On The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

On The 40^th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 I got my “religion” on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this post, the day when Bruce Springsteen sprung his Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the issuance of the album Born To Run to a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past.

Here comes that ass-backward part though. See I really was “unavailable” in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast from about Boston in summer (and the area which I could from) to D.C. maybe a little further south as the weather got colder trying to cope as best we could with the “real” world. The post ‘Nam “real” world that just couldn’t seem to be the same as before we left whatever we left of ourselves in burning, shooting, napalming, molesting a whole race of very busy people with whom we had not quarrel, no quarrel at all. So not doing a very good job of it mostly not succeeding against the drugs (my personal problem from cocaine to meth and back depending on when you ran into me, if you dared), the liquors (my boy Sean whom I couldn’t save one night when the DTs got to him so bad he went down the Hudson River from the nearest bridge he was so lost), the petty robberies (Jesus, holding up White Hen convenient stores with hands so shaky I could barely keep the gun from jumping out of them ), and the fight to stay away from the labor market (work the curse of the lost boys, the boys who wanted no connection  with Social Security numbers, VA forms, forwarding,  addresses, hell even General Post Office boxes just in case some dunning repo man, or some angry wife was looking for support, support none of us could give for crying out loud why do you think we worked the stinking rivers, the smoke streams trains, faced the rats under the bridges).

Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, guys like Sean who if you looked at him you could not believe how gone he really was with that baby-face of his I still see now) didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black marble down in D.C.-although maybe they should be. Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital trying to get well for about the fifteenth time (meth again, damn I can still feel the rushes when I say the word) and that was that. The next step was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.          

Once I did grab a serious chunk of Springsteen’s work, grabbed some things from the local library since my ready cash supply was low I admit I got a bit embarrassed. Admitted to myself that I sure was a long gone daddy back in 1975 and for few years thereafter. How could I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the high hymnal songs about the antics of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out in the streets making all that noise, trying to do the best they could in the hard working class neighborhood night around Harry’s Drug Store on windless Friday nights  without resources after all the grifter, sifter, and especially midnight shifter stuff was said and done (and where are they now, Frankie, Markin, Jack, Jimmy, Tiny, Dread, and a few other who faded in and out over the high school years, I know where Jimmy Johnson and Kenny Bow are, down on a black marble stone in D.C. still mourned, mourned since they never got to graduate from the corner boy night like the rest of us one way or another).

Yeah, singing out loud about the death trap small town that kills the spirit of the young (mine spent up in Carver down Massachusetts way), especially in the close quarters of the working class neighborhoods like the small shack of a house I grew up in(along with four brothers if you can believe that looking at the house today which is owned by a new ramshackle generation caught on the low-down) along with all the other stuff that went with it about keeping your head down, about not making waves, about not bringing public shame, about going along to get along. Yeah, the whole nine yards. The worse part though was to do your duty, do the right thing when your freaking country called, called for any reason. You know what I say-fuck that, get the hell out of Dover, Auburn, Saratoga, Naples, Oceanside, Fayetteville, Steubenville and a million other Carver-like towns before the bastards eat you alive. That was the message, or one of the messages, Brother Bruce laid down.

Here is another part to consider too, the constant hanging around with nothing to do looking for the heart of Saturday night and maybe a date with Lorraine who had been promising to take me “around the world,” (I’ll let you smart people figure out what that meant on your own) when we got married and settled down after I got out of the Army (which was in our stink-hole of a town considered automatic, double automatic as the war clouds heated up in Vietnam as we were getting ready to graduate. Lorraine, if you can believe this and you should, lived in an even more ramshackled shack of house than I did, even more run down because her old man was a drunk and her mother had some kind of mental problems that nobody could ever figure out (she would years later be “put away” as the saying went so there was truth to her problems, maybe that old man drinking and belting her around added to the pain in her head and she just nodded out into her own world, I guess). Lorraine maybe dirt poor, maybe not the best dresser since her clothes came out of the local Bargain Center that she was afraid to admit to me until I told her my stuff was strictly hand-me downs from my older brothers and my mother made her purchases for us at that same store, was the smartest girl in her class (she was a year behind me), was in the College Prep classes while I was in some dink General Ed track. But here is where having too much time on your hands, and too much “from hunger” too got in the way.

Not so sweet Lorraine was two-timing me, she was two-timing me with a guy from Hingham in the back of his Chevy half bare-assed, taking him “around the world,” which I figure that you have figured out by now what it means, as my friend Jack found out from his sister who was dating the guy’s younger brother and passed on to me, the bitch. Yeah, I took it hard, took it harder when she lied to me that they were “just friends,” that our thing was real. I dropped her like a hot potato, gone (although not forgotten obviously since I still have a slow burn about that situation, hell, she was my first love). I heard later when I was in ‘Nam from that same Jack that she went with this Hingham guy out to California for a while, that the guy had treated her right, that they had been on the same wavelength about getting out of Podunk, getting out of that public shame stuff too. Jack said he heard she had become a “flower child” or something but then his sister stopped dating the guy’s younger brother and she kind of just faded from the earth.        

The guys were right, my corner boys were right, right as hell, live fast, live very fast and don’t look back because there ain’t nothing to look back to. Just keep looking for some new Lorraine to break your heart, you know you will so you don’t have to take it from me, to take you “around the world” if she decides not to two-time you for some new Jimmy. Just keep looking and moving, that’s the ticket. Yeah, it’s a sad, cold world so damn you had better run, run as hard and fast as you can. That’s the score, Jack, that’s the score.   

Singing songs from the soul about getting out on that Jack Kerouac-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night that before ‘Nam every one of my corner boys dreamed of and Sam, Sam Lowell even did, of hitting the thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, looking for that desperate girl beside him when he took that big shift down in the midnight “chicken run,” in taking that girl down to the Jersey shore everything is alright going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later getting all retro-folkie, paying his Woody and Pete dues looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita too (and me with three busted marriages to show for those dreams), and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home bleeding, bleeding a little banged up, out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road maybe dancing in the streets if the mood took him to that place that you could see in his eyes when he got going, coming home from down in Jungle-land the place of crashed dreams out along the Southern Pacific road around Gallup, New Mexico  dreaming of his own Phoebe Snow. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.          

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind 

 

 
 
 

Here is the drill. Bart Webber had started out life, started out as a captive nation child listening to singers like Frank Sinatra who blew away all of the bobbysoxers of his mother’s generation before he pitter-pattered the Tin Pan Alley crowd with Cole Porter champagne lyrics changed from sweet sister cocaine to the bubbly reflecting changes of images, Bing Crosby, not the Bing of righteous Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? but White Christmas put to sleep stuff along with “come on to my house” Rosemary Clooney (and to his brother Bob and his Bobcats as well), the Inkspots spouting, sorry kit-kating scat ratting If I Didn’t Care and their trademark spoken verse on every song they touched (and not a soul complained at least according to the record sales, Miss Patti Page getting dreamy about local haunt Cape Cod (although slightly better on Tennessee Waltz maybe because that one was a cautionary tale about letting your friend cut in on your gal, or guy), Miss Rosemary Clooney telling one and all to jump and come to her house as previously discussed, Miss Peggy Lee trying to get some no account man to do right, do right by his woman (and swinging and swaying on those Tin Pan Alley tunes of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers and Jerome Kern which kept a whole generation of popular singers with a scat of material), the Andrew Sisters yakking about their precious rums and cokes (soft drinks, thank you remember what was said above about the switch in time from sweet sister to bathtub gin), the McGuire Sisters getting misty-eyed, the Dooley sisters dried-eyed, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy who had his own band for some reason, maybe sibling rivalry, look it up if you like) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s. The radio which his mother, Delores of the many commands, of the many sorrows, and the many estrangements best saved for another day, always had on during the day to get her through her “golden age of working class prosperity and single official worker, dad, workaday daytime household world” and on Saturday night too when that dad, Prescott, joined in.

Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlin on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression (no mean task not necessarily easier than slogging through that war coming on its heels)  and when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or the Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II.

Bart, thinking back on the situation felt long afterward that he would have been wrong if he said that Delores and Prescott should not have had their memory music after all of that Great Depression sacking and war rationing but frankly that stuff then (and now although less so) made him  grind his teeth. But he, and his three brothers, were a captive audience then and so to this very day he could sing off Rum and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller version not the Andrew Sister’s) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover from memory. But that was not his music, okay. (Nor mine either since we grew up in the same working class neighborhood in old Carver, the cranberry bog capital of the world, together and many nights in front of Hank’s Variety store we would blow steam before we got our very own transistor radios and record players about the hard fact that we could not turn that radio dial, or shut off that record player, under penalty of exile from Main Street.)     

 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which Bart “dug” (his term since he more than the rest of us who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Clam Shack on Main Street [not the diner on Thornton Street, that would be later when the older guys moved on and we stepped up in their places in high school] was influenced by the remnant of the “beat” generation minute as it got refracted in Carver via his sneak trips to Harvard Square),  seriously dug to the point of dreaming his own jailbreak dreams about rock star futures (and girls hanging off every hand, yeah, mostly the girls part as time went on once he figured out his voice had broken around thirteen and that his slightly off-key versions of the then current hits would not get him noticed on the mandatory American Bandstand, would not get him noticed even if he was on key) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for him, us, to be able to unlike Bart’s older brother, Payne, call that stuff the music that he, I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through his, our, minds as we recently proved yet again when we met in Boston at a ‘60s retro jukebox bar and could lip-synch, quote chapter and verse, One Night With You (Elvis version, including the salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry, of course, too bad he couldn’t keep his hands off when the deal went down and Mister wanted no interracial sex, none), Let’s Have A Party ( by the much underrated  Wanda Jackson who they could not figure out how to produce-female Elvis or sweet country girl), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night, well almost one hit, but what a hit when you want to think back to the songs that made you jump, made you a child of rock and roll), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course, who had long ago answered the question of who put the rock in rock and roll), Peggy Sue (too soon gone Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.   

The music that Bart really called his own though, as did I, although later we were to part company since I could not abide, still can’t abide, that whiny music dealing mainly with death, thwarted love, and death, or did I say that already, accompanied by, Jesus, banjos, mandos and harps, was the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with his, our coming of chronological, political and social age, the latter in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside us filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with which neither of us tied up with knots with seven seals connected with until later after getting out of our dinky hometown of Carver and off into the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn  the world upside down.

By the way if you didn’t imbibe in the folk minute or were too young what I mean is the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell, a guy you probably never heard of and haven’t missed much except some history twaddle that Bart is always on top of (from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later in some kind of act, conscious or unconscious, of historical affinity), the blue grass music (which grabbed Bart by the throat when Everett Lally, a college friend of his and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band let him in on his treasure trove of music from that genre which he tried to interest me in one night before I cut him short although Everett was a cool guy, very cool for a guy from the hills and hollows of Appalachia). Protest songs too, protest songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crow’s midnight ways, against the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called the “ticky-tack little cookie-cutter box” existences all of us were slated for if nothing else turned up by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. Bart said that while he was in college (Boston College, the Jesuit school which was letting even heathen Protestants like Bart in as long as the they did not try to start the Reformation, again on their dime, or could play football) the latter songs (With God On Our Side, Blowin’ In The Wind, The Time They Are A-Changing, I Ain’t Marching No More, Universal Soldier and stuff like that) that drove a lot of his interest once he connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which he has written plenty about elsewhere and need not detain us her where he hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights.

 

Bart said a lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that he, we although I just kept replaying Elvis and the crowd until the new dispensation arrived, kept hearing on his transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers (Fabian, a bunch of guys named Bobby, the Everly Brothers) and vapid young female consumer-driven female singer stuff (oh, you want names, well Sandra Dee, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, Leslie Gore say no more). I passed that time, which I agree was a tough time in the rock genre that drove our desires, playing my classic rock and roll records almost to death and worn down grooves and began to hear a certain murmur from down South and out in Chicago with a blues beat that I swear sounded like it came out of the backbeat of rock. Of course both of us being nothing but prime examples of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow sociologists were fretting about, worried that we were heading toward nihilism and not sure what to do about it, worried about our going to hell in a handbasket, like our hurts and depressions were what ailed the candid world although I would not have characterized that trend that way for it would take a few decades to see what was what. Then though the pretty boy and vapid girl music just gave me a headache.  Bart too although like I said we split ways as he sought to seek out roots music that he kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once he found a station (accidently) which featured such folk music and got intrigued by the sounds.

 

Part of that search, my part but I dragged Bart along a little when I played to his roots interests after he found out that some of the country blues music would get some play on that folk music station, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice singing out about how he would rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man, Bukka White (sweating blood and salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited), and, of course Creole Belle candy man Mississippi John Hurt.

 

But those guys basically stayed in the South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south looking for, well, looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto  and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, the late B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they too had made their own pacts with the devil. And made a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.  

B.B. King was by no means my first choice among electrified bluesmen, Muddy Waters and in a big way Howlin’ Wolf got closer to the nut for me, But B.B.  on his good days and when he had Lucille (whichever version he had to hand) he got closer to that feeling that the blues could set me free when I was, well, blue, could keep me upright when some woman was two-timing me, or worst was driving me crazy with her “do this and do that” just for the sake of seeing who was in charge, could chase away some bad dreams when the deal went down. Gave off an almost sanctified sense of time and place, after a hard juke joint or Chicago tavern Saturday night and you showed up kind of scruffy for church early Sunday morning hoping against hope that the service would be short. B.B. might not have been my number one but he stretched a big part of that arc. Praise be.

 

 

The Max Daddy Of Horror Films Passes-Wes Craven At 76

The Max Daddy  Of Horror Films Passes-Wes Craven At 76

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Usually this space is dedicated to current left-wing politics, all-around cultural critiques any commemoration of certain moments in the history of the convoluted American experience. Once in a while, and this time is one of them, it is important to take note of the passes of icons out the norms for this space though. The passing of horror auteur (and other stuff too) Wes Craven at 76 is so noted. The guy knew how to make scary movies, knew how better than most because he knew you only had to be a little out of the ordinary to be scary. You did not need all the techo-bang-bang. Take Freddie Kruger from Nightmare on Elm Street. I am still looking over my shoulder on dark streets on dark nights just in case. Enough said.

Once Again The Life Of The Dharma-Jack Kerouac-A Biography By Tom Clark

Once Again The Life Of The Dharma-Jack Kerouac-A Biography By Tom Clark

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Jack Kerouac: A Biography, Tom Clark, Paragon House, 1990

 

I have been on a Jack Kerouac tear of late (if you do not know who he is at this point either think On The Road, the famous alternate road to life book he wrote putting flesh and blood to the “beat” movement of the 1950s, think of the guy who the media proclaimed as the “king of the beats” after writing that novel which he wore kicking and screaming or if those suggestions fail ask your parents, or ouch, grandparents for they will know, probably headed out on the road themselves if only for a minute after reading the book). I have been reading not so much his works, although I have been doing some of that too but reading biographies, essays, and other sketches to get a better grasp on my fascination about this working class guy from Lowell not so far from where I grew up, about a guy who grew up from hunger as I did, and a guy who for a minute anyway gave the literary set a run for its money with a new way of writing novels. He called it, maybe disingenuously “spontaneous writing” since he was an incredible re-writer and reviser of everything he wrote as well as a meticulously organized keeper of his own archives but probably better is a take from a Norman Mailer title-advertisements for myself. (Allen Ginsberg, the poet, his early friend and road companion, called Jack the great rememberer of their generation and that is probably right.)

That said, I have gained a lot of information not previously known by looking into the life of the man who probably with the exceptions of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway (yeah, Hemingway is always in the mix somewhere when you talk guys, guy writers in the 20^th century, in “modern” writing) has influenced me more than all others in a lifetime of reading. This is a little bit ironic since I was a shade bit too young to appreciate as a child of the generation of ’68 (you know those of us who raised hell with the government, with society, hell, with Jack who disowned us when the deal went down although we, I, did not disown him, or his influence in the 1960s).       

Now there are several ways to approach doing a biography about a writer. The two ways that come to mind most readily in the case of Jack Kerouac are, one, to do a close analysis of his writings like his first real biographer, Ann Charters (the one whom almost all those have written something about Jack afterward own a debt to, acknowledged or not), did who had the advantage of actually working with the man on his bibliography before he passed (and the disadvantage of knowing him too well so that on the personal stuff she did a great deal of sliding over as later biographers have felt no need to do). The other is to do like the writer/poet Tom Clark did in the book under review, Jack Kerouac: A Biography, and give us the more nitty-gritty details of Jack’s life, his terrible struggles to get published and his awful time with success when he became the “once and future king of the “beats”         

In a recent review of the Ann Charters biography which I think bears repeating here I noted the following:

“It is probably hard for today’s youthful generation (the so-called millennials) to grasp how important the jail break-out of the 1960s, of breaking free from old time Cold War red scare golden age dream, of creating our own sense of space was to my generation, my generation of ’68 (so-called). That “generation of ’68” designation picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) was winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.

But we did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando and above all the “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from.

Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers like myself only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.”              

Here the odd thing, as Tom Clark’s biography insightfully brings out better than Ann Charters who perhaps was too close to the scene , Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” is worthy of investigation along with his obvious literary merits as a member in good standing of the American literary pantheon.           

On the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of the generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.” Add to those factors his being a “jock,” a corner boy (at least that is the feel from a read of Maggie Cassidy), and a guy who liked to goof off and that only adds to the confusion about who and what Jack Kerouac was about. But here is the secret, the secret thread that runs through the Clark biography (and Charters too as well as Jack’s friend and rival John Holmes in his remembrances of Jack), he was a mad man to write, to write and to write about himself and his times. And had enough of an ego to think that his writing would carry out his task of making a legend of his own life. Yeah, a million word guy (probably much more than that and without a word processor to keep count, to make editing easier, despite his theory of spontaneous writing to the contrary, and to easily store his output).

So the value of this biography is the material presented about his rough-hewn upbringing in down and out Lowell, the dramatic effect that the death of his older brother at a young age had on his psyche, his football prowess and disappointments, his coming of age problems with girls, his going off to New York to prep school and college, his eventual decision to “dig” the scene in the Village, his checkered military record during the war, the shock of the death of his father, his inability to deal with women, and marriage, his extreme sense of male bonding, his early and often drinking problems and other personal anecdotes offered by a host of people who knew, loved and hated him do not play second fiddle to this literary strand here.       

Mister Clark does his best work when he goes by the numbers and discusses Kerouac’s various troubles trying to be a published paid serious writer, and to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. The fate of On The Road which after all is about his and Neal Cassady’s various cross-country trips, drug and alcohol highs, partying, women grabbed in the late 1940s and not published until 1957 is indicative of the gap between what Kerouac thought was his due and what the finicky publishing world thought about him. Of course after he became a best-seller, had his “fifteen minutes of fame plus fifty plus years” getting his work published was the least of his problems. While he was to write some more things after he became famous there is a real sense that he ran out of steam. And as Clark’s last chapters summarily detailed beginning with the 1960 events which made up the short novel Big Sur about his increasing alcohol and drug problems and breakdowns highlight those problems and how the problem of fame itself got the better of him. Although no way can you consider Jack Kerouac a one-note literary Johnny. However if he had only written On The Road his niche in the pantheon would be assured.          

At the end of my review of the Charters biography I made a suggestion to the millennials who need to read Kerouac -after you read On The Road - read Charter’s something of an early definitive biography (with lots of good notes at the end about her sources for various opinions and questions of fact) to get a feel for what it was like to be there at the creation of the big jail-break “beat” minute which spawned your parents, or ouch, grandparents “hippie” minute. I can now make another addition. Read this one too. While other later biographies have been produced, especially around the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On The Road in 2007, this is the one to check out next.   

Outrage- Hugo Pinell- The Last Of The San Quentin Six And George Jackson's Comrade Murdered In Jail

Outrage- Hugo Pinell- The Last Of The San Quentin Six And George Jackson's Comrade Murdered In Jail 

The Second Day Of The Locust-Kirk Douglas’s Ace In The Hole

The Second Day Of The Locust-Kirk Douglas’s Ace In The Hole

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Ace In The Hole, starring Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, directed by Billy Wilder, 1951

Get this story line right out of today’s mad social media driven desperate cry for recognition in a sullen, indifferent world.  A hard-nosed, hard-hitting newspaper reporter who liked his liquor, liked his women, liked to live close to the edge on a story, hell was willing to go over the top six ways to Sunday in order to sell the boss’s newspapers (and he was not particular about which boss as long as he go that by-line, got that big fat check). Get this too was willing, way more than willing to throw the truth out with bath water in order to keep the story humming for a few extra days, or until the juice was sucked out of the damn thing. Of course guys (gals too but our protagonist is a guy on this one) like our boy, Chuck, Chuck Tatum, maybe you read his by-line when he was riding the big wave, who live for wine, women, song and a big chunk of fame have a habit over going over the edge a little too much for the city editors of most newspapers taste which has caused him to be thrown off half the best newspapers in the country.

As we hone in on the story line Chuck is cooling his heels out in Albuquerque, on some nowhere square dink newspaper where the editor/owner thinks you should tell the truth straight and without the garnish, funny guy right. Finds himself out there where the states are square and the people left to their own resources by their own choice had better treat one another square, and be square or else. So our big city reporter was just looking for that one little story to ride him back to the big time, to easy street, what the heck maybe to that Pulitzer Prize that has eluded him all these years. And lo and behold out in the middle of Podunk on his way to cover yet another hoe-down or picnic in the boondocks Chuck gets his lucky break, a story a real live human interest story, the kind that people stop whatever they are doing to follow, the one that has them on the phone telling one and all their exact opinion of what is happening, with baited breathe. Here is the beauty of this one, a guy, a regular Joe (although his name is Leo but nobody cares about the name as much as the one-on-one human interest about what is happening to some poor sap who is in more trouble than they are, not much more was caught in a cave looking for relics around the mountains which the local Indians, oops Native Americans, you know the native peoples and needs help getting out, help which in the normal scheme of events would take a few hours and done. Except our boy Chuck smelled this for a million dollar story anyway you cut it, a story that every poor sucker who reads the newspapers form Podunk to New Jack City could relate to, if he can keep the thing alive long enough to draw an audience. So the catch is too get the guy out, but not too some. Through some very devious methods and some pure high-handed power-plays Chuck shows his reckless expertise, gets so wrapped up in the thing that he can see the bright lights of the city as fast  as he can write, and finagle things so that he gets exclusives, the almighty exclusives that separate the pros from the amateurs in the newspaper business. The key though was to keep that story going and that is where everything turned to dross in the end. See Chuck ordered the rescue crews to do the rescuing of poor sap Leo the long way round, you know, to keep the story going, has the crowds attracted by his stories coming out to observe the human drama in person on edge, has made the whole thing a  media circus. Key to that was getting Leo tough/hard as nails/sexy snake of a wife to work the ropes with him. And she, Lorraine, like all blonde Lorraines played her part well once our boy Chuck who, frankly, seemed to have been hard on his women, got under her skin (and gave her the franchise in the gathering circus end of the game).       Of course there was a down side to Chuck’s scheming since Leo refused to cooperate by getting a little short of breath waiting for that long way around digging to get to him, yeah the poor guy  folded up under the cave-in pressure and didn’t last long enough to get the big headline. Great big fifteen minutes of fame story if there ever was one.          

 Sounds like any other news story of today 24/7/367 media frenzy of the moment though, right. Wrong this is the skinny, the real skinny this one came in 1951. This one is famed director Billy Wilder’s (he the super-max daddy director of the close up sordid underbelly look at old time Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard) Ace In The Hole as he takes a big swing at the newspaper business in the days when that medium ruled the roost of mass communication and when like today with the expansive social media mega-reach the notion of “all the news that fit to print” hinged on how many paper it would sell. Kirk Douglas as the cranky, over-the-top news hound Chuck gives a very good performance here as does Jan Sterling as Lorraine, that hustling wife of poor old Leo. Hey, I didn’t tell you the ending, the real ending not poor schmuck Leo’s running out of air but Chuck’s. In the end Chuck got “religion” (helped by a friendly mortal wound from Lorraine when he decided one more time to play rough with her), see before he too passed from the scene he realized that he had gone over the edge, had set something in motive better left to the fates. Yeah, that’s the real cautionary tale sixty some years later.      

 

Mumia: Urgent action needed for lifesaving medical treatment

Mumia: Urgent action needed for lifesaving  medical treatment Dear Friends: Please see email below from Prison Radio.  Mumia is still being denied life-saving health care by prison authorities, and his situation is increasingly grave.  Action is needed to keep up the pressure to save Mumia’s life.  Please see Prison Radio’s Action Guide below for ways you can help.  Share with friends and urge people in your networks to support. Watch the video appeal below here. PAYDAY

Mumia Abu Jamal

We are in court demanding immediate lifesaving medical treatment for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and we are going to win. Yesterday, Mumia's lawyers Bret Grote, Legal Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, and co-counsel Robert Boyle filed a preliminary injunction in Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes with Judge Robert Mariani of the Middle District Federal U.S. Court (see link below). The injunction seeks a federal court order to ensure that prison medical staff provide immediate lifesaving treatment to Mumia. Hear from Emory Douglas on how you can fight for Mumia. The prison administration is simply denying Mumia all treatment. Let me be clear: Mumia is weak, his lower extremities still swollen, his skin still severely compromised and raw, and his hepatitis C active and damaging his organs. Given the severity of Mumia's organ failure (his skin) and indications of additional potential organ damage, our legal action states that withholding treatment is causing immediate and irreparable harm. Prison officials have refused to conduct additional viral load blood panels, reveal or conduct additional organ damage assessments, and they are refusing to prescribe simple medications to reduce Mumia's painful and dangerous skin eruptions.   And in an effort to further delay treatment, attorneys for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections have filed briefs opposing the class action lawsuit for hepatitis C treatment filed in June. We expect they will oppose our injunction filed yesterday as well. Treatment for hep C has a 95% cure rate. By withholding medication, the DOC would like to see this become a death sentence.  In addition to the hepatitis C antiviral cure, we are demanding that prison medical personnel re-proscribe Protopic ointment and the mineral supplement  Zinc (220 mlligrams per day) as recommended by his physicians to provide immediate relief to Mumia's skin rashes- which have become open wounds. As Mumia's legal team fights tirelessly for Mumia's life, we more than ever need your assistance. We need to raise $5,317 in the next 5 days to make it half-way to our goal for this stage of Mumia's legal and political campaign.  We are amplifying the call for: 1. Immediate treatment of Hep C with the latest Anti-viral drugs that have a 95% cure rate. 2. Treatment of Mumia's skin condition by re-proscribing protopic cream and zinc supplements. 3. In-person medical exams by Mumia's independent physicians. Help us make these demands reality by giving to Mumia's medical and legal fund now, and by calling the numbers listed in our Action Guide. Every action and every gift makes a difference. bit.ly/fight4mumia See the preliminary injunction filed yesterday here. Facebook Twitter Website You can also give to Mumia's fund through our website, Paypal, or check: PO Box 411074 | San Francisco, CA 94141 Luchando por la justicia y la libertad, Noelle Hanrahan Director To give by check:  PO Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141 Stock or legacy gifts: Noelle Hanrahan (415) 706 - 5222

Cold War II In Film -The Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Cold War II In Film -The Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Man From U.N.C.L.E., starring Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer,  2015

No question the world political situation, more particularly the strained relations between the United States and Russia today, remind those of us who came of age in the early days of the Cold War of the times when those difficult relationships put both sides very close to the brink of war. And naturally culture, popular culture as pressed through the childhood television, where it could reflected acted to address those tensions and themes. So the popular T.V. spy thriller series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. now reduced to a couple of hour movie (although the ending left plenty of possibilities for sequels, endless sequels) has gotten a new lease on life although the original tensions that made that series successful and reflected our capacity to wonder, wonder beyond the bomb, the nuclear bomb, and its aftermath, about how to stop its proliferation and use have been effectively much reduced if not eliminated.  

Now as the opening sequence to this film amply demonstrates at the field level anyway the business of spy craft and the type A personalities who would engage in such activities creates a small cadre of equals, a small fraternity. And that is how Napoleon Solo (played by Henry Cavill), a rogue operative recruited by the Americans, and Illya some Russian last name which I never could pronounce (played by Armie Hammer) team up in the hard early 1960s Cold War night and get joined together at the hip to solve the pressing problem before them. What? Working together-CIA types, KGB types (with British MI6 thrown in for good measure) in the high Cold War red scare night. Well, yes, (at least 2015 yes)because there is another danger that both parties are aware of-some neo-Nazis are out to bring back the next version of the Third Reich if they can only get their hands on a few nuclear bombs to take their proper place in the world political order (possession of such instruments of destruction as we have too frequently witnessed of late with “rogue states” the only way to stop the big boys of the world order from coming and blowing your civilization back to the Stone Age or finding yourself a place at the world power table).     

Of course all that is happening is that the United States, Russia (and Great Britain) are just reviving the old World War II alliance that helped defeat the Nazis and their hangers-on the first time. So once you get through the attempts to rescue a nuclear scientist with a fetching daughter (used as a lure to get to him) from the ugly crypto-Nazis ready to take on the world, once the boys are able to trust each other enough to gain a certain respect for each other, once through daring do the boys are able to stop the madness of the emergence of another nuclear armed power to muddle the 1960s world order you get the same result as the old time war alliance ( being commemorated in its70th anniversary observance this year). The only question now is what the new boys on the block will do in the next episode. Although my main wonder is when cuckoo Illya is actually going to kiss that fetching young woman who helped him out of a couple of jams.