My response to Trump's inauguration speech
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Sunday, January 22, 2017
The Cold Civil War Has Started-From Socialist Alternative
Freedom For Chelsea Manning-Here Is One Way It Happened
A response to your petition on Chelsea Manning:
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For Black History Month-Learn About Previous Struggles-Passage at St. Augustine" Film Showings and Discussion, led by filmmaker Clennon L. King, and Civil Rights veteran Mimi Jones.
[act-ma] 2/09 + Passage at St. Augustine" Film Showings and Discussion, led by filmmaker Clennon L. King, and Civil Rights veteran Mimi Jones.
"Passage at St. Augustine" Film Showings and Discussion, led by
filmmaker Clennon L. King, and Civil Rights veteran Mimi Jones (at the
Boston Public Library).
"Passage at St. Augustine" establishes America's Oldest City as home to
the most violent Civil Rights campaign of the entire Movement. Viewers
are transported back to this unlikely Florida tourist town to hear
first-hand from civil rights foot soldiers, Klansmen, journalists,
clergy, politicians and the like, who fought on the front lines of the
18-month battle that led directly to the passage of the landmark Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Despite MLK and LBJ headlining the film's real-life
cast, most come away asking why a campaign so pivotal appears to have
been wiped from the hard drive of History.
Thursday, February 2, 6:00
<http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001JFap4BwoTTw0xfwzXWjUwsTIi6r67H7KsTS_ig0t7Wgj5oGghksokmotiv3NrqRC5TSBq8ECU3ZasDhXjusPhYb7Dwis0tfzehkoC5z2wt1VmnGCL9iz6NeDYWK4O8-VK9iMb--P5QK9-
filmmaker Clennon L. King, and Civil Rights veteran Mimi Jones (at the
Boston Public Library).
"Passage at St. Augustine" establishes America's Oldest City as home to
the most violent Civil Rights campaign of the entire Movement. Viewers
are transported back to this unlikely Florida tourist town to hear
first-hand from civil rights foot soldiers, Klansmen, journalists,
clergy, politicians and the like, who fought on the front lines of the
18-month battle that led directly to the passage of the landmark Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Despite MLK and LBJ headlining the film's real-life
cast, most come away asking why a campaign so pivotal appears to have
been wiped from the hard drive of History.
Thursday, February 2, 6:00
<http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001JFap4BwoTTw0xfwzXWjUwsTIi6r67H7KsTS_ig0t7Wgj5oGghksokmotiv3NrqRC5TSBq8ECU3ZasDhXjusPhYb7Dwis0tfzehkoC5z2wt1VmnGCL9iz6NeDYWK4O8-VK9iMb--P5QK9-
*****The Search For The Great Working-Class Love Song - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind
*****The Search For The Great Working-Class Love Song - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind
From
The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:
Several
years ago, maybe about eight years now that I think about it, I did a series of
sketches on guys, folk-singers, folk-rockers, rock-folkers or whatever you want
to call those who weened us away from the stale Pablum rock in the early 1960s
(Bobby Vee, Rydell, Darin, et. al, Sandra Dee, Brenda Lee, et. al) after the
gold rush dried up in what is now called the classic age of rock and roll in
the mid to late 1950s when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Chuck, Bo and their kindred
made us jump. (There were gals too like Wanda Jackson but mainly it was guys in
those days.) I am referring of course to the savior folk minute of the early
1960 when a lot of guys with acoustic guitars, some self-made lyrics, or stuff
from old Harry Smith Anthology times gave us a reprieve. That Harry Smith stuff, commercial music from
back in the 1920s and 1930s saved many a weary folk-singer on a tough night
when he or she had run out of ideas and yet the girls or guys were still
transfixed and thus provided for a last few tunes.
(One
old-time, now old-time folk-singer from the 1960s folk minute who is still
performing at small clubs and coffeehouses that small dot the country still in
places like Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Joshua Tree out in
California, Seattle, both Portlands and so on, small dots, made a gradation of
folk-singer, male folk-singer expectations-if you knew three chords you could
gather young straight long-haired women around you, four or five chords would
help fill out your date book, a dozen chords and you could have whatever you
wanted. Sounds about right about the times even if you didn’t play an
instrument, or sing, but knew about two thousand arcane folk facts, although
songs better. Any old-time women folksingers can add their recollections if
they were similar.)
The
series titled Not Bob Dylan centered on why those budding folkies like
Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Jesse Winchester and the man under review
Richard Thompson to name a few did not make the leap to be the “king of folk”
that had been ceded by the media to Bob Dylan and then whatever happened to
them once the folk minute went south after the combined assault of the British
rock invasion (you know the yah, yah, Beatles, the no satisfaction Stones, the
really got me Kinks, hell, even I’m Henry the Eighth Herman’s Hermits got
serious play for a while), and the rise of acid rock put folk in the
shade (you know the White Rabbit Alice in Wonderland Jefferson Airplane, the
let’s keep trucking Dead, the this is the end Doors, The ripped Who,
hell, even the aforementioned non-yah, yah Beatles and non-no satisfaction
Stones got caught up in the acid-etched fray although not to their eternal
musical playlist benefit nothing that would put then into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame anyway). I also did a series on Not Joan Baez, the “queen
of the folk minute” asking that same question on the female side but here
dealing with one Richard Thompson the male side of the question is what is of
interest.
I
did a couple of sketches on Richard Thompson back then, or rather sketches
based on probably his most famous song, Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
which dove-tailed with some remembrances of my youth and my semi-outlaw front
to the world in that working poor neighborhood where I grew up and the pervasive
role that motorcycles played in that world. Additionally, in light of the way
that a number of people whom I knew back then, classmates whom I reconnected on
a class reunion website several years ago responded when I posed the question
of what they thought was the great working-class love song since North
Adamsville was definitely a working class town driven by that self-same ethos I
wrote some other sketches driving home my selection of Thompson’s song as my choice.
Those
later sketches about the world of motorcycles are what interest me here since Thompson
gave up the “king of the hill” folk idea. See Thompson at various times packed
it in, said he had no more spirit or some such and gave up the road, the music
and the struggle to made that music, as least professionally. Took time to make
a more religious bent to his life and other such doings. Not unlike a number of
other performers from that period who tired of the road or got discouraged with
the small crowds, or lost the folk spirit. Probably as many reasons as
individuals to give them. Then Thompson, they, years later had an epiphany or
something, got the juices flowing again and came back on the road. That
fact is to the good for old time folk (and rock) aficionados like me.
What
that fact of returning to the road by Thompson and a slew of others has meant
is that my friend and I, (okay, okay my sweetie who prefers that I call her my
soulmate but that is just between us so “friend”) now have many opportunities
to see acts like Thompson’s Trio, his current band configuration, to see if we
think they still “have it” (along with acts of those who never left the road
like Bob Dylan who apparently is on an endless tour whether we want him to do
so or not). That idea got started about a decade ago when we saw another
come-back kid, Geoff Muldaur of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, solo, who had taken
something twenty years off. He had it. So we started looking for whoever was
left of the old folks acts (rock and blues too) to check out that
question-unfortunately the actuarial tables took their toll before we could see
some of them at least one last time like Dave Von Ronk.
That
brings us back to Richard Thompson. Recently we got a chance to see him in a
cabaret setting with tables and good views from every position, at least on in
the orchestra section, at the Wilbur Theater in Boston with his trio, a big
brush drummer and an all-around side guitar player (and other instruments like
the mando). Thompson broke the performance up into two parts, a solo set of six
or seven numbers highlighted by Vincent Black Lightning, and Dimming
Of The Day which were fine. The second part based on a new album and a
bunch of his well-known rock standards left us shaking our heads. Maybe the
room could not handle that much sound, although David Bromberg’s five piece
band handled it well a couple of weeks before, or maybe it was the melodically
sameness of the songs and the same delivery voice and style but we were frankly
disappointed and not disappointed to leave at the encore. Most tunes
didn’t resonant although a few in all honesty did but we walked out of the
theater with our hands in our pockets. No thumbs up or down based on that first
old time set. However, damn it, Bob Dylan does not have to move over,
now.
Which
brings us to a later sketch I did based on Brother Thompson’s glorious Vincent
Black Lightning. When I got home I began to revise that piece which I have
included below.
Mimi’s
Glance, Circa 1963
Mimi
Murphy knew two things, she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as
hell of moving, of the need, of the self-impose need, to keep moving ever since
that incident five years before, back in 1958, with her seems like an eternity
ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, her “walking daddy,” Pretty James Preston,
although he as long as she had known him never walked a step when his “baby,”
his bike was within arm’s length. I knew this information, knew this
information practically first hand because the usually polite but loner Mimi
Murphy had told me her thoughts and the story that went with it one night after
she had finished a tough on the feet night working as a cashier at concession
stand the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater out on Route One in Olde Saco, Maine.
That
night, early morning really, she had passed me going up to her room with a
bottle of high-end Scotch, Haig& Haig, showing its label from a brown bag
in her hand while I was going down the stairs in the rooming house we lived in
on Water Street in Ocean City, a few miles from Olde Saco. A number of people,
including Mimi and me, were camped out there in temporary room quarters after
the last of the summer touristas had decamped and headed back to New York, or
wherever they came from. The cheap off-season rent and the short
stay-until-the-next-summer-crowd-showed-up requiring no lease drew us there.
Most residents, mostly young and seemingly unattached to any family or work
life kept to themselves, private drinkers or druggies (probably not grass since
I never smelled the stuff which I had a nose for from youthful smoke-filled
dreams while I was there so coke, opium, speed, maybe horse although I saw no
obvious needle marks on arms or cold turkey screams either), a couple of low
profile good looking young hustling girls, probably just graduating from
amateur status and still not jaded “tarts” as my father used to call them, who
didn’t bring their work home, guys maybe just out of the service, or between
jobs, and so on. I had seen a couple of guys, young guys with horny looks in
their eyes, maybe an idea of making a play, making passes at Mimi but thought
nothing of it since they also targeted the hustling girls too.
Since
I had never bothered Mimi, meaning made a pass at her, she must have sensed
that being contemporaries, she was twenty-one then and I twenty-two, that maybe
she could unburden her travails on a fellow wayward traveler. That no making a
pass business by the way due to the fact that slender, no, skinny and
flat-chested Irish red-heads with faraway looks like Mimi with no, no apparent,
warm bed desires, that year and in those days not being my type after
tumbledown broken-hearted youthful years of trying to coax their Irish Catholic
rosary bead novena favors to no avail over in the old Little Dublin
neighborhood around the Acre in Olde Saco.
Whatever
she sensed and she was pretty closed-mouth about it when I asked her later she
was right about my ability to hear the woes of another wanderer without
hassles, and she did as she invited me up into her room with no come hither
look (unlike those pretty hustling girls who made a profession of the “come
hither look” and gave me a try-out which after proving futile turned into small
courtesy smiles when we passed each other). But she showed no fear, no apparent
fear, anyway.
After
a couple of drinks, maybe three, of that dreamboat scotch that died easy going
down she loosened up, taking her shoes off before sitting down on the
couch across from me. For the interested I had been down on my uppers for a
while and was drinking strictly rotgut low-shelf liquor store wines and barroom
half empty glass left-overs so that stuff was manna from heaven I can still
taste now but that is my story and not Mimi’s so I will move on. Here is the
gist of what she had to say as I remember it that night:
She
started out giving her facts of life facts like that she had grown up around
this Podunk town outside of Boston, Adamsville Junction, and had come from a
pretty pious Roman Catholic Irish family that had hopes that she (or one of her
three younger sisters, but mainly she) might “have the vocation,” meaning be
willing, for the Lord, to prison cloister herself up in some nunnery to ease
the family’s way into heaven, or some such idea. And she had bought into the
idea from about age seven to about fourteen by being the best student, boy or
girl, in catechism class on Sunday, queen of the novenas, and pure stuff like
that in church and the smartest girl in, successively, Adamsville South
Elementary School, Adamsville Central Junior High, and the sophomore class at
Adamsville Junction High School.
As
she unwound this part of her story I could see where that part was not all that
different from what I had encountered in my French-Canadian (mother, nee
LeBlanc) Roman Catholic neighborhood over in the Acre in Olde Saco. I could
also see, as she loosened up further with an additional drink, that, although
she wasn’t beautiful, certain kinds of guys would find her very attractive and
would want to get close to her, if she let them. Just the kind of gal I used to
go for before I took the pledge against Irish girls with far-away looks, and
maybe red hair too.
About
age fourteen thought after she had gotten her “friend” (her period for those
who may be befuddled by this old time term) and started thinking, thinking hard
about boys, or rather seeing that they, some of them, were thinking about her
and not novenas and textbooks her either she started to get “the itch.” That
itch that is the right of passage for every guy on his way to manhood. And girl
on her way to womanhood as it turned out but which in the Irish Roman Catholic
Adamsville Junction Murphy family neighborhood was kept as a big, dark secret
from boys and girls alike.
Around
that time, to the consternation of her nun blessed family, she starting dating
Jimmy Clancy, a son of the neighborhood and a guy who was attracted to her
because she was, well, pure and smart. She never said whether Jimmy had the
itch, or if he did how bad, because what she made a point out of was that being
Jimmy’s girl while nice, especially when they would go over Adamsville Beach
and do a little off-hand petting and watching the ocean, did not cure her itch,
not even close. This went on for a couple of years until she was sixteen and
really frustrated, not by Jimmy so much as by the taboos and restrictions that
had been placed on her life in her straight-jacket household, school and town.
(Welcome to the club, sister, your story is legion) No question she was ready
to break out, she just didn’t know how.
Then
in late 1957 Pretty James Preston came roaring into town. Pretty James, who
despite the name, was a tough motorcycle wild boy, man really about twenty-one,
who had all, okay most all, of the girls, good girls and bad, wishing and
dreaming, maybe having more than a few restless sweaty nights, about riding on
back of that strange motorcycle he rode (a Vincent Black Lightning, a bike made
in England which would put any Harley hog to shame from rev number one when I
looked for information about the beast later, stolen, not by Pretty James but
by third parties, from some English with dough guy and transported to America
where he got it somehow, the details were very vague about where he got it, not
from her, him) and being Pretty James’ girl. One day, as he passed by on his
chopper going full-throttle up Hancock Street, Mimi too got the Pretty James
itch.
But
see it was not like you could just and throw yourself at Pretty James that was
not the way he worked, no way. One girl, one girl from a good family who had
her sent away after the episode, tried that and was left about thirty miles
away, half-naked, after she thought she had made the right moves and was
laughed at by Pretty James as he took off with her expensive blouse and skirt
flying off his handle-bars as he left her there unmolested but unhinged. That
episode went like wildfire through the town, through the Monday morning before
school girls’ lav what happened, or didn’t happen, over the weekend talkfest
first of all.
No
Pretty James’ way was to take, take what he saw, once he saw something worth
taking and that was that. Mimi figured she was no dice. Then one night when she
and Jimmy Clancy were sitting by the seawall down at the Seal Rock end of the
beach starting to do their little “light petting” routine Pretty James came
roaring up on his hellish machine and just sat there in front of the pair,
saying nothing. But saying everything. Mimi didn’t say a word to Jimmy but just
started walking over to the cycle, straddled her legs over back seat saddle and
off they went into the night. Later that night her itch was cured, or rather
cured for the first time.
Pouring
another drink Mimi sighed poor Pretty James and his needs, no his obsessions
with that silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black
Lightning that caused him more anguish than she did. And she had given him
plenty to think about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to
settle down a little, just a little, but what was a sixteen-year old girl,
pretty new to the love game, totally new, new but not complaining to the sex
game, and his well-worn little tricks to get her in the mood, and make her
forget the settle down thing. Until the next time she thought about it and
brought it up.
Maybe,
if you were from around Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard
about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about
1957 and 1958. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the
end. Before that bank job, the one where as Mimi said Pretty James used to say
all the time, he “cashed his check.” Yes, the big Granite City National Bank
branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as
stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she
didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down
just a little and if that was to happen he needed a big score, not the penny
ante gas station and mom and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as
he also used to say, “coffee and cakes” but a big payday and then off to
Mexico, maybe down Sonora way, and a buy into the respectable and growing drug
trade.
And
he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood
across the street, an extra forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it
for a final getaway. She never having handled a gun mush less fired one was
scared stiff it might go off in that purse although she Pretty James had her in
such a state that she would have emptied the damn thing if it would have done
any good. But he never made it out the bank door. Some rum brave security guard
tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty
James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and
felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the
real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her, with
a tear, sweet boy Pretty James.
According
to the newspapers a tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen
across the street from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness,
nervously. The witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the
bank and when she looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone,
maybe an accessory to felony murder or worst charge hanging over her young
head, and long gone before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of
Braintree headed to Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end
whorehouse doing tricks to make some moving on dough. (She mentioned some funny
things about that stay, which was not so bad at the time when she needed dough
bad, and about strange things guys, young and old, wanted her to do but I will
leave that stuff out here.)
And
she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the
past few months, she had been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment
stand at Olde Saco Drive-In to get another stake to keep moving. She had been
tempted, a couple of times, to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland
whorehouse that a woman she had worked with at her last job, Fenner’s
Department Store, where she modeled clothes for the rich ladies, had told her
about to get a quick stake but she was almost as eternally tired at that
prospect as in moving once again.
And
so Mimi Murphy, a few drinks of high-shelf scotch to fortify her told her
story, told it true I think, mostly. A couple of days later I saw her through
my room’s window with a suitcase in hand looking for all the world like someone
getting ready to move on, move on to be a loner again after maybe an indiscrete
airing of her linen in public. Thinking back on it now I wish, I truly wish,
that I had been more into slender, no skinny, red-headed Irish girls with
faraway looks that season and maybe she would not have had to keep moving,
eternally moving.
ARTIST: Richard Thompson
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like
Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems
Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme
And he pulled her on behind
And down to Box Hill they did ride
/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /
/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /
Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man
I've fought with the law since I was seventeen
I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine
Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22
And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you
And if fate should break my stride
Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride
Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae
For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside
When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left
He was running out of road, he was running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride
Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52
He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
He said I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home
And he gave her one last kiss and died
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