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	Friday, October 9, 2015 VFP Denounces U.S. Bombing of Afghan Hospital If the attack was indeed deliberate, then it is a very serious war crime.  We support Doctors Without Borders’ call for an independent investigation.  We have seen what happens when the Pentagon is allowed to investigate itself.  It is high time that the U.S. military be held accountable for the deaths of innocent civilians. We call for all involved, up to the highest level, to be held accountable. Veterans For Peace also calls for the end of the U.S. led war in Afghanistan and all military personnel brought home.  <VFP Full Statement> Related Articles 22 People Killed by U.S. Airstrike on Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan by Kathy Kelly VP Gerry Condon Comments About the Recent Hospital Attack in Kunduz, Afghanistan (Courtesy of Sputnik News) Back to Top Maine Peace Walk – Militarization of the Seas When:  October 9-24, 2015 Where:  Peace Walk Route Schedule The Pentagon has the largest carbon footprint on our Mother Earth.  Waging endless war consumes massive amounts of fossil fuels and lays waste to significant environmentally sensitive places on the planet – particularly the oceans. The walk is being sponsored by Maine Veterans for Peace; PeaceWorks; CodePink Maine; Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST); Peace Action Maine; Veterans for Peace Smedley Butler Brigade (Greater Boston); Seacoast Peace Response (Portsmouth); and Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. For more information about the walk & the pot luck supper schedule,  visit VFP Tom Sturtevant's Chapter 001's website. Back to Top Golden Rule to Sail at San Francisco Fleet Week The historic sailing vessel Golden Rule has arrived in San Francisco just in time for a peaceful encounter with Fleet Week warships, during the Parade of Ships, Friday 11:am to 12:30 pm.  She will be joined by at least one other sailboat from the Bay Area’s famed Peace Navy. The Golden Rule and her crew intend to sail peacefully on the San Francisco waterfront throughout Fleet Week activities on Friday and Saturday. The public is invited to meet the crew and to tour the boat. To arrange an interview, a tour, or to sail on the Golden Rule, call Gerry Condon at 206-499-1220.<Full Press Release> Back to Top Order Your Fall Issue of Peace In Our Times Today! Deadline to place NEW subscription and new bundle orders:  Oct 16, 2015 Order your copy or bundle today! Articles included in this edition: Capt. Mena Sandoval: A Different Kind of Soldier – John Lamperti Peace Movement Must Pivot Into Asia Pacific – Bruce Gagnon The Asian Pivot, U.S. Militarism and Agent Orange – Tarak Kauff Power of Conscience: U.S. Military and the Myth of Violence – Maria Santelli PIOT Editor to Run for Mayor – Mike Ferner Black Americans and the Military – William Anderson Voyage of the Gold Rule Continues – Ellen Taylor WWII Hero Condemns Nuclear Weapons – Pamela Alma Weymouth The Other Feminism – Charlotte Maria Sãenz Hedges, Swanson, Marjorie Cohn . . . and much more Back to Top Travel Opportunities for Activists Please be advised that we take 15-20 people, and only 4 spaces remain. Our tours are led by VFP member and Cuban documentary film maker Jim Ryerson, who has been to the island more than 25 times.  If you are interested, please contact Jim. Like the other 2 trips, this one will sell out. jim@travelingman.net 323-436-5223 Here is the itinerary   http://cubaexplorer.com/tours/jrjan/ (Click on Book Now to see prices) Location Sponsored by Dates              Contact for Additional Information Palestine Code Pink Nov 1-8, 2015 Visit the Code Pink website Cuba Code Pink Nov 20-29, 2015 Visit the Code Pink website Venezuela SOAW Dec 2-10, 2015 For more information email Terri Mattson at teri.mattson@yahoo.com Cuba Jim Ryerson Jan 22-29 2016 For more information email Jim Ryerson at jim@cubaconnections.org. Cuba Code Pink Feb 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Việt Nam Việt Nam's  Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160 Mar 14 -Mar 30 2016 For more information, please email Nadya Williams Cuba Code Pink May 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders May 21 -Jun 1 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders Jul 16 - Jul 29 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders Oct 24 - Nov 6 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Back to Top		In This Issue: VFP Denounces U.S. Bombing of Afghan Hospital Maine Peace Walk – Militarization of the Seas Golden Rule to Sail at San Francisco Fleet Week Order Your Fall Issue of Peace In Our Times Today! Travel Opportunities for Activists Join the People's Climate Movement National Day of Action on October 14 2015 Convention Videos Available Le Ly Haslip East Coast Speaking Tour VFP Jeju/Okinawa Delegation Save the Dates: Nov 20-22 - SOA Watch Vigil VFP Member/Chapter Highlights Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Join the People's Climate Movement National Day of Action on October 14 VFP members participating in Climate Change March in NYC The People’s Climate Movement and others are calling for a National Day of Action Wednesday, October 14 to demand bold action on the climate crisis facing our planet. We are calling for a sustainable, democratic and just economy that preserves our planet and works for all peoples. Find an action in your city! Back to Top 2015 Convention Videos Available Plenaries and workshops from the VFP 2015 National Convention are available online. More will be available online in the upcoming weeks The Opening Ceremony Deported Veterans Workshop The Middle East and Ukraine Plenary Back to Top Le Ly Haslip East Coast Speaking Tour Le Ly Haslip will speak in October at various locations throughout the Northeast. Ms. Haslip was one of the many speakers at this year's convention. She is an internationally known Vietnamese-American author, philanthropist, peace activist and speaker. She is the founder of both Global Village Foundation and East Meets West Foundation, which has helped rebuild Vietnam since 1986 through an array of projects including the construction of hospitals and schools, and a Mobile Library project which brings books to rural schools. For more information and updates to the tour, please visit the Global Village Foundation facebook page. Back to Top VFP Jeju/Okinawa Delegation This winter, VFP members will host a delegation to accompany local communities who are opposing U.S. bases on their islands in Jeju, South Korea and Okinawa, Japan.  For more information on the delegation, please email Tarak Kauff @ takauff@gmail.com. Back to Top Save the Dates: Nov 20-22 - SOA Watch Vigil Join us as we continue to denounce the failed U.S. policies, which have left a brutal legacy of impunity and Human Rights violations throughout the hemisphere. If you haven't already done so, start making your travel arrangements to Georgia! Please contact Casey at casey@veteransforpeace.org or 314-725-6005 if you plan to attend the SOAW gathering this year.  Hourly Shuttle Info from Atlanta to Columbus Back to Top VFP Member/Chapter Highlights Gary May, VFP member of Evansville/ Southern IN Chapter 104 will be presented with a $250 donation from the Evansville branch of NAACP to help fund the chapter's scholarship fund.    Scholarship applicants must write an essay or poem in response to peace related questions.  <More> VFP Indiana Chapter 49 will participate in Butler University's Peace Festival Oct 19-22 with a “Remembering Our Youth,” Boots Display 11:00 AM–2:00 PM, at the Peace Pole outside Starbucks. Back to Top Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Aug 28 - Oct 15 - Golden Rule Schedule of Events Oct 9-24 - Maine Walk For Peace Nov 20-22, 2015 - SOA Watch 25th Anniversary Vigil Back to Top Did you know? In 1990, the National Office is notified that VFP has received a permanent NGO seat at the United Nations.
Forward to a Friend Veterans For Peace, 1404 N. Broadway, St. Louis, MO 63102   Veterans For Peace appreciates your tax-exempt donations. We also encourage you to join our ranks. Click to no longer receive updates from Veterans For Peace

In Boston- Increasing Federal and State Investment in Public Transit

Increasing Federal and State Investment in Public Transit

Saturday, October 24, 2015, 9:30 am to 1:30 pm

SEIU Local 32BJ/ District 615 • 26 West St, 2nd Floor • Park St T • Boston

Public Transit is a Public Good that Deserves and Requires Public Funding

The Budget for All Coalition invites you to a half-day forum

• The state of public transit in Eastern Massachusetts
• Investments needed for a modern and efficient public transportation system
• The impact of public transit privatization on riders, T employees and their unions
• The need for re-allocation of our Federal Tax Dollars to mass transit
• A role for the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Peoples Budget in mobilizing to improve mass transit

Panelists include:
Phineas Baxandall, Mass Budget & Policy Center
Cathy Ann Buckley, Mass Sierra Club
Representative, T Riders Union at Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE)
Representative, Boston Carmen's Union, Local 589, Amalgamated Transit Union
Cole Harrison, Massachusetts Peace Action
Jonathan King, professor of biology, MIT and Budget for All
Jeremy Mendelson, TransitMatters
Joshua Ostroff, Transportation for Massachusetts
Concetta Paul, Mass. Alliance of HUD Tenants (MAHT)
Kirstie Pecci, Mass PIRG
John Ratliff, Mass. Senior Action
Paul Shannon, Budget for All and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
Jack Spence, 350 Massachusetts, Transportation working group
Space is limited – To attend please pre-register at fed-invest.brownpapertickets.com/. $12 donation requested to cover expenses, no one turned away.
“Investing in public transit is essential to building and strengthening the economic and environmental well-being of our communities today and for future generations” — Community Labor United, "The Path to Better Public Transit"

Upcoming Events: 

Music for Peace: Music of Schumann and Beethoven	Saturday, October 17, 2015 - 7:30pm	Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church	Cambridge
Shut Pilgrim Speakout	Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 1:00pm	Boston State House	Boston
Palestinian Villages: Erased from Space and Consciousness	Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 7:00pm	3 Church Street	Cambridge
Increasing Federal and State Investment in Public Transit	Saturday, October 24, 2015 - 9:30am	SEIU Local 32BJ/ District 615	Boston
A New Day? Organizing to Change US Policy on Israel and Palestine	Saturday, November 14, 2015 - 1:00pm	Location TBA	Boston/Cambridge
Rising to the Challenge: Sustainable Security for All	Saturday, November 21, 2015 - 9:00am	Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall	Cambridge

More Peace and Justice Events.    How to Submit Events
 

Newsletter: 

UJP Activist

Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits

Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin (who fell by the wayside, fell to his notorious monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother-RIP     

 

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address.

Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors. Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for you at the expense of me system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.

If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap,  with blinkers on) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull  sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times), reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay) and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.

If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land  that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that bed to perdition. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.

So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes   ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel, better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.

See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 

 

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.

If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
  

Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits

Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin (who fell by the wayside, fell to his notorious monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother-RIP     

 

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address.

Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors. Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for you at the expense of me system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.

If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap,  with blinkers on) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull  sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times), reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay) and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.

If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land  that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that bed to perdition. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.

So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes   ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel, better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.

See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 

 

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.

If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.

Of Pranks And Cranks-Steve Martin And John Candy’s Planes, Trains And Automobiles

Of Pranks And Cranks-Steve Martin And John Candy’s Planes, Trains And Automobiles

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Planes, Trains and Automobiles, starring Steve Martin, John Candy, 1987

There are lots of ways that Hollywood has played the male-bonding buddy film from the deep fog into the mist alliance to fight the bad guys of World War II Rick of Rick’s American Café (played by Humphrey Bogart in fine fettle) and the seemingly corrupt policeman (played by Claude Rains) in the classic Casablanca to the over the cliff bravado of Butch (played by Paul Newman) and Sundance (played by Robert Redford) in the classic cowboy film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the film under review we get a comedic, cloud puff sent-up of the genre when dead pan comic Steve Martin joins up with over-the-top maniacal John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And while their performances and the plotline of the story will not have future auteurs cribbing from the film it was a film that provided more than a few chuckles in this quarter.

Here’s the mix. Take everybody’s, well, everybody in modern society’s fear of not being able to get home for the holidays, or just get home in one piece if you are depending on modern transportation, modern transportation that has gone berserk all at one time add in two very different guys, Neal (played by Martin) a by the book straight arrow executive and Del a salesman (played by Candy) a cukoo bird loose cannon of a guy who if you saw such a character in real life you would run from, run very fast the other way. But here is the dilemma Neal is trying to get from a useless conference in New York to sweet home Chicago for Thanksgiving. Now even under the best of circumstances getting home for that holiday is a dicey matter, a matter that according the numerous horror stories I have heard from others and a couple of my own is fraught with peril even with all the breaks.

What happens when you are connected (via a “stolen” cab grab by Del) to that cuckoo bird for the duration. Through hassles getting to the airport, through flights delays, through the dreaded snowed-in O’Hare Airport and you are switched off to Wichita with no motel in sight, your best laid plan to take the train turns to ashes when the damn thing conks out, and your rented automobile turns into a heap of rubble all because you are tied by some mythical umbilical cord to a genuine mad man who is barely sane. Turn yourself into Bellevue? Not a bad idea but wrong. No, you learn through adversary that here was your long lost buddy. See what I mean about Hollywood and the male-bonding genre.                      

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