AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

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

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress, humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful English poets (we will speak of American poets when they slip into war footing in 1917)like Wilfred Owens before he got religion, e.e. cummings madly driving his safety ambulance, beautiful Rupert Brookes wondering which way to go but finally joining the mob in some fated oceans, sturdy Robert Graves all blown to hell and back surviving but just surviving, French , German, Russian, Italian poets tooo all aflutter; artists, reeking of blooded fields, the battle of the Somme Muirhead Bone's nothing but a huge killing field that still speaks of small boned men, drawings, etchings that no subtle camera could make beautiful, that famous one by Picasso, another by Singer Sargent about the death trenches, about the gas, and human blindness for all to see; sculptors, chiseling monuments to the national brave even before the blood was dried before the last tear had been shed, huge memorials to the unnamed, maybe un-nameable dead dragged from some muddied trench half blown away; writers, serious and not, wrote beautiful Hemingway stuff about the scariness of war, about valor, about romance on the fly, among those women. camp-followers who have been around since men have left their homes to slaughter and maim, lots of writers speaking, after the fact about the vein-less leaders and what were they thinking, and, please, please do not forgot those Whiggish writers who once the smoke had cleared had once again put in a word about the endless line of human progress, musicians, sad, mystical, driven by national blood lusts to the high tattoo, went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….

Parade's End (Parade's End #1-4)

by Ford Madox Ford, Robie MacAuley (Introduction)

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 · rating details · 2,942 ratings · 288 reviews

In creating his acclaimed masterpiece Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time . . . The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war. Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and gentleman- the last English T ...more

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner

You Should Have Listened To What Mama Said-Samuel L. Jackson’s Reasonable Doubt

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Reasonable Doubt, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Dominic Cooper, 2014

When I said in the title of this review the film, Reasonable Doubt, you should have listened to what Mama said I mean that literally, well, literally about the advice part anyway although the Mama part is maybe a stretch since it is the mother of up and coming New York City Assistant DA Mitch’s (played by Dominic Cooper) child who gave the advice, and good advice too. See Mitch was out on the town in the City with some co-workers and as will happen he had too much to drink and had told that mother of his infant child, wife, Rachel (played by Erin Karpluk) if that happened he would take a cab home. Well there would not be much of a story if he did as he promised but you know without me telling he did not. As a result of his impaired condition (nice way to put it, right), the time of night, and the icy conditions of the roads he was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident of some poor guy. And in a serious error of judgment he left the guy there after calling for assistance. The hit-and-run part was to cover up that he, an up and coming Assistant DA and wife promiser would be in deep trouble if his action had been exposed. While this action on Mitch’s part gave him a few sleepless nights and whatever guilt he could muster up he nevertheless figured that he could ride it out, ride it out especially when it turned out the guy he ran over was a low-life criminal. Except, low-life criminal or not, when the New York cops intensely investigated the case they came up with a ton of evidence of the guy who they thought was the real killer, a working class black guy Clinton (played by Samuel L. Jackson), ready made by the circumstances to take the fall. That arrest and murder one rap Clinton faced really sent Mitch up the wall because no way could he let Clinton take the fall, take a big step-off at Sing-Sing for his blunder. So up and coming Assistant DA Mitch fudged the case, fudged it so bad police eyes were watching him, skewed the evidence in such a way that Clinton got off and went his rightfully merry way. End of story.

Well not quite end of story otherwise this would have been an exceptionally short film despite the hard truth cautionary note, the hard lesson Mitch had to learn. So the story-line had to be “spiced up” a bit and what better way to do that than introduce a serial killer into the plot, a serial killer who actually did kill that low-life Mitch ran over. A serial killer whose wife and child were murdered before his eyes while he was helpless to do anything about it and setoff something evil inside him. So he had taken to avenge his emptiness as he called it on all the low-life recent parolees in the city who were clustered in various support groups for easy pickings it seemed like since the killer spent his off-hours as a volunteer as these meetings.

And guess who our serial killer turned out to be. Yeah, old Clinton who was if evil a pretty crafty fellow because he set up Mitch to take a few falls, once Mitch got wise to what Clinton had done, and what had driven him to those killing fields. Needless to say Samuel L. Jackson who can play a range of roles convincingly from blasé hipster to badass gangster is very scary as the serial killer here. But this one left me wondering a more general thought. Maybe I am off on this but between books and movies there have to be many more fictional serial killers that in the real population otherwise we should all lock our doors and stay inside, permanently. Strangely it is only the addition of the serial killer angle that made the story-line on this one the least bit interesting. Go figure.

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

Some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school (The Farmer in the Dell, etc. in case you forgot) and embedded in the back of your mind even fifty years later. Some reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in my case was the music that got my parents through my father’s slogging and mother anxiously waiting World War II. You know, Frank, The Andrew Sisters, Peggy Lee, etc. Other music, the music of my generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what I wanted to hear when I had my transistor radio to my ear up in my bedroom. Yeah, Elvis, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Jerry Lee, etc. again. The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste.

Acquired through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s when they would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music to play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, I don’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.

The real stuff having been around for while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll. So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden electric blues some time to filter through my brain. What did not take a long time once I got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when I saw him perform. Once I saw him practically eat that harmonica he was playing on How Many More Years . Yes, that is an acquired taste and a lasting one.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music OF The Carter Family (First Generation)

You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes. As a kid I could not abide it but later on I figured that was because I was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of my generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. Later in high and school after when I hung around Harvard Square I would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit then meaning that I would find myself occasionally idly humming such a tune. But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught my attention more when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.

Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with my family, going back to my own roots, making peace with my old growing up neighborhood, I started asking many questions about how things turned so sour back when I was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in my mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that I went for reconciliation. To find out what my roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before I could rightly remember the early day. And in that process I finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to me.

The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player. But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues

The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left

Click below to link to The Rag Blog

http://www.theragblog.com/

Peter Paul Markin comment:

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics.(1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the American bourgeois political upheavals that led to Chicago hell in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits that a student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought.)

Those scorned old leftists, mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on who survived the 1950s red scare or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare and the Stalinists had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face- rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress.

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.
Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

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A Frank Jackman comment (2014):

Recently I wrote a short piece in a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back, the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still holds true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days, now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s, made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against it should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.
A Markin disclaimer:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow (see also review in American Left History April 2006 archives). I have made some special points here yesterday about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in American Left History January 2006 archives). In this 100th anniversary period of World War I it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these efforts centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism.

That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

Out In The James Dean Night-With Robert Altman’s Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, starring Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, directed by Robert Altman, 1982

Jeff Sterling, the now retired journalist whose by-line appeared in many of the coffee-table magazines put there by those of the generation of ‘68 who still felt an unread urge to at least display tokens of their youth, was devoted to all things James Dean, an interest he would carry from his youth and throughout his working life. Had seen in Dean’s larger-than- life figure more than the other icons of the era like the young brash Brando with his brooding sexuality, his “better move on brother if you don’t want all hell coming down on your head,” his Johnny swagger around the women with a “take ‘em or leave ‘em” pose which for young Jeff defied all the anguish and trauma of his own girl-driven youth a kindred spirit. Or Elvis as much as he was driven, girl-driven to palely imitate the “King” with his sullen baby boy pose (that sullenness more than one girl, more than one tween girl of Jeff’s acquaintance was willing to turn into a smile), those sideburns and that hair combed just so, and those endlessly moving, gyrating, swiveling or whatever he could do with them hips that spoke of satin sheets and sweaty nights. Both, whatever else they projected, exuded an aura of long and fruitful lives about them whereas Dean, even a quick flash look at him exuded a certain casted dark shadow, a certain fatalistic view of the world turning him over soon much like his own then.

Assuredly Jeff was not attracted to Dean like some fan club groupie with a room filled with commercial memorabilia, his family had little extra money to do much more than provide an occasional outing at the Saturday matinee up at the old Strand Theater over by the Fields Corner Redline subway stop in the Dorchester section of Boston where he had grown to manhood in one of those infamous crowded triple-deckers that covered the area like a spider’s web. Nor was he like some blurry-eyed budding girl like one of his sister’s friends who did have Photoplay movie magazine cut-out photos of Dean all over her bedroom walls because she thought his blue-eyes, his blond hair, hell, even his world wary smirk which she had confessed to that sister she would not mind trying to change in person were “boss.” And Jeff decidedly was not one of those who twenty, thirty, forty years later still commemorated Dean’s 1955 death date like doing so would bring back the crushed crash dead, bring back some lost garden, bring back that long faded youth which would be eternally Dean’s.

Jeff, as he told his old Dorchester streets friend, Tim Riley, a few weeks before at the Sunny Grille over a few cups of wine, had simple identified with the brooding smoldering figure of Dean not from the obvious film choice, 1955s Rebel Without A Cause, a preview of the jail-break from square cubed parents, ditto authority and cookie-cutters that his generation would take full throttle over the next decade or so, but the more literary East of Eden (adapted from a John Steinbeck novel of the same name) where Dean suffered all the angst, alienation, confusion, sexual stirrings and questioning the hypocrisy of the world that he had no say in creating that Jeff himself had endured. (When somebody had asked him how he only ten or so when that film came out was able to see Eden when she was watching Snow White or some Disney film he told her it was simply family economics since his parents could not afford a baby-sitter so they could go alone they dragged all the kids along, kids who got in free by the way accompanied by a parent in those days.)

Jeff drew a distinction between the obviously alienated Rebel Dean caught up in some greater West Coast social drama dealing with JDs, hot-rod culture, and guys with time and discretionary money on their hands and the more subtle truths in Eden. So Jeff saw in the almost biblical Cain and Abel saga of Eden a replication of his own growing up times, of trying to make sense of a world he didn’t create, and didn’t feel like he fit into. Saw too, maybe post hoc since what would a barely teen-aged boy know of such things, James Dean along with Marlon Brando, Elvis and a few others as important coming of age icons for his generation’s jailbreak leap in the 1960s. That said, Jeff was at pains to insist whenever he was called on the subject by one of his old-time corner boys, including the night he was discussing the subject with Tim Riley, that he did love the midnight “chicken run” scene in Rebel, having himself ridden shot-gun for Dwayne Hutton on a few midnight runs when some redneck guys from Dedham or Norwood wanted to challenge Dwayne’s reign as king of the hill on the flats around the old Naval Air Station near the bay.

Although Jeff has never been a fanatic about his tastes he nevertheless will take any appropriate occasion to wax poetic about the first of a line of creative guys, white guys mainly, who lived by the motto-“live fast, die young, and make a good corpse.” As he told Tim when they were at the Sunny Grille thanks to modern technology he has been able to watch such classic (and only major) Dean films as Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, and East Of Eden in the comfort of his own home. And has been able to watch other related documents to the Dean legend like Robert Altman’s Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. He had recently re-watched the film and one night he was talking with another of his old high school friends, Sam Lowell, over a few glasses of white wine at Simmy’s Grille over in Gloversville about the highlights of the film and reminiscences of a review that he did when that film came out in the 1980s for the now long defunct East Bay Other in California:

“Who knows who, where or when some new trend, some new icon will hit the population right between the eyes, will speak to some unnamed, maybe un-nameable, feeling that makes a person whole for a few minutes. You can name the icons in a couple of minutes though the ones that strike your own generation most easily come to mind and that for my generation would include the unseen subject of Come Back To The Five And Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, James Dean. Not everybody, including this reviewer, did like the women from that small Texas town did and form a club, create a shrine to, or commemorate the personage of James Dean but many drew some kind of sustenance from his life, his story, and that mumbling confusion about what was happening to him in a world that he did not create, and which he had no say in creating that he projected on the screen. That look stirred many more people than those aficionados like the women in this film.

This is an intriguing film in many ways from the single set setting of the inside of a Woolworths’ Five and Dime store to the dramatic secrets that these women have held within themselves since they formed the James Dean Fan Club in 1955 and had enshrined his memory psychically and psychological since his death that year. There was probably no more iconic site in small town America in the 1950s beside some steepled church or the post office on Main Street than the local branch of the national Woolworth’s chain. That home for every cheap gimcrack known to humankind was central to the growing up experience of lots of small town baby-boomers and their older brothers and sisters who bought their first small gifts for some sweetheart there, or had something to eat at the lunch counter (make mine a grilled cheese sandwich and lime rickey in season, please at the one I frequented in Uphams Corner), or, and here is where we separate out the generations, find out who was touched by the Dean glow, played the jukebox three songs for a quarter that was conveniently located within arm’s reach at that counter. Later events, the sit-ins of early 1960s down south to integrate those damn counters (and support efforts by those in the North who picketed in front of the store in Boston including this reviewer) would seriously tarnish the image of that idyllic scene as would the triumph of the mall in finishing such stores off in small town downtown.

Strangely this film although it is about devotees of the James Dean mystique is very little about him and plenty about what drove the various personalities to join the club and to keep the flame alive twenty years later. And the almost mythical hold that his person held in their lives, for good or evil. Apparently James Dean cast spell on the ability of the women to tell the truth, if only to themselves. Starting with the leader of the club, Mona (played with great aplomb and feeling by Sandy Dennis) who was so hooked on the Dean legend that she created a separate universe for herself claiming that the illegitimate child, Jimmy Dean, that she conceived was Dean’s child, moving on to Sissy (played by Cher with that world-weary and wariness that she has brought to many roles) who has lied to herself that her husband was coming back after he had rejected her after her breast cancer operation, and, finally, to the other central figure, Joanne (played by Karen Black with that slippery sexuality she brought to many roles) who as it turned out had been, back in the day, a guy, Joe, who it turned out had been transgender and had had an operation to prove it. Oh yeah, and who back in the day had impregnated Mona and thus the other unseen Jimmy Dean of the title. Nice work, Robert Altman.

Of course some films are meant to further some storyline, others like this one are conceived to highlight the interplay between characters and in this film that is exactly what you get. Get the interplay between the characters (including the lesser characters which fill out the cast, tough and cynical Stella Mae, fertile Edna Mae, and the older woman, Juanita who managed the store) through flashbacks to events in 1955 interspersed with the 1975 actions all confined to that single store. Moreover the interplay between the characters at any given moment made you think the whole experiment could blow up any minute as the deep secrets keep slowly getting revealed to show, well, to show that these women were made of ordinary human clay, just wanted something to believe in, something greater than themselves and their ordinary human clay lives. Join the club, sisters, join the club.

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Parade's End (Parade's End #1-4)

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

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