Out In Pooh’s Corner-With The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit In Mind

 

White Rabbit

Song by Jefferson Airplane

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
To call Alice, when she was just small

When the men on the chessboard.
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know

When logic and proportion have fallen softly dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen's off with her head
Remember what the door mouse said
Keep your head,
Keep your head

 

A while back, maybe three years ago now, I was sitting in the Sunnyvale Grille in Boston where I was visiting my old time merry prankster friend, Frank Jackman, where we got into a hot and heavy discussion about the kind of songs that turned us on back in the 1960s when we had come of musical age. We had young kids’ stuff grown up on the classic Elvis-Jerry Lee-Chuck-Bo-Roy stuff but that was mainly copped from our older brothers and sisters, the ‘60s sounds and their attendant political connections were our real age time. I had met Jackman out in California after I had hitched out there in the mid-1960s just after I had graduated from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine. He was going under the moniker Flash Dash then , don’t laugh, for a while I was the Prince of Love, those monikers used in abundance as a way to break from our traditional-bound pasts, to break from the old neighborhood corner boy stuff, on the a way to make our own newer world. That night Frank had a couple of his recently reunited North Adamsville High old corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins and Sam Lowell, and a guy he met after he had just graduated from high school, Josh Breslin, who was from Hull about twenty miles south of North Adamsville all of whom I had previously met one time or another out in the “Garden of Eden,” which is what we called our search back then and which came up California for all of us then whatever happened later.

Now the reason that I have mentioned who was in attendance at that “meeting” (really an occasion to have a few drinks without the bother of womenfolk around for a short time and without the lately more pressing need not to drink and drive impaired since Pete was in town for a conference and had been staying at the Westin a short walk down the street) is that each and every participant was a certified member of the generation of ’68. That generation of ’68 designation meaning that all were, one way or another, veterans of the political wars back then when we tried to “turn the world upside down” and got kicked in the ass for our efforts and, more importantly here, veterans of the “hippie” drug/drop-out/ communal experiences that a good portion of our generation imbibed in, if only for a minute. And thus all were something like “experts” on the question that was pressing on Frank’s mind. That question centered on what music “turned” each guy there on. Not in the overtly sexual way in which the question asked might be taken today but while they were being “turned on.” Turned on being a euphemism plain and simple for getting “high,” “stoned,” “ripped” or whatever term was used in the locale that you frequented, for doing your drug of choice.              

See Jackman, full name Francis Xavier Jackman but nobody in his old high school corner boys crowd called him that, nor did I or do I here, had this idea that rather than the common wisdom Beatles, Stones, Doors, Motown influence that when the deal went down the Jefferson Airplane was the group that provided the best music to get “turned on” by. By the way since she will enter this story at some point the only one that I can think of who called Frank that three name combo was a girl, what we call a young woman now, whom we met, or rather he met, and then I met and took away from him, Cathy Callahan, out in La Jolla in California, who went under the moniker Butterfly Swirl back in the 1960s. She thought, clueless California sunshine ex-surfer guy girl, the three name combo was “cute” like Frank was some Brahmin scion rather than from his real working-class neighborhood roots. But that was a different story because as he said, she “curled his toes,” curled mine too, so she could call him (or me) any damn name she wanted.    

Naturally there was some disagreement over that premise but let me tell you what the mad monk Jackman was up to. See, as a free-lance journalist of sorts, he had shortly before our recent meeting taken on an assignment from a generation of ’68-type magazine, Mellow Times. A ’68-type magazine meaning that it was filled with full-blown nostalgia stuff: New Mexico communes where kids strictly from suburban no heartache homes tried to eke, the only word possible for such exertions, an existence out of some hard clay farming; outlaw bikers who guys like gonzo writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe made infamous, or rather more infamous; acid head freak-outs in the Fillmores of the East and West sipping weird drug concoctions out of Dixie cups and getting twisted to the high decibel music up front; merry pranksters riding shotgun to the new dispensation taking more than a few over the high side with them; the Haight-Ashbury scene from the first “all men are brothers” days of sharing on the soup kitchen lines to the gun, drug shoot-up bitter end; Golden Gate Park days when that park had more kites, more bubbles, more wha-wha than any other park in the world; psychedelics from drugs to art; retro- art deco styles like the lost children were channeling back to the “lost generation” Jazz Age jail-breakers as kindred; and, feed the people kitchens in the good days and bad, Sally or Fugs, that kind of thing from that period.

Jackman, well known to a select audience of baby-boomers for his previous work in writing about the merry prankster hitchhike road, what he had called in one series that I had read-The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- in which he had used me as a stick drug-addled figure from Podunk who didn’t know how to tie his own shoes until he came under the god-like Jackman spell, was given free rein to investigate that question under the descriptive by-line- Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night -that was to head the series of articles the magazine proposed that he work on. Here is Jackman’s proposed introduction to the series that he gave us copies of that night: 

“This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1960s with its bags full of classic (now classic) rock songs for the ages. Now many music and social critics have done yeomen’s service giving us the meaning of various folk songs, folk protest songs in particular, from around this period. You know they have essentially beaten us over the head with stuff like the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as a clarion call for now aging baby-boomers back then to rise up and smite the dragon, and a warning to those in charge (not heeded) that a new world was a-bornin’, or trying to be. Or better his The Times They Are A-Changin’ with its plaintive plea for those in charge to get hip, or stand aside.  (They did neither.) And we have been fighting about a forty year rearguard action to this very day trying to live down those experiences, and trying to get new generations to blow their own wind, change their own times, and sing their own plainsong in a similar way.”

And so we, his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys hometown corner boys, Josh, and I were the “masses” for the purpose of Frank’s work. Free labor if you like for his little nostalgia music piece. And here is his rationale, or at least part of it that he sent in an e-mail trying to drag me from Portland down to Boston to beat the thing over the head with him:

“…Like I said the critics have had a field day (and long and prosperous academic and journalistic careers as well) with that kind of stuff, fluff stuff really. The hard stuff, the really hard stuff that fell below their collective radars, was the non-folk, non-protest, non-deep meaning (so they thought) stuff, the daily fare of popular radio back in the day. A song like Out At Pooh’s Corner. A song that had every red-blooded American teen-age experimenter (and who knows maybe world teen) wondering their own wondering about the fate of the song’s narrator. About what happened that night (and the next morning) that caused him to pose the comment in that particular way. Yes, that is the hard stuff of social commentary, the stuff of popular dreams, and the stuff that is being tackled head on in this series”

And so after succumbing to his blarney we sat at that table in the bar of the Sunnyvale Grille sipping high-shelf scotch and trying to work through this knotty problem that Frank had put before us. This problem of what moved us though the squeeze that we put our brains through back then. Frank brought something up that kind of set the tone for the evening. He mentioned that coming out of North Adamsville in 1964 he, Jimmy, and Sam, if they had been prophetic, could not have possibly foreseen that they would, like about half of their generation, or so it seemed, have imbibed deeply of the counter-culture, its communal values, its new-found habits, its ethos, its drug-centeredness, or its music. He explained (and Jimmy and Sam chimed in with comments as he proceeded) that in strait-laced, mostly Irish working- class neighborhoods like where they grew up in North Adamsville anything other than working hard to get ahead, “getting ahead” being getting some kind of white-collar city civil service job and finally breaking the string of factory worker generations, since they were in some cases the first generation to finish high school and have enough knowledge to take the exam to white-collar-dom, getting married, maybe to your high school sweetheart or some such arrangement, and eventually buying a slightly bigger house than the cramped quarters provided by the house you grew up in and have children, slightly fewer children than in the house you grew up in, was considered scandalous, weird, or evil.

But as Jimmy said after Frank finished up it wasn’t so much the neighborhood ethos as the ethos of the corner boy life, the life in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up on Thornton Street. That life included plenty of under-age drinking, plenty of talk, mostly talk, of sex with pretty girls  (certainly more talk than any activity that actually happened-except in bravado Monday morning before school banter with every guy lying, or half-lying about what was done, or not done,  after the weekend’s exertions), and a view of the world perhaps slightly less rigid than the parents but still scornful of people of the opposite sex living together unmarried (and in high Catholic North Adamsville even divorced people were subject to comment, and scorn), scornful of guys who didn’t want to get married, sometime, and of the opinion that those who did dope, that dope being heroin, opium, or morphine which they knew about and not so much marijuana which just seemed exotic, were fiends, evil or beatniks. Not the profile of those who would later in the decade grow their hair longer that any mother’s most outlandish nightmare dream, wear headbands to keep that hair back, grow luxurious and unkempt beards, live in communes with both sexes mixing and matching, smoke more marijuana, snort more coke, and down more bennies, acid, and peyote buttons, and play more ripping music than the teen angel, earth angel, Johnny angel music heard down at Jack Slack’s jukebox. Everybody laughed after that spiel from Jimmy.

Those old time references got me to thinking about the days when we had headed west in the mid-1960s days, Frank with various combination of corner boys including Sam, Josh and Jimmy, me, the first time solo and thereafter with Frank and others, the days when we were in search of Pooh’s Corner. Thinking along the lines of about Frank’s “theory” of the great turn on song for our generation, thinking about the search for the “garden,” the “Garden of Eden,” that we had picked up from a line in a Woody Guthrie song, Do Re Mi (meaning if you did not have it, dough, kale, cash, forget California Edens although at our coming of California age money was not a big deal, nobody had any and so we didn’t worry about it, unlike now). Of course everybody then knew the reference from the Jefferson Airplane’s song which contained those Pooh Corner references. I remember I first heard the song one night at the Fillmore, the rat’s end concert hall where everybody who had any pretensions to the new acid-etched music either played or wanted to play, and that was the Mecca for every person who wanted to think about dropping out of the rat race and try to get their heads around a different idea.

We had in any case all headed west maybe a couple of years after the big summer of love 1967 caught our attention. Frank  had already been out there for a few months having hitchhiked from Boston in the early spring, had wound up in La Jolla down by the surfer Valhalla and had run into Captain Crunch and his merry band, a band of brothers and sisters who had been influenced by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to drop out, drop acid and “see the world” and their legendary former yellow brick road school bus, Further In, earlier in the decade and whose adventures had been the subject of a Tom Wolfe book. That Kesey-led experience, especially noticeable on the California coastal roads was multiplied a thousand fold once the jail-break hit full speed and Captain Crunch and his companion, Mustang Sally, had followed suit. It was never clear whether the Captain actually knew Kesey but he sure as hell was knee deep in the drug trade since the reason that he and the bus load had been in La Jolla was that he and his crew were “house-sitting” a safe house used by one of the southern drug cartels while the Captain was getting ready to head north to San Francisco and find out what was happening with the scene there. Frank had “signed on” the bus (in those days a common expression was “you are on the bus, or you are off the bus,’ and you were better off on the bus) since he had wanted to head to Frisco town from Boston anyway but the vagaries of the hitchhike road, a couple of long haul truck driver pick up the first which left him in Dallas and the second San Diego had brought him farther south. (In those days as I well knew you took whatever long haul ride you could get as long as they were heading west and got you some place on the California coast. I remember telling Frank, and he agreed that, I had never realized just how long a state it was, had been  clueless, until I had my first San Diego ride when I was looking to get to Big Sur several hundred miles up the coast which took me a couple of days of rides to get to.) 

This is the time when Frank met Cathy Callahan, Butterfly Swirl, from Carlsbad up the road a few miles from La Jolla and who was then “slumming” in La Jolla after breaking up with her perfect wave surfer boyfriend and looking for, well, I don’t know what she was looking for in the end and neither did Frank, maybe just kicks, momentary kicks to see what she might be missing because after she got through with us she went back to that perfect wave surfer boyfriend. Go figure. But then people like Butterfly Swirl, ex-surfer boy girls, working-class guys like me from Podunk, Maine, ex-soldiers unable or unwilling to adjust to the “real world” after Vietnam, hairy-assed bikers who had taken some dope and mellowed out on their rage trip, college professors who saw what they were teaching as a joke , governmental bureaucrats who knew what they were doing was a joke, or worse, con men getting all worked up seeing all the naïve kids from nowhere who wanted to be hip and were easy marks for bad dope and bad karma , corner boys trying to break out of their corners looking for easy girls, the derelict doing what the derelict always do except not being castigated for it by those seeking the newer world, hot-rod junkies tired of their midnight runs and death, and the like were all taking that jail-break minute to see if they fit into the new dispensation so maybe it was just that. Most of them went back to whatever they were doing previously once the ebb began to catch up with us, once the bad guys put on a full-court press.

So Frank and Butterfly Swirl met, met at a party Captain Crunch was throwing at that safe house, a mansion from what Frank had told me.  This Butterfly Swirl was all legs, thin, blonde a then typical California surfer girl waiting on dry land for her surfer guy to get that  perfect wave and then go ball the night away before he/they got up the next day to look, he, for the next perfect wave. Definitely in the normal course of events not a Frank-type of young woman, his running to sad- sack Harvard Square intellectual types who broke your heart a different way when they were done with you, or mine either, French-Canadian or Irish girls, all virginal and pious for public consumption any way, also heart-breakers, but chalk it up to the times. So they met, got turned on to some great grass (marijuana, for the squares) and hit one of the upstairs bedrooms where she “curled his toes.”  And they were an item as the Captain and crew ambled north for the next few months until they hit a park on Russian Hill where they parked the bus for a few weeks.

And that is where I had met Frank, and eventually Butterfly Swirl. I had stopped off at the park because somebody I met, a guy who had been on the Haight-Ashbury scene for a while, on Mission Street said that I could score dope, some food, and a place to sleep if I asked around up on the hill where the scene was not as frantic as around downtown and in Golden Gate Park. There was the bus, painted in the obligatory twenty-seven day-glo colors, just sitting there when I walked up and asked about a place to sleep. Frank, looking like some Old Testament prophet long unkempt hair and scraggly beard, army jacket against the chilled Bay winds, bell-bottomed trousers as was the unisex fashion then, beat-up moccasins, and looking like he had hit the magic bong pipe a few times too many, said “you can get on the bus, if you want.” But mainly I remembered those slightly blood-shot fierce blue eyes that spoke of seeing hard times in his life and spoke as well that maybe seeking that newer world he was seeking would work out after all, he no longer has that fierce look that “spoke” to me that first time. That introduction started our now lifetime off and on comradely relationship. I think for both of us the New England connection is what drew us together although he was a few years older than me, had seen and done things that I was just getting a handle on. And strangely I think that being older helped when I “stole” young Butterfly Swirl away from him one night at the Fillmore where the Airplane were playing their high acid rock he was mad, mad as hell, when he did find out about us but he did get over it (and I, in my turn, got over it when she about a year later she went back to Carlsbad and her surfer boy).

The “strange” part mentioned above came about because Butterfly Swirl and Frank had been “married,” at the time, no, not in the old-fashioned bourgeois sense but having been on the bus together for a while one night Captain Crunch in his capacity as the head of the band of sisters and brothers “officiated” at a mock wedding held under his authority as “captain” of the adventure ship. While this “marriage” ceremony carried no legal weight it did carry weight on the bus for it meant that the pair were to be left alone in the various couplings and un-couplings that drove the sex escapades of all bus dwellers. Moreover Captain Crunch, a rather strange but upfront guy who was all for couplings and un-couplings at will, oh yeah, except when it came to his own barnyard and he would rant and rave at Mustang Sally, his longtime companion who as a free spirit in her own right made a specialty of picking up young guys who played in one of the burgeoning rock bands of the times, “curled their toes” and made connections to get them gigs too and stuff like that. The Captain was fit to be tied when Sally got her young guy wanting habits on. But what could he do, if he wanted her on the bus.

In any case the Captain who was not only mysteriously connected with the drug world, but knew the mad max daddy of acid, Owsley, himself as well as the hermanos down south who trusted him as much as they could trust any gringo, but also had connections with the rising number of rock promoters on the West Coast decided to spring for a “honeymoon” for Frank (who was still going by the moniker Flash Dash at the time) and the Swirl. The honeymoon was to be a party before and during the Airplane’s next gig in San Francisco where he had copped twenty tickets from the promoter for some service rendered, maybe a brick of grass who knows. But here is where things got freaky, this was also to be something of an old time Ken Kesey “electric kool-aid acid test,” particularly for Swirl who never had done LSD before, had never done acid, and was very curious.

So the night of the concert a couple of hours before it was to start Captain gathered all around the bus then headquartered in Pacifica about twenty miles south of the city at another cartel safe house and offered whoever wanted to indulge some blotter. Flash and Swirl led things off, she trembling a little in fear, and excitement.  Then one and all, including me, took off in the bus to amble the Airplane show. An amble which included picking up about six people on the Pacific Coast Highway road up, offering them blotter as well, and on the in-bus jerry-rigged sound the complete (then) Stones’ playlist which had people, including me, dancing in the back of the bus.

That was a very strange night as well because that was the night, the “honeymoon” night when Swirl freaked out on the acid trip. Good freaking out after she got over the initial fear that everybody has about losing control and about the very definite change in physical perspective that are bound to throw you off if you are not used to that pull at the back of your head, or you think is pulling at the back of your head, after seeing gorgeous colors which she described in great detail, feeling all kinds strange outer body feelings as well. See she and I got together as I helped bring her down after Dash Flash took off with some woman. Well just some woman at the time, although he eventually married her (and divorced her), Joyell, Joyell of the brown-eyed world. He had met Joyell initially in Boston but he had been seeing her quite a bit since she had come to Frisco, come to get her Master’s degree at Berkeley, and whom he had run into at the concert. Yeah the times were like that, a guy or gal could be “married,” or married and then have a million affairs, although usually not on their “honeymoon” but that was Frank, Frank to a tee, and nobody thought anything of it, usually, or if they did they kept it to themselves. We tried about six million ways to try to deal with breaking from our narrow pasts and I think we saw what would be scandalous behavior back in the neighborhoods as a way to do so, although in the end all Frank (and I) got was about three divorces, a bunch of love affairs and many, too many, flings. Here’s the laugher though the thing that brought Swirl back to earth that night was her “grooving” (yeah, we had our own vocabulary as well and you can check Wikipedia for most of the meanings) on the Airplane’s music, on Grace Slick’s going crazy on White Rabbit and assorted other great music from After Bathing At Baxter’s. (Swirl said she felt like Alice-In-Wonderland that night.) So in a way I have to agree with Frank about the effect that band had on us but I will be damned if fifty years later I am going to side with him after he left his “bride” standing at the altar. Even if I was the guy who caught her fall. Yeah such was life out in Pooh’s Corner, and I wish it were still going on, wish it a lot.                                                              

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

Workers Vanguard No. 1025	31 May 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.

Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.

Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

 

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

 

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  ….    


 Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ralph Manheim (Translator), William T. Vollmann (Afterword)

Journey to the End of the Night 4.25 of 5 stars 4.25  ·  rating details  ·  14,962 ratings  ·  741 reviews

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first pub Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion. ...more

 

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now! 

No question the case of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning had fallen below the radar for the general public since her trial down at Fort Meade in Maryland where she was convicted and sentenced to thirty-five years for multiple charges including espionage in August 2013. (She was tried by the military under the birth name Bradley Manning and has subsequently had her name legally changed in a Kansas court.) Some of that fall-off would be expected even in a high profile case once the verdict was in and the case was taken off the front page and into the wrangle of appellate legal proceedings.  Important people, including the heroic whistle-blower Edward Snowden, still sign petitions and sent birthday greetings and the like and Chelsea has occasional Op-Ed and other media changes to make her views known to a candid world but what she needs is a renewed effort to get a pardon from President Obama who has the legal authority to grant such a request. I urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition to put pressure on President Obama to do so.          

 

All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers-The Documentary 1971 

Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.        

Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).

Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience trying to shut down the government's war machine on the streets, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action.

The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.    

******

The Husband And Wife Who Burgled The FBI

John and Bonnie Raines are pictured with their three children in Glen Lake, Michigan circa August 1969. (1971film.com)

Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.

They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s  Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.

 “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law.”

– John Raines

In a world where personal phones are locked with finger scans, it’s hard to imagine that these eight ordinary people could pull off such a major heist, especially considering they couldn’t even pick the lock on the first door they tried.

But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.

“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.

“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”

Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.

When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”

The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.

Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.

 “A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.”

– John Adams

Now, 43 years later, their story is being told in the new documentary “1971,” which opens in New York today.

While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.

“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”

Watch the trailer for '1971':

Guests

• John and Bonnie Raines, husband and wife who participated in the 1971 burglary of the FBI office in Media, Penn.

Old PIs Never Die, They Just…Paul Newman’s Twilight

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Twilight, starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, 1998

The movies and bookstores are filled (and have always been filled) with all kinds of private detectives, hardboiled guys like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the old days, oh yeah, Nick and Nora Charles too, old days that is, fetching female detectives, young guys and gals starting out in the profession, gumshoe types too who spill coffee over themselves on stake-outs and smoke far too many cigarettes. Yeah, a whole litany of types from languid shamuses to keyhole peepers doing the best they can. Harry Ross (played by Paul Newman) in the film under review, Twilight, is one of those guys, one of those PIs, who has lost a step or two, maybe is not as hungry to see the bad guys put down, maybe not as hungry to see himself put them down like in his youth, but when the deal went down all his shattered detective instincts rose to the top, almost. Not bad for a guy who did not even bother to renew his PI license with the Los Angeles police, not bad at all.        

Like a lot of guys who turn PI Harry started out as a public cop, did his time, and to help while away the retirement hours went PI, did a few cases and that was that. Well not quite “that was that” because his last case went awry on him. He was hired by Jack (played by Gene Hackman) and Catherine Ames (played by Susan Sarandon) to find their errant under-aged daughter who had run off with a sleazebag guy to sunny Mexico. Naturally Harry found them shacked up in a resort (hell of course he found them after all he was a good PI in his time and they did leave a trail of bread crumbs behind them). When Harry tried to take her back boyfriend, sleaze or not, seeing his meal ticket go down the tubes threw some fist, and the daughter, Mel (played by a young Reese Witherspoon) shot poor Harry accidently. Not good PR for a PI, no question.

Somehow that blow-out got Harry room and board at the Ames residence, they, Jack and Catherine, maybe you remember them if you are old enough, had lit up the screen in their younger days but now were on cheap street, or heading there what with the big overhead of running a La La house, keeping tabs on that errant teenage daughter and paying out of pocket medical bills for Jack (he had cancer). Of course in the movies you can’t just have an old PI retire and sit around the pool all day drinking some guy’s gin (or ginger ale in Harry’s case since he was drying out) so Jack asked Harry run an errand for him, an errand involving sending some hush money to a woman up in the Hollywood hills from the look of it when he got there, straight from cheap street.

See Jack in his vindictive fatherly way had that sleazebag boyfriend of Mel’s picked up and jailed for transporting a minor, you know the scoop, and he was looking for a payout to keep quiet about things he knew, or thought he knew about the mysterious fate of Catherine’s ex-husband who got lost in the mist of time some twenty years before. That missing person thing turned out to be very convenient for this pair of movie stars since they could get married once that ex was assumed to have given up the ghost.                 

Before Harry could do that simple errand though he ran into another PI who had been shot and killed, murdered, in that woman’s house by a party, or parties, unknown and that set off a whole string of events that led back to that twenty-year old case since that dead PI (an ex-cop too) strongly suspected he had been a victim of foul play. Of course when a dame (or dames) is involved you know, or you should be presumed to know in any noir-ish film, there will be plenty of treachery and a few more off-hand murders (of that boyfriend and his lady-friend parole officer) before the mystery is solved. You also know old dog Harry (after all this is blue-eyed Paul Newman we are talking about even in his twilight) had drawn a bee-line for Catherine. Bee-line or not Harry was determined to solve this one no matter who he went to bed with, whose house he had been staying at and who actually shot that ex-husband in the head and buried him out in the desert. Here though is where the aging PI not so hungry for justice whatever the cost comes in. After a little shoot-out with a co-conspirator of the Ames,’ an ex-cop Raymond (played by James Garner), everybody walked. I’ll bet old Bridget in The Maltese Falcon wished that she had Harry around then to twirl around her finger instead of Sam Spade who turned her over, turned her over even though every part of him did not want to. Yeah, aging PIs work differently, very differently.                         

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes In Boston- No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Young Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues  

A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority youth, mainly black and latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six months have given us that. But below is an example, a beautiful graphic example, of just how deep the hurts go, and how deep into society these injustices are felt. Read on.

 

        

To Trust Or Not Trust-George V. Higgins’ Trust  

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Trust, George V. Higgins, Henry Holt, New York, 1989    

Recently I have been on a crime novelist George V. Higgins tear as a result of re-reading his classic first and I believe still his best crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (and re-watched as well as a result of that read the film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum as Eddie). As is my wont when I get on a tear on an author I have been picking off his later work although in no particular order. Higgins certainly had an ear, a close ear, for dialogue, especially down in the streets dialogue gained from his growing up working-class town of Brockton where in the old days he would have found plenty of corner boys in the old Irish or Italian streets to perk his interest and from his having been a federal prosecutor where the joint was jumping with them.  

I noted in a review of Sandra Nichols Found Dead that Higgins has tackled all kinds of criminal situations, murder, extortion, leg-breaking, money laundering, you name it in the rough crime categories and has tackled white collar crime, you know, taking bribes, dishing out contracts for a cut, embezzlement, the whole litany of governmental and private company crimes. Along the way there seems to have been three main story lines that Higgins’ work can be grouped around. Stories about the classic street hoods like Eddie Coyle, corrupt government officials like Billy Ryan defended by recurring character criminal defense lawyer Jerry Kennedy, and those amorphous tales like Sandra Nichols Found Dead, involving, for lack of a better term, private citizen crimes, rough or white. I also mentioned in that review that I believe that the prolific Higgins had his best days when he took on the street hoods straight up, brought them to life, and those private crime sagas like Nichols and the book under review, Trust, pale by comparison.

The main story line here is, well, about trust, not implicit trust like one long-time friend might have for another but trust based on mutual understandings, based on a favor to one requiring a favor back. So this whole tale revolves around favors given, taken back, and which ones went awry. The central cause for all of these collisions is one “from hunger” let’s call him a grifter, Earl Beale. A small-time grifter, always scratching for ten here, a hundred there, maybe a thousand max around, unlike a big-time grifter I knew once named Top Hat who pulled a big scam for about a million in cash off a big time gambler and although I have not heard from him for a while I believe that he walked away alive.    

Earl of course had been cutting corners, small corners, ever since he took the fall for shaving points in basketball games that he played in for a New York college in the 1950s. Yeah, he did time as guys like him will when the heat is on and a fall guy is needed but he also made a career thereafter of small hustles whether working at a car dealership, or selling a hot car, or trying to shake down a businessman with telltale photos of him and a steady hooker who also happens to be Earl’s girlfriend. Still he couldn’t pull off that last deal, couldn’t close the biggest deal of his life due to his hubris, or maybe just commitment to the world of small grifts.          

Here is how the favor for favor thing gets played out. One “connected” guy, you know a low-end mobster, did a favor for a friend of Earl’s car-dealer brother, a big unnamed favor, for that friend was a politician, and did not need the heat. In return the politician through his connections in D.C. did the mobster a favor by keeping his gung-ho hot-headed son out of Vietnam in the 1960s when that meant something. That brother’s friend also got Earl’s criminal record erased as a favor to Earl’s brother. But that was not the end of the favor line for the mobster needed a favor for a judge friend (maybe customer is a better word). The favor: getting somebody to “steal” the judge’s car (or rather his wife’s) to avoid a scandal. So the politician calls in Earl’s brother’s debt and the brother calls in Earl. Of course Earl as we now know is the weak link since after he “stole” the car he decided to sell the car through his brother. So the brother sold the car as legit (on Earl’s word and paperwork) until the car turns up on the “hot” sheet and that begins the breakdown of favor-dom.

Now whether all of this back and forth on favors is enough to sustain interest over a couple of hundred pages filled out with plenty of filler is a close question. I say, as I have said before, old Higgins is in his glory with the serious street con artists and here just so-so.                 

 

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes-  Jazzonia 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

 Jazzonia 

 

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

Langston Hughes

 

 

This was the limit. That exact thought and no other crossed Louise Crawford’s mind as she fumed, fumed for the third time over the past several weeks waiting, waiting for his lordship, his budding poet lordship, to show up sometime in the next decade. Waiting so that he could take her to the Red Hat where “the Earl” and the boys were playing some heavy-noted down and dirty black-assed jazz that week and for “beat” aficionados, or like her, looking to be seen at the latest happening thing around the city she just had to be present at the creation. Yeah, she was like that, had a talent, no, maybe better a wanting habit which constantly needed to be replenished.

Other times he had begged indulgence because he was in the throes of writing some inspired poem, calling her his muse which stopped her in her tracks, or some small press publisher was all agog to print a few hundred copies of a small collection of his work. Still no, no Crawford, no Crawford whose forbears practically came over on the Mayflower was ever on this great earth to be kept waiting, for anything under any circumstances, and she would make that abundantly clear to him, again, when he arrived, if he did arrive. (For those not in the know, yes, that Crawford of the Wall Street financiers Crawford who have been making money hand over fist since about the time of the Mayflower so waiting had been bred out of the clan she, Louise the youngest daughter, twenty-two, if anybody was asking.) 

Of course, Louise recognized the double-standard, although only recognized it and would not be enslaved to it any more than any other twenty-two year old woman would be, that she was more than willing to play her own fashionably late card when it suited her, especially among her old boarding school friends who made something of a science of the custom. She, moreover, did not care, did not care one whit, that he, Jesse to give him a name, was somebody’s protégé , some friend of Mabel Dodge’s granddaughter or something like that, and the greatest poet, the greatest black poet since, what was his name, oh yes, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance back in the Jazz Age or something (not real jazz, not be-bop jazz, not from what she had heard on old records but more stuff to please the booze-swilling patrons, not like today with Earl, and walking daddies like Earl, and their cool, ultra-cool be-bop, be-bop sound).

She had had her full string of Greenwich Village hipsters, or want-to-be- hipsters, “beats” was the term of art ever since Jack Kerouac blew the lid off the straight world with his big book, On The Road, a few years back so every half-baked suburbanite joker was “beat,” beaten a better way to say it. Had had her fill of every variety that passed through Bleecker Street and she had had a veritable United Nations of lovers from the time she had turned sixteen and learned the karma sutra arts (and liked them) from poet prince Jesse back to Bob, the Jewish folksinger who wrote songs in honor of her pale blue eyes, his long legs and her natural blonde hair, and before him, Jim the jug band guy who made her laugh but had to go when he got into some serious drug stuff and got all devil cultish about it, and let’s see, Julio the painter who painted her in the nude, well, semi-nude and then took off with some senorita from Sonora , Michelangelo the sculptor who proclaimed his metal pieces the new wave( so no, not that old time one), Betty, the writer (just a crush and trying something new when some guy, a trumpet player so it figured, introduced her to sister and to some low-life sex stuff), Lothario the high-wire artist and juggler, and, well you know, a lot of very interesting people.

Of course Jesse was her first negro, oops, black lover. Jesus, she remembered one night when she called him that, negro, “the greatest Negro poet since Langston Hughes,” when she introduced him to friends at a party and later he yelled holy hell at her saying that he was a black man, a black son of Mother Africa and that his people were creating stuff, human progress stuff, when her people were figuring out how to use a spoon, and trying to figure out why anyone would use such a thing if they could figure out how to use it. He said if he was in Mexico or Spain and was called word that it would be okay, okay maybe, but in America he was black, a sable warrior, black. And had been black since Pharaoh times. Later that night he wrote his well-received In Pharaoh Times to blow off the madness steam he still felt toward her. ( A poem which when she read it later, really read it expressed all his pent up stuff about being black, about coming from slavery and what that remnant still left had done to the psyche, the black male psyche not being able to protect his own, and about Mister Whitey, read Pharaoh, read Crawfords, read Wall Street, read waiting blondes cultivating their first black lover always getting what they wanted when they wanted it and some stuff she could not understand, some references to specific black cultural events.) And being her first black lover she had given him some room knowing that he was an artist, and he really was good in bed but this standing up thing was just not done, not done to a Crawford and so she determined that she would give him his walking papers this very night.

Just then she remembered, remembered the last time, that second time he, Jesse, had kept her waiting and the next day, as an act of contrition, he had written his lovely poem Louise Love In Quiet Time for her that some Village poetry journal was all aflutter to publish (and that she had re-read constantly). So maybe tonight she would not give him his walking papers…

***Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He wrote of small-voiced people, mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder, never were heard over the rumble of the subway, working stiffs and their women, sometimes their kids, their kids growing up like weeds, who turned out to be disappointments but what could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of North Adamsville, another town filled with small-voice people). Never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people who tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors, people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall (not some edenic fall but just a worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored). Wrote of the desperately lonely, a man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to him move on, or else, a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, no more. Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did Eliot call it, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man, about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. Wrote of the night people, of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the  people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all shape angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well, or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal moment. The next fix, how to get it, the next drink, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment. Waiting eternally waiting to get well, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any doctor could prescript, better than any priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them. Not for him the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn, the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine or whatever the traffic would bear, or of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred who of course they would never tell do when the whole thing goes public (although one suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent)who in the pull and push of the writing profession they had (have) their muses. Nor was he inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard (although again one suspects he could have, if so inclined, shilled for that set). No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him a name took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, other to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

I remember reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the feckless “hot rod” boys, boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

He spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers, all night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.