*****I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

*****I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

 

Sam Eaton, nothing but the son of a son of a son of an old swamp Yankee, that’s a Yankee fisherman, a small tradesman, a farm hand and those who had, or their forebears had, come across the ocean not under some city on the hill dream but to escape the poor house, the debtors prison or the hangman and wound up doing some indentured servitude before getting under some high Brahmin's fist who did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged his way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought him and his every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought him down in Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as a “bogger,” a man who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner, so yes, a swamp Yankee as against the Beacon Hill Brahmins who reaped the benefits of the bloodstained freedom fight without the risks and settled into a quiet life of coin counting and merchandise buying, had been puzzled at the age of fourteen at a time when he first heard a blues song, Howlin’ Wolf’s How Many More Years on a fugitive radio station down in Carver one night in the late 1950s (a song that later, much later, seemingly a technological millennia later, he would see done by Wolf on YouTube taken from a performance at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s where the Wolf sweat rolling from his ebony cheeks and forehead flowing down his face like some ancient Nile River snaking its way to the sea, deep bass voice beyond deep seeming to get deeper with each drop of water would practically  eat the harmonica he had in the cusp of his hand talking, no preaching to himself, taking himself to task, about some woman, some mean mistreating mama if the truth be known who had him in a sailor’s knot, has him all twisted up, had him so depressed and blue his wanted to go under the grasses but who in the end took the walk of the beaten down, beaten around  and left old Minnie high and dry which Sam had sensed was happening way back when on that fugitive radio.).

That “fugitive” part just mentioned not being some pirate station off the coast which he had heard that some people who couldn’t get their music on the regular dial were doing somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean (he would find out later that this pirate station was out in the North Sea someplace and was there because of the uproar in England, like in the states over the demon effect rock and roll was having on the Queen’s subjects, her gaggle of children who somehow heard the fresh new breeze from America was heading their way and which he found out more about still later when he saw a film starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman about the subject) the result of some mystical still not understood airwave heading out into the atmosphere all the way from Chicago where occasionally around eleven o’clock (ten Chi town time) he would pick up Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour over WALM, a station that billed itself as the “Blues is the dues” station.
 

He was not sure but he thought then that Be-Bop Benny was a black guy, a Negro (the “polite” word of common usage then to signify blacks, now far out of style and thus the need to explain to generations born after who accept the racial designation black or Afro-American or some other local derivative), although he heard his father, Prescott, who was the last of a long line of downtrodden independent Eaton boggers who would soon thereafter go belly up and sell out to the mega-growers, call them “n----rs” without a trance of rancor or self-consciousness and put “damn” in front of that term with rancor when he had been drinking rye whiskey and bemoaning his fate and said the “n” word were being treated better than he and his were).

Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.

See Sam had not really been happy when he heard that station come over the fugitive airwaves on late Sunday nights (although the song was okay, no, more than okay, cool even if he didn’t quite understand why the Wolf was letting some mean mistreating mama get him down, get him so crazy that he wanted to go six feet under which even naïve Sam knew meant old Wolf was losing it but that kind of hard-bitten lyric was not to his taste then since he was just getting that bug, just wanted to hear about roses and playthings, stuff like that, happily ever after stuff). As a dedicated fourteen old white boy from a town with no Negro families, not even people who were connected with those workers in the town like his father and a couple of older adult brothers and uncles who worked the cranberry bogs, he was not interested, or maybe consciously interested is better, the blues.

Sam was totally into rock and roll, totally into listening to WMEX the local radio station out of Boston which was being interfered with by that blues is dues station out of Chi town at eleven o’clock (remember ten Chi town time). Interfered with his listening to Bill Haley blast away on Shake, Rattle and Roll, Elvis doing Tomorrow Night and Good Rockin’ Tonight, Johnny Grey doing a great version of Rocket 88, Sam Jackson doing This Is Rock, Bobby Sams doing One Night Of Sin good rocking stuff that DJ Arnie Ginsberg would play on his At The Hop show where he played songs that had dropped off the charts but were diamonds of rock and roll. So at fourteen he could not figure out, nor could they when he asked his friend Jack Caldwell who knew everything about roll and rock, what the appeal was of that Wolf tune. But that beat, that chord progression, that going down to the messy forlorn earth and then coming back up again would follow him for a long, long time. He never really found an answer, a satisfactory answer until he looked beyond the fugitive sound, looked back to why the blues was even the blues. Looked more to the way it made him feel when times were tough, when he would get into his depressive shell, and a blues is dues song would break the bad ass spell.               

Not until later did Sam figure some stuff out after he had kind of given up on rock and roll for a while, maybe around sixteen, seventeen, when the music seemed, well, square, seemed to be about blond-haired, blue-eyed guys searching for (and getting) blond-haired blue eyed girls with a “boss” car and dough as a lure, maybe a surfer guy cruising the beaches out west, out California way, none of which he and his had much of, the dough and car part, and Carver being kind of landlocked no surfer profile, and so kind of distant from the life of a son of a son of a son of a swamp Yankee.
 

Sam started figuring stuff out too when he got into his folk music thing for a minute, music which mainly made him go up a wall but which he put up with because Sara Leonard, his girlfriend or the girl he wanted to be his girlfriend got all excited about it when she saw Joan Baez in Cambridge at some club (the original Club 47 as it turned out where Joan and lots of other folkies hung out) and insisted that he like the songs or hit the road, you know how that is (this Sara by the way all dark hair and the whitest of white skin got hung up on the iron-your-hair-like Joan Baez craze and he would have to sit in the Leonard parlor cooling his heels while Sara did her ritual). Jesus. Part of that folk thing although he was not sure how and why was about the blues, about down south music from the plantations and sharecropper cabins, and how they made music to keep themselves from going crazy when the hammer came down and they needed some way to express their rage at their plight without getting hung up on a tree somewhere or shot in the back down some dirty road.      

The critics, and don’t ever ask Sam who these guys are since all he cares about is the music, about the blues, who performs it and whether it will take the bite out of his depression or not and not some discursive history stuff although if you talked about the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, some guys called the Diggers (not boggers, not as far as he knew), or about the Renaissance he will listen all day, as long as you realize that you will be listening all night, say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code).

Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched nailed string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wooden churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” home truth low down mean mistreating mama, two-timing man, cut you if you run, weary tune blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights out in the back woods accompanied by Willie’s fresh made brew and then sang high white collar penance blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.

Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.

Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, big-voiced in a naked world, speaking of freedom trains with her brothers and sisters jam packed on the road, speaking of sweated field hand labor for damn Mister, man, women and child, speaking of that dirty bastard Mister James Crow and his do this and do that and don’t do this and don’t that like his charges were mere children to be ordered about, or hung from stange fruit trees or lying down in some shallow bottomland grave chains tied around the neck, speaking of the haunted northern star which turned Mister’s plantation indoors as it headed north, speaking of finding some cool shaded place where Mister would not disturb, couldn’t disturb and making lots of funny duck, odd-ball,  searching for roots white college students whose campus halls she filled, marvel, mainly marvel, that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization, calling them back to where all, everything began.  
 

And then Sam knew, or began to know, what that long ago fugitive beat that stayed in his head meant.         

*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

*****Important  Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

 

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

The legendary social commentator and standup comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction. The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be. ***** An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008 but the main point-freedom for Mumia is still front and center) The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below. Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight. Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls. What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it. Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price. I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress. Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stage-ist theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.

*****As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums In Syria -Again- Stop The Bombings

*****As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums In Syria -Again- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Incessant Escalations-- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries From The Middle East!

Frank Jackman comment:

I have already recently mentioned elsewhere the night not long ago when my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in southeastern Massachusetts, Sam Lowell, who I hadn’t seen in a while were, full disclosure, having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. I also mentioned that night, which is germane here, in discussing the broader category of the seemingly endless wars that the American government is determined to wage at the close of our lives ( we are both on the wrong side of seventy so check the actuarial tables if you think I am mistaken) so that we never again utter the word “peace” with anything but ironic sneers that I, again for full disclosure, am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days.

For those not in the know that organization of ex-veterans of the last couple of generations of America’s wars has been for over a quarter of a century (actually just commemorated its thirtieth anniversary this summer of 2015) determinedly committed to opposing war as an instrument, as the first instrument, of American policy in what that government sees as a hostile world (a view that it has held for a long time, only the targeted enemy and the amount of devastation brought forth has changed).  

I also noted Sam’s position with his concurrence, full disclosure, he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective on the killer/spy drones. I thought his argument perhaps reflected an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. More importantly that Sam, who marched in any number of anti-Vietnam War parades with me after my service was over and I gave him the “skinny” on what was really going on in that war, had made in the post-9/11 period like many from our generation of ’68 a sea-change in their former anti-military positions. Something in that savage criminal attack in New York City against harmless civilians got the war lusts, yes, the war lusts up of people, good, simple people like Sam and lots of “peaceniks” from our generation to kill everything that got in our way. LBJ and Richard Nixon would have in their graves rather ironic smiles over that change of heart.   

And those many who changed positions, who sulkily went along with whatever was “necessary,” including I remember one time a woman who identified herself as a Quaker who, I swear, asked plaintively on some radio talk show I was listening to whether we (meaning the American government and not her individually I assume but who knows) could not surgically nuclear bomb Al Qaeda from all memory. Sam got caught up in this war lust wave and has since, starting with his initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, wound up in the end left with egg all over his face.

But Sam is nothing if not determined just like me to carry on in his views and so another night at Jack Higgin’s found us arguing over the more recent egg-in-face aspects of American war policy in the Middle East with the rise of ISIS, the demise of the failed states of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and with it whatever rationale made the American government built a thing from which it had to run.

As is also usual these days like with the question of killer/spy drones we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I again got to thinking about the issue of the debacle of American policy and while not intending to directly counter Sam arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:

“Nobel “Peace” Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced in relationship to this “new age” warmonger extraordinaire), abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate (not so strangely more Republicans than Democrats, at least more vociferously so) as internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys, etc.), has over the past year or so ordered more air bombing strikes in the north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred at last count [summer of 2015] but who really knows the real number with all the “smoke and mirrors” by the time you rotate guys in and out, hire mercenaries, and other tricks of the trade long worked out among the bureaucratiti, to “protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army whose main attribute is to run even before contact is made, has sent seemingly limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to {which it could not and backed off for now in the Fall of 2015],  quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama on any subject ).

Of course the existential threat of ISIS has Obama crying to the high heavens for authorizations, essentially "blank check" authorizations just like any other "war" president, from Congress in order to immerse the United States on one side in a merciless sectarian war which countless American blunders from the get go has helped create.

All these actions, and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue from the experience (and have become a fervent anti-warrior ever since), learn to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world. Have made us very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation (and the most recent hikes of whatever number for "training" purposes puts paid to that thought).

And during all this deluge Obama and company have been saying with a straight face the familiar (Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be?

Now not every event in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang around with might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq!–Stop The Bombings In Iraq And Syria!- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War Budget Appropriations!     

***
Here is something to think about picked up from a leaflet I picked up at a recent (small) anti-war rally:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]  

*****Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

*****Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

 

 

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin 

 

 

I remember one day many years ago now, although it could have been any number of years before or since given the woman who I want to talk about, talk about Lady Day, and how she made me feel better about things, about blue things going on in my life those many years ago that I am thinking of, or many years before or many years after that. By the way although I know that this is confessional age, an age when every emotion seemingly has to be publicly wrought out over no matter how private this is not about my blues, or not much but about the lady in question, Lady Day helped chase some of them away and I will leave it to the reader to decide whether I am running a confessional scene like some errant Catholic schoolboy, a faith that I grew up in incense and high Latinisms and all but which probably was trumped by that finer Irish Catholic grandmother heritage of not "airing the damn, her term, family's or your dirty linen in public." Yeah, I do believe the latter prevailed in the long haul. So, yes, I want to talk about a woman whom I never knew personally since she was of my parents generation and thus removed by at least a generation from any possibility of being a direct influence unlike my Olde Saco, Maine corner boys, was hanging out in New York City a place I never went to until my high school years long after she was a shade and was black a condition that would not have played well in that Irish Catholic grandmother-etched neighborhood where I grew up. Had moreover had never been that aware of her as a performer although I believe I heard her one wisp of a time on the Ed Sullivan Show but don’t quote me on that.

Yeah, talk about how a lady from my parents time, from a foreign city and a foreign color chased away my blues, unlike a number of women who I have known from my own time and place, and white too, Irish Catholic red-headed women mostly who have given me endless heartache (although having grown up in a different time and eventually place than grandmother's Irish Catholic-etched Olde Saco neighborhood streets I did had a couple of black women who gave me that same endless heartache), more than once before that day I am thinking about and did so after. This particular day Lady Day came in very handy, it must have been a winter day for sure since I still can feel the frosty feeling, the snow whirling outside and inside my brain I had while the events were unfolding.

So add that to the depression I was feeling over the latest serious quarrel I had had with my wife, the chill and bluster of that winter day had me down as well, as I entered a bookstore in Harvard Square, I think the Harvard Bookstore which is still there although it could have been the Paperback Book Smith which is long gone as Square fixture. That wife very soon thereafter to be my ex-wife, an ex-wife who with her alimony demands and child support would continue to have plenty to do with my blues for a long time thereafter, but who just that moment had plenty to do with the particular depression I felt that time so don’t blame the winter for that, but don’t ask for the particulars of the dispute, that time, that is another story, a story already done and wrapped up in a bow. And don’t blame Billie for either the cold or subsequent divorce since people have blamed Billie enough for what ails them and I have come today to honor that fresh flower lady day.

Now that I think about it on that blustery day I have it ass backwards I think I was entering the old long gone Paperback Booksmith store but it might have been the still there Harvard Book Store up the street so don’t hold me to the particular bookstore just know that it was a bookstore, in Harvard Square, in the cold raw winter (and you know about the depression part so onward).

In any case that is the day and place where I heard this low sad torchy female voice coming out of the sound system most of those places had (have) to liven things up while you were (are) browsing (or “cruising” as I found out later when somebody told me bookstores were the “hot” spot if you were looking for a certain kind of woman [or man], needless to say my kind of woman, bookish, sassy and, well, a little neurotic but the dating circling ritual among the bookish, sassy whatevers is also a story for another day). 

A smoky voice for smoky darkly lit rooms where the smoke hangs on the walls through daylight but best seen in low wattage light  and where romances might burst open (or at least be an inexpensive cheap date at a couple of cups of coffee and a pasty or a couple of glasses of sweet red wine hopefully not just out of the press and more hopefully loosen her up, loosen up that hot date you had been moving heaven and hell to get to for weeks,for the night’s anticipations) reminding me of cafés and coffeehouses in places like New York, Boston, San Francisco. New York around the Village when smoking was “cool,” when cigarettes smokers like me (heavily at times especially whisky drinking or dope pulling times all now mercifully quieted) ruled the roost with regulation butt hanging out of side of one's mouth in the old con man or French gangster imitating Chicago gangster style (and now pity for French style smokers now banished, now desperate refugees in the outer edge of the outdoor café tables, rain or shine, destroying the whole noir cinema night).

When smoky rooms lived and jazz (okay, okay jazz and some rarified urban blues too not the country bumpkin Delta kind every black person who could follow the northern star was fleeing from to break Mister James Crow’s grip) was king and such a rasp-edged cut the air with a knife voice would be  swaying in the background amidst the cling of glasses, small wine glasses bulb-like with slender stems filled maybe one third of the way with some house blend (again hopefully not newly pressed) and sturdy whisky shot glasses which spoke of hard-edged ethnic enclaves, workingmen drowning themselves in sorrows to break the hunger sorrows of their lives and their sons taking right up where they left off except maybe since café prices unlike men’s taverns were dear sipping the edges of the glass more slowly. A voice to cut through the edge of the air around the small murmurs of collective voices (two, three, four but an uncomfortable fit to a table times whatever number Bob, Ray or Sam could squeeze into the space without the fire marshal raising hell about capacity or asking for a bigger extortionous pay-off)  talking of the news of the day (Jesus, that damn war is starting to heat up), the current hardship of life (Christ, the damn rent man was looking for his draw and I barely culled him out of the damn thing), the latest lost romance (divorces, two-timings, will write when I get a chance, waiting by the midnight phone the damn thing growing out of the ear waiting for that prisoner’s one call) or just cheesy chitchat. Yeah just the dross of daily life until the singer (you already know who she is because I set it up that she is smoky-voiced, can cut the air with the damn thing), yeah, until she hits that high white note and for one second, maybe today the time a nanosecond but whatever the count the room is silent, no glasses tinkling (some slender dame almost ready to put the stem of the glass to her mouth, some guy, maybe Red Radley who was famous for the slow whisky sipping and all of the bartender in town dreaded his appearance at their doors because he would take up a table or a stool and the tip would be nada), no dishes clanging (those pastries with two forks almost gone and the parties asking why they had bothered to order the damn thing since it tasted like last week’s stale remainders at some Salvation Army Harbor Lights retreat, which I can tell you is pretty stale, no voices chattering their hearts out (that midnight waiting suspended in the air) but stopped against that neck-turning sound.

The hushed patrons searching the dark smoky night for the source finally fixing in on an ill-lit stage, a joke of a stage put together slap-dash, a few boards, a little varnish, raised just enough to see whoever was performing, hell, to see Lady Day performing she was practically indentured to the owner since he had advanced her seven weeks pay when she had to see the “fixer man” to get well, in order not to cut down on the number of café tables that could be squeezed into the space, a third-rate bass player strumming his beat message (that’s all Harry could afford he said then ranting about the musicians' union scale but what were you going to do  otherwise she would have to hoof it alone), likewise the pitter-patter of the second-rate drummer not playing too loudly in order avoid drowning out the voice in front of him (see he had been her lover before that “fixer man” became her true lover, gave her that smoky voice, let the night air be cut by her voice), and a first-rate big sexy sax man (a second cousin to Johnny Hodges and so had something big and high white culled in his genes) blowing his brains out and mentally taking note that amid the clutter of daily life, the insolvability of the hardships and the need to go on to find the next romance that for that one moment those concerns were suspended.

Yeah, a voice, now that he had been through his own troubles with sister cocaine (hence the knowledge of slow whisky sipping a la Red Radley, Salvation Army Harbor Light retreats, and if you could get through the “detox” then the screwy message they had to spread the gospel that you had to listen to and no Sky’s Miss Sarah Brown all pert, petite, and pious, and of waiting around midnight phones after the twelfth “cure” had not taken and your own Miss Sarah Brown has abandoned ship, has moved onto some other Eddie whose only virtue, and maybe no virtue was that he was not you, that his nose was clean [a pun] and that she would at least have a breather until whatever fatal weakness he was hiding took hold) having just an edge fortified by some back room dope (she was trying to ease off “boy”, H, heroin to the squares and so the “fixer man” was squeezing sweet cousin cocaine into her brain) to break the monotony of the day (and who knows maybe the life, maybe of everything that had led her to this dark, ill-lit stage filled with too many tables, no room to breathe, no drink in hand to get through the numbers until the break as her cousin was wearing off after that early rush) with its phrasing (strange how the phrasing separated out those who could reach that high white note, not every night like this night for she would know but the silence, by the absence of glass clanging, the shuffling of dishes, the small murmurs all in suspension except those clouds of smoke rising to meet her, and her wishing to chase down that damn drink with a nice mellow cigarette to calm her fucking nerves), pleading with you like in some biblical battle between heaven’s angels and hell’s like something old revolutionary divine John Milton would think up but which she just the deliverer of high white notes not some literary light to take your blues away.

Like in that second (okay to be all up to date nanosecond) aside from whatever the dope that was still running round her brain could do she had a space there in that frail shimmering body with its pit-marked skin that could end that fucking war, could make that rent man disappear, could sent that guy a dime to drown that midnight phone madness, hell, could make the decision between red or white for the living room walls, to solve your pain, to take yours on, and get rid of hers.  

Not placing the alluring voice in that bookstore that day since my torch singers of choice then were the likes of Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt, Helen Morgan, or Peggy Lee I asked one of the clerks who the person who was singing that song, the old Cole Porter tune, Night and Day with such sultry, swaying feeling on the PA sound system. She, looking like a smarmy college student, probably a senior ready to graduate and enlighten us, the heathens some way, and therefore wise to the worldly world who didn’t mind the job she was doing while waiting for her small change fame but was not in the habit of answering questions about who or what was being played over the loudspeaker since she had been hired to cater to help patrons find where such-and-such a best seller, academic, or guide book was located, looked at me like I was some rube from the sticks when she said Billie Holiday, of course (and she could have added stupid, which is what that look meant).      

Now that event was memorable for two things, listening to that song and a follow-up one, All of Me (which she did not hit the high white note on in that PA version), almost immediately thereafter got me out of my funk despite the fact that the subjects of the songs were about love, or romance anyway, something I was at odds with just that moment (remember the wife, ex-wife business). The other, as is my wont when I hear, see, read something that grabs my attention big time also was the start of my attempt to get every possible Billie Holiday album or tape (yeah, it’s been a while since that wintry day of which I speak) I could get my hands on. So thereafter any time that I felt blue I would put on a Billie platter or tape and feel better, usually.

In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday is the torch singer's torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs (like I heard in that first song that got me thinking back to old time cafes and coffeehouses). That well-placed hush, the dying gasp. The hinted fragrant pause which sets the next line up. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when she is on a roll and the arrangements which with few exceptions make me think whoever else might have been scheduled to cover the song the composer had Billie in the back of his or her mind when they were playing the melody in their heads. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope that kept her edge up but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love (Cole Porter show tunes, Irving Berlin goof stuff, Gershwin boys white boy soul), lose, or both like no other.

And if in the end it was the dope that got her through the day and performance, let me say this- a “normal” nice singer could sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it right when she was at her best. Dope or no dope. Was she always at her best? Hell no, as a review of all her recorded material makes clear. Some recordings, a compilation, for example, done between 1945 and her death in 1959 for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and the dope put the nerves over the edge toward the end.

Here is the funny thing though, no, the strange thing now that I think about the matter, the politically correct strange thing although those who insist on political correctness in everyday civil life should lay off anybody’s harmless cultural preferences and personal choices if you ask me. One time I was touting Billie’s virtues to a group of younger blacks, a mixed group, who I was working with on some education project and the talk came around to music, music that meant something other than background noise, other than a momentarily thrill and I mentioned how I had “met” Billie and the number of times and under what circumstances she had sung my blues away when times were tough. A few of these young blacks, smart kids who were aware of more than hip-hop nation and interested in roots music, old time blues, Skip James on the country end and Howlin’ Wolf on the city end, to an extend that I found somewhat surprising, when they heard me raving about Billie startled me when they wrote her off as an empty-headed junkie, a hophead, and so on. Some of their responses reflected, I think, the influence of the movie version of her life (Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross) or some unsympathetic black history ‘uplift,’ “you don’t want to wind up like her so keep your eyes on the prize and stay away from dopers, hustlers, corner boys and the like, or else” views on her life that have written her off as an “addled” doper.

I came back on them though, startled them when I said the following, “if Billie needed a little junk, a little something for the head, a little something to get through the night, to keep her spirits up I would have bought her whatever she needed just to hear her sing that low, sultry and sorrowful thing she did in some long lost edgy New York café that chased my blues away.” Enough said.     

*Poet's Corner- William Wordsworth's "Ode To The French Revolution"- In Honor Of Its 221st Anniversary

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip about William Wordsworth.

Markin Comment:

Here is William Wordsworth's famous ode to the beginning of the French revolution full of all the youthful enthusiasm such a world historic event can elicit. That he, like many another former 'friend' of revolutions over the ages, went over to the other side when things got too hot does not take away from his efforts here.


The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts

. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—

Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.

What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,

The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,

And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these

Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;--
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,

And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,--the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

William Wordsworth

Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-The Ghost Dance-Late 1969

Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-The Ghost Dance-Late 1969

 

 

Scene Nine: The Ghost Dance-Late 1969

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

Introduction by Sam Lowell

Many years ago, back in the 1970s (ouch!) many years ago, the late and long lamented Peter Paul Markin, always known when I first meet him in the beginning of sixth grade at Adamsville North Elementary School in the days when around Massachusetts anyway sixth grade was considered elementary school-worthy as just Markin and later in high school after Frankie Riley coined the moniker “the Scribe,” wrote a series of eleven articles about his “search” for what he called the great blue-pink American West night. That search fell between about 1966, 1967 when he had dropped out of Boston University to “find himself” and headed the hitchhike road west and about 1974 just before he headed down Mexico way, down into Sonora, then a very big center of the drug trade mostly marijuana and cocaine, and met his too soon death from gunshot wounds after what we heard was a botched drug deal. Most of the articles, which were printed in the East Bay Other, a now defunct alternative newspaper put out in Berkeley and which was widely read in northern California, were about his early days, about his sense that things were in for a big shake-up and in the not too distant future and he wanted to be there at the creation, and about the early days on the road west looking, well, when all was said and done, looking for something that he never found, maybe never could find when the 1960s high points ebbed, ebbed very quickly leaving him high and dry.     

Most of the early adventures heading west, or out West, were purely of Markin’s own making but the reason that I am reprinting the article below is that I was actually there at the ghost dance which is the subject of this piece. See Markin had called all his high school corner boys from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor, or rather from “holding up the wall” in front of that establishment, Tonio’s of blessed memory during our high school days to head out to California and join him on what he called a yellow brick road bus owned and operated by a guy called Captain Crunch who was cruising up and down the coast partying and searching, again that searching for what business was never clear. What was clear was that the bus was a floating den of drugs, booze, women, sex and rock and roll. Markin had begun calling his corner boys out something in late 1966, early 1967 and guys like Josh Breslin and Bart Webber were the first to go out sometime in that latter year. Their adventures have been incorporated into some of those early Markin articles.

Truthfully I was a little square, was looking to break out of the poverty that my family, my parents, had endured and so in those early years I was not interested hitchhiking west, joining a traveling caravan or anything like that. When the Scribe would begin with his monologue on how things were going to be turned upside down and soon I dismissed that as so much Markin bullshit, could have given a rat’s ass about some pipe dream. I was into the college grind looking to get good enough grades to eventually get into law school and prosper. Then one night in early 1968 I was at a party in Boston, some students from around the town, and a guy passed me a joint, marijuana. At first I said no but the second pass I said what the hell. That’s when I “got religion,” started seeing that the grind was not the place where I was happy and while I was still driven by the desire to be a lawyer I began thinking that I could put that on hold for a while. So after I graduated in June of that year I decided that I would join the Scribe in the big ass search for something (and join Josh, Bart, and I think Frankie Riley who were also there then).         

Now in those days people, ordinary young people in all kinds of garb and with all kinds of travelling gear alongside, were on the road a lot, would hitchhike places and so that was what I decided to do. At that time Markin had made one of his hitchhike trips home to take a break from the yellow brick road bus and to check on his draft status since the local draft board was harassing him about trying to draft him (I had one leg shorter than the other, and was lame as a result so I was 4-F unfit for military duty). He came at a time I was getting ready to go west but had not finalized my plans. He decided to head back west without me but told me that he was going to stop in Denver for a while on the way back so I should go that route and meet him there, or if I was too late someplace in Arizona. Which I wound up doing and along that way west we got involved in that ghost dance. Markin, when we talked about it later, a few years later after I had left the road and before I had lost contact with him, told me that ghost dance experience was the highlight of his journey west, had been what the “search” was all about.    He was right, right as the Scribe was ever right about anything. S.L.    

[The Angelica mentioned in the first section below was a young woman whom Markin had met when he was left off in Steubenville, Ohio by a truck-driver who was supposed to be heading west to Chicago but decided to see his girlfriend there first and left Markin off at the famous Dew Drop In Diner, the truck stop diner where she was serving them off the arm for the summer. Markin had stopped in for a short something to eat, they hit it off just fine, he wound up back at her cabin that night and several days later, showing the tenor of the times, Markin and Angelica headed west in search of, well, you know what they were in search of if you have been paying attention. Angelica, as it turned out was like many people not built for the road and so headed back to her school in Indiana after some mishaps along the way in Omaha. That was the tenor of the times too.]   

*******

Damn, already I missed Angelica, road-worthy, road-travel easy, easy on the eyes and easy getting us a ride Angelica as I traveled down Interstate 80 onto the great prairie Mid-American hitchhike road after we parted at the Omaha bus station, she heading home East, at least Indiana east from Nebraska, and I to the savage search for the blue-pink great American West night. And I will tell you true that first ride and every ride after that, every miserable truck stopped or sedan ride, it didn’t matter, made me utter that same missed Angelica oath.

Right then though I was on my first connection ride out of Omaha and as luck would have it this big bruiser, full tattoo armed with snakes, roses and lost loves names, truck driver who was obviously benny-ed, benny-ed to perdition and was talking a blue streak was driving right through to Denver, my next destination. All I wanted was the ride but I knew enough of the road, enough of the truck driver come-on part of it anyway to know that this guy’s blue streak was a small price to pay for such a lucky break.

See, some guys, some guys like Denver Slim, who left me off at that long ago (or it seemed like long ago) Steubenville truck stop and Angelica (hey, now I know who to blame for my miseries, if I ever get my hands on that damn Denver Slim… Yah, yah, what are you going to do, big boy?), wanted to talk man to man. Back and forth like real people, especially as I reminded him of his errant (read: hair growing long , full-bearded hippie –swaying) son. Other guys are happy for the company so they can, at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour with the engine revved high and where conversation is made almost painful and chock-filled with  “what did you says?”, spout forth on their homespun philosophy and their take on this wicked old world. With these guys an occasional “Yah, that’s right,” or a timely “What did you mean by that?” will stand you in good stead and you can nod out into your own thoughts.

And that is exactly where I wanted be, as old Buck (where do they get these names out in Mid-America anyway) droned on and on about how the government was doing, or not doing this or that for, or to, the little guy who helped build up, not tear down, the country like him. Thinking about what Aunt Betty, sweet Neola, Iowa grandmotherly Aunt Betty, said as she left me off at the Interstate 80 entrance still rings in my ears. I was good for Angelica. Hell, I know I was. Hell, if I had any sense I would admit what I know inside. Angelica was good for me too. But see certain times were funny that way. No way in 1962, or ‘64, or ’66, let’s say, that I would have run into an Angelica. I was strung out, strung out hard on neurotic, long black-haired (although that was optional), kind of skinny (not thin, not slender, skinny, wistfully skinny, I say), bookish, Harvard Square, maybe a poet, kind of girls. If I said beatnik girls, and not free-form, ethereal, butterfly breeze “hippie” girls you’d know what I mean.

As a kid I was cranked on pale, hell wan was more like it, dark-haired, hard Irish Catholic girls, and I mean hard Irish Catholic girls with twelve novena books in their hands, and unrequited lust in their hearts. So, I swear, when Angelica’s number turned up I was clueless how to take just a plain-spoken, says what she means, means what she says young woman who had dreams (unformed, mainly, but dreams nevertheless) that also were plain-spoken. Ah, I can’t explain it now, and I doubt I ever will. Just say I was stunted, stunned, and smitten, okay and let me listen to old Buck’s drone.

Later.

I have now put many a mile between me and Omaha and here I am well clear of that prairie fire dream now in sweet winter desert night Arizona not far from some old now run down, crumbling Native American dwellings that keep drawing my attention and I still want to utter that oath, that Angelica oath. Sitting by this night camp fire casting its weird ghost night-like shadows just makes it worst. Old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies”, Jack and Mattie, playing their new-found (at least to me) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone. And Sam Lowell, old corner boy, just joined us, finally, finally on the road west, and finally after just missed Denver when we wanted to get out before the early snows clogged up the high Rockies.  

Hey, I just remembered, sitting here wrapped up in Angelica and ancient primal tribal memories out of the whistling black star-filled night that I haven’t filled you in on where I have been, who I have seen (like John and Mattie), and how I got here from that star-crossed Neola night, at least the past Denver part. Jesus, and here we are only a few hundred miles from the ocean. I can almost smell, smell that algae sea- churned smell, and almost see the foam-flecked waves turn against the jagged-edged La Jolla rocks and mad, aging surfer boys from another time looking for that perfect wave. Yah, another more innocent time before all hell broke loose on us in America and crushed our innocent youthful dreams in the rice paddies of Asia, our Angelica plain-spoken dreams, but not our capacity to dream. That only makes the Angelica hurt worst as I remember that she had never seen the ocean, the jagged edged, foam-flecked ocean that I went on and on about. I was to be her Neptune on that voyage west to the rim of the world. Well let me get to it, the filling you in part.

 

After grabbing that straight ride from blue streak talkin’ old Buck I did tell you about, and a short but scary two day delay by a serious snow squall hurricane-wind tumult just before the Rocky Mountain foothills leading into Denver I got there in good order. If I didn’t tell you before, and now that I think about it I didn’t, I was to hook up with my now traveling companions, Sam, Jack and Mattie, there for the final trip west to the ocean and serious blue-pink visions. If you don’t remember Jack and Mattie, whom I did meet there and Sam who was delayed in Illinois west of Chicago since his hitchhiking was going slower than he expected, they are two guys that I picked up on the Massachusetts highways heading south in the days when I had a car in the early spring. We had some adventures going south, that I will tell you about another time, before I left them off in Washington, D.C. so they could head west from there. We agreed then to meet up in Denver later in the year where they expected to stay for a while. My last contact with them in late summer had them still there but when I arrived at the communal farm on the outskirts of Denver where they had been staying I was informed that they had gotten nervous about being stuck in the snow-bound Rockies and wanted to head south as fast as they could. They had left a Phoenix address for me to meet them at. I stayed at the commune for a few days to rest up, doing a little of this and that, mostly that, and then headed out myself on what turned to be an uneventful and mercifully short hitchhike road trip to Phoenix to connect with them. That is where Sam caught up with us afterchecking out that Denver connection. Forward.

 

And so here we are making that last push to the coast but not before we investigate these Native American lands that, as it turns out, we all had been interested in ever since our kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

 

Earlier today we had been over to Red Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely here not all that long ago but who are now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of our own warrior shaman trances are still in our heads. I am still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive the marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but we scored some peyote buttons (strictly for religious purposes, as you will see) and they have started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (again strictly for medicinal purposes).

So right now in this dark, abyss dark, darker than I ever saw the night sky in the East with all its lights at every corner to keep the bad element at bay but forgetting whatever made us build a thing from which we had to run, though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented hash pipe-filled dreams of Angelica I am embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And if my ears don’t deceive me, and they don’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle I hear, and hear plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

 

And after more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, I swear, I swear on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls I see the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that I had heard got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, we four as Sam, head full of peyote, hash and who knows what else, greedy to be high in this locale from his utterings, we four television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so we were actually out of synch with the wall action to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya,…..until we speed up to catch the real pace. After what seems an eternity we were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white man injustices.

But just as quickly the now flickering camp fire flame goes out, or goes to ember, since in the trance nobody remembered to throw a few more logs or keep the flames stoked the shadow ghost dance warriors are gone and we crumble in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance. We, after regaining some strength, all decide that we had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean as soon as possible the next morning. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, will do us in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment we, or at least I knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.

The Not So Discreet Charm-Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

The Not So Discreet Charm-Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell 

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, Luis Bunuel, 1972  

 

Back in the day, back in the later part of the 1960s, early 1970s anybody who was involved in any aspect of the counter-cultural movement that animated “youth nation” in this country and abroad had to have some kind of critique of late capitalist society, of the thing that previous generations had built from which we had to run, and run like hell, That critique could go from high Leninist assaults on economic imperialism to a soft-shell lambasting of bourgeois manners and norms from cultural anarchists to cultural Marxists (mainly through small press journals and magazines where such material appealed to the academy). Into that mix any manifestation by film, book or song of such critiques drew immediate attention from some segments of youth nation such as the film under review, Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie. This one was like catnip for those who needed a visual representation of what was wrong with capitalist society in the raw.      

Of course Bunuel was an old hand at such critiques. He was old man at the time of this film but in his youth and in his earlier works very much drawn to the Surrealists and Dadaists and it showed in this film as well especially the dream sequels which dominate this award-winning effort. In fact the dreams, or rather nightmares, of the bourgeoisie get quite a sent up here. The basic plotline is pretty standard critique of the affluent and their allegedly superior manners and tastes. A small group of Parisian Mayfair swells which expanded (mostly) and contracted depending on the scene are connected together through trying to break bread, trying to eat together which through might and main does not get accomplished. Something always got in the way from the beginning starting with a wrong date for dinner to a restaurant being used as a funeral parlor after the death of the owner to the French military showing up to do practice exercises and so on.      

Of course this group of bourgeois are also tied together by the men, one an ambassador from a fictitious country in South America, who are making a ton of money running a drug smuggling operation through using his diplomatic immunity as cover. This operation and its possible discovery has then on edge (they are eventually arrested but are let go to avoid an international incident). Has them having dreams turned to nightmares involving getting caught, being murdered and other combinations including a couple being characters in each other’s dream. Of course standard for such an anti-establishment 1972 film there were references to Chairman Mao, guerrilla warfare, terrorists and every other dread that the bourgeois elements lived through in those times. At the end (and also interspersed throughout the film) the six main characters are seen walking, walking on a deserted road to someplace, no place, any place. Whatever Bunuel had in mind for his characters by this piece of symbolism they need not have worried about their futures since this period was the ebb tide of the big changes that “youth nation” expected to bring unto the world. Straight up, they won, we lost and have been fighting a rearguard action ever since. Enough said.