*****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

From The Pen Of Bart Webber  

Sam Lowell has of later liked to review books, movies, musical CDs for various citizen journalist blogs and other such cyberspace outlets as relaxation writing from the drear of his professional writing, writing legal briefs, memoranda and motions for himself and other lawyers. Usually he does such avocational writing as a wisp-of-willow affair depending on some prompt that would get him going like happened recently after hearing a song on YouTube by Bob Dylan from his prime days, Like a Rolling Stone. While listening to that song he noticed on the sidebar which gives other performances that one might wish to look at a segment from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary, Don’t Look Back, where Dylan, his then shortly to be abandoned flame and great folksinger in her own right, Joan Baez, and his then road manager and folksinger Bob Neuwirth were sitting in some English hotel singing bits of Hank Williams’ Lost Highway. That got him interested in seeing the whole documentary which had just been rereleased in the Criterion films series and which he ordered on Netflix and later reviewed. Such helter-skelter choices are the norm for his selection process.           

Not so on the subject of the “beats,” those cool cats and kittens (I guess that is the way it would have been put by hipsters in North Beach and the Village when beat was pure before the movement became just another commodity to be sold on television like cars or soap) who came shortly before our coming of age time down in working-class Carver where we grew up and were slightly singed by the beat flame. That “working-class” before Carver was not accidental, not for Sam anyway since his “max daddy,” “be-bop daddy,” or any way you want to say it literary hero from that period was the hipster mad monk novelist Jack Kerouac who had grown up about sixty miles north of Carver in working-class mill town getting ready to move south for cheaper labor Lowell. So in Sam’s eyes that designation was important then although maybe not quite as deeply thought through as recently when he had been on a tear re-reading most of Jack’s work.

Here again chance plays a part in what he would review. After having read a few of the more important novels, the iconic classic (we must use the word “iconic” these days to keep up with the professional users of that word which is now something of a flavor of the month term for any event or person who had had at least fifteen minutes of fame along the way) On The Road, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur he had picked up the Ann Charter-edited Portable Jack Kerouac which led him to her early informative biography. But Sam was looking for something more than a literary appraisal of Kerouac’s work, important as that is, than the Charter biography provided. He was looking for tidbits, pieces of information about Kerouac’s time in Lowell, the effect that growing up working poor had on him growing up in that city by the Merrimac. In short Sam wanted to expand on that idea of why Kerouac had, even if at a remove, on him, us as kids growing up in working poor Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world. So he went through some other later biographies which blossomed especially around the time in 2007 of the 50^th anniversary of the publication of On The Road.

One of the books that satisfied his desire for biographical information was Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac: A Biography (Paragon House, 1990) which he told us about one night, us being Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Sam Eaton, Ralph Morris and me, when we gathered together for our periodic night out at the Rusty Nail in downtown Boston and which he wrote a review of later.  Here’s what Sam had to say about Jack Kerouac, warts and all:

“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 hitchhike road to life from the white picket fence norm 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 of him, 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” since the vast majority of his work was an on-going saga of his life and times spread out from the 1930s with Maggy Cassidy to just before his death in 1969 Vanities of Duclouz. (Allen Ginsberg, the poet, his early friend and road companion, and no mean hand as a rememberer himself 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, guys who influenced “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 did (the one whom almost all those have written something about Jack afterward own a debt to, acknowledged or not), 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 as I said 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. He spent after some modest success with the semi-autobiographical Town And City writing about six versions of Road, other unpublished material and lots of frustration although not much self-doubt trying to break through the arcane New York publishing scene. He said when fame did come he was no longer physically, mentally or philosophically the same man who sought out the mid-20^th century version of the great American West dream of his youth even though his admirers thought he still had those inclinations. As is fairly well known, and if not you can google YouTube for the famous debate Kerouac was part of in 1968 on William Buckley’s PBS show Firing Line where he lays it, by those who lived through the 1960s, Kerouac 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 his antics with his boys and his forlorn love in 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.   

Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart-With Blues Queen Janis Joplin In Mind

Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart-With Blues Queen Janis Joplin In Mind  

 

It was never stated in so many words by anybody Sam Lowell knew, never given some academic jargon mumbo-jumbo like it was when the sociologist, social historians and cultural anthropologists got their hands on the work long after the high tide of the 1960s had ebbed, had turned into a remnant rear-guard action by the ragged stragglers who would just not let go but they had lived under a certain sign, a certain way to navigate the world and seek out kindred. Perhaps being young and carefree Sam’s “youth nation” could not articulate the thing that way, maybe too afraid to speak of it out loud fearing to unleash some demons that they could not control. (Let’s call the phenomenon “youth nation” a term that today’s youth nation generation can relate to better since the advent of the great social media blast has elements of that older camaraderie rather than the more restrictive “hippie” or counter-culture generation since when the deal went down the numbers of hippies, the hip, did not have enough of a critical mass to keep everything going against the counter-offensive by those who were in charge yet many, many more of the young took snippets of what was offered, while not testing the limits of bourgeois society [Sam’s words for what was bothering him at the time]).

Those, like Sam who had initially gotten caught up in the doings (dope, politics, life-styles, a new ethos) by the late Peter Paul Markin, one of the corner boys from around Jimmy Jack’s Diner in growing up town Carver and an early Janis Joplin fan having seen her out in Monterrey on one of his hitchhiking trips to Big Sur when that place mattered in the youth nation configuration and who despite his many contradictions had a preternatural bead on what was coming down, who had been washed clean by the fresh new breeze that came through the country in the early 1960s lived under the sign of “live fast, die young and make a good run at it.” Some later cynics, or maybe the too candid made the third part “and make a good corpse” but that was when all hope that the “newer world” was upon us had faded like a tissue in the wind. A time too when the overwrought pile up of corpses from overdoses, crashed cars, suicides, and just plain “from hunger” wanting habits like Markin’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the deal went down, went down badly made that part of the mantra more explicable.

Nobody said it all in so many word, although Sam and the surviving corner boys hinted at that very idea, that living fast idea, one night after the definite word had come up from down in Sonora in late 1976 that Markin had cashed his check when they gathered at Jimmy Jack’s to mull things over and Frankie Riley, who had called Markin “the Scribe” in the old days had said some guys are “dead men on leave” and nobody contradicted him. But mostly nobody could articulate it that that way, maybe too afraid to speak of it out loud fearing to unleash some demons that could not be controlled lived under that certain sign in sullen wonder. To be old, old being over thirty to youthful twenty something eyes who saw the getting ahead career, wife and family in some leafy suburb drinking elegant wines writing on the wall, reflecting the phrase of the time taking direct aim at parents “don’t trust anybody over thirty,” meant “square,” a residue expression for the tail end of the “beat” generation which whether Sam and the guys knew it or not was their launching pad as they  came of age in that 1960s red scare Cold War night. That was Markin’s time really, the time of sensing the breeze not the mud of the breeze itself.  Meant too, meant as a signal far greater than Markin’s reach that if one did not imbibe in whatever one desired by the time they did get to thirty it would be too late, way too late.     

So Sam, Markin, Frankie, all the guys who stayed around long enough who had not been inducted into the service or to have married their high school sweethearts pursued their  outrageous appetites moved from the traditional working class neighborhood fashion dress statement , winter flannel /summer plaid shirt, chinos, black winter or summer, loafers or engineer boots (saved for rumbles, or threats of rumbles when turf was an issue way before dope smoothed such silliness out) and hair (boys’ regular Lenny the barber called it without  a whiff of irony) and liquor addictions (cheap rotgut wines, smoother Southern Comfort once the cheap wines lost allure, low-shelf whiskeys when some town wino would buy for underage them) to the new ones of the era (new at least to young mostly white eyes not familiar with old-time Billie Holiday New York café jazz needles and “beat” Village high tea time) with the emerging hip “drugstore” of every imaginable medication to salve the soul. Tried every kind of living arrangement as long as it drifted toward the communal (even on church-friendly floors and bedraggled Volkwagen bus campsites) and every kind of love, including the love that could not speak its name (this well before GLBTQ times). Tried every way to take dead aim at old bourgeois society and turn it upside down. Wanted to, desperately wanted to, listen to new music that reflected the new drug-induced karma that matched the chemicals spinning in their brains. No more rock and roll music, or any music, from Bobby Vee/Rydell/Darin, Fabian, Brenda Lee, Leslie Gore, Patsy Cline, that our parents might like, might even tolerate. Everything had be acid- etched.          

Sam had pegged it exactly right one night not long ago when he and some of the old gang who went through the 1960s experience were preparing for a Carver High class reunion when he told the gathering that “we sought to ‘live free,’ to break from convention and we expected out musical heroes (actually all of our heroes which in retrospect seemed of a piece with the outrageous appetites of the time) to partake of our newly established ethos, to lead the way. (That bit of wisdom despite the fact, to his occasional regret whenever he thought about what he could have done to “save” Markin, he had eased out of the “hippie” life-style in the early 1970s and snuck back into law school and that career track while Markin had held out to his visions for much longer.) They had expected their heroes like their slightly older brothers and sisters who went wild over brooding Marlon Brando, sulky James Dean, and moody Elvis to live high off the edge. And so they did, so anyway did what became the holy trinity come concert night, come party time, Jim (Morrison), Jimi (Hendricks), and Janis (Joplin). They lived hard, lived out there on the edge subject to their own doubts, subject like the rest of us to those rat ass things that formed our childhoods and would not let go and they needed release just like us. So Jim twirled the whirling dervish shamanic dance, Jimi fired up his grinding guitar and Janis, little Janis with the big raspy voice sang like some old-time barrelhouse blues mama reincarnate. Sang like the ghost of Big Mama Thornton had her back, like Bessie Smith was holding her place in the devil-is-going-to-get you blues pantheon. Gave us down-hearted blues to fill the heavens, gave us, well, gave us whatever she had to give with every little beat of her heart. Yeah, and they, she lived fast, and died, died way too young not matter what our ethos stated. Markin would have understood that, understood it in aces.      

 

 

Mister James Dandy To The Rescue-With LaVern Baker In Mind

Mister James Dandy To The Rescue-With LaVern Baker In Mind

 

 

 

Mister James Dandy To The Rescue-With LaVern Baker In Mind

 

 

 

 

No question a lot of the classic works of rock and roll, say from the mid-1950s until the end of that decade were driven by those twangy guitars (hopefully provided by the genius of Les Paul and other pioneers working in their little garages in places like Nowhere, Texas trying to get more hyp out of that damn acoustic guitar, knowing, knowing like we all know now that whatever musical jail-break breeze was blowing was going to need plenty of electricity before it was through), those big blast sexy saxs blowing out to high heaven (think about that sax player who backed up Bill Halley on something like See You Later, Alligator and almost inhaled that sax driving that be-bopping first touch of rock coming out of about six musical traditions), and big brush back beat drums. Driven mainly by guys, hungry guys, guys with huge wanting habits trying to run away from the farms and small towns trying to break free from that life of farmer’s son or small store hardware clerk. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Bo, Jerry Lee, Warren, Carl and a lot more. But in that mix, maybe somewhat neglected, intentionally or not, maybe there was no room for lilting voices when the music got all sweaty and from jump street, were female performers like Wanda Jackson (who really could have held her own with the big boys and had a fetching look to boot), Ruth Brown and the Queen of the popping fingers, Miss LaVern Baker.         

Strangely the rise of the “girl” singers in rock and roll, usually in groups, did not really get a jump until toward the end of the 1950s decade but I would argue that LaVern Baker is the “godmother” who set the latter grouping up with her sweet life rhythm which had us all snapping our fingers. It is no secret that a lot of young guys then, a lot of guys like me with two left feet, almost instinctively overcame our shyness, overcame our desire not to be made fools of ourselves when something like LaVern Baker’s Jim Dandy popped out of the school dance DJs hands and on to that creaky old record player in that sullen gymnasium which passed for a dance floor come Friday night keep the kids off the streets time. Or come last dance chance time and having broken the ice, and hopefully no ankles or toes of that eyed partner (as for possible damage imposed on yourself, well, we all, guys anyway, learned early on around our streets that it is a dangerous world and that is that), you closed out the evening with her soulful version of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night. There is still a lot to be written about the women of early rock and roll but Miss Baker is definitely in the mix.     

[Another thing that could use some addressing is the fate of those artists who had center stage for a minute and then faded from mass view when the next best thing came along but who continued to perform out in the back streets, out in the bandstand bowling alleys, out in the motel lounges, out in the road houses. In the mid-1990s long after her heyday 1950s I heard LaVern Baker in a jazz bar in Cambridge. She had just gotten out of “rehab” for a knee or hip replacement, I forget which, and performed in a wheelchair, performed a lot of her old stuff and the highlight of the performance was a rousing version of Jim Dandy. Still working, still popping. I know my youthful memory fingers were popping that night.    

   

 

 

Jesus, A Man Of Her Own- With Barbara Stanwyck’s “No Man Of Her Own” In Mind

Jesus, A Man Of Her Own- With Barbara Stanwyck’s “No Man Of Her Own” In Mind

 

 

 

DVD Review

No Man Of Her Own, starring Barbara Stanwyck, 1951  

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

“Boy some of the plot lines in these old black and white film noir type movies that I was addicted to as a kid in the late 1950s, early 1960s when I would go to the Strand Theater over on Lipton Street in back of Levitt’s Department Store either by myself or with Larry Jeffers who was also addicted although he was not a guy that I hung around with otherwise defy belief,” Sam Eaton mentioned to Ralph Morris one night at Jimmy’s Grille in Boston. Ralph was in one of his periodic trips to town to see Sam and a few other guys from their old political days now that they all were more or less retired and so finally had time to reminisce about the old days, or anything that popped into their heads.  

Lately Sam, aside from some blistering commentary about the endless wars of the American government which was the cement that glued this group together since they all were members in good standing of Veterans for Peace which as the name indicates stand forthwith against the last decade or so of catastrophic American foreign policy beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq, regaled one and all with his new “hobby,” or really an old one that he now had time to put some time into watching old time black and white films, mostly film noir, via his subscription to Netflix. The film that Sam was referring to in his conversation directed at Ralph was Barbara Stanwyck’s No Man Of Her Own which sounds innocuous enough but which turned on a very funny dime as the plot unfolded. Ralph, not particularly a movie buff but expressing interest in what Sam had to say since he usually made the old gang laugh, asked Sam why he was so worked up about this one when usually he would just comment on the film and let it go. That was all that Sam needed to egg him on.    

“Okay, now this Barbara Stanwyck who was a dish in her time and did some great work in films like Double Indemnity where the plot really had you going and where she really was a femme fatale  from the word “go” and had this insurance guy like putty in her hands is supposed to be this woman scorned. Scorned by this bad ass guy, Morley, a guy who was nothing but a grifter, a two-bit guy who always had an edge on, was always looking for the main chance. See Barbara, her name was Helen in the film, though had two problems, one she was in love with this slug and second she had given into him in a moment of passion and was as the film opened about eight months pregnant, very pregnant, very pregnant without a wedding ring in 1950s America. But our boy Morley had already tired of Helen, who seemed like some kind of out of her depths farm girl, and had moved onto faster company, a blonde who looked like she wouldn’t take any guff from our boy, not without some cost. All that part seemed probable, guys giving the girl they just seduced the air happens all the time, kid’s stuff.                       

Here’s where the thing starts to fall apart plot-wise though. This Morley springs for a train ticket for Helen to go to Frisco town and work out her troubles there. Other than the ticket she has no dough for anything to eat and so on the train she looks like something out of displaced person camp, strictly from hunger. Then this couple, this couple where the wife is also pregnant but with a wedding ring in 1950s America which also happens all the time, takes pity on her, feeds her and some kind of bond grew between the two women. The wife gives Helen her wedding ring to hold for a minute while she is freshening up in the Ladies’ room. Then with the ring safely on her finger the train slides over a cliff, or runs off the track anyway. Runs off the track and kills the couple but leaves Helen while severely injured still alive and the baby she is carrying too. A boy as it turned out.  

Of course now that the screenwriter and director have gone to the effort of putting that ring on her finger everybody from the hospital staff, and this is key, to the guy in that dead couple’s wealthy parents think that she is that dead wife. Want to bring her home with the baby as a lasting remembrance of their dead son. Helen balks a little but with no dough, no husband (no man of her own of the title), and no respectable ring on her finger if she takes the one she has off she decides to take the ticket, take the ride. The family embraces her like one of their own. 

Problem is every time somebody mentions something about her and their son, something that she should know, she is clueless although nobody seems bothered by that. Nobody except Bill, the dead husband’s brother who looks at her askance every time she makes a faux pas. Still he gives her a pass, even letting her into the family will just like she was family. See this Bill is in love with Helen if you can feature that. Now Barbara Stanwyck was definitely a looker in something like Double Indemnity but in this role she is well motherly if you want to know and why a good looking guy would flip for her seemed odd. But there you have it the guy is going to be tested on that love in any case.   

Morley, or guys like Morley are always looking for the main chance and he was not different here than when he gave her the walking papers. Now that she is on easy street he wants in on the dough and is not particular how he gets it, is even willing to wait as long as he gets his long large. She balks or tries to when he forces her to marry him to protect her child’s future and the family’s. But in the end she knows that the only way to get rid of this snake is to Dial M for murder. And she goes to his office and puts a bullet right where it hurts. In the meantime Bill is frantic about her whereabouts and finally winds up at that Morley office right after she wastes Morley. Here’s where Bill proved his colors though he helped get rid of Morley’s body, threw it off a train trestle, nice touch. Of course a guy doing a good deed and a gal who is just protecting her child can’t go under, not in a 1950s movie, no matter how much they try and so in the end they are exonerated. Seems Helen didn’t kill Morley. He had already been killed by that blonde who meant business and who got miffed when Morley tossed her over for Helen’s riches. Figures that there would be a blonde involved somewhere. But you see what I mean about how it doesn’t hold together?

Everybody nodded in agreement and then Ralph chirped up-“What don’t you look those odd-ball plot lines on Wikipedia before you order them from Netflix.” Yeah, Ralph good idea.

From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning- Isis shouldn't dictate how we address refugees:Chelsea's new Guardian op-ed

Chelsea discusses refugees in Guardian op-ed Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Isis shouldn't dictate how we address refugees: Chelsea's new Guardian op-ed Chelsea Manning addresses xenophobia by politicians in response to the refugee crisis in her Nov 25th Guardian opinion article,"We must not let Isis's crimes dictate how we address the refugee crisis – or privacy." Following the attacks by Isis in Paris and Beirut, "leaders throughout the US and Europe have demanded that authorities stifle the flow of migrants seeking asylum," states Manning. "I don’t have all the answers – but I do know that blaming minority groups, refugees and immigrants, investing in gigantic surveillance platforms and calling for expansive legal authority and the creation of a neo-Gestapo and panopticon-style police state aren’t one of them." Chelsea Manning, Guardian OpEd Nov 25, 2015 Even in the weeks and months before the attacks, rightwing parties in Europe – most notably the National Front in France – have attempted to exploit a rising xenophobic sentiment following this year’s influx of migrants seeking refuge from Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. Immediately following the attacks such fears have “gone viral” in a way that is disturbing and frightening... The demands for more power by the powerful were described by Naomi’s Klein “Shock Doctrine” principle: people and organizations often exploit crises in order to justify seizures of power to meet their own political and economic ends... Click here to read the complete op-ed 40% and free shipping! Use discount code "stopwar" at checkout for 40% your entire order! Valid now through December 3rd, 2015. Chelsea Manning and Courage to Resist shirts, books, buttons, stickers, posters, hats, patches, and more. These are great, alternative, holiday gifts for friends (or yourself). Every order includes free shipping, making this a great way to show your support for war resisters and whistle-blowers. https://orders.couragetoresist.org/shop/

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No Killer/No Spy Drones...

No Killer/No Spy Drones...

One night my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in Southeastern Massachusetts Sam Lowell who I hadn’t seen in a while I were, full disclosure while having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. Me, well again for full disclosure I am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. I follow the line of VFP that killer/spy drones are qualitatively a no better (or no worse) part of the modern military arsenal that any other weapon and need to be opposed with the same rigor as we do for nuclear weapons and other all the military hardware used in the seemingly endless wars the American imperium has dragged us into. (That “line” business in relationship to VFP is unlike various Marxist groups and quasi-Marxist collectives I hung around with in my younger days after discharge from the American Army a matter of choice rather than obligation. In those old-time organizations based on the concept of democratic centralism one, if one disagreed with the organizational “line” would if in the minority keep quiet in public about the difference. VFP, based on more broadly-based democratic principles reflecting a different mission and different way to change the world, has no such restrictions although arguing for support of killer/spy drones would put one in opposition with the goals of the organization and one would in good conscience have to consider whether continued membership was appropriate.      

Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective. Perhaps reflecting an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. In the post-9/11 period he like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions and have embraced some form of selected approval of various aspects of current military doctrine. Starting with the initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq which in the end left egg all over his face. Sam, nevertheless, argued that the high degree of accuracy, the “cleanness” of the method, and the destruction of the specific object (his word, I would say person or place, mainly person) without high casualties on the American side (that reduction of “boots on the ground” argument which underpins much of modern doctrine in the wake of Vietnam and even Iraq itself) to fight the “war on terrorism” which disturbs his old age has made him a partisan of such weaponry.       

As usual these days we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I got to thinking about the issue and while not intending to directly counter his arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:

“Ever since the early days of humankind's existence an argument has always been made by someone and not always by the gung-ho warriors, many times rather by some safely-ensconced desk-bound soul who was too busy to become a warrior but was more than glad to let some other mother's son do the bitch work, that with some new technology, some new strategic gee-gad, warfare, the killing on one of our own species, would become less deadly, would be more morally justified, would bring the long hoped for peace that lots of people have yacked about in the abstract until some governmental decision to go to war gets their war blood up.

Those arguments are being retailed these days by the killer/spy drone aficionados who think they have found something new under the sun. Don't believe that false bill of goods, don't believe the insane war lies from warriors, arm-chair warriors, or the merely fearful, it is the same old killing machine that has gone on for eons. Killing from far way places like Nevada to the Middle East in war game rooms with screens set up like video games except tell that to the "sorry, collateral damage, no foul because not intended" victims who got in the way. Enough said and enough of killer drones killing and spy drones spying too.”  

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, Bing Crosby, not the Bing of righteous Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? but White Christmas put to sleep stuff (and to his brother Bob and his Bobcats as well), the Inkspots spouting If I Didn’t Care and their trademark spoken verse on every song they touched, Miss Patti Page getting dreamy about local haunt Cape Cod, Miss Rosemary Clooney telling one and all to jump and come to her house, Miss Peggy Lee trying to get some no account man to do right, do right by his woman,    the Andrew Sisters yakking about their precious rums and cokes (soft drinks), 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) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which his mother 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 and then right on its heels 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 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 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 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 steam 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 off-key versions of the then current hits would not get him noticed on the mandatory American Bandstand ) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for him, us, to be able to unlike Bart’s older brother, Prescott, 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), Let’s Have A Party ( the much underrated  Wanda Jackson), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night but what a hit), 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, and where we parted 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, 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 (from 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), and the protest songs, 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 in as long as the they did not try to start the Reformation, again) 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 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, 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 toward going to hell in a handbasket, like our hurts and depressions were what ailed the candid world 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 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, 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.