.
The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to me of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say). She said Roy had told her he would laugh to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, judgmental was just not the way she was built. She said she had let a little grin form on her face in recognition of that trait, a trait that she told me she was particularly proud of.
Then Roy would describe to her his thoughts on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank basements and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.
She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, ditto on the attraction look. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. Funny she said since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.
Yeah, yeah that was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All she knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. He would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication that if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.
Then Roy would move on to a blow by blow description of what happened after that. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she said he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were the days when he was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend), and reasoned what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he said he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. A patent lie, no question.
Then he went on to speak of a maybe that totally befuddled him. It was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was“mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older then being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Roy would then give the full-court press.Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes they, had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say“sell-out.” Yes, she had protected him from the scavengers as I had, maybe better since she did not have to deal with them like I had to.
Which led to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized (and not long before she started keeping that diary), he almost did so out of some hubristic rage. She waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was… “ And as the tears slowly formed as she finished the quote she floored me with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more try.
Damn.
***In The 101st Anniversary Year Of The Great IWW-led Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-Reflections In A Wobblie Wind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman Every kid who has had wanderlust, even just a starry little, little bit on his or her way to the big, bad world. Meaning every half-starved, ill-clothed, hard-scrabble kid reduced to life in walking paces, footsore, time-lost sore, endless bus waiting sore, and not the speed, the “boss” hi-blown ’57 gilded cherry red Chevy speed of the 20th century go-go (and, hell, not even close in the 21st century speedo Audi super go-go) itching, itching like crazy, like feverish night sweats crazy, to bust out of the small, no, tiny, four-square wall project existence and have a room, a big room, of his or her own.
Meaning also every day-dream kid doodling his or her small-sized dream away looking out at forlorn white foam-flecked, grey-granite ocean expanses, flat brown-yellow, hell, beyond brown-yellow to some evil muck prairie home expanses, up ice cold, ice blue, beyond blue rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (or name your very own generational signifier) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yeah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it.
And every kid who dreamed the dream of the great jail break-out of dark, dank, deathic bourgeois family around the square, very square, table life and unnamed, maybe un-namable, teen hormonal craziness itching, just itching that’s all. Waiting, waiting infinity waiting, kid infinity waiting, for the echo rebound be-bop middle of the night sound of mad monk rock daddies from far away radio planets, and an occasional momma too, to ease the pain, to show the way, hell, to dance the way away. To break out of the large four-square wall suburban existence, complete with Spot dog, and have some breathe, some asphalt highway not traveled, some Jersey turnpike of the mind not traveled, of his or her own.
Meaning also, just in case it was not mentioned before, every day-dream kid, small roomed or large, doodling, silly doodling to tell the truth, his or her dream away looking out at fetid seashores next to ocean expanses, corn-fed fields next to prairie home expanses, blasted human-handed rocks up rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (oh, yeah, just name your generational signifier, okay) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yeah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it.
And every guy or gal who has been down on their luck a little. Like maybe he or she just couldn’t jump out of that project rut, couldn’t jump that hoop when somebody just a little higher up in the food chain laughed at those ill-fitted clothes, those stripped cuffed pants one size too large when black chinos, uncuffed, were called for. Or when stuffed bologna sandwiches, no mustard, had to serve to still some hunger, some ever present hunger. Or just got caught holding some wrong thing, some non-descript bauble really, or just had to sell their thing for their daily bread and got tired, no, weary, weary-tired weary, of looking at those next to ocean, prairie, rocky mountain expanses. Or, maybe, came across some wrong gee, some bad-ass drifter, grifter or midnight sifter and had to flee. Yeah, crap like that happens, happens all the time in project time. And split, split in two, maybe more, split west I hope.
And every guy or gal who has slept, newspaper, crushed hat, or folded hands for a pillow, all worldly possessions in some ground found Safeway shopping bag along some torrent running river, under some hide-away bridge, off some arroyo spill, hell, anywhere not noticed and safe, minute safe, from prying, greedy evil hands. Worst, the law. Or, half-dazed smelling of public toilet soap and urinals, half-dozing on some hard shell plastic seat avoiding maddened human this way and that traffic noises and law prodding keep movings and you can’t stay heres in some wayward Winnemucca, Roseburg, Gilroy, Paseo, El Paso, Neola, the names are legion, Greyhound, Continental, Trailways bus station. Or sitting by campfires, chicken scratch firewood, flame-flecked, shadow canyon boomer, eating slop stews, olio really, in some track-side hobo jungle waiting, day and day waiting, bindle ready, for some Southern Pacific or Denver and Rio Grande bull-free freight train smoke to move on.
Hell, everybody, not just lonely hard- luck project boys, wrong, dead wrong girls, wronged, badly wronged, girls, wise guy guys who got catch short, wrong gees on the run, right gees on the run from some shadow past, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, society boys on a spree, debutantes out for a thrill, and just plain ordinary vanilla day-dreamers who just wanted to be free from the chains of the nine to five white picket fence work forty years and get your gold watch (if that) retirement capitalist system was (and, maybe, secretly is) an old Wobblie at heart. Yeah, just like Big Bill (Haywood), Jim Cannon, the Rebel Girl (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn), Joe Hill, Frank Little, Vincent Saint John (and me). Yeah, all the one big union boys and girls from way back, just to name a few.
Except when you need to take on the big issues, the life and death struggle to keep our unions against the capitalist onslaught to reduce us to chattel, the anti-war wars giving the self-same imperialists not one penny nor one person for their infernal wars as they deface the world, the class wars where they take no prisoners, none, then you need something more. Something more that kiddish child’s dreams, hobo camp freedom fireside smoke, or Rio Grande train white flume smoke. That is when day- dreaming gets you cut up. That is when you need to stay in one place and fight. That is when you need more than what our beloved old free-wheeling wobblie dream could provide. And that is a fact, a hard fact, sisters and brothers.
***Out In The 1960s Be-Bop Night-Doin’ His Midnight Creep
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Benny Brady, a freshly-minted teenager out in the 1960s be-bop night, 1960 to be exact, mercifully no more tween-dom for him, no more kid’s stuff and wait until you are older stuff, was sick, sick unto death of the music he was hearing on his transistor radio, on American Bandstand on the television, at school dances, and on the jukebox down at Doc’s Drugstore too. Squaresville. Enough of Connie Francis finding somebody to love without lipstick on his collar, Patsy Cline falling to pieces everybody she heard some no good guy who left her probably for some other twist, Brenda Lee being sorry, sorry practically for being born because she offended some guy, some mechanic or grease monkey and his macho sensibilities, and Sandra Dee flipping out on some ever so ever beach. Enough of the Bobbies, Rydell, Vinton Darin, and throw in the Everley Brothers telling some little Susie to wake up. Enough of Mark Dinning and the two hundredth time that Teen Angel came over the airwaves, as well as earth angels, paradise angels, Johnny Angel and every angel from here to L.A. Enough, more than enough too of emaciated, although he would not have known that word’s meaning exactly then, of raggedy doo-wop since the heyday with the Teen Queens, the Chiffons and the Shirelles had passed by. But enough of railing against the fouled-up airwaves around his native Hullsville.Benny needed, desperately needed, if you asked him directly, a new sound, a sound to go with his new found interests.
By the way that transistor radio, a tiny radio, battery- run which could be concealed at will, for the unknowing was his life-line, his and about twelve billion other tweens and teens dragged up in the cold war red scare night by, well, overprotective parents. Said parents the number one cause as far as Benny was concerned with the demise of rock ‘n’ rock as he knew it when he was just nothing but a wet behind the ears tween kid a few years back listening to his brother Prescott’s records into the wee hours down in the family room when those said parents were in dreamland. Listening to Elvis and his swivel hips that made all the girls go crazy (he would not know the why of why the girls, and women too, went crazy until later in his teen years); listening to Jerry Lee who was accused of every kind of unclean thing (again he would learn only later what that meant); listening to Chuck Berry ding-a-linging (ditto on the learning later thing) But enough too of railing against parent-dom.
If you haven’t figured out yet Benny’s new found interest was in, ah, girls, girls who when he was a tween were nothing but nuisances and a pain in the you know where. Person to be avoided at all costs except when absolutely necessary like copying homework from or borrowing money for ice cream, stuff like that, especially if they “liked” you and you were privy to that information. But after careful re-evaluation once he became a freshly-minted teen he saw that they might be, well, interesting. At least that is the way he figured, figured he had the whole boy-girl thing scoped out. What he was looking for in that vanilla music night was an edge, something he could talk to girls about and of which they were clueless. Not some prattle about Bobby slick-backed hair this, or Fabian smooth that which filled all the girl magazines. He needed something too that might, in light of his reevaluation of girls, give him a leg up with them as well, especially Lucinda, Lucinda Mott, the one girl he knew who might be interested in something new in music. Something not parentally approved.And who he had heard through that junior high school grapevine that was more effective that the whole telecommunications industry put together “liked” him.
The times were hard though just then, nothing looked like it was going to break-out of the cookie cutter ever since Elvis died, or went in the service or something, Jerry Lee got caught doing something wrong (although he couldn’t figure out what that wrong was), and guys Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed and burned. Then one Sunday night, it had to be a Sunday because he had gone up into his room early to try and see if he could get Murray the K, the big be-bop DJ on some New York station. See something in the air, something about radio waves and transmitters, on Sunday night allowed Benny to occasionally get faraway stations on his transistor. That night Benny got heaven, got the Brother Bopper Blues Blast out of WJDA in Chicago. He could hardly believe his ears.
Benny heard stuff that sounded like old time rock ‘n’ roll but not exactly like Elvis and Jerry Lee. He heard some stuff he couldn’t quite figure out but that Brother Bopper (real name found out later Milton Jones) said was from down in the Delta, wherever that was. Stuff done on acoustic guitar accompanied by raspy-voiced guys who kind of slurred their words, maybe didn’t know proper English for some reason. Stuff like that. And then Brother Bopper played a whole segment of the show, about one half hour devoted to one performer.
That night Benny Brady fell in love with Howlin’ Wolf, fell in love with that raspy, graspy voice, fell in love with the harmonica sound Brother Bopper between songs would describe as giving the Wolf (Brother’s term) his power (and which Benny would later see the Wolf almost ate when he was in rare form, when he was reaching for the high white note). Wolf spoke of smoke-stack lightning, big-hipped women, of little red rooster running amuck in barnyards, of pining away for women, and a lot of stuff that sounded like it might be interesting to know about; juke joints, knife-wielding guys protecting their women from other guys; hard work on weekdays and hell-raising on Saturday night.
That night too Benny Brady, freshly-minted teen knew, knew to a certainty that this was stuff that Lucinda Mott, once he definitely found out (via an older sister), that she “liked” him would flip out over, would want to endlessly discuss with him. And she did.
***Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-The Memphis Jug Band- She Stays Out All Night Long
Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin
Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-The Memphis Jug Band- K.C. Moan
Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin
Memphis Jug Band
Well, I thought I had heard that K C when she moan Thought I heard that K C when she moan Thought I heard that K C when she moan Well, she sound like she got a heavy load
Yes and when I get back on the K C road When I get back on the K C road When I get back on the K C road Gonna love my woman like I never loved before
Well I thought I heard that K C whistle moan Well I thought I heard that K C whistle moan Well I thought I heard that K C whistle moan Well she blow like my woman's on board
When I get back on that K C road When I get back on that K C road When I get back on that K C road Gonna love my baby like I never loved before
