The Cold Civil War Has Started- Resist Trump: Jan. 20 Inauguration Day Protests
Resist Trump: Jan. 20 Inauguration Day Protests
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Wednesday, December 21, 2016
The Cold Civil War Has Started- Resist Trump: Jan. 20 Inauguration Day Protests
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
*****In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind
*****In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Several years ago, maybe in 2007 or 2008 Sam Lowell, the locally well-known lawyer from the town of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, wrote some small pieces about the old days in the town, the old days being for him the 1950s and 1960s, the time of the golden age of the automobile and relative abundance but also if mocking the ephemeral materialist nature of the times also the red scare Cold War night with its threats of some errant Russkie bomb landing of top of us. At that time the town was mainly a rural outpost, the usual Main Street and drive on through like many such places in outer America, where instead of the usual rural occupation of farming, truck or raising staple crops on fertile land, the cranberry bogs, the marches and water pits, and boggers (as kids we called them “boogers” not knowing what the hell bogs were about although knew what nasty boogers were from the eternal kids picking their noses) held sway and dominated a fair part of town life, ran the town politics and determined the ethos, determined the ethos to the extent that was possible in post-World War II America where the older cultural norms were rapidly being replaced by a speedier and less homespun way of doing business.
In the teenage life line-up, the only one that was important in Sam’s world then, since he was not a low-life bogger and had no bogger roots he had gravitated to those whose families like his that were connected with the shipbuilding industry about twenty miles up the road. So you would have seen Sam and his corner boys on any given Friday or Saturday night if not dated up holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street daring, with the exception of Jack Callahan the great school football running back and fourth generation bogger who hung with them because he thought they were “cool,” any of the bogger clan to do anything but go in and order food or play the jukebox.
(Seemingly every boy in town from junior high on, if not before, had his corner boys for protection against a dangerous world outside the corner, or something like that if you asked them. If you wanted an explanation more than that of self-preservation professional sociologists and cracker barrel philosophers of the time spent endless hours of their time analyzing that angst-driven night and could give you their take on the phenomenon although as usual they were about twelve steps behind the curve and by the time they had caught up these guys were shedding their angst and alienation for Zen rock and roll, drugs, Nirvana and the Kama Sutra not necessarily in that order.)
In the teenage life line-up, the only one that was important in Sam’s world then, since he was not a low-life bogger and had no bogger roots he had gravitated to those whose families like his that were connected with the shipbuilding industry about twenty miles up the road. So you would have seen Sam and his corner boys on any given Friday or Saturday night if not dated up holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street daring, with the exception of Jack Callahan the great school football running back and fourth generation bogger who hung with them because he thought they were “cool,” any of the bogger clan to do anything but go in and order food or play the jukebox.
(Seemingly every boy in town from junior high on, if not before, had his corner boys for protection against a dangerous world outside the corner, or something like that if you asked them. If you wanted an explanation more than that of self-preservation professional sociologists and cracker barrel philosophers of the time spent endless hours of their time analyzing that angst-driven night and could give you their take on the phenomenon although as usual they were about twelve steps behind the curve and by the time they had caught up these guys were shedding their angst and alienation for Zen rock and roll, drugs, Nirvana and the Kama Sutra not necessarily in that order.)
Sam had seen that small town Americana all change over his long association with the town, including a few terms as a town selectman, although the boggers were still there, still moaning about their collective water tax bills, and still a force on the board but the drift over the decades was for the town to become a bedroom community for the sprawling high tech industry running the Interstate corridor about ten miles away. Sam though hung up with some old age nostalgia twist wrote about the old neighborhood now still intact as if time had passed that hell’s little acre by (the new developments were created on abandoned bog lands to the benefit mainly of Myles Larson, the largest bogger around), largely still composed of the small tumbledown small single family homes with a patch of green like that he grew up and came of age on “the wrong side of the tracks” (along with three brothers all close in age in a five room shack, Sam had never, except in front of his parents, ever called it anything but that). Sam sighed one time to his old friend from that very neighborhood Bart Webber after they had put the dust of the old town behind them for a while on the hitchhike road west that the “acres” of the world will always be with us. Markin, in his “newer world” turn the old world upside down phase did not want to hear that, blocked it out when Sam would bring the idea up on the road. That said a lot about Markin, and about Sam as well.
Wrote too about the old (painful, the painful being that the school drew the more prosperous new arrivals staring to come into town leaving the boggers over at John Alden Junior High and subjecting him to lots of taunts about his brother hand-me-down clothes, silly saran wrapped-brown lunch bag bologna sandwich lunches with no dessert, no twinkles, cupcakes, Jello or anything at all fruit even, stuff like that) days when he attended the then newly built Myles Standish Junior High School (such places are now almost universally called middle schools) where he and his fellow class- mates were the first to go through starting in seventh grade. In that piece he mentioned that he was not adverse, hell, he depended on “cribbing” words, phrases and sentences from many sources.
One such “crib” was appropriating the title of a six-volume saga by the French writer Marcel Proust for one of those sketches, the title used here In Search of Lost Time as well. He noted that an alternative translation of that work was Remembrances of Things Past which he felt did not do justice to what he, Sam, was trying to get a across. Sam had no problem, no known problem anyway, with remembering things from the past but he thought the idea of a search, of an active scouring of what had gone on in his callow youth (his term) was more appropriate to what he was thinking and feeling.
One such “crib” was appropriating the title of a six-volume saga by the French writer Marcel Proust for one of those sketches, the title used here In Search of Lost Time as well. He noted that an alternative translation of that work was Remembrances of Things Past which he felt did not do justice to what he, Sam, was trying to get a across. Sam had no problem, no known problem anyway, with remembering things from the past but he thought the idea of a search, of an active scouring of what had gone on in his callow youth (his term) was more appropriate to what he was thinking and feeling.
Prior to writing those pieces Sam had contacted through the marvels of modern technology, through the Internet, Google and Facebook a number of the surviving members of that Myles Standish Class of 1962 to get their take on what they remembered, what search that they might be interested in undertaking to “understand what the hell happened back then and why” (his expression, okay). He got a number of responses, the unusual stuff that people who have not seen each for a long time, since the old days as school and so are inclined to put up a “front.” To show that the trajectory toward state prison or whore-houses which Miss Winot or one of them had predicted was to be their fate had been put behind them long ago, so endlessly going on and on about beautiful houses in beautiful neighborhoods putting paid to the dust of the dingy old town, what they had done with their lives in resume form, endless prattle about grandchildren (Sam admitted to a certain inclination that way himself so he was more forgiving on that issue) and so forth who also once Sam brought the matter up wanted to think back to those days.
One of those classmates, Melinda Loring, whom Sam in high school although not in junior high had something of a “crush” on but so did a lot of other guys, after they had sent some e-mail traffic to each other, sent him via that same method (oh beautiful technology on some things) a copy of a booklet that had been put out by the Myles Standish school administrators in 1987 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the opening of the school. Sam thoughtfully (his term) looked through the booklet and when he came upon the page shown above where an art class and a music class were pictured he discovered that one of the students in the art class photograph was of him.
One of those classmates, Melinda Loring, whom Sam in high school although not in junior high had something of a “crush” on but so did a lot of other guys, after they had sent some e-mail traffic to each other, sent him via that same method (oh beautiful technology on some things) a copy of a booklet that had been put out by the Myles Standish school administrators in 1987 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the opening of the school. Sam thoughtfully (his term) looked through the booklet and when he came upon the page shown above where an art class and a music class were pictured he discovered that one of the students in the art class photograph was of him.
That
set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the
community freely offered every student a chance to take art in school and
outside as well unlike today when he had been recently informed that due to
school budget cuts art is no longer offered to each student in school but is
tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way
community center, he was encouraged in his pursuit of artistic expression. In
seventh grade after noticing some seascapes that he had done in a crude quasi-impressionist
style like the French painter Monet whose work he had seen at the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston where he and his brother Kenny had done a whirlwind tour of the
place in about two hours going there mainly to see the Egyptian exhibits but
stopping at the French Impressionists for some kindred reason Mrs. Robert’s
encouraged him to become an artist, thought he had some talent, enough to carry
into an art school if he worked at it hard enough. Later at Carver High his junior
and senior year art teacher Mr. Henry thought the same thing after he had done
some less crude and less imitative semi-Impressionist-like rural scenes from
the bogs around town and some quite good Abstract Expressionist work when he discovered
the work of Jackson Pollock. He was prepared to recommend Sam to his alma
mater, the Massachusetts School of Art in the Back Bay of Boston.
Art
for Sam had always been a way for him to express what he could not put in
words, could not easily put in words anyway and he was always crazy to go to
the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see some artwork by real professionals,
especially in high school the abstract expressionists that he was visually
drawn to (and would leave after viewing such modern masterpieces feeling like
he at best would always be an inspired amateur since he did not have the vision
to break off from what he already had seen and imitated, at least that is what
he thought then). Part of the appeal of art was the kind of bohemian lifestyle he
imagined they led, having read a few things in the encyclopedia about various
artists like Gauguin and Van Gogh and that enflamed a kid who was stuck in a
three boys to one bedroom shack of a house down in the wrong side of the tracks
and part was the idea of breaking out, breaking out from the traditional art
that you would see on people’s walls, stuff used as decoration. His idea was to
create something that someone would buy and not put on the walls for decoration
by maybe highlight in a room of its own as the next new thing in art. Those were
on his better days, days when he had not seen museum pieces for a while and
began to believe once he had the basics down he could take off from what
Picasso, Miro, Pollack, Rivers, Dove and the others were trying to do. Those
were the days when he had painted a weird scene in watercolor, a medium always hard
for him to work in, that was something like a breakaway from a Georgia O’Keefe Southwest
mountain painting which Mr. Henry wanted him to enter into the Art for Art’s
Sake competition the Boston Globe was sponsoring and he won third prize, his
best effort ever.
The
big reason that Sam did not pursue that art career had a lot to do with coming
up “from hunger,” coming up the hard way. When he broached the subject to his
parents after he won the prize (and had already been accepted in a local college
based on his high SAT score in History), mainly his mother, Delores, lowered
the boom, vigorously emphasized the hard life of the average artist, and old
chestnut about the million failed artists for every Picasso, and told him that
a manly profession like a teacher was better for a boy who had come up from the
dust of society. (“Manly” her term, although she did not mean the practice of
law which he had not aspired to at the time except that his cranky old grandfather
would keep bugging him to be a lawyer after he had recited the Gettysburg Address as part of a school ceremony
honoring Abraham Lincoln on the centenary of that event, but like all second-generation
Irish mothers in that town when they got their tongues wagging some nice white
collar civil service job to support a nice wife, nice three children and a nice
white picket fenced house outside the “acre,” such were motherly dreams).
Sam
wondered about that long ago mother’s sensible remark after seeing the
photograph, after seeing that twinkle in his eye as he was creating something
with his hands, some painting because outside the brush he was not very mechanically-inclined.
Wondered about the fact that after a lifetime of working the manly profession
of the practice of the law all he could conclude was that there were a million
good lawyers (and he included himself in that category without any undue modesty
he thought) but far fewer good artists and maybe he could have at least had his
fifteen minutes of fame in that field. He might not have caught he Pop Art/Op
Art waves that were carrying art forward then but maybe being around such artists
would have made him push his personal envelope. He resolved to search for some
old artwork stored he did not know where, maybe still in the attic of the old family
house which after his parents passed on his unmarried older brother, Seamus,
took over, the only one who didn’t flee the place like it was the plague, to
see if that path would have made sense.
Sam
had had to laugh after looking at the other photograph, the one of the music
room, where he spotted his old friend Ralph Morse who went on in the 1960s to
some small fame in the Greater Boston area as a member of the rock group The
Rockin’ Ramrods. Actually a bit more than small fame since they had fronted for
the Stones when they came to the Boston area a few years later and had had a
couple of local hits that went number one on the WMEX hot rock charts. Many an
after concert party in Boston or down at the Surf Ballroom in Hull where they
were a fixture and were “discovered” by Alex Ginsberg from WMEX one night when
he was there because his girlfriend had heard about the band from a woman she
worked with and had bugged Alex to go hear them and he pushed them forward
after that found Ralph and Sam drunk as skunks talking about the old days when
rock and roll music was not even let into the Morse household (his parents were
Evangelicals and hated “the devil’s music”). Hell barely tolerated in the pious
Catholic Lowell household (a truce declared when Sam’s parents purchased a
transistor radio for him one Christmas at the Radio Shack so they could not
hear the music). Ralph had eventually once the Ramrods broke up as such bands
do when there are personal differences or in Ralph’s case when he wanted to try
his luck as solo lead singer headed west to seek his fame and fortune but kind
of fell off the face of the earth in the early 1970s out in Oregon and nobody
even with today’s technology, Internet/Facebook and whatever else could help
track somebody down, somebody who was not hiding under the radar anyway, has
been able to find out his whereabouts, if any.
That
Ralph look too set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the
way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take music in
school and outside as well like with art classes unlike today when he had been
informed recently that due to school budget cuts music is no longer offered to
each student but is also tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at
the out-of-the-way community center. However unlike with his art teachers Mr.
Dasher the slap-dash music teacher often went out of his way to tell Sam to
keep his voice down since it was gravelly, and off-key to boot.
At
the time Sam did not think much about it, did not feel bad about having no
musical sense. Later though once he heard folk music, the blues and some other
roots music he felt bad that Mister Dasher had put a damper on his musical
sensibilities. (Mister Dasher who had a band of his own, you know a swing band,
playing stuff for people like his parents from the big band era, Benny Goodman,
Count this, Duke that to supplement his meager teacher’s pay was something of a
flashy dresser and was taunted by the kids in class, taunted by Sam right along
with the others as Mister Dasher, the Nighttime Flasher. In that innocent age
nobody thought anything of it except kids caught up in the nation-wide “rhyming
simon” craze but today no question such a moniker would bring heaven’s own wrath
down on his poor head, Jesus.) Not that he would have gone on to some career
like Ralph, at least Ralph had his fifteen minutes of fame, got Mick and the boys
autographs and had a few of their leftover party girls but he would have
avoided that life-long habit of singing low, singing in the shower, singing up
in the isolated third floor of his current home where no one, including his
longtime companion, Laura Perkins a woman with a professional grade voice that
would make the angels weep for their inadequacies, would hear him. The search
for memory goes on….
An Appeal From Veterans For Peace-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier -He Must Not Die In Jail
An Appeal From Veterans For Peace-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier -He Must Not Die In Jail
The Empress Of The Blues- Queen Latifah’s “Bessie” (2015)-An HBO Film Review
The Empress Of The Blues-
Queen Latifah’s “Bessie” (2015)-An HBO Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Bessie, starring Queen
Latifah (who else in this century could do the role as well), HBO, 2015
One sunny afternoon in the
mid-1960s, come on I don’t remember if it was sunny or not but the day would be
sunny for another reason, I was trolling the Paperback Booksmith in Harvard
Square (that institution, the bookstore, of blessed memory long gone as have
most of the brick and mortal bookstores in the age of e-commerce) when I heard
this old-time bluesy woman’s voice coming over the store’s speaker system, an
amenity that most such places had then to set a certain mood. (You could always
tell as far as bookstores went who they were catering to –the Paperback
Booksmith tended toward blues and classic jazz a la Billie Holiday, the Harvard
Bookstore to classical, The Globe to folk music, hell, they were located above
a coffeehouse then what else would they play, and Frank’s (mostly second-hand
books) to jazz).
I was so intrigued by the
voice that I asked one of the clerks whose voice was beaming over the speakers.
She, without lifting an eyebrow or her head from whatever she was concentrating
on said, “Come on you don’t know Bessie Smith when you hear that voice, where
have you been?” Of course in those days unlike the canned random selection
stuff today in most stores she had, as she explained to me once she had
finished her task, the staff, her, played whatever records, vinyl records,
okay, they wanted on the record player. Her thing was Bessie Smith so Bessie it
was playing for all the blues-soaked world to hear.
That voice haunted me the
rest of the day (as did that snippy way that clerk had cut me to the quick
although the next time I went to that bookstore I wound up getting her
telephone number and had a few dates with her on the basis of my new enthusiasm
for Bessie and my “desire” to learn all about her music but that is a story for
another day. I was serious though when I
said I was “trolling” the bookstore and had been ever since a friend of mine
had told me that such places were good “pick-up” spots for intellectual young
women who might give you a verbal workout and who knows what else. A guy had a
fighting chance in that locale, in a bookstore, those intellectual young women
figuring that if you were in a bookstore you could at least read and maybe form
complete sentences and you probably were not some Neanderthal ready to pounce-they
tended to work the bar scene).
This is Bessie’s story
though so forget all that other stuff. Well it is almost all Bessie’s story
once you learn how I became a devotee back in the mid-1960s and thus would have
reason to pick up an HBO DVD in 2016 about her working career back in the 1920s
and 1930s when she went “from hunger” to big-time stardom and back-probably one
of the early crossover singers-crossover here meaning a black woman who white
audiences, at least hip white audiences, could relate to long before guys like rock
and roller Chuck Berry did in the 1950s when he told Beethoven to roll over a
new sheriff was in town. After that voice haunted me, couldn’t get the song out
of my head all day, Empty Bed Blues
was the song if I didn’t mention it before I did what came naturally I went
back to my growing up home in Riverdale, a town about forty miles west of
Cambridge to check with my friend, Pete Markin, the now long gone late Peter
Paul Markin to see what he knew about her.
See I was/am a child of
rock and roll and while back then I was influenced by some blues stuff if it
passed through the rock filter like that Chuck Berry who just mentioned I was
not knowledgeable about the genre then. Markin was the “max daddy” as he called
himself of everything in the blues night. He had become an aficionado, had
dragged the rest of us somewhat kicking and screaming to at least a surface appreciation
of the art form by accident. He had been trying to get Rockin’ Eddie’s Rock and Roll Hour on the locale radio station,
WJDA, one Sunday night (I won’t say one dark Sunday since I don’t remember
Peter saying what kind of night it was and I would not remember this far removed
what kind of night it was anyhow) when he got some static on his transistor
radio and then clear as a bell Be-Bop’s
Benny Blues Hour out of WABC in Chicago came ripping through the night. The
song that was being played when he tuned in was Howlin’ Wolf’s (via Willie
Dixon) Little Red Rooster and that
was all it took. (Markin had actually heard that song covered by the Rolling
Stones on rock station WMEX after the ban against had been lifted in Boston but
that gravelly voice of the Wolf coming out of some Delta mist had put Mick to
shame.) After that night you almost couldn’t talk to Markin about sassy old
rock without him coming at you with the blues genesis theory of the birth of
rock and roll. He had picked up on Bessie and many of the other female blues
singers like Ma Rainey, Mame Smith, the salacious Lucille Bogan, Memphis Minnie
and a bunch of other women named Smith (maybe they were hiding from something or
someone with that common name-or maybe Smith DNA naturally gravitated toward the
blues. The women actually were more popular back in those days than the
men.
So Markin had, as was his
wont, filled me in on more than I would ever need to know about Bessie, about
the Empress of the Blues as he called her without a hint of mockery in his
voice. (I had personally over the years drifted to the bluesy jazzy voice of
Billie Holliday who I would have dubbed the Empress if we were going for royal
titles in a democratic age). Told about her tough cotton field beginnings and
her tragic Mister James Crow-induced death at a fairly early age. Turned me on
to a few of her classics like Down-Hearted
Blues, Gin House Blues and Hustlin’ Dan. A few days later (the same
day I went back to Paperback Booksmith to “pick-up” that snippy clerk) I went
to Sandy’s Record Shop located between Harvard and Central Square to see what
he had in stock (last I knew he was still there-at least he was a couple of
years ago). Lucky me I was able to get a second-hand set of four double sides
albums (with liner notes intact) put out by Columbia Records. I still have all
those scratched to perdition records. Ah, very heaven.
So when I was browsing the
Amazon site for some DVDs recently it was not a stretch, I didn’t have to
scratch my head to figure out who she was and to see what Queen Latifah had
done with a biopic of Bessie. I am here to say that Queen Latifah is Bessie.
Not necessarily in her mannerisms, in her style or even in her voice but the
whole performance left me speechless. You could almost see the “ghost” of
Bessie coming barrel-assing at you at one hundred and ten. If you don’t believe
me check the video on YouTube of Bessie singing Saint Louis Blues.
*****Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind
*****Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind
Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweating profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come.
Some nights they were on fire as they blew that big high white note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white note, I swear, blew out into the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. Well see we were all a little high so I don’t know about that Japan seas stuff but I sure know that brother blew that high white one somewhere out the door. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at later when he was not in his prime.
The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating “father” preacher/sinner man Son House for showing up drunk. Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.
Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.
They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them to sit here not there, to walk here but not there, to drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their own and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade corn liquor (or so he, Jack Flash called it).
So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room in the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs lining the black streets of blustered America and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly the Stones lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, did pretty good, right.
*****The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth
*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth
A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).
That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.
I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.
At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.
At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.
Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015). Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).
At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.
On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.)
[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea ]
Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27th birthday in December with a rally (and did again this year on her 28th birthday).
More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)
Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.
We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.
After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.
From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days Of......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-Stop The Deportation Of Veterans
From
The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days Of......The Struggle Against The
Endless American Wars
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Hunter Thompson Please Come Back- “Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail 1972”
One should note that ‘gonzo’ journalism is quite compatible with socialist materialism. That is, the writer is not precluded from interpreting the events described within himself/herself as an actor in the story. The worst swindle in journalism, fostered by the formal journalism schools, as well as in other disciplines like history and political science is that somehow one must be ‘objective’. Reality is better served if the writer puts his/her analysis correctly and then gets out of the way. In his best work that was Hunter’s way.
As a member of the generation of 1968 I would note that this was a period of particular importance which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States and all- around political chameleon. Thompson went way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when he was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick him when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon represented the ‘dark side’ of the American spirit- the side that appears today as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson’s work. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books.
Monday, December 19, 2016
An Appeal From Veteran For Peace-It Is Desperately Necessary To Get President Obama To Pardon Chelsea Manning Now-She Must Not Die In Prison!
An Appeal From Veteran For Peace-It Is Desperately Necessary To Get President Obama To Pardon Chelsea Manning Now-She Must Not Die In Prison!
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