This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
The
stakes are high for all of us in the twenty-first century world.
The big picture: the new cold war is here. US foreign policy elites have
identified Russia and China as the long-term obstacles to US global dominance.
Tensions are rising: Middle East, Ukraine and across Europe, South China Sea and
East Asia. Military budgets, including for “modernization” of nuclear arsenals
are skyrocketing. In an era of rising and declining great powers, the U.S. is
playing a complex and dangerous game of cooperation and competition, with the
strategic goal of resisting and containing all challenges to its “full spectrum”
and global domination. Michael Klare: Five College Professor of Peace and World
Security Studies and author of Resource Wars
Prospects for war and peace
Policy alternatives to enhance mutual understanding and trust?
What can the peace movement do to oppose militarism and support global
resistance?
contact : info@justicewithpeace.org or call 617-661-6130
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Service Committee, Harvard Peace Action, Mass Peace Action
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Teen Queens performing the classic Eddie My Love.
Markin comment:
This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived, and what we listened to back in the day.
EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling) The Teen Queens - 1956 The Fontane Sisters - 1956 The Chordettes - 1956 Dee Dee Sharp - 1962
Also recorded by: Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.
Eddie, my love, I love you so How I wanted for you, you'll never know Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long
Eddie, please write me one line Tell me your love is still only mine Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September To return to me before long But all I do is cry myself to sleep Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast The very next day might be my last Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September To return to me before long But all I do is cry myself to sleep Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast The very next day might be my last Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
(Transcribed from the Teen Queens recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)
********** Billie here, William James Bradley, if you don’t know already. To “the projects” born but you don’t need, or at least you don’t absolutely need to know that is get the drift of what I have to say here. I am here to give my take on this latest song, Eddie My Love, that just came out and that the girls are going weepy over, and the guys are saying “that a boy, Eddie.” At least that’s what the wiser guys I hang around with say when they hear the record played on the radio. Except, of course, sappy Markin, Peter Paul Markin if you don’t know, my best friend at Adamsville Elementary School (or maybe best friend, he has never told me one way or the other what it was with us from his end, but sappy as he may be at times, he is my best friend from my end) who thinks Eddie should be righteous and return to his forlorn girl. What is he kidding? Eddie keep moving wherever you are, and keep moving fast. And please, please don’t go within a mile of a post office.
Why do I hold such an opinion and what gives me the “authority”, some authority like the pope of rock and roll, or something to speak this way? Well, first off, unlike Markin, I take my rock and roll, my rock and roll lyrics seriously, hell, I have written some myself. Also I have some talent in this field and have won vocal competitions (and dance ones too), although there have been a few more I should have won. Ya, should have won but the fix was in, the fix was in big time, against project kids getting a break, a chance to make something out of the jailbreak music we are hearing. I’ll tell you about those bad breaks some time but now I am hot to straighten everybody out, even Markin, on this one. Markin pays attention to, too much attention to, the “social” end of the question, looking for some kind of teenage justice in this wicked old world when there ain’t none. Get it, Peter Paul.
Look, I can read between the lines of this story just like anybody else, any pre-teenage or teenage anybody else. Parents, my parents, Markin’s parents, Ozzie and Harriet, whoever, couldn’t get it if you gave them that Rosetta Stone they discovered to help them with old time Egyptian writing and that we read about in Mr. Barry’s class. No way. But Billie, William James Bradley, who will not let any grass grow beneath his feet is wise, very wise to the scene. Hey, it’s not rocket stuff, it’s simply the age old summer fling thing. Eddie, handsome, money in his pocket, super-charged car under his feet, gas in the tank, and an attitude that he is king of the known world, the known teenage world, sees this cutie, makes his play, they have some fun, some teenage version of adult fun for any not wise kids, school days come and he is off to his next cutie. Ya, he said he would write and, personally, I think that was a mistake. A quick “I'll be in touch,” and kiss on the cheek would have been smarter.
See Eddie, love ‘em and leave ‘em Eddie, is really a hero. What did this teen queen think was going to happen when Eddie blew into town? Love, marriage and here comes the teen queen with a baby carriage. Please. Eddie, Eddie your love ain’t got no time for that. And that old threatening to do herself in or whatever she means by “my next day might be my last,” is the oldest trick in the book, the oldest snare a guy trick that is. Ya, maybe someday when things are better, and guys don’t have that itch, that itch to move on, and maybe can settle down in one place and have plenty of dough, plenty of ambition, and the old wicked world starts taking care of its own better. Whoa… wait a minute, I’m starting to sound like Markin. Jesus, no. Eddie just keep moving, okay. Billie’s pulling for you.
A link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Frank Jackman comment:
Ifind Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. And an on-going fetish for her running for office whatever seems to be worth looking at. In 2014 it was the Governor's race in California. Other years it has been for President and for Congress. That Congressional race made sense because it was against Congresswoman and U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who at one time was a darling of the liberals and maybe still is. But electioneering while necessary and maybe useful is not enough. So while her politics and strategy are not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times they do provide enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left, the parliamentary left, to which she is appealing.
One though should always remember, despite our political differences, Ms. Sheehan's heroic action in going down to hell-hole Crawford, Texas to confront one President George W. Bush in 2005 when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize in 2002-2003 after we had millions in the streets for a few minutes and not much after when it would have counted. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
*************
Additional Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.
***********
Another note from Frank Jackman
There are many ways in which people get “religion” about the issues of war and peace, about the struggle to oppose the imperial adventures of the American government. Learn that it is our duty to oppose those decisions as people who are “in the heart of the beast” as the late revolutionary Che Guevara who knew about the imperial menace both in life and death declared long ago. My own personal “getting religion” and those who I have worked with in such organizations as Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and later Veterans For Peace (VFP) came from a direct confrontation with the American military establishment either during or after our service. Those were hard confrontations with the reality of the beast back in those days and it is no accident that those who confronted the beasts directly then are still active today. Remain active as a whole new threat to world peace emanates from Washington into the Middle East highlighted by the air wars in Syria and Iraq and the now new lease on life in Afghanistan.
In a sense the military service confrontation form of “getting religion” on the issues of war and peace is easy to understand given the horrendous nature of modern warfare and its massive weapons overkill and disregard for “collateral damage.” Less easy to see is the radicalization of older women, mothers, mothers of soldiers like Cindy Sheehan in reaction to the senseless death of their loved ones. As pointed out above whatever political differences we have I will always hold Ms. Sheehan’s heroic actions in confronting one George W. Bush then President of the United States and the “yes man” for the war in Iraq started in 2003 (the various aspects of the Iraq saga have to be dated since otherwise confusion prevails) in high regard. She took him on down in red neck Texas asking a simple question-“if there were no weapons of mass destruction, not even close, why did my son die in vain?” Naturally no sufficient answer ever came from him to her. There she was a lonely symbol of the almost then non-existent anti-war movement. And then she started, as this blog of hers testifies to, to put the dots together, “got religion,” got to understand what Che meant long ago about that special duty radicals and revolutionaries have “in the heart of the beast.” And she too like those hoary military veterans I mentioned is still plugging away at the task.
Skiddo, Take
It On The Lam, Frail-Barbara Stanwyck and Garry Cooper’s Ball Of Fire
DVD Review
By Zack
James
Ball Of
Fire, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Dana Andrews, directed by Howard
Hawks, 1941
In 1941,
depending on the month, Europe needed and then America needed a few laughs,
something to take their minds for a couple of hours off the grim work ahead in
a world that had been taken over by the night-takers. And no one could do
better than to take in at their local theater the film under review, Barbara
Stanwyck and Gary Cooper’s Ball of Fire, to
while away a couple of hours. When one thinks of romantic screwball comedies
from that era one usually thinks automatically of Preston Sturgis (whose Sullivan’s Travels was recently reviewed
in this space) or George Cukor (whose The
Philadelphia Story was reviewed in this space a while back) but here the auteur
Howard Hawks works some cinematic magic taking a hand at comedy.
And comedy
it is from first to last. Here’s how it played out. A group of professors, you
know the usual shoulder to the wheel stuffy suspects from academia who have
their heads in the clouds knocking into every earth-bound object in their way,
had been commissioned by a private foundation to write an encyclopedia. You
know write up the totality of the human experience in about twenty or thirty
volumes for future high school and college students to refer to when doing
assorted term papers (now mercifully superseded by Wikipedia and the like
although the temptation to crib whole sections by those self-same lazy students
has probably not abated). Said work to be done in a spacious New York City
brownstone and done at an apparently leisurely pace. Naturally when writing up
the totality of human experience in twenty or thirty volumes a certain division
of labor is necessary. The question of language, the English language of
course, had been assigned to the youngest of the professors. Potts from Ivy
League Princeton, played by long tall Gary Cooper last reviewed in this space
while defending a town’s honor in High
Noon. Since he will become one of the central figures we will key in on
him. Potts’ (I refuse to call the august Cooper “Pottsy” as others will) area
of work just then was on American slang (expressions which probably got
transmitted world-wide as such things goes once an expression gains a critical
mass). He had prepared a beautiful article fully footnoted, with secondary
references noted as well, probably a big bibliography to boot, but after
running into a trash-man he had an epiphany. His damn beautifully footnoted and
referenced article was way out of date, the slang went out with his
grandfather’s spats. Tear that thing up, no question.
Here was
Potts’ new take. He will, fortunate to be in the Big Apple, to be in New Jack
City, to be, well, you know New York, run around town to local gin mills to
hear what the heavy drinkers have to say, maybe the racetrack over in Long
Island to take note of the touts, listen to cabbies gabbing, check out the
crippled newsies hawking their wares, sit at a table in the Automat overhearing
what workaday lunch talk poured forth, and fatally, take in a nightclub act to
see what slang popular dance and serious jazz were up to. All duly noted. That
fatal last locale was not really fatal fatal but led to his comeuppance, of
sorts. See it was at that unnamed nightclub that one staid proper Professor
Potts ran smack daub into one nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea (yeah, I know,
where did they get that one), played by a fetching bouncy filled to the gills
with slang young Barbara Stanwyck who was last seen in this space beguiling one
Fred MacMurray into murder most foul, murder for hire, in the film adaptation
of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Sugarpuss certainly had all the answers and
while she could not sing worth a damn (at least according to my sources Stanwyck
was lip-synching that Drum Boogie
while showing off some nice gams on stage) she could dance to the beat of Gene
Krupa’s drums (no fakery there, no fakery on the whole orchestra blowing like Gabriel
blew his horn way back when).
The problem
for a gal like Sugarpuss though, a gal who grew up on the wrong side of the
tracks, on her way up in this hard old world she didn’t meet many professor
types. Probably had lost her virtue on the way up too. In fact she was shacked
up with a no good gunsel, a hood, a mobster, a bad guy named Joe Lilac (played
by Dana Andrews last mentioned here as the good guy cop in Laura in a fairly small role), who the police would have liked to
have a moment with, would like to get seriously under the lights in the
precinct basement for a bunch of unsolved murders of bad guy New York citizens
but citizens nevertheless, who was walking around free as a bird. And the
reason that our Joe could walk around in that condition was that under his
orders Sugarpuss, who had information that might be helpful to the fuzz, had
taken a powder, had gone on the lam. On the lam straight to the Professors’
digs.
Of course
the cover story was that Sugarpuss, along with assorted other denizens of New
York life, of Damon Runyon’s New York, newsies, pug-uglies, touts, working
stiffs, were furthering the quest for academic excellence under the guidance of
Professor Potts. Naturally though a guy who has had his head in the clouds, has
been hanging around with seven other stuffed shirt professors with their
collective noses to the grindstone to long was clueless about worldly nightclub
performers. And certainly clueless about that jasmine scent, that fresh bath soap
smell, that glimmer in her hair, those well-turned gams, that has him in a dither
every time he was within five feet of her.So naturally our professor threw all caution to the wind and fell for
Sugarpuss head over heels. She, for her part, has a little twinkle in her eye
for him but mainly she was playing him for a fool to cover for her darling Joe.
Oh yeah,
back to Joe who had the big legal problem if Sugarpuss surfaced soon anywhere
near New York City. On advice of counsel, wise advice under other circumstances
if you were rooting for the Professor to sweep Suagarpuss off her feet, Joe proposed
to her under the theory that a wife could not testify against her husband. Nice
play. Nicer still for a girl from the wrong side of the tracks among the
fellahin was the huge rock he lays on her as an engagement ring. Any girl, high
society or tramp, from a wrong gee or not, from wrong side of town or not,
would have to take that rock-laden proposal seriously. So Sugarpuss did,
figured to finally ride the blind to easy street. Then damn it didn’t naïve old
Potts gum up the works and propose marriage to her as well. With a dinky Woolworth’s
dime-store ring that might as well have come from a crackerjacks box, maybe
did, and which any sensible frail would blow off as some much bad air.
But see there
was something about Potts that had gotten under her skin, had Sugarpuss feeling
a little out of sorts, something she couldn’t put into words later when she went
big for him. Stuff about him getting drunk on buttermilk, the way he blushed
when he was around her, his inability to kiss worth a damn. Go figure with dames,
right. But that was later, later after Joe Lilac had made his big goof-ball
play. Joe was in a rush to get married, to get back above ground, but Sugarpuss
was, as frills will for no known to man reason, stalling. Joe decided to speed
things up, decided to foul her game, by telling the Professor the facts of
life, that he was being played for a sucker by Sugarpuss, was being strung along.
That was that once Joe dropped the other shoe.
Well not
quite because Joe didn’t get to be king of the hill in the tough New York underworld
by being some Professor named Potts from Princeton’s patsy and so he has his
boys strong-arm the professors in their brownstone quarters in order to get
Sugarpuss to do his bidding. Wrong move by Joe as the profs used their collective
non-violent wisdom to take care of his henchmen. Then take off for Jersey to
stop the wedding, of course getting there just in time to stop the ceremony, and
just in time to let the police round up Joe and his cronies. And so the
Professor and his tart, okay, okay his gal with the heart of gold lived happily
ever after. Well almost, almost happily ever after because naturally being a
twist Sugarpuss had to balk one last time thinking she was a tramp unworthy of
the good professor. A little “didn’t know how to kiss” kiss on his part left
things looking up as the screen fated. Hey, this one is a good one for 2015 as it
was in 1941, hell, we still have the night-takers about and we still can use a
couple of hours of escape. This one is aces, pure aces.
***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- The Weary Blues
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
February is Black History Month
The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway .... He did a lazy sway .... To the tune o' those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man's soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan-- "Ain't got nobody in all this world, Ain't got nobody but ma self. I's gwine to quit ma frownin' And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more-- "I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can't be satisfied-- I ain't happy no mo' And I wish that I had died." And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Langston Hughes
…he, black as night, black as forbear Mother Africa could make him come to the slave ship new world all shackled but left alone by master and the overseer still hearing in some womb moment the siren call of some Africa left beat some ancient young prince putting metal to metal or string to string, big, big lungs, born of a thousand crying generations, crying since the fall the banishment of the high white note east of Eden, but only banishment for the fallen sin. He, some young son, hell, maybe grandson, of the president, no not that president, guys like him never mixed the search for the fallen high white note with politics, loose rhetoric, all manic, so much mechanic, the Prez, sainted Lester Young who howled behind the Duke, made Billie all smooth and sentimental without being sappy, yeah, so the lines were there, the bloodlines and the search for the fallen high white note that he heard the prez blow from some mother’s womb. He, showing some schooling like all the new guys do, do so they know what grandpas blew when they blew after hours when the real jam began after the staid white-breads took to their sullen beds thinking they heard the real thing before midnight cabs took them home .
He showed his stuff and stuff school stuff style maybe from Berkeley up in Boston where all the new cats learned to blow, learned to take those big lungs and riff them, learned about the high white note, learned about that sound going back to Mother Africa before the chains. He home now sat on a dead-ass bench on a lonely wind-blown winter corner of 125th Street in high Harlem, Harlem with the ghosts of the Prez, Billie, the Duke, all the royalty just like he never spent day one in school, and blew, blew playful, put some passer-by money in the brother’s basket playful, stop and listen to that brother blast, sweet white notes this way and that on a big sexy sax, tenor sax for the aficionados, against the moving traffic blowing those notes back in his face. And he back to the honking noise, the hustle and the bustle started drawing a foot-sore crowd, a crowd hurrying by but stopped by the play between those big-lunged riffs and the cab cadence. Nice.
He, on 125th Street although truth be told he had never before worked those corners, Grandma said to stay away from the riff-raff reefer rats (her term, he, hell Berkeley-bound, knew those sweet smokes from about fifteen) even though he only lived over in the Bronx, evoking some big joyous immense faded tale remembrance when Duke, yes, that Duke, and all the jazz age cats, big and small, held forth nightly at the old Cotton Club where the Mayfair swells got their high-hats flattened, got their expensive illegal liquor chilled, and their high yella dream nights sated, were chasing that faded high white note, chasing it far into the street.
There on that street-wise corner he, the princeling anointed now paying his dues, his street-wise dues once some professor told him he needed to see if he could out-blow those Harlem cabs, remembered what his father, or maybe it was old grandfather told him about the night Johnny H., yes again, that Johnny blew the high white note, blew it to hell and back, and it never came back in his face, never. Yes, Johnny blew that big sexy sax, all dope high, sister, legal in those days, legal when Mister didn’t know he could make a dollar off of it, rather than let some iffy druggist sell it over the counter, maybe a little reefer to flatten the effect and then he blew, blew that big note on A Train, a high white note that trailed out the club door, headed down to the river, make that the East River for those not familiar with New Jack City, or high Harlem, and hit this guy, this lonely black guy, maybe just up from Mississippi goddam or red tide ‘Bama from his ragged attire and head down demeanor learned, hard-headed learned from Mister James Crow , who started grooving (maybe not using that word, maybe not even knowing that word, proving how raw he was, how new city) on that note, started to patter on that note-be-bop, be-bop, be-bop, be-bop (and this before Dizzy crowned boppy be-bop and Charlie swaggered that big sexy horn).
But that brother, that ebony night brother, just couldn’t quite get the hang of the thing, was wrapped up in some old time no electricity juke joint “blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on your mind,”or “old Mister take your hand off me” delta fade-out.
So that Johnny deflated note floated down to the sea, out to some homeland Africa fate. And that down south brother never did get another chance to grab the high white note, and probably would have just faded away except he had a son, or was it a grandson, who knew how to be-bop beat that drowsy old delta gimme, knew how to curl it around his big lung sexy sax and blow that thing from the East River haunts all the way up to 125thStreet, all the way up to faded Cotton Club Johnny dreams and endless Mayfair swells reeling out the door (with or without their high yellas) early in the harsh Harlem morning. He…
*****Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To TheChapel Of Love In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.
The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the young nations part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)
It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back then, like could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill outGypsy Anne at the Skee game which he was an expert at. (For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute one you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked now a days, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) And Edward did win her a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics (and “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told himthey were if approached the right way) down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later. No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when the hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while.
That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley, who read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late (for the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was nine o’clock at night just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).
Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a resident professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual well behind the curve and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.
Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him. But he was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.
That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music (what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that) that had passed for rock. Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.
More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground. But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.
He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before, who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.
That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.
One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.
Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.
So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.” So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).
Then came 1964 and Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.
That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid. Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:
“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by.)
Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.
And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat” except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).
Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic out in the streets, in the school lavs, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)
Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."
And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:
“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little longer than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester. And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."
Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)
They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and have purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck though, young travelers, good luck.
Stick With The Crooks, Jerry-George
V. Higgins’ Sandra Nichols Found Dead
Book Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sandra Nichols Found Dead, George V.
Higgins, 1996
Recently I have been on a crime
novelist George V. Higgins tear as a result of re-reading his classic first and
I believe still his best crime novel, The
Friends of Eddie Coyle (and re-watched as well as a result of that read the
film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum as Eddie). As is my wont when I get on
a tear on an author I have been picking off his later work although in no
particular order. Higgins certainly had an ear, a close ear, for dialogue,
especially down in the streets dialogue gained from his growing up working-class
town of Brockton where in the old days he would have found plenty of corner
boys in the old Irish or Italian streets and from his having been a federal
government prosecutor. So Higgins has tackled all kinds of criminal situations,
murder, extortion, leg-breaking, money laundering, you name in the rough crime
categories and has tackled white collar crime, you know, taking bribes, dishing
out contracts for a cut, embezzlement, the whole litany of governmental and
private company crimes. Along the way there seems to have been three main story
lines that Higgins’ work can be grouped around. Stories about the classic
street hoods like Eddie, corrupt government officials like Billy Ryan, and
those amorphous tales like the one in the book currently under review, Sandra Nichols Found Dead, involving,
for lack of a better term, private citizen crimes, rough or white. I have
mentioned previously that I believe that the prolific Higgins had his best days
when he took on the street hoods, brought them to life, and the contrast to
that in this book makes that case stronger in my mind.
Higgins starts off here with a
simple premise, or maybe a couple. Not every murder, done in passion or by
design, gets solved in this wicked old world and taking a leaf from old F.
Scott Fitzgerald the rich, the very rich that we don’t even see, are very
different from you and me. They are as likely as not to get away, one way or
the other, with murder, murder most foul. Here the subject named in the title
has been found murdered, brutally murdered and dumped to be found several
months later. If she had been an ordinary citizen, or had not married a very
rich man, Peter Wade, Sandra would have, given her checkered history of
marriages, affairs, and “working the streets,” been chalked up as a lost cause.
As usual the police and District Attorney work the case as best they can but
then not finding enough clues to build an airtight case and with the case leading
nowhere they put the thing in the “cold case” files.
But this is where Sandra not being
an ordinary citizen and having signed a pre-nuptial agreement with Wade to
benefit her three emotionally battered and bruised kids (a big part of that as
a result of her own behavior by the way) if she and Peter were divorced or
something else happened to her. Smart woman in that regard. After Sandra is
found in some desolate swamp the case takes a turn for the better when one of
the DAs investigators, a plugger, keeps looking for the murderer and has a damn
good idea of who did it, or ordered it done, Wade. The case also takes a turn
for the better when the probate judge in the case, a law school classmate of
recurring Higgins character, Attorney Jerry Kennedy, is assigned the case by
him and will not take no for an answer. Now Kennedy is strictly a criminal
lawyer, a guy who got Billy Ryan the public official grafter off without
working up a sweat, but this probate stuff acting on behalf of the three
children seems beyond his expertise. Worse, even that plugger investigator knew
that although murder was in the air, knew the nuts and bolts of how it was
done, knew as well that Wade was not going to take the fall for murder one
since no way could the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable
doubt.
Kennedy is no quitter though and so
he plans his strategy as an end around, make Wade pay like he should under that
pre-nuptial agreement for the kids’ education and their pain and suffering,
about three million he thought would square things. Kennedy spends the bulk of
the novel proving to his own satisfaction that Wade is the one who ordered the
murder of his wife once he tired of her and wanted to move on to the next best
thing and set up the framework where Wade would be forced to pay out. And he
does in the end. The problem for me with this plot-line though is that I could
not suspend my disbelief long enough to figure out why the mostly absent and
hence not fully sketched out by Higgins Wade felt he needed to order the “hit”
on Sandra when forking out thedough
would have worked just as well. Moreover unlike the tight narrative in a work
like Coyle this one has way too much
sidebar talk about camera clubs, Kennedy’s unhappy marriage, the history of
private schools and lots more, not remotely relevant to the case. I think
Higgins bulked this one up when he too found the plot-line rather thin. Enough
said.
The big picture: the new cold war is here. US foreign policy elites have
identified Russia and China as the long-term obstacles to US global dominance.
Tensions are rising: Middle East, Ukraine and across Europe, South China Sea and
East Asia. Military budgets, including for “modernization” of nuclear arsenals
are skyrocketing. In an era of rising and declining great powers, the U.S. is
playing a complex and dangerous game of cooperation and competition, with the
strategic goal of resisting and containing all challenges to its “full spectrum”
and global domination.
