******The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

******The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

Laura Perkins was talking to her daughter, Emily Andrews one afternoon in April when she went to visit her and the grandkids up in Londonderry that is in New Hampshire, after returning from Florida, down Naples way. Laura had spent the winter there, a pilgrimage she had been doing the past five years or so since she, New England born and bred had tired, wearily tired of the winters provided by that section of the country and joined the “snow bird” trek south. Been doing more of the winter since she retired as a computer whizz free-lance consultant a couple of years ago. Emily the first born girl from the first of her three marriages who now had a couple of kids of her own although she has retained as is the “new style,” post-‘60s new style anyway, of women retaining their maiden name, or went hyphenated, kept Andrews in the bargain although Laura had given that name up minute one after the divorce which was messy and still a source of hatred when Emily’s father’s name is mentioned and thereafter kept her maiden name through the subsequent two marriages and divorces. During the conversation Laura commented to Emily, having not seen her for a while, on how long and straight she was keeping her hair these days which reminded her of the old days back in the romantic early 1960s when she used to hang around the Village in New York at the coffeehouses and folk clubs listening to lots of women folksingers like Carolyn Hester, Jean Redpath, Thelma Gordon, Joan Baez, Sissy Dubois and a bunch of others whose names she could just then not remember but whose hair was done in the same style including her own hair then.

Laura looked wistfully away just then touching her own now much shortened hair and colored a gentle brown with highlights, how much and for how long only her hairdresser knew and she, the well-tipped hair-dresser, was sworn to a secret Omerta oath even the CIA and Mafia could admire in the interest of not giving into age too much, especially once the computer whizz kids started showing up younger and younger either looking for work or as competitors. Meanwhile Emily explained how she came to let her hair grow longer and straighter (and her own efforts to keep it straighter) against all good reason what with two kids, a part-time accounting job and six thousand other young motherhood things demanded of her that would dictate that one needed a hair-do that one could just run a comb through, run through quickly.       

“Ma, you know how when you get all misty-eyed for your lost youth as you call it you are always talking about the old folk days, about the days in the Village and later in Harvard Square after you moved up here to go to graduate school at BU, minus Dad’s part in that time which I know you don’t like to talk about for obvious reasons. You also know, and we damn made it plain enough although you two never took it seriously, back when we were kids all of us, Melinda and Peter too, hated the very sound of folk music, stuff that sounded like something out of the Middle Ages and would run to our rooms when you guys played the stuff in you constant nostalgia moments. [That Middle Ages heritage, some of it, at least the rudiments, actually was on the mark if you look at the genesis of say half of the Child ballads which a folk enthusiast by that name in the 1850s over on Brattle Street in Cambridge collected, a number of ballads which ironically got picked up by the likes of Joan Baez in the late 1950s and played at the coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Café Nana just down from that Brahmin haven street. Or if you look to the more modern musicologists like the Seegers and Lomaxes who went down South, down Appalachia way, looking for roots music you will find some forbears brought over from the old country, the British Isles, that can be traced back to those times without doing injury to the truth.]

“Well one day I was in Whole Foods and I hear this song over their PA system or whatever they call it, you know those CDs they play to get you through the hard-ass shopping you need to do to keep the renegade kids from starvation’s door. The song seemed slightly familiar, folkie familiar, so I asked at the customer service desk who was singing the song and its name which I couldn’t quite remember. Of course the young clerk knew from nothing but a grey-haired guy, an old Cambridge radical type, a professor-type now that I think about what he looked like probably teaching English Lit, a guy you see in droves when you are in Harvard Square these days doddering along looking down at the ground like they have been doing for fifty years, standing in the same line as me, probably to return something that he bought by mistake and his wife probably ran his ass ragged until he returned the damn thing and got what she wanted, said it was Judy Collins doing Both Sides Now.  

That information from the professor, and that tune stuck in my head, got me thinking about checking out the song on YouTube which I did after I got home, unpacked the groceries, unpacked the kids and gave them their lunches. The version I caught was one of her on a Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest series from the 1960s in black and white that was on television back then which I am sure you and Dad knew about and she had this great looking long straight hair. I was envious. Then I kind of got the bug, wanted to check out some other folkie women whose names I know by heart, thank you, and noticed that Joan Baez in one clip taken at the Newport Folk Festival along with Bob Dylan singing With God On Our Side, God-awful if you remember me saying that every time you put it on the record-player, had even longer and straighter hair than Judy Collins.

“There she was all young, beautiful and dark-skinned Spanish exotic, something out of a Cervantes dream with that great hair. So I let mine grow and unlike what I heard Joan Baez, and about six zillion other young women did, including I think you, to keep it straight using an iron I went to Delores over at Flip Cuts in the mall and she does this thing to it every couple of months. And no I don’t want you to give me your folk albums, as valuable as they are, and as likely as I am to get them as family heirlooms when as you say you pass to the great beyond, please, to complete the picture because the stuff still sounds like it was from the Middle Ages although Dylan sounded better then than I remember, better than that croaking voice he has now that I heard you play one time on your car radio when we were heading up to Maine with you to go to Kittery to get the kids some back to school clothes.”        

Laura laughed a little at that remark as Emily went out the door to do some inevitable pressing shopping. After dutifully playing with Nick and Nana for a couple of hours while Emily went to get some chores done at the mall sans the kids who really are a drag on those kinds of tasks and after having stayed for supper when Sean got home from work she headed to her own home down in Cambridge (a condo really shared with her partner, Sam Lowell, whom she knew in college, lost track of and then reunited with after many years and three husbands at a college class reunion).

When she got home Sam, making her chuckle about what Emily said about that guy in the line at Whole Foods looked like and tarring Sam with that same brush, working on some paper of his, something about once again saving the world from the endless wars of the American government (other governments too but since as he said, quoting “Che” Guevara, always Che, about living in the heart of the beast the American government), the climate, nuclear disarmament, social inequality at home and in the world, or the plight of forgotten political prisoners, which was his holy mantra these days now that he was semi-retired from his law practice was waiting, waiting to hear the latest Nick and Nana stories instead she told him Emily’s story. Then they started talking about those old days in the 1960s when both she and he (he in Harvard Square having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston and her in the hotbed Village growing up in Manhattan and later at NYU where they went to school as undergraduates) imbibed in that now historic folk minute which promised, along with a few other things, to change the world a bit.

Laura, as Sam was talking, walked to a closet and brought out a black and white photograph from some folk festival in 1963 which featured Joan Baez, whom the clueless media always looking for a single hook to hang an idea on dubbed her the “queen of folk (and Dylan the king),” her sister Mimi Farina, who had married Richard Farina, the folk-singer/song-writer most poignantly Birmingham Sunday later killed in a motorcycle crash and Judy Collins on stage at the same time. All three competing with each other for the long straight hair championship. Here’s part of what was said about the picture that night, here’s how Laura put it:    

“Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. Remember Sam how we all called folk the “new dispensation” for our generation which had begun back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, slightly before our times when we caught up with it in college in 1964. So maybe it started in reaction to the trend when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits. That funny Mad Men, retro-cool today look, which is okay if you pay attention to who was watching the show. In the days before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on that fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by not wearing a soft felt hat like Uncle Ike and the older guys.”

“Funny too it would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts could be worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit or dress combination. Remember even earlier when the hula-hoop fad went crazy when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you. I know I did with Jasper James King who tried like hell to imitate Elvis and I just stepped on his toes all dance when he asked me to dance with him on It’s Alright, Mama.”  

“But maybe it was, and this is a truth which we can testify to when some girls, probably college girls like me, now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, or flippy like mine, whatever  don’t hold me to all the different hairstyles to long and straight strands. Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover, the folk scene was too young and small back in the early days to cause such a sea-change.”

 Sam piped up and after giving the photograph a closer look said, “Looking at that photograph you just pulled out of the closet now, culled I think from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the rage among the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High. But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy sexual desire thing about hopping in the hay, and that was that.”                   

“My old friend Bart Webber, a guy I met out in San Francisco  when I went out West with my old friend  Josh Breslin in our hitchhike days with whom if you remember I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British Beatles/Stones  invasion).”

“He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when the place had their weekly folk night (before every night was folk night when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together. That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Bart thought she looked fine. Bart, like myself, was not then hip to the long straight hair thing and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.”

“Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory straight hair although it was not much longer than when he first met her which he said frankly made her face even longer. When Bart asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.”

“Of course he compounded his troubles by making the serious mistake of asking if she had her hair done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go. So she joined the crowd, Bart got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl, and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched Catholic school shirt things she used to wear.”     

“By the way Laura let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Bart back in the early 1960s since his Emma goes crazy every time anybody, me, you, Bart, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan mentions any girl that Bart might have even looked at in those days. Yeah, even after almost forty years of marriage so keep this between us. She and Bart went “Dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. They were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Just friends despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Bart hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers.

“Many years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to me since I had gone with them with my date, Joyell Danforth, as we waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with us to see if I remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while I thought I remembered I was not sure.

I asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.”

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who as mentioned before was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk times (think Pack Up Your Sorrows). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo as proof.           

Pen-Pals In Love –With Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewarts’s The Shop Around The Corner In Mind

Pen-Pals In Love –With Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewarts’s The Shop Around The Corner In Mind

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Shop Around The Corner, starring Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart, directed by Ernst Libitsch 1940

Nowadays with the advent of about seven different forms of social networking (including the ubiquitous “sexting” among the young, and their elders too from what I hear) a film about two young people who find their romantic fates intertwined anonymously while working together in the same employment would probably draw yawns, maybe a cynical snicker that of course that is the “proper” way to meet a mate-do you know that, stupid. In fact a more recent film, You’ve Got Mail, pays homage to that newer technology, newer than snail mail, to the now passe e-mail, as it pays homage to the original film adaptation of an Eastern European play, The Shop Around The Corner, reviewed here.

Technology aside this is another rather stylish romantic comedy set in Budapest “before the war” as the expression went then meaning before World War II (although while I am thinking about the matter why anybody bothered to decide to “fake” set it in that locale since the scenarios all looked like Hollywood sets and the actors all spoke if not the King’s English then at least English not the universal language of choose in 1940 Budapest). The romantic comedy part, the center of the whole film, is the knock down drag out relationship between Alfred the head salesman at a luggage and leather goods shop and Klara a newly hired employee who take every opportunity to put each other down.

But get this Alfred (played by James Stewart) and Klara (played by Margaret Sullavan) have been conducting a long distance high-mined pen-pal relationship with each other not knowing that they were corresponding with each other. You remember pen-pals in elementary school, right. You would write to some guy or girl in say Indianapolis and they would write back about school, summer vacations and stuff with no expectation of ever meeting, Indianapolis being a place that might as well have been on another planet then. Well back in those days adults could do the same except they expected to meet. The way they would do it is to answer “discreet” inquiries placed in the ‘Personal’ section of the newspaper if you can believe that. Then write each other by snail mail to post office boxes. Yeah, ancient history and in that time today a guy or gal could have already “dumped” or had about six affairs and had time for a long lunch without working up a sweat.                

Of course the Alfred-Klara build-up to real in person romance has to work its way through a few sub-plots to justify a couple of hours at the movie house back in the day. The shop owner suspicious of Alfred’s alleged attentions to his unseen on film fires him until he finds out that another employee has been stealing his wife’s time. The discovery has that shop owner suicidal which works out to Alfred’s benefit as he becomes the manager while the owner recovers. There is also some side action with the ambitious errant boy moving up the food chain by his own pluck and luck. Some play as well with a frightened to lose his job clerk who is something of an Alfred confidante.  

But make no mistake that the Alfred-Klara mix and match is the main draw here as they can hardly stay in the same room until Alfred accidently finds out that his fellow correspondent is none other than Klara. With that knowledge Alfred puts on a full-court press to wow the unknowing Klara. Classic Libitsch, classic feel good Hollywood. Watch the pros go through their paces even if you are too young to know about “Personals,” about writing high-brow love letters and going to the Post Office to conduct a love affair. Okay.

The Times Are Out Of Joint-The Trials and Tribulations Of Sand-Bagger Johnson

 

 

 

The Times Are Out Of Joint-The Trials and Tribulations Of Sand-Bagger Johnson

 

 

 

“You know Tom was all confused when I called him up after my flight got in asking him about whether I could get, or needed a tee time in order to play. Got confused because I was asking him at the ungodly hour of about one in the afternoon. We chuckled about the matter when I went in the clubhouse to sign up to play,” chortled Sand-Bagger Johnson as he approached the dreaded wind-blown and frigid first tee and spied an old-time  member of his playing foursome, Casey, standing there with two other unknown golfers waiting for a fourth (him) to come can join them. The “confusion” reference referred to the unusual time that Sand-Bagger had decided to play. For that matter as we shall presently hear the same with the lanky Casey.

See Sand-Bagger (henceforth Sandy in order to save cyber-ink which one wag claimed Sandy was using up at a prestigious rate with his weekly musings about the game of golf, the historic game of those with plenty time on their hands like the phalanx of retirees one sees on the nation’s links on any given weekday, and time to write little paeans to the “sport of kings,” or at least to the sport of King Charles I of England back in the day) had just come in from a flight to Washington and had missed the usual Saturday morning tee time with Casey, Lucky Pierre and Zowey (formerly known and Zowy but he, Zowey, had insisted that if his name was to be maligned in the interest of literary license then the added “e” provides a more stately moniker). Hence his unheard of late tee-off and Tom’s, the assistant pro at the exclusive Pine Pond Club, utter confusion. Casey’s reason for teeing up so late had been that he (and the others) had arrived for their tee-time at the imminently reasonable time of 6:30 but due to the frigid conditions of the fairways and greens a “frost delay” had been declared for an hour and none of the brethren had wanted to wait around for that new tee time. Casey, known around town as something of a malingerer had decided to “sneak” out of the house in order to avoid doing the dreaded spring yard work.

Thus Casey and Sandy’s meeting had been completely fortuitous that brisk day. What was not fortuitous was Sandy’s next sentence after explain to the three fellow golfers what he had been talking about when he came up too them-“Okay, bet, I’m giving you three strokes, no, we are only playing nine so you get two off of my handicap. You get one of this hole and on four.” Naturally Casey smilingly nodded in agreement to the bet knowing that Sandy felt there was almost no reason for playing golf these days without a small wager on the contest. The explanation for the mysterious reason why Casey was getting two strokes will have to wait a more advantageous moment since an explanation of that arcane handicapping system would tax Casey’s short-fused reading habits and it is necessary to at least pay some attention to the match. So later on that.

Of course Sandy, the older of the two men, and somewhat feeble these days, or with some excuse about a broken shoulder or something, golfers’ grab bag of excuses for poor play are endless, was fearful of the younger man, of giving him two precious strokes as they teed it up. And that proved to be the case that day as Casey got many lucky breaks. Or to hear Casey tell it, beat the old man’s gong. First hole-stroke hole-half, second hole half, third ditto, fourth-stroke hole- Casey one up (with the additional benefit of having the advantage if there was a tie after nine another arcane rule which there is no time to explain now)-fifth hole Casey drained a forty-footer for a very lucky birdie, Casey two up. Sixth hole-half-Casey still two up. Seventh Sandy gets a well-deserved break, Casey one up. Eighth hole Sandy booted it all over the place, Match, Casey. Leaving Sandy shaking his head wondering why he bothered to exercise his flight-addled brain playing golf that day.   

Summary for Casey’s eyes. A nice Abe to put in his fatted calf wallet. But wait a minute. Hasn’t the reader been paying attention to previous sketches? A “loser” has the constitutional right (look it up it is in the Bill of Rights section, the Second Amendment I think) to “press.” There is not much time (or space) to go into the intricacies of the “press” now but the idea is that the winner has to take the bet or gets “no dough.”  In the event both golfers booted the ball all the way down the long ninth fairway but Sandy took a satisfying victory against the younger man seven to eight. So Father Abraham stayed down in his righteous big ass memorial in D.C. for another day.   

 

  

 

 

***Alright Miss Lonelyhearts- The Life And Times Of Nathanael West And Eileen McKenney- A Guest Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 11, 2010, concerning the American novelist Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen McKenney.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/04/11/reversal_of_fortune/

Markin comment:

I have always held Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts", and more so, "Day Of The Locust" in very high regard. That last scene in the movie version, starring Donald Sunderland, still haunts my memory of what the "mob" can do when it gets its head up. More on this important member of the American literary canon later.

In Boston Join Ths Fight For $15 On April 14th

In Boston Join Ths Fight For $15 On April 14th

Daniel -   On April 14th, low-wage workers and allies will join together nationwide for a historic moment to Fight for $15. You won't want to miss it. For every hard working underpaid worker who dreams of a better future for their family - and for every person who believes that's a dream worth fighting for, this is it. This is the day to be louder, stronger, and more united than we've ever been. Join the Fight for $15 in 2016! RSVP on Facebook or at WageAction.org Thursday, April 14th, 3:30PM MA State House Save the date and stand with us for economic justice! Too many low wage workers are trapped in poverty. We are tired of being pitted against each other in a race to the bottom. Rain or Shine. Family friendly. On Thursday, April 14th, we'll rally at the State House in Boston at 3:30PM, followed by a short march through the Boston Common. While corporate executives, Wall Street investors and other one-percenters bounce back from the most serious economic recession in 100 years, everyone else continues to face a punishing, decades-long reality of stagnant wages. Too many of us are forced to choose between keeping a roof over our heads, paying our bills or feeding our kids. But on April 14th, we have a different choice; we can choose to stand up for what is right.  Sign up for the Thunderclap to help spread the word! A Thunderclap is a social media tool where hundreds of people can help amplify one message for a cause. All you have to do is click this link, choose Support with Facebook or Support with Twitter, and it will connect your personal social media accounts!  Then, on April 14th at 3:30PM, just as we're advocating at the State House for $15/hour, all of the messages will be released. All at once. One unified message in support of the #Fightfor15 will reach tens of thousands of our friends, family, and community members - but only if you take two minutes to chip in. Together we're turning the tide in favor of working people and our families. And we'll need everyone's help - including yours -  to make this a reality.   We're fed up with working families being forced to survive on poverty wages, while being exploited by companies raking in billions of dollars of profit. On April 14th, 2016, we are taking to the streets.  Will you be there to stand with us for $15/hour? RSVP on Facebook or at WageAction.org!  In solidarity,   The #WageAction Coalition  And remember: save the date for May 1st! On Sunday, May 1st, we'll also be standing up for workers' and immigrant rights for International Workers' Day, or May Day. More details to follow - save the date! #WageAction Coalition | Email | Website The #WageAction Coalition is fighting against wage inequality and is part of the growing Fight for $15 movement. For more events, please visit our calendar at WageAction.org! STAY CONNECTED:

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From The Peace Movement Archives-There Are Many Ways To Make Peace

*RANDOM NOTES ON THE WORKERS PARTY QUESTION AND WORK IN THE TRADE UNIONS

Click on title to link to a Leon Trotsky 1938 article on a discussion with leaders of the American Socialist Workers Party on the Labor Party question as it pertained to America.

COMMENTARY

BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM

I have spent a good deal of my political life waging a propaganda campaign here in America in favor of an independent workers party with a program that fights for a workers government, socialism. I have no regrets about that work although I have had more than my share of disappointments over the small inroads made toward that goal. But whining is not what I want to do here. I have received various communications over the past period asking about the whys and wherefores of the workers party question in America and elsewhere and about militant work in the trade unions. Here I make some historical comments and general observations about the work. I will deal with tactical questions at another time.

Let us be clear on this from the outset, calls for formation of a generic workers party are part of the tactics that revolutionaries in America, and elsewhere where such parties do not exist, are appropriate in order to anchor their program and gain a hearing from the more class conscious workers. In the best of all possible left-wing political worlds where working people have developed a level of political class consciousness sufficient to begin flocking to revolutionary parties we would not have to raise the question of a workers party. And there is the rub. Raising the workers party question is a reflection of the apparently undying weakness that the American trade union bureaucracies have for the capitalist Democratic Party (and on occasion a scattering of support for its sister capitalist party, the Republicans) and the weakness of left-wing forces in trying to break that allegiance.

Simply put, unless one assumes some kind of stagist theory of working class organizational development, which this writer does not subscribe to, there is nothing to preclude mass recruitment to a revolutionary organization under proper conditions, like a successful mass trade union organizing drive at Walmart or in the South. To put this point in perspective can one imagine the Bolsheviks in 1917 calling for a mass workers party? Christ, they were the mass workers party (and the class struggle was so 'hot' at the time that there were working class elements to their left who thought the Bolsheviks were unnecessarily dragging their feet on the subject of the seizure of power and wanted to form a ‘real’ mass revolutionary workers party to do so).

To bring this point closer to home there were periods in the 1930’s in America when the workers party question was shelved by revolutionaries because it was possible to recruit the best militants straight to revolutionary organizations. Thus, when we raise the workers party question in the year 2007 it reflects an understanding that we live in tough times for the labor movement. But, as the old Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill is alleged to have said before he was executed for his labor activities out in Utah in the early 1900’s- “Don’t Mourn, Organize”.

It may be informative to contrast the political tasks that confront American militants with those in, let’s say, Britain where there is a ‘worker's party’, the British Labor Party, that as of this date administers the British imperial state. Despite the changes in that party brought about by one Anthony Blair, in an attempt to make it conform more to a trans –class party like the Democratic Party in the United States, at its core today the British Labor Party is still a working class party, although a clearly reformist one. The British Labor Party has a long and checkered history but mainly it serves as an example of what militants do not want to build. Sure, sure, every British militant today should be a member of the Labor Party in order to get any kind of hearing from the best trade union militants there but their main task is to split the Labor Party and create a ‘new’ workers party that will fight for a workers government. Obviously, that is no simple task given the extreme loyalty of the average British worker to that party. In that sense the tasks in America and Britain, as well as elsewhere are essentially the same.

Someone once told me this little nugget of political wisdom and I hope I have learned it well. Tell me the programmatic basis of your party and I will tell you what kind of party you have. He then proceeded to rattle off various party programs and bowled me over with how close his characterizations came to the type of party he was describing. Sure, innocent political mistakes will be made, and sometimes even conscious ones. Sometimes the whims of personal predilection will twist about the program. Sometimes when confronted with the reality of the class struggle it will fly away in the winds. But, note this well, in the end that damn program is decisive.

If one looks at the latest program of the British Labor Party one will note that even if the greatest amount of class struggle since the Russian Revolution swept through the British Isles that party would stand foursquare in defense of Her Majesty’s capitalist imperial system. Yes, Ma’m. The point is this- if the program of your workers party does not lead to a workers government then you will wind up like the British Labor Party-tied as it is to the monarch, nobility and the state church. Hell, even Cromwell, that consummate bourgeois revolutionary, knew you had to get rid of those things if you wanted to push society forward-and that was over three hundred and fifty years ago!

Those even slightly familiar with American labor history know that the 1930’s represented the last widespread and successful organization of the working class. It was also the time of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reign. Some labor bureaucrats, knowing that many militants would refuse to support Roosevelt under the Democratic banner, organized an organization called the American Labor Party, which was essentially a vehicle for steering militant and socialist votes to Roosevelt. Needless to say our conception of a workers party has nothing in common with that electoral scheme. You can be sure, however, that some bright labor bureaucrat (and there are a few), if there is a labor upsurge will drag out a 21st century model of that moribund organization.


The obvious place to propagandize for a workers party is in the trade unions. I would like to round out my thoughts by observing that the only real way to make an impact on the unions and to break them from their reformist (at best) leadership is to form a caucus within the union based on a program. In that sense the union caucus is the workers party in embryo. Here again all experience has showed that if one does not base oneself on a program one is kind of doomed to failure. A million guys and gals have started out as militants only to burn out, be co-opted by the bureaucracy, or fall silent without such an anchor. If the goal is to bring political consciousness to the working class then it is necessary to have a political program. Yes, yes by all means every militant is the best defending of the day-to-day needs of their fellow workers and defender of democratic rights but one must go beyond that to educate about the need to take power.


Elsewhere in this space I have presented some talking points for the program of a workers party (see the archives under A Modest Proposal for a Workers Party). Here are a few for a trade union caucus. Today, the central question is the war in Iraq and therefore it is necessary to take a position on that in the unions. Sure, plenty of unions these days have ‘paper’ resolutions against the war. However it is necessary to move to action, and fast. I have presented elsewhere my point about building anti-war soldier and sailor committees and that could be fought for here. Moreover, a critical point for the independence of the trade unions is to vote against support to capitalist party candidates. Today, also, in some recent cases this is a desperate necessity, for a fight in support of immigrant rights and organizing the unorganized. More latter.

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described in parenthesis, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible. That later summer  heat escape valve is a result of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes.

The only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days etched Crane Castle to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been doing since there were well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including the various incantations of the mansion. 

Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont while listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth.  One of the things that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.     

One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report he had heard on NPR. Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs imitating Woody's style something  fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age.

Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave' post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”  

Laura said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers who she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could put up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except to you had to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hand over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”

“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”    

“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-ip market.  

Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and conmen who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”     

“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1980s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll, On The Road which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge.

Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that very same club then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.  And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'

Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story. He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”

Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.       

As Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that  Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”

Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”

They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.  Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.'

As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.