AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Saturday, March 18, 2017

From NPR-'White Tears' Is A Mystery, A History, A Coming-Of-Age Story-And A Blues Story As Well

'White Tears' Is A Mystery, A History, A Coming-Of-Age Story

8:37

March 12, 20178:14 AM ET

Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday

A Brooklyn hipster, old blues music, cultural appropriation, a ghost story: these are ingredients in Hari Kunzru's new novel, White Tears. He talks with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Early on in Hari Kunzru's new novel, the narrator, Seth, a white Brooklyn hipster, makes this statement about his love of quintessentially black, old blues music. Speaking of his fellow hipster and wealthy college buddy, Carter, he says, we really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness. What Seth and Carter find, as the story unfolds, isn't what they bought but what they owe.

Hari Kunzru's novel is called "White Tears." It's a mystery, a coming-of-age story, a history, and Hari Kunzru joins me now from New York. Welcome.

HARI KUNZRU: Hello.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Your main characters are these bedroom music collectors and DJs, and they're called Carter and Seth. And I think they are recognizable to anybody that's seen a beard in Park Slope. Can you tell us about who they are when we meet them?

KUNZRU: Yeah. They meet at a liberal arts college somewhere upstate in New York. And Carter is - he's the heir to one of America's great fortunes. He's an extremely wealthy young man, and he's kind of the coolest guy on campus. He's - he has money to do whatever he wants, if he wants to throw a party or whatever. And Seth is exactly the opposite. He is a loner. He's a very introverted young man who has a fascination with music technology and kind of geeking out on various kinds of music things. And the love of music is what draws these two very unlikely friends together.

They are sort of obsessive collectors of black music. And Carter, in particular, who, I think, feels that for all his money, his life is rather weightless and the things you do doesn't - don't have substance, he feels that there's something real and true and authentic that he can get from this music and from this culture that he doesn't have himself.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: The central event that propels the mystery in this novel is an act of theft. Explain what happens.

KUNZRU: Essentially, Seth and Carter, these two young, white men, fake a 1920s blues record. They take a few words of a blues song that Seth has heard traveling around the city, and they put it together with a guitar figure. They bury the whole thing in crackle and hiss, and they present it as if it's a very old 1920s blues record.

Now, they put this out on the internet as a sort of calling card for their production house, and people get very excited about it. And they're contacted by an old blues collector who asks them where they found this record, and they're very smug and amused. You know, they say - ha ha ha, we made it up. And he says, well, no, you didn't. I haven't heard this record since 1959, and there is a story attached.

And this collector, who's a character called JumpJim, once went down to the South with an older and very obsessive collector called Chester Bly. And the story follows from the present, falling back into the past and follows these guys as they go around the South looking for old records.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is there a similarity to this character in, let's say, Alan Lomax and the other early white collectors? You know, they saved this music for posterity. But did they also kind of steal it?

KUNZRU: Well, I think that this is a fascinating area, and it's one of the questions that really drew me to the blues and to the history of blues collecting and the story of the Lomaxes because these collectors were certainly - and many are now - elite white men. But it's not a simple question of nasty white people stealing from authentic black people. They did do real cultural work in rescuing things that otherwise would have been cast into oblivion. But at the same time, they interpreted that in a certain way. They had certain views about what was good and what was bad, and they kind of remade the story of the blues in an image that suited them.

You know, the Lomaxes, father and son, John Lomax was a particularly - I suppose he would be thought of as quite a problematic character in our days. And in the '30s, he was a folk song collector. And what he loved was the most authentic - he was looking for the roots of music. And he asked himself where he could find the most authentic black music that was untouched by contact with white people. And the answer he came up with was in the penitentiary.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROCK ISLAND LINE")

KELLY PACE: (Singing) I said the Rock Island Line.

UNIDENTIFIED CUMMINS STATE FARM INMATES: (Singing) Is a mighty good road.

PACE: (Singing) I said the Rock Island Line.

UNIDENTIFIED CUMMINS STATE FARM INMATES: (Singing) Is the road to ride.

PACE: (Singing) I said the Rock Island Line.

KUNZRU: He got access to various penitentiaries in the South, and he recorded the people that he found there. And it seemed not to really touch him, the actual condition of the people that he was recording, the situation in which they found themselves. And eventually he discovered Lead Belly, the very famous blues musician and a while later, secured his release and took him on a sort of circuit of lecture demonstrations. And Lead Belly would play at parties on the Upper West Side to sort of left-leaning, liberal types.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LEAD BELLY: (Singing) Good night, Irene. Good night, Irene. I'll get you in my dreams.

JOHN LOMAX: That's fine, Lead Belly. You're a fine songster. I never heard so many good nigra songs.

LEAD BELLY: Thank you, sir, boss.

KUNZRU: So there were these very complex power relations, I suppose, that are going on there.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Would I be right in saying that your book is an indictment of the infatuation with blackness and black culture by white people?

KUNZRU: I think an indictment might be a bit too straightforward a word. I mean, I think that America is a country that is haunted by its racial history. And it is very hard for black and white Americans to look at each other in an uncomplicated way and to understand each other in an uncomplicated way. And often in the realm of culture, and especially in the realm of music, there is this possibility of connection but actually it becomes very fraught.

And I'm not saying that white people, or any people, shouldn't listen to any kind of music they wish to listen to but that there's a difference between loving something and trying to own it or control it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Your characters are collectors, but they don't make art themselves. So what do you think the responsibility of the curator is?

KUNZRU: I think you have to be very alive to the possibility that you're using these objects to tell a story that's your story rather than the story that actually is there. When you think about the blues, the taste for the blues that we have now is really largely formed by a group of collectors in New York in the '40s and '50s.

And these guys had a particular feeling about what was good about this music, and it was all about outsiders, and it was all about the slightly mythical, diabolical figure who goes down to the crossroads and sells his soul to the devil to play guitar. And actually, that has a lot to do with their own desires and their own feelings about otherness, perhaps. So as a curator, I think you need to be alive to the possibility that you're actually distorting things sometimes with your love and passion.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is that a responsibility that you feel as well? Should there be a limit to what writers write about if they're not directly connected to that specific history?

KUNZRU: Well, I think that's a dangerous route to go down because I think, a priori, no writer should be limited in any way like that. But you have to understand that you can do things well or badly. The question of rights is often brought up when it comes to, should writers be able to write different kinds of characters or people who are distant from them? But - and if you take that to its logical conclusion, everybody would have to just write characters who are exactly like them. I would be in a sort of strange world populated exclusively by mixed race British-Asian guys. And so, you know...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Sounds like a fun world.

KUNZRU: It's a crazy world, but it's a world of, you know, Eccles. It's a solipsistic world. So what all writers have to try and occupy positions distant from their own. You know, you have to occupy a position of different genders, different ages, different races. You know, in this book, I clearly don't own any of these positions. But also I've tried to approach it, I suppose, with humility. That seems to be a good word. The writers should approach their material with a degree of humility.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hari Kunzru's book is called "White Tears." Thank you so much for being with us.

KUNZRU: Well, thank you for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FUTURE BLUES")

WILLIE BROWN: (Singing) Can't tell my future, and I can't tell my past.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

And Then Some

Has He Got His Mojo Workin'? - The Blues Harmonica Of James Cotton

CD REVIEW

Got My Mojo Workin’, James Cotton and his band, Blu Mountain Records, 2003

I have, over the past year or so, spent some time tracing the roots of the blues from its southern country home, mainly on the plantations, farms and small towns that surround them, through its transition into the larger cities of the South where the crowds and hence the lyrics got more sophisticated and, ultimately, to the blues Mecca, Chicago, and other Northern cities where blacks migrated en masse between the two world wars and in the immediate post World War II period. As part of that exposition I have discussed not only the differences in the lyrics reflecting the changeover from the moaning and groaning of the plantation life to the hyper-intensity of city life. I have also mentioned the key change in the guitar going from some old acoustic instrument to the electric guitar of the cities.

Along the way I have failed to mention, or not mentioned enough, some of the other changes in instrumentation. For one, and this is relevant here, the harmonica. This instrument, as an accompanying sound, has a long history beyond its key place in the blues saga. However, with the citification of the blues its role in a blues band as back up to those electric guitars and drums became more central. In short, a strong harmonica player became necessary to fill in the spaces left by the reverberating guitar. Correspondingly, virtuosity on the harmonica brought its own rewards. I would argue that Sonny Boy Williamson's role in this change was key in the 1920's and 1930's followed by Lil' Walter of the early Muddy Waters Band. And who followed Walter - well, the artist under review here, James Cotton.

Like all talented musicians with any sense of leadership James Cotton, after serving his long apprenticeship with Muddy Waters, went on to form his own band. This CD is one of the results of those efforts. James, as always, plays the bejesus out of the harmonica. His backup band is a little more than adequate. The gruff-voiced Cotton does so-so a job on the vocals. However, this album left me drifting in and out. Some tracks are very fine like "Fanny Mae", "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" and the title track "Got My Mojo Workin'". However, such numbers as "Goodbye My Lady", "Teenie Weenie Bit" and Help Me" seemed forced. I confess this is the only CD of Cotton's that I have reviewed but off of this performance I sure wish he had been back with Muddy wailing out on something like "Hootchie Gootchie Man".

Got My Mojo Working

by Preston Foster / McKinley Morganfield a.k.a. Muddy Waters

Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you

I wanna love you so bad till I don't know what to do

I'm going down to Louisiana to get me a mojo hand

I'm gonna have all you women right here at my command

Got my mojo working

Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you

Play on!

Got my mojo working

Got my mojo working, but it - uh uh - just won't work on you

__________

Note: the original version of Got My Mojo Working was sung in a jump blues style by Ann Cole. She performed the song on stage in 1956, which was how Muddy Waters found the song!. Muddy Waters adapted it to his style but the bassline is still the same. The song can be found on the 1999 Rhino Records anthology album Jump, Jive & Swing. These are the lyrics to the original version as sung by Ann Cole and written by Preston Foster:

FANNIE MAE

Well I want somebody to tell me what's wrong with me

I want somebody to tell me what's wrong with me

Oh I ain't in any trouble and so much misery

Now Fannie Mae, baby won't you please come home

Fannie Mae ae ae, baby won't you please come home

Yeah I ain't been in debt baby since you been gone

I can hear your name a ringin on down the line

I want to know pretty love how do I win my time

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

I no o o o for me, I no-o-o-o for me

Well I ain't been in trouble and so much misery

Song Lyrics: Good Morning Little School Girl

Written and Recorded by: Sonny Boy Williamson II (1937)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Good mornin' 'lil school girl,

can I go home, can I go home with you?

Tell your mother and your father,

I'm a little school boy too

Woke up this mornin',

woke up this mornin',

I didn't know what to,

I didn't know what to do

I didn't have no blues,

baby, bit I couldn't be satisfied

I'm gettin' me an airplane,

get in my airplane

Gon' fly all oh-oh, gon' fly all over this land

I'm gonna find my little school girl,

find her in the world somewhere

Good mornin' 'lil school girl,

good mornin' 'lil school girl

Can I go home with, can I go home with,

can I go home with you?

Tell your mother and your father,

Johnny little school boy too

Come be my baby, come be my baby,

I buy you a diamond, I buy you a diamond ring

You don't be my little baby,

I ain't gonna buy you a doggone ring

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men … (and I added women too)-lines from “Protest” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Usually when I want to grab a line or two from some poem it would more likely by from say Bertolt Brecht’s “To Those Born After,” Langston Hughes’ “Homage To John Brown” or Claude McKay’s “Let’s Us Die Like Men (and I would add women here again) and not some relatively obscure American poet but when the point is made so succinctly I could not resist using the damn thing as it disturbed my sleep one night

Ella Wheeler Wilcox whatever her vices or virtues as an American working the ways of the late 19^th and early 20^th century had it exactly right-had a mantra that we need to live by these dark days on the American frontier (the frontier not Harvard Professor Turner’s old idea about the closing of the frontier once you hit the Pacific Ocean with all its consequences for a restless people ever since but the outer edge of civil society). We must continue to resist the Trump government with whatever resources we have. And whatever hubris we can gather in to keep us from the storm that has gathered right on our doorsteps.

Most of us didn’t want this fight, the older ones of us thinking that maybe we could pass on under conditions of an armed truce with the imperial government. But then the cold civil war descended on us and we had to pick sides, those of us who see the necessity of picking sides when bans are in place, when walls are being built and when the rich, no, hell no, the super-rich have literally stepped up to besieged every social program that our people need to face the next day. And act. Act to build the resistance which these days looks like it will need to be on the order of the French Resistance in World War II.

Do you really want to bend your head down when the deal, the hell train coming, goes down and your kids, if you have kids, your grandkids if you have grandkids, or just your own conscience asks you what did you when it was time to speak up. Remember Ella had it right, right as rain.

Here is Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After" if you need further reason-

I

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.

Bertolt Brecht

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know

Frank Jackman comment:

One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.

To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).

Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.

Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.

Electric Blues Harmonica Great James Cotton Passes At 81

Electric Blues Harmonica Great James Cotton Passes At 81

Link to NPR tribute to James Cotton

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/16/520453907/james-cotton-legend-of-the-blues-harmonica-dies-at-81

Zack James comment: the number of guys who can trace their roots back to country blues days-guys like Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James Son House have mostly long a go passed the shades. Now were are seeing the last of the great links to the 1940s and 1950s electric blues explosion, guys like Howin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, the blues that most of my generation came of blues age on are passing as well. James Cotton, RIP,

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing. Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Tylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.

From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some

From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some

CIA archivist Nicholas Reynolds discusses his new book, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures. It describes Hemingway's relationship with Soviet intelligence.

Click on link for a piece of Papa Hemingway’s link with the Soviets during World War II

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/520631331/chronicling-ernest-hemingways-relationship-with-the-soviets

For Frederick Douglass On His Upcoming 200th Birthday-

Is 'Fred Douglas' Park Named After Frederick Douglass?

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/520631303/is-fred-douglas-park-named-after-frederick-douglass

As March 17th Approaches- The Children of Easter 1916- A Moment In History… For M.M, Class of 1964

As March 17^th Approaches- The Children of Easter 1916- A Moment In History… For M.M, Class of 1964

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:

“A Terrible Beauty Is Born”, a recurring line from the great Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Easter, 1916.

At the corner of Hancock Street and East Main Street, forming a wedge in front of our old beige-bricked high school, ancient North Adamsville High School now of blessed memory although that hard fact was not always the case after passing through its portals but that for another day, stands against all weathers a poled plaque, sometimes, perhaps, garlanded with a flower of flag. From that vantage point, upon a recent walk-by, I have noticed that it gives the old school building a majestic “mighty fortress is our home” look. The plaque atop the pole, as you have probably already figured since such plaques are not uncommon in our casualty-filled, war-weary world, commemorates a fallen soldier, here of World War I, and is officially known as the Frank O’Brien Square. The corners and squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many.

That plaque furthermore now, as it did not have to back in the 1960s, competes, unsuccessfully, with a huge Raider red billboard telling one and all of the latest doings; a football game here, a soccer game there, or upcoming events; a Ms. Something pageant, a cheer-leading contest, a locally produced play; or honoring somebody who gathered some grand academic achievement, won some accolade for a well-performed act and so forth. In due course that billboard too will be relegated to the “vaults" of the history of our town as well. This comment , however, is not about that possible scenario or about the follies of war, or even about why it is that young men (and now women) wind up doing the dangerous work of war that is decided by old men (and now increasingly old women), although that would be a worthy subject. No, the focus here is the name of the soldier, or rather the last name, O’Brien, and the Irish-ness of it.

A quick run through of the names of the students listed in, our yearbook, the Magnet for the Class of 1964, will illustrate my point. If Irish surnames are not in the majority, then they are predominant, and that does not even take into consideration the half or quarter Irish heritage that is hidden behind other names. My own family history is representative of that social mixing with a set of Irish and English-derived grandparents. And that is exactly the point.

If North Adamsville in the old days was not exactly “Little Dublin”, the heritage of the Irish diaspora certainly was nevertheless apparent for all to see, and to hear. More than one brogue-dripped man or woman, reflecting newness to the country and to the town, could be heard by an attentive listener at Harry’s Variety Store on Sagamore Street seeking that vagrant bottle of milk (or making that bet with Harry’s book on the sure-fire winner in the sixth at Aqueduct but we will keep that hush since, who knows, the statute of limitations may still not have run out yet on that “crime,” although the horse certainly did, run out that is). Or at Doc Andrews’ Drugstore, yah, good old Doc over on the corner of Young Street and Newberry seeking, holy grail-seeking that vagrant bottle of whiskey, strictly for medicinal purposes of course.

And one did not have to be the slightest bit attentive but only within a couple of blocks of the locally famous, or infamous as the case may be, Dublin Grille to know through the mixes of brogue and rough-hewn strange language English that the newcomers had “assimilated.” To be fair, those same mixes could be heard coming piously out of Sunday morning Mass at Sacred Heart or at any hour on those gas-guzzling, smoked-fumed Eastern Mass buses that got one hither and fro in the old town. That North Adamsville was merely a way-station away from the self-contained Irish ghettos of Dorchester and South Boston to the Irish Rivieras, like Marshfield and heathen Cohasset and Duxbury, of the area was, or rather is, also apparent as anyone who has been in the old town of late will note.

And that too is the point. Today Asian-Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, and other minorities have followed that well-trodden path to North Adamsville from way-station Boston. They have made, and will make, their mark on the ethos of this hard-working working-class part of town. So while the faint aroma of corn beef and cabbage (and colorful, red-drenched pasta dishes, from the other main ethnic group of old North Adamsville, the Italians) has been replaced by the pungent smells of moo shi and poi and the bucolic brogue by some sweet sing-song Mandarin dialect the life of the town moves on.

Yet, I can still feel, when I haphazardly walk certain streets, the Irish-ness of the diaspora “old sod” deep in my bones. To be sure, as a broken amber liquor bottle spotted on the ground reminded me, there were many, too many, father whiskey-sodden nights (complete with the obligatory beer chaser) that many a man spent his pay on to keep his “demons” from the door. And to be sure, as well, the grandmother passed-down ubiquitous, much dented, one-size-fits all pot on the old iron stove for the potato-laden boiled dinner (that’s the corn beef and cabbage mentioned above for the unknowing heathens) that stretched an already tight food budget just a little longer when the ever present hard times cast their shadow at that same door.

And, of course, there was the great secret cultural relic; the relentless, never-ending struggle to keep the family “dirty linen” from the public eye, from those “shawlie” eyes ready to pounce at the mere hint of some secret scandal. But also this: the passed down heroic tales of our forebears, the sons and daughters of Roisin, in their heart-rending eight hundred year struggle against the crushing of the “harp beneath the crown” (and even heathens know whose crown that was); of the whispered homages to the ghosts of our Fenian dead; of great General Post Office uprisings, large and small; and, of the continuing struggle in the North. Yes, as that soldier’s plaque symbolizes, an Irish presence will never completely leave the old town, nor will the willingness to sacrifice.

Oh, by the way, that Frank O'Brien for whom the square in front of the old school was named, would have been my grand uncle, the brother of my Grandmother Riley (nee O'Brien) from over on Young Street across from the Welcome Young Field.

Easter, 1916-William Butler Yeats

I HAVE met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

On Saving The American Presidency-Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man 3 (2013)-A Film Review

On Saving The American Presidency-Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man 3 (2013)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Iron Man 3, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Gweneth Paltrow, 2013

Yeah, Tony Stark is up to his old tricks again in this Iron Man 3 production tinkering with the far edges of technology-and off-handedly saving the world, well almost the world, the generic American president (depending on your point of view a question of some import these 21^st century days). But our Tony, I don’t think I have to mention that he is played by Robert Downey, Jr. not after two previous efforts as Iron Man and others as one of the Marvel Comic action hero collective), has been a little off his game since helping save the world from aliens along with his Marvel buddies. In the old days that might not have mattered but now that he living with his paramour, Pepper, who I also probably don’t have to mention is played by fetching Gweneth Paltrow, his post-traumatic stress is getting in the way of their wholesome relationship. Every guy knows how that one feels, and will play out.

Of course with those personal problems weighing down on him it is an open question whether Iron Man will be able to save the world yet again. That is not a rhetorical question either because another in the long line of villains, alien (meaning from off-planet not some woe begotten refugees from the world’s incessant conflicts) or earth-bound, is raising hell, creating firestorms and all creation falling apart. A guy who looks very much like an Osama bin Laden character who calls himself the Mandarin is talking big talk about taking the known world, the known Western world, down in flames. Along the way an old nemesis an off-beat edgy scientist named Killian is simultaneous trying woo Tony to his side and to supplant him as the king hell king of the Marvel universe.

You know the end of that story, you know old Killian will have to take the fall, have to take the big step-off on general principles that bad guys can’t make the pure as gold Marvin heroes’ pantheon. That part is clear but kind of a side issue because this dastardly Mandarin had taken the American President prisoner in order to execute him on world-wide television (nice if evil touch). By the way the Prez was not hijacked from the White House but from a flying in the air Air Force One which should make one wonder about high level air security and what the heck the Secret Service was up to but we will let that slide for another day. What we won’t let slide for another day though is that Tony, okay, okay Iron Man saves the President’s bacon from Mandarin who just so happened to been a cover for Killian. So, yes, Killian took the big step-off from guess who, yes, Pepper. Nice work. And to make it a great success Tony had an operation on that silly pseudo-heart of his and so now he and Pepper can go under the silky sheets without worrying about him going off on some crazy tangent. Good action-packed fun-okay

**Poet's Corner- Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After"- In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The Paris Commune

Markin comment:

Old Brecht may not have been from the be-bop generation but he, in his way, knew how to speak truth to power through his poetry and plays.

To Those Born After

I

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.

Friday, March 17, 2017

You Can’t Get There From Here- With The Appalachia Hills And Hollows In Mind

You Can’t Get There From Here- With The Appalachia Hills And Hollows In Mind

By Zack James

“Damn, those shacks we just passed by looked like they could have come out of some John Steinbeck or Erskine Caldwell novel from the dustbowl, tobacco road 1930s or something, ” Bradley Fox, shaking his head, mentioned to his companion, Sarah Simon, as they travelled down Highway 7 toward Prestonsburg, and “home.” That “home” rightly in quotation marks since Bradley Fox for whom this journey had been planned had never to his conscious knowledge been to that town in his life. Had for many years never even though to go there until his brother, Jamison, told him a story about how when he, Jamison, was young, about a year old, back in 1946 or so, their parents, Bolton and Delores Fox, had taken a trip from Riverdale in Massachusetts where Delores had grown up and which had been their residence after they got married when Bolton was discharged from the Marines, and gone down to Prestonsburg where Bolton had grown up to see if prospects there for work and living were any better than in post-World War II Riverdale. The textile mills which had sustained that town’s economy for most of the previous century were heading out, were heading south and would eventually leave for foreign shores as the century progressed and so staying pat looked like a wasted option.

The intriguing part was that Delores had been pregnant with Bradley when this attempted move took place and so although he was only in the womb he had been “home” to the Appalachian hills and hollows before he breathed his first air breathe. What made the story all the more dramatic was that Yankee born and bred Bradley, or he liked to present himself to the world that way, always was ashamed, or if not ashamed then always hiding that element of his roots, from where his father came from. Like his father had had any say where he had come from. This distain would come out on anything from Bolton’s slightly southern drawl which would made Bradley’s friend laugh whenever they heard that (calling Bolton damn “reb” and other silly stuff until Bradley no longer brought friends around until high school when Bolton’s accent was seen as “cool” if not by Bradley then by his friends who thought-since Bolton was not their father-that Bolton was cool in the language of the time.

His feelings of shame came out as well when Bradley was old enough to recognize that his father, when he was able to find work, got the short end of the stick, got into that last hired, first fired (or rather laid-off, pink-slipped which meant the same thing) syndrome which meant that there was never enough of life’s goods around in good times or bad. Bradley resented that, resented that because of those shortage his family abode looked like, especially in over-grown summer, those Dorethea Lange photographs he had seen in a magazine of some places down south, down in Appalachia, down not too far from where he and Sarah were heading on State Highway 7.

Yeah times had been tough for Bradley, when he got “caught,” got caught out when Jack Kennedy whom he idolized for being everything his family was not decided to do something not only about improving the lives of black people down south, which he was okay with, but with the poor benighted “white trash” as well. The whole thing from what he gathered later had been started when guy named Michael Harrington wrote a book, The Other America, about poverty in white bread Appalachia and mentioned Prestonsburg, Christ, Prestonsburg of all places and him with a birth certificate which showed his father’s place of birth that very same place. That was not the worst of it though because nobody really needed to know, or probably gave a “rat’s ass” an expression that he and his boys used excessively then about where his father was born and raised and what his condition of life had been if some damned school do-gooders didn’t decide that the citizens, students anyway, should put together a clothing drive for the poor misbegotten residents of Prestonsburg and have that campaign announced day after day for several weeks over the P. A system at school making him feel like crawling under the seat in homeroom when that announcement for goods came over the loudspeaker.

So Bradley Fox had a serious history of denial about one half of his roots (the Delores half was pure Riverdale Irish and thus he could “pass” and unfortunately his father Bolton P. Fox went to an early grave being reconciled with his son over that silly stuff). It took a long time, too long, and too much estrangement, too many missed chances to right wrongs before he realized that simple truth that his father could not help where he had been born anymore that Bradley could be. By the time he realized that, realized that his father was good and honest man who never got break number one in his life it was too late. But that sense that he had committed a grave injustice to the man never stopped haunting him. And hence the trip south “home”

Maybe it was that father guilt, maybe it was Sarah continuously telling him over the previous decade that he needed to physically confront his fears and maybe it was that mountain music that lately he had been drawn too. The music of the Saturday night barn dance down in the hills and hollows with the mist coming down over the mountains to blanket the night, music to take the sting out of Willie’s White Thunder and to let those young lovers do their courting ritual in peace. Whatever combination prevailed one day a few months after Bradley had given up the day to day operation of his roofing company to his younger son he cell-phoned Sarah and asked her if she would be willing to go south with him. She made him laugh when she said that was her in the front of his house with the car motor running so get moving. And so they did. That didn’t stop Bradley as they headed south of the Mason-Dixon Line from feeling queasy, very queasy as they approached the Ohio River and entered into coal country with its beauty, starkness, and decay all mixed up. Then he saw those tar-paper shacks with their open air window and old papas sitting on the bent porch, kids and animals running every which way and he thought back to those photographs from his youth and started to get those old-time feelings of disgust. No this would not be an easy trip “home,” not easy at all.

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-The 1970s Angela Davis Case

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-The 1970s Angela Davis Case

In The Time Of The First Troubles-With David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter” In Mind –For Saint Pat’s Day

In The Time Of The First Troubles-With David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter” In Mind –For Saint Pat’s Day

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[Recently my old friend (and at various times competitor, usually friendly, when I was a film critic for now long defunct The Eye out in the Bay Area and he was doing the same for the American Film Gazette then out of a brick and mortar New York now on-line) mentioned that he was preparing a short review of the David Lean 1970 masterwork, Ryan’s Daughter to be published around Saint Patrick’s Day. Not that Sandy had any Irish blood in him, none mostly German and Jewish, but he thought that film’s subject appropriate for the publication date. He told me that he had been impressed by the film’s beautiful cinematography when he first watched the effort back in 1970 although in those days he was not a film critic but trying to scratch out a living as a newshound, a journalist.

I mentioned to him that I had missed the film entirely, had not come across many later references as against the big masterwork Doctor Zhivago either, because I was in Vietnam trying to keep my ass in one piece just then. When Sandy summarized the film’s plot for me though I knew I had to take a peek, had to see what Sandy could not see not having been brought up shanty Irish in this country. Knew too that I would have a vastly different perspective on the thing. Although I have given up most of the grind of film reviews I have reserved the right on occasion to comment on some films from let’s call it a “social” perspective. This one is for those Irish brethren who take national pleasure in Saint Patrick’s Day. For the boyos of Easter, 1916 too.]

Damn, the “shawlies” in my old Acre working-class neighborhood, my almost totally Irish working-class section of Riverdale out about forty miles west of Boston (where most of the Acre Irish had emigrated from Southie when the linen factories were still up and running in the town a couple or three generations back), would have had a field day with the plotline of the film I am thinking about just now David Lean’s 1970 vast epic Ryan’s Daughter. For those not in the know the “shawlies” in Dublin, the Irish countryside, in Boston, in the Acre where in her time my grandmother was a leading figure were those virtuous women, mostly older women like Grandma Riley, who controlled the day to day mores of the section (the priests, especially Reverend Doctor Lally, took care of the Sunday and holy day chores). They controlled the mores in the time-tested ways from the old country (where in my youth most of them had either immigrated from as children like Grandma or had come over as first generation adults complete with brogue and their funny ways) of shunning, shamming and cackling like geese, if that is what geese do over the word of mouth “grapevine.” That grapevine for its instant intelligence about matters neighborhood matters small and large would be the envy of any CIA or NSA operative (the only grapevine better was the teenage Monday morning before school boys’ or girls’ restroom [okay, oaky lavatory] who did what, meaning who did the do, or said they did, okay who had had that holy grail sex we were all preoccupied with. Nothing was faster than that not even close and those older women, including Grandma, would have been shocked out of their undies if they knew who, or who was not, “doing the do” among the younger set.)

The reason the Riverdale shawlies, and probably shawlies everywhere in Ireland or in the diaspora, would have had a field day is that the central story line of the film is the illicit love affair that young Rosy Ryan, played by Sarah Miles, had had with a British Army officer, played by Christopher Jones, during World War I, during the early part of World War I when not only were the British fighting in France and elsewhere on the continent against the Huns, against the Germans and their allies but were continuing their eight hundred year occupation of Ireland. Ireland then nothing but the number one colony across the Irish Sea. One of the village shawlies where almost all the action takes place out in the boondocks near that Irish Sea just mentioned gave the whole game away once they found out that Rosy was having that illicit affair when she uttered “there are loose women, whores and then there are a British officer’s whore” [lowest of the low] within earshot of the departing Rosy. That loose women category by the way included in the old neighborhood, divorced women, even divorced women with children, who seemed like some weird anomaly in the large family two parent main social situation.

Oh yeah, to add insult to injury Rosy was a married woman, married in the consecrated local Roman Catholic Church by the old worldly priest to the widowed middle-aged school teacher Charles Shaunessey, a “quiet man” as they used to say around the neighborhood, played by Robert Mitchum (an aging Robert Mitchum by then who back in the day, back in the 1940s would not have played it so rational when some frail like Jane Greer in Out of the Past twisted him every which way.)

This cuckolded husband business is nothing new in film, in Irish lore as well if you look at the lyrics to many Irish folk songs, especially those that deal with rural life out in the potato fields. What makes it note-worthy is that Rosy was having that affair in a very public manner at a time when Irish patriots were gearing up to show the British what for (this is the time around the unsuccessful if heroic Easter, 1916 uprising hailed by poets like William Butler Yeats). Needless to say the local villagers were eager to do harm to her-and they did.

Beside the shunning and shaming of a “collaborator” (they would before she left the village with Charles holding her up emotionally stripped her naked and cut of her hair reminiscent of what the Resistance fighters in France did when they rounded up female collaborators, whores, who went around with the Germans during the occupation of France in World War II) they tarred her with the label “informer.” Maybe a worse epithet than a whore, even a British Army officer’s whore. Like I said this time frame was deep in World War I where the Irish who sought independence from Mother England decided to use her preoccupation with the continental war to take a stab at liberty. This included, which has happened in liberation struggles before and since, grabbing whatever weapons, you know, guns, hand grenades, dynamite anything, from the “enemy,” enemy of England in this case the Germans. An Irish Republican Army unit was in the area to grab some of this weaponry which the Germans had delivered by ship along the rocky ocean-splashed coast near the village. The seas were up and the IRA unit decided to brave the storm to see what could be salvaged as it washed ashore. And they with the help of the suddenly aroused local people were able to retrieve a lot of the materials.

Problem was that the British garrison headed by Rosy’s soldier boy lover had been forewarned and were waiting to stop the transport of the weapons. Somebody must have “snitched,” a sin in my old Acre neighborhood worse than lots of things like some married woman going under the linen sheets with somebody not her husband, or not married, more so among us schoolboys who had larceny in our hearts and would rather face seven a rations of hell than get that reputation. So Rosy took the fall, took a beating, got stripped and clipped, even as her ever understanding husband Charles physically tried to defend her. She didn’t do it though, her old man, her father the bastard did the dastardly deed. Boy the shawlies of Riverdale would have sliced and diced that bastard, done it up good. So would we young boyos. Check this film out now that we are in a Saint Patrick’s Day mood.

When The Blues Was Dues- The Classic Alligator Records Compilation

CD Review

By Zack James

Long before Seth Garth became back in the day, the 1960s day, the music critic for the now long gone The Eye published in those day out of Oakland California he had been bitten by the blues bug. Of course in the 1960s one to be a successful and relevant music critic one had to concentrate on the emerging and then fading folk music minute (of which the blues was seen as a sub-set of the genre especially the country blues wings) and then post-British invasion and the rise of the counter-cultural movement what was called “acid” rock. So Seth’s blues bug, except for an occasional sneak-in was cut short by the needs of his career. Even then though Seth would keep up with the various trends coming out of places like Chicago and Detroit and of the artists who had formed his first interests.

Strangely Seth had come to his love of the blues almost by accident. Back in the 1950s he had been like many teenagers totally devoted to his transistor radio to shutout the distractions of parents and siblings around the house. In those days though he was drawn to the fresh air of rock and roll, guys like Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. One Sunday night though almost like a ghost message from the radio airwaves the station he usually listened to WMEX was drowned by a more powerful station from Chicago, WABC. The show Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour (actually two hours but that was the title of the show). The first song Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying. He was hooked, hooked mainly because in those days the blues coming out of Chicago sounded like a very primitive version of rock, like maybe it had something to do with that beat in his head whenever a serious rock song came on WMEX like Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller. He couldn’t always get the station on Sunday night, something to do with those wind patterns but he was smitten.

Like a lot of things including his later interest in folk music and acid rock Seth always wanted to delve into the roots of whatever trend he was writing about. That was how he found out that a lot of the songs that he heard on the Be-Bop Benny show were the genesis of rock. Also that rock had eclipsed the blues as the be-bop new thing leaving many of the most popular blues artists, overwhelming black artists, behind to pick up the scraps of the musical audience (only to be “discovered” later by some of the more thoughtful rock stars like the Stones with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf just as the old time country blues artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Bukka White from the South were “discovered” by folk aficionado in their turn).

Seth also dug into the technical aspects of the industry, who was producing the music. Those where the days when there were many small, small by today’s mega-standards, essentially mom and pop record companies producing blues material. In Chicago, with the huge migration of blacks from the South during the previous two generations there were a myriad of labels. But two stuck out, two were the ones who grabs the very best artists around Maxwell Street and made them stars, from the many one hit wonders to classic stars like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King. Of course most people have heard of those artists who worked out of the Chess Record label. But the other big label, the one under review, Alligator, also produced a shew of stars. So that very first night Seth had heard the legendary Hound Dog Taylor doing The Sky Is Crying he was under contract with Alligator. For more artists check out this two CD compilation of those others who also graced that label. Then you will be up to date on the genesis of the Chicago blues explosion that changed blues from acoustic to electric back in the day.