Thursday, March 09, 2017

A View From The Left-Defend the Palestinian People!- Down With Zionist Colonization of West Bank, East Jerusalem!

Workers Vanguard No. 1106
24 February 2017
 
Down With Zionist Colonization of West Bank, East Jerusalem!
Defend the Palestinian People!
For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!
The rulers of Israel are once again escalating their colonization of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Tel Aviv has been further emboldened by the election of Donald Trump and his virulent anti-Muslim bigotry and denunciations of Iran. Trump has also nominated David Friedman, a staunch Zionist and prominent fund-raiser for the fascistic settler movement, as ambassador to Israel.
In January, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) approved the construction of a further 6,000 housing units for Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It also passed a “regularization law” to retroactively legalize settlements that have already been built on private Palestinian land. The settlers are clamoring for Israel to annex Ma’ale Adumim, a settlement of 41,000 Jewish inhabitants covering an area almost the size of Tel Aviv. The construction of such massive, Jewish-only population centers amounts to de facto annexation and has always been aimed at extinguishing the possibility of a Palestinian state.
In a February 15 joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump appeared to jettison Washington’s longstanding policy of nominally supporting a “two-state solution.” For his part, Netanyahu once again made it clear that his government would not tolerate a Palestinian state, declaring: “In any peace agreement Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River.” This assertion merely underscores the fact that since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel seized the Occupied Territories, there has been only one state power between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—the Zionist Israeli state backed up by the U.S. imperialists.
As Marxists, we have a side in defense of the oppressed Palestinian masses against Zionist state and settler terror. At the root of Palestinian oppression is the impossibility of achieving national justice for geographically interpenetrated peoples within a capitalist framework. Both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews lay claim to the same land. The coming to power of the Nazis in Germany and the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust played a key role in the consolidation of a nation of Israeli Jews. Refused entry into the U.S. and Britain, desperate Jewish refugees were forced to Palestine both before and after World War II. As we have explained in “Birth of the Zionist State: A Marxist Analysis” (WV No. 45, 24 May 1974):
“It was clear that the establishment of an independent nation-state, either by Palestinian Arabs or the Jews, would occur in Palestine only at the expense of the other nation. When national populations are geographically interpenetrated, as they were in Palestine, an independent nation-state can be created only by their forcible separation (forced population transfers, etc.). Thus the democratic right of self-determination becomes abstract, as it can be exercised only by the stronger national grouping driving out or destroying the weaker one.”
The only way to achieve an equitable solution to the conflicting national claims of the Palestinians and Israeli Jews is through the overthrow of capitalist rule in Israel and the surrounding Arab states, where millions of Palestinians languish. The national emancipation of the Palestinians—including the right of all refugees and their descendants to return to their homeland—can only be realized through a socialist federation of the Near East in which both they and Israeli Jews would exercise their right of self-determination. What is necessary is an internationalist class perspective that looks to proletarian rule in the region, as well as to socialist revolutions in the imperialist centers.
Today, more than half of the territory of the West Bank has a majority Jewish population. Following the 1993 Oslo “peace” accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which were brokered by President Bill Clinton, the West Bank was divided into three administrative categories. The largest of these, Area C, makes up more than 60 percent of the West Bank, and its population today includes over 380,000 Jewish settlers and only 150,000 Palestinians. Nearly two and a half million Palestinians are crowded into the numerous non-contiguous areas that make up the remaining 40 percent of the West Bank (Areas A and B).
In Area C, Israel controls not only security but also all land-related civil matters, including planning and construction. Jewish settlements are built, while construction of Palestinian homes and other structures is regularly declared illegal. In 2016, citing lack of building permits as a pretext, the Zionist rulers destroyed the homes of more than 1,400 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the two million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip, for all practical purposes a vast prison camp, have been blockaded by Israel and Egypt and are subject to Israeli airstrikes. Eighty percent of the Gaza population depends on humanitarian aid to survive.
We condemned the imperialist-backed Oslo accords as a “grotesque bargain over the subjugated Palestinian people.” A Palestinian mini-state in Gaza and the West Bank would have been a partial and deformed expression of self-determination. But we noted that Oslo “does not offer even the most deformed expression of self-determination” but, rather, “would place the PLO’s seal on the national oppression of the long-suffering Palestinian Arab masses” (“Israel-PLO Deal for Palestinian Ghetto,” WV No. 583, 10 September 1993). That analysis has been fully borne out by events of the succeeding years. The Palestinian Authority was established as the Zionists’ police auxiliaries in the Occupied Territories. Meanwhile, the plight of the ghettoized Palestinians has dramatically worsened, and the population of the Zionist settlements has expanded more than threefold.
Petty-bourgeois Palestinian nationalism has proven to be a dead end. The political bankruptcy and abject betrayals of the secular-nationalist PLO have paved the way for reactionary Islamic groups like Hamas to pose as the only fighters against the Israeli occupation. These fundamentalist outfits are made up of vile anti-Jewish and anti-Christian religious bigots who seek to enslave women. In Hamas-controlled Gaza, Palestinian women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic headscarf) and are subjected to anti-woman sharia law.
Israel was founded upon the subjugation of the Palestinian nation. Its establishment in 1948 was marked by the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. And the Arab regimes that went to war with Israel that year did so not to liberate the Palestinians but to seize their land. Since its victory in the 1967 War, Israel has encouraged Jewish settlement of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, including by providing subsidized housing. Today, there are more than 750,000 settlers on occupied Palestinian land.
The settlements are often designated “closed military zones” that are off limits to Palestinians, whose travel is severely restricted by military checkpoints and who are forbidden to travel on “Jewish” roads that are free of checkpoints. An apartheid wall ghettoizes the Palestinians, who are subjected to military occupation by thousands of Israeli troops. The heavily armed settlers act in collusion with the Israeli military in carrying out murderous repression against the Palestinian population. All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories!
For Proletarian Internationalism!
Israel is a regional power with its own interests that do not always coincide with those of the U.S. Both Trump and Netanyahu have made much of President Obama’s supposed “hostility” to Israel. In fact, Obama’s record of support for the Zionist state was second to none. In December 2016, the lame-duck Obama administration abstained on a toothless UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. That was the only time in eight years that Obama failed to side with Israel in the UN. By comparison, previous Republican administrations, including those of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, allowed numerous resolutions against Israel to pass. In 1991-92, the first President Bush even held up ten billion dollars in loan guarantees to extract a promise that Israel would freeze settlement construction. Of course, it was an empty promise; settlement building continued apace, as did U.S. aid.
In a December 28 speech defending the Security Council abstention, Secretary of State John Kerry stressed the Obama administration’s pro-Israel credentials. Kerry boasted that last year’s $38 billion military aid deal with Israel “exceeds any military assistance package the U.S. has provided to any country, at any time.” More than half of U.S. imperialism’s entire foreign military financing goes to Israel. Down with U.S. aid to Israel!
Despair over ever finding a solution to the oppression of the Palestinians has led many bourgeois liberals to embrace the idea of a “one-state solution,” under which Palestinians would fight for equality within Israel. Liberal Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy argues that the “two-state solution” is dead and “the alternative is one state” and that from now on the struggle should be for “democracy now, equal rights” (Democracy Now! 30 December 2016).
A similar sentiment is expressed by Ali Abunimah, cofounder of the online publication Electronic Intifada. He argued after the Trump/Netanyahu meeting that if Israel were to annex the West Bank, “pressure would escalate—as it did on South Africa—to end openly declared apartheid. Indeed there could be no greater boost to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement” (Electronic Intifada, 15 February). If Israel’s rulers were to annex the West Bank, they could very well consign the bulk of the Palestinians to an unviable statelet like Gaza or drive them into Jordan. One thing the Zionist rulers would never permit would be a single “democratic” state with anything approaching an Arab majority. And, aside from the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and the 4.5 million in Gaza and the West Bank, there are another four million Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Abunimah’s perspective of seeing “openly declared apartheid” as a boost to BDS goes straight to the heart of that movement’s strategy, which seeks to employ moral suasion to pressure campus administrations and American corporations to withdraw investments from Israel, while organizing boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural activities. The aim is to pressure the U.S. and other imperialist powers—including Britain and France, the historic occupiers, colonizers and oppressors of the Near East—to pressure Israel to stop being Israel. This perspective can only build dangerous illusions in the presumed benign nature of the imperialists—whose class interests are fundamentally counterposed to those of the workers and the oppressed of the entire world. It is U.S. imperialism that is responsible for the utter devastation of whole swaths of the region today. All U.S. forces out of the Near East now!
Abunimah also repeats the liberal fiction that divestment ended apartheid in South Africa. In fact, it was the mass social struggles of the black and other non-white toilers, centered on the powerful working class, that brought an end to direct white-supremacist rule there. Before the end of apartheid, it was the significant wage gains won by black workers and the instability caused by a growing strike movement that deterred investment. Seeing its continued profits threatened, U.S. imperialism began to look upon the South African regime as a liability.
By the early 1990s, the imperialists and key sections of the apartheid ruling class had decided to go for a “power-sharing” deal with the African National Congress (ANC). A key factor was the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, which for decades had supported the ANC materially and diplomatically. As the Moscow Stalinist regime disintegrated, ending what the imperialists saw as the “Communist threat,” the South African rulers came to terms with Nelson Mandela and the ANC. Moreover, the end of formal apartheid did not end the oppression of South African blacks. Under the current system of neo-apartheid, the mainly black working class is still superexploited by the same capitalist class that ruled under apartheid. The ANC-led Tripartite Alliance government serves as black front men for the capitalist rulers, who are still overwhelmingly white.
In South Africa, the white capitalists need the black workers, and thanks to its centrality to production, the black proletariat has tremendous social power. In contrast, the consolidation of the Israeli Jewish nation entailed large-scale displacement of Palestinian labor by Jewish labor. The exclusion of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories from participation in the Israeli economy deprives them of social power, while increasing their marginalization and impoverishment.
We would support time-limited, trade-union actions against the Israeli state, but we are politically opposed to standing economic boycotts, divestment and sanctions. Such boycott campaigns serve to reinforce the view of a monolithic Israeli society and drive Jewish workers even more deeply into the arms of their Zionist exploiters.
Despite our disagreements with the liberal strategy of BDS, we vigorously oppose the vicious Zionist-led witchhunts against BDS and other fighters for Palestinian rights. As we wrote last year in “Down With Zionist Witchhunt Against BDS Activists!”:
“Equating anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry is aimed at silencing all opponents of the bloody crimes of the Israeli state, including a growing number of Jewish students and activists who support BDS. It also serves to bury actual instances of anti-Jewish hatred under a mountain of lies. Moreover, in the supercharged climate of the imperialists’ ‘war on terror,’ to be charged as ‘allies’ of terrorism is to be branded as people whom the capitalist state can and should eliminate.”
—WV No. 1089, 6 May 2016
There has indeed been an increase in anti-Jewish threats and attacks in the U.S. in recent months. In January alone, 48 Jewish Community Centers received bomb threats. But these anti-Jewish incidents have nothing to do with BDS. They are part of the all-around racist reaction unleashed by Donald Trump’s campaign and election victory. Fascist and Nazi scum have been emboldened to go after blacks, immigrants and Jews.
However distant it may seem, fighters for Palestinian rights must look toward a proletarian solution to the oppression of the Palestinian people. Like every other capitalist country, Israel is a class-divided society, with a capitalist ruling class that exploits the Jewish, Arab and immigrant proletariat. And while Israeli society has continued to move to the right, there are Israeli Jews who are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Earlier this month, thousands of Jews and Arabs demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the demolition of the Bedouin Arab village of Umm al-Hiran.
There is broad support for the Palestinians among significant concentrations of the industrial proletariat in countries like Egypt, Iran and Turkey. These workers are exploited and oppressed by the imperialists as well as their “own” ruling classes, which reinforce their rule by pushing nationalism and religious sectarianism. These bourgeois rulers are enemies of Palestinian national liberation and channel justified anger against the subjugation of the Palestinians into anti-Jewish bigotry. Through the intervention of revolutionary Marxist parties and in the course of class struggle, the workers of the Near East must be broken from all-sided bigotry and won to the understanding that they share a common historic interest in sweeping away all the capitalist ruling classes of the region.
The perspective of the Spartacist League and the International Communist League is to forge revolutionary workers parties throughout the Near East, including Israel, and in the imperialist centers, not least the U.S. These parties will be national sections of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. Only with the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a voluntary federation of workers states in the Near East will there be a full and equal place for all the peoples of the area—including Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
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When Mister Beethoven Got Rolled Over-With The Music Of Mister Chuck Berry In Mind

When Mister Beethoven Got Rolled Over-With The Music Of Mister Chuck Berry In Mind




CD Review

By Zack James

Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection, Chuck Berry, Chess Records, 2006 

You never know when two or more old guys, two or more mature forget calling the old at your peril gals too but this one is about guys, will gather down memory lane or what will trigger that big cloudburst. Seth Garth and Jack Callahan two old time friends from high school in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston had an abiding interest in music successively rock and roll, the blues and folk music (never losing interest in any in the process just that one genre would wax and wane at any given time). Seth had eventually become as an early part of his journalistic career a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye, an alternative newspaper out in the Bay Area in the days when he, Jack and a few other guys like Phil Larkin headed out there to see what everything was all about in the later part of the 1960s.

Recently though Seth and Jack, and occasionally Phil would get together and talk music shop at the Erie Grille where they would down a few scotches to level out (their expression). One night they had been at Seth’s request discussing the first time they had heard the legendary Woody Guthrie sing his songs, or one of them anyway. As it turned out Seth had drawn a blank on when that might have occurred and he begged Jack to think the matter through since he was preparing an article, an unpaid article, for the American Folk Music Review and needed a frame of reference. Jack had come up with the answer-in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class when he put on Woody and a bunch of other stuff to try to ween them off rock and roll which he hated (and which they loved, loved to perdition). Seth had accepted that answer (although later he contacted Phil and Phil reminded him about the song This Land Is Your Land covered by the Weavers with Pete Seeger in Miss Winot’s fourth grade class on her cranky old record player and he would use that source in the article).      

All this talk of that fateful seventh grade music class, and Mr. Lawrence, is probably what solidified everybody in the class in their devotion to rock and roll. Mr. Lawrence was just the front man for all kinds of parents, school principals, priests minsters, mayors and city councilors, cops and whoever else weighted in on the deleterious effect of rock and roll, on the “devil’s music in some quarters on the youth of the nation. So that unanimous devotion to rock and roll was a hard fought and paid for devotion. A few days after the night drinking with Jack at the Erie Grille Seth woke up from a nap thinking about the time in Mister Lawrence’s class when he was being crazy about Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and wanted the class to appreciate classical music, wanted the class to appreciate the finer things in life.  Seth, Jack and Phil had had enough and started in one class singing Chuck Berry’s throwing down the gauntlet song Roll Over Beethoven and the class cheered them on. 

Of course in this penalty-ridden world Mr. Lawrence took his revenge and the trio spent several afternoons after school listening to Beethoven and his crowd since they had adamantly refused to apologize for their outbursts. Seth smiled to himself-Yeah, rock and roll will never die. To prove that assumption just listen to Mister Chuck Berry’s gold star compilation here. And be prepared to do something rash.    


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An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101







 From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some deep fogged memory producing, maybe acid-etched flashback memory at the time, accompanying CD booklet tossed aside on the coffee table by a guy from the old days, the old New York University days, Jeff Mackey, who had been visiting Sarah, Josh Breslin’s wife of the moment. Jeff had just placed the CD on the CD player, the intricacies of fine-tuned down-loading from YouTube beyond anybody’s stoned capacity just then and so the “primitive” technology (stoned as in “turned on,” doped up, high if you like just like in the old days as well although Josh had gone to State U not NYU but the times were such that such transactions were universal and the terms “pass the bong” and “don’t bogart that join” had passed without comment). Don’t take that “wife of the moment” too seriously either since that was a standing joke between Sarah and Josh (not Joshua, Joshua was dad, the late Joshua Breslin, Jr.) since in a long life they had managed five previous  marriages (three by him, two by her) and scads of children and two scads of grandchildren (who had better not see this piece since grandma and grandpa have collectively expended many jaws-full hours of talk  about the danger of demon drugs, the devil’s work even if only with a half-hearted sincerity since they fully expected that those younger kids like their own kids would experiment, would "puff the magic dragon" and then move on).

When Josh had picked up that tossed aside booklet he noticed a  wispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. (The Generation of "68 designation a term of art among the brethren still standing who had faced down that seminal year in the history of the 1960s, some calling it the ebb tide year although Josh had pushed that forward over the years to 1971 the year when they had utterly failed to shut down the government if it would not shut the Vietnam War.) The woman maybe kin to Janis, maybe not, but certainly brethren who looked uncannily like his first ex-wife, Laura, who had taught him many little sex things learned from a trip to India and close attention to the Kama Sutra which he had passed on to everybody thereafter including Sarah. And no again don’t take that wistful though about Laura as anything but regret since their civil wars had passed a long time before and beside Laura had not been heard from since the time she went down to Rio and was presumably shacked up with some dope king or diamond king or something probably still earning her keep with those little India tricks. (Strange to think that straight-laced Forest Lawn-raised Laura knew all the tricks that some courtesans would blush at sine a look at her would say virgin until marriage. No way. 

Still looking at the tantalizing artwork Josh thought of the time of our time, passed. Of wistful women belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if the dough was tight and there had been ginger ale or ice to cut the sweet taste or if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing, no, better evoking, yes, evoking barrelhouse down-trodden black empresses and queens from somewhere beyond speaking troubled times, a no good man taking up with that no good best girlfriend  of hers who drew a bee-line to him when that empress advertised his charms, no job, no prospect of a job and then having to go toe to toe with that damn rent collector man on that flattened damn mattress that kept springing holes, maybe no roof over a head and walking the streets picking up tricks to pass the time, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or in a downtown “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay. Jesus, maybe he had better kick that dope thing before he actually did start heading to Rio.

*******

Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or someplace like that, maybe Russia he was not sure of the geography all he knew was that he had made a wag wiggle a little for his indiscretion)  was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride but in a time when everyone in youth nation was shedding "slave" names the moniker of the day or week was the way that you identified most fellow travelers-that was just the way it was and kind of nice when you thought about it-wouldn't you rather be Moonbeam than some Susan something), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising.

Yeah, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then. Hell, he had dropped out of State U, dropped out of Laura Perkin’s life, dropped out of everything to chase the Western arroyo desert ocean washed dream that half his generation was pursuing just then.

Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.

Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually and she had never heard of the Kama Sutra) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).

Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain was the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).

But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).

Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.

Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.

The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.
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In Maine- Next Bath Iron Works 'Christening' Alert - Protest planned April 1

Global Network
To  Peaceworks 
 
Christening of the Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyer, Thomas Hudner (DDG 116)
Saturday, April 1, 2017 
Bath Iron Works
 
 
We will hold a protest at BIW on April 1 beginning at 9:00 am until noon on Washington Street in Bath.

Help will be needed setting up our sound system and with other tasks.  Please let us know if you can help.

We will be again calling for the conversion of BIW to build mass transit systems, solar, wind and tidal power to help us deal with our real problem – climate change.

Please let us know ASAP if your organization would like to be listed as a protest co-sponsor on the promo flyer.

Please help us spread the word by sharing this email with your local list.


Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau
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Sat March 11 Boston Park Street vigil against war on Syria and Yemen 1pm-2pm

Joan Livingstonviabostonunac
To  UNAC Boston,   DAVID KEIL Copy  UJP Discussion Listserv  
Amnesty International has issued a number of reports that
aren’t “factual,” any more than the White Helmets are a 
people-saving group. (Codepink was among the “progressive"
organizations duped by the Helmet propaganda, and is now
—belatedly—saying it will look into its claims, which were
discussed at length this week on the national no-drones
discussion list, after one “progressive” said he cheered
when “White Helmets” won an Oscar.)

Different views on Russia (as the USG continues to
demonize Russia for things it didn’t do) and on the 
war on Syria (which we’ve protested many times,
with Syrians, beginning in 2013)? There are facts
available, rather than opinions, to support truly
united action. I’m tired of sending out links about
Syria, after all these years, but David cites a 
single AI report, which “in his opinion [etc.].

At the #NoNato protests, there were signs 
everywhere by Amnesty and Human Rights
Watch about how much Afghan women’s 
lives had improved as a result of the most
recent war on Afghanistan—an absurd claim.

Some NGOs are NG: no good as information
sources. Particularly bad, of course, are the
NED, USAID, etc., but the supposedly non-
partisan ones should be questioned. Many
people have traveled to Syria themselves,
and have listened to the Syrian people,
among whom there is little disagreement
that the US has been funding terrorism.

One doesn’t “counter” pro-war propaganda by
putting in a single link and calling it “factual." 

Amnesty International Stokes Syrian War



On Mar 8, 2017, at 6:26 PM, DAVID KEIL <dmkeil@gmail.com> wrote: It's important to stand together against the US participation in the Yemen war and against the intervention in Syria. United action is needed despite different views on Syrian and Russian government actions. We will need to counter p…
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Ordinary People-Seriously-Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Jack Goes Boating” -(2010)-A Film Review

Ordinary People-Seriously-Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Jack Goes Boating” -(2010)-A Film Review



DVD Review  

By Sam Lowell

Jack Goes Boating, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010

Damn Philip Seymour for letting “boy,” you know heroin get to him. That was my immediate reaction after viewing, no, my immediate reaction after about two minutes of the film under review Jack Goes Boating. A beautiful talent that gave us an Oscar performance in the difficult and tricky Capote (not letting his performance get in the way of the story line from Capote’s In Cold Blood )and a rip roaring one in Pirate Radio  among others goes to the mat, goes mano y mano with himself one more here explaining what the first sentence above was my immediate reaction. I don’t know if his paramour in the film Connie, played by Amy Ryan was right in saying Jack, the character Hoffman played was sexy but his presence was felt throughout the film even in moments of utter silence. Maybe particularly in those moments. And his deft directorial hand as well as he lets the four main characters go through their paces.     

The headline here tells the story-ordinary people trying to make their places in the sun in hard-bitten New York with all the humor, horror, pathos, and bathos that gilded town lays on its denizens and have them still survive. The film based on the successful play centers on the up and down relationship between two guys, Jack and Clyde played by John Ortiz, who work as chauffeurs for Jack’s uncle. Jack is letting the world go by mostly but Clyde has aspirations and is in a up and down relationship with his wife Lucy, played by Daphne Rubin-Vega, which before the film is over is in Connie’s words not where she and Jack should go. Connie enters the picture because whatever their personal differences Clyde and Lucy want to set Jack up with her. Neither Jack nor Connie are Type A’s and might not have met if left to their own devices but as the film progresses all of a sudden you can sense that they will cling to each other for dear life.             


The beauty of the story is that budding relationship where Jack, once he is smitten by Connie, is willing to move mountains to get next to her. Well maybe not mountains but was willing to learn how to swim in order to take Connie at her wish boating come New York summer with Clyde’s guidance (Jack a non-swimmer like lots of urban folk who never got around to it in their youth just like they don’t get driver’s licenses or learn to ride a bicycle). Willing to learn how to cook as well beyond cooking rather than starving from a top chef who was once, maybe still was Lucy’s lover a situation which caused plenty of heat between Lucy and Clyde as Jack and Connie were heading the other way. Heading the other way despite a dope-filled debacle of a dinner. This one was riveting like I said from minute two. Yeah, damn Philip Seymour and his “boy” problem.           
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