From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some -Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

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

And then some:

Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

From The Pen Of Zack James 

Sam Lowell, who had usually an easy going guy when not preoccupied with his profession, his lawyerly profession, was frustrated. No, better, was, had been, beside himself with frustration for a fairly long time. He had, as he wound down the management of the day to day operations of the small independent law firm that he had helped start with a fellow law school student, Ben Ames, decided that finally he could begin to pursue an avocation as a writer that he had been eager to do since high school. Back then the war, the Vietnam War if anybody is asking, intervened, and had caught him up in the draft call and after his tour of duty into the counter-culture night around San Francisco which had set him back several years when he couldn’t/did not want to face the return to the “real” world for a while.

More than that Sam found as he foundered and as his new “real” world foundered that he needed to move on. Moving on in the direct sense by taking up the law career that his mother, grandfather and several others had been harping on him since his youth. But he still hankered after that idea of being a writer, being a writer maybe in Paris, San Francisco, or some other town where blossoming the written word counted, counted a lot. But time and tide had passed that idea by and it had only been the previous decade or so that he got back to writing just for the hell of it.

Fortunately the times he choose to come back in were very propitious for amateur writers, writers who were not making their livelihoods trying to eke out a living at so many words per day. He had over the course of that decade, first very sporadically then more consistently, joined several writing-oriented blog and other self-publishing enterprises.        

That return to recreational writing however was really what Sam had been frustrated by. Or rather as he took his writing more seriously he realized that he had come to a block in the road, not a writer’s block fortunately because one way or another he could still produce the words, sometimes a torrid of words, but an understanding that he would always be a first rate third rate writer as somebody back in the day had said about some public servant whom the person who said the words was trying to smear.

This is the way Sam explained it to his long-time companion Laura, Laura Perkins, who had encouraged him in his writing as best she could. He had just written a short story based on a few episodes in the current love life of his old schoolboy friend, Bart Webber, from Carver where they grew up together. Bart had had a short torrent affair with a fellow student in their class, Melinda Loring, whom he had rekindled a relationship with after their 50^th anniversary class reunion. The affair, in the end, floundered on Bart’s inability to meet Melinda’s demands that they think about marriage which Bart, having suffered through three failed marriages (and more alimony, child support and college tuitions than any man should have rightly been required to do in that loveless legal world Sam inhabited along with some nasty judges),    was adamantly against, although he was open to the idea of living together or some such non-legal arrangement. Bart’s position set off a firestorm from which the relationship could never recover.

Bart, in telling Sam the details of the split up between him and Melinda, mentioned that he suddenly realized what the author Thomas Wolfe meant when he titled one of his books You Can’t Go Home Again. That idea, that hook, the notion that in some things you cannot go back stirred Sam into the thought of writing up a sketch, duly fictionalized, about Bart’s affair as some kind of cautionary tale for the generation of ‘68 now filled with plenty of regrets and sorrows about their pasts-and time to think about them as well. Bart agreed, although he was skeptical that anybody could learn anything from the exposition. In any case Sam wrote the piece up, about three thousand words, let Bart look it over and make corrections as well as check for any incidents revealed that might be tied to anything real that had happened in the Bart-Melinda relationship.

Bart satisfied, Sam sent the piece to various publishing outlets where there was a certain small interest expressed in publishing the story especially by one young female editor. It was a comment by that editor, Julie Stern, which riled Sam and set off his latest round of frustration. She said that the way he wrote the story, the way he defended his protagonist Jack Callahan, the piece as a whole read like, and this is a direct quote, “the closing argument of legal brief.”          

Initially stung by the comment Sam later, after several days’ reflection, realized that Julie was right, was right not only about that piece which she had read but after looking over some of his other earlier writings he had the same sense that she was onto something. All the years of dry legal writing had atrophied his creative writing skills, had left him thinking strictly inside the box. Had made him realize that he was a prime example of that first rate third rate writer he dreaded that he might become when he was young despite his junior and senior year English teacher, Miss Soros, at Carver High encouraging him in his creative endeavors.        

Sam thought it was funny that back in high school he had had such creative bursts, had stirred Miss Soros and his classmates with a few of his efforts mostly about the absurdities of teenage life, angst and alienation. He had fashioned himself, maybe imitated is a better word, after various heroic writers that he had read. In those days he was crazy for Ernest Hemingway’s sleek style, meaning crisp dialogue, clear short sentences yet with words that were power-packed to descript not only the action of the story but the environment in which the characters worked out their particular problems. Sam had been crazy to study about the Spanish Civil War after he had picked that event as the subject of his first term paper in high school. Along the way he found out that many Americans, not all of them communists or socialists, had supported the Republican side against the Nazi-infested Fascists and that Hemingway was one of them. Had written For Whom The Bells Toll as a result of his experiences (Sam would not find out until later that the American Communist Party and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades were not at all happy about Hemingway’s work on that book, its’ what would be today called its political incorrectness. Many years later when he had run into a veteran of the Lincolns at a conference at Brandeis where the Lincoln Archives were housed he had been still incensed that Hemingway had slighted them.

Sam had not known Hemingway’s work before his efforts around his term paper except maybe some film adaptation of one of his short stories, The Killers, but he was in thrall ever after, thought everybody wherever they might end up on their literary journeys should write following his style. Naturally, something that Sam was inclined to do when he was “hot’ on a writer he would read (and re-read later several times) all Hemingway’s works that he could get his hands on. Never could then though figure out why a guy who could write like a whirling dervish, a mad monk if you don’t like the dervish description, took his own life. That was then and like in a lot of things later Sam could understand that a person with declining stamina, some form of writer’s block, and a feeling that his best work was behind him, could take that way out. Not a way Sam’s would be inclined to take for those reasons since a first rate third rate writer would only bring laughter from the crowds upon himself if he fancied himself enough of a driven writer to contemplate that.    

Jesus, Sam thought, thinking back to the time when he first heard about how guys like Hemingway and Fitzgerald abandoned the vacuity of post-World War I America for the bright lights of Paris, or France anyway. Yeah, if Hemingway gave Sam pause on style then Fitzgerald was the master of the narrative, of telling a great story letting the reader sink beneath the pauses. Like the first time he read The Great Gatsby and realized that Jay Ganz was just like a lot of guys he knew, corner boy guys who had big dreams. Except Jay driven did more than dream about what he wanted. He had had to read that famous last page about the Dutch sailors reaching the New World around New York Harbor way and seeing the possibilities of the fresh new start once they had seen that unsullied “fresh green breast.”  Yeah, Fitzgerald knew a certain milieu and worked that minefield for all it was worth.

As Sam dozed off a bit while thinking about all the great literature around, all the stuff that was worthy of being read he was dazzled by the progression of great writers who had influenced him at various time. Thomas Wolfe, Edith Wharton (even though he was not at all familiar with Brahmin life), Dorothy Parker and her Big Blonde, the max daddy detective story writers Raymond Parker and Dashiell  Hammett (who Sam swore learned their dialogue  craft from Hemingway after reading The Maltese Falcon  and the Big Sleep by them) and a whole bunch of others. And now he is to go without a bang but with a whimper, maybe better a sigh. Sighs the fate of first rate third rate writers.

A View From The Left- No Deportations! Down With Racist War on Immigrants! No to Anti-Muslim Crusade!

Workers Vanguard No. 1107	10 March 2017

No Deportations!

Down With Racist War on Immigrants!

No to Anti-Muslim Crusade!

MARCH 6—A 26-year-old woman with a brain tumor ripped from her hospital bed in Texas and thrown back into detention; a Los Angeles restaurant worker pulled over and handcuffed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents after dropping his daughter off at school; a transgender woman in El Paso arrested after seeking protection from domestic violence. The Trump administration has unleashed I.C.E. and other police agencies in a blitzkrieg of terror against immigrants, racking up hundreds of arrests from coast to coast. Immigrant families are holing up in their homes, refusing to answer the door, afraid to go shopping or to school, fearful of using social media. Kids are being told who to call and where to go if their parents are seized and deported.

Unleashed by Trump, the I.C.E. thugs are now saying that their job is “fun” as they bust into homes in the predawn hours or sweep up day laborers on their way to work, giving them a taste of hell as they fling them into detention centers. Many of these dungeons are run by private corporations that have been big, and powerful, profit-makers under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

President Trump’s January 25 executive order vastly expanded the pool of those considered a “priority” for deportation to include any undocumented immigrant even suspected of a criminal offense, no matter how minor, or who might “pose a risk to public safety.” Such “risks” apparently include a Mexican mother of two U.S.-born children who was arrested in Phoenix and immediately deported when she showed up for her regular check-in with the immigration office. She is considered a criminal because, like eleven million others, she is in this country “illegally.” Although Trump has not (yet) terminated Barack Obama’s DACA program, which gave a temporary reprieve to people brought to this country as children, a number of these “Dreamer” youth have been swept up in the raids and face deportation.

You don’t even have to “fit the profile” to be subjected to the tender mercies of the immigration cops. Last week, Henry Rousso, a French academic and expert on the Holocaust, was held at Houston’s international airport for ten hours and threatened with expulsion on the completely bogus suspicion that he was trying to enter illegally. Also in February, passengers on a flight from San Francisco were asked to show their IDs as they disembarked at New York’s JFK airport, supposedly so that I.C.E. could nab an undocumented immigrant. Of course, I.C.E. knew everybody on the flight, and no such person was found. The point of the exercise was to cow people into meekly accepting such intrusions by the state—the Bill of Rights be damned.

On top of all this, the White House today issued a revised anti-Muslim travel ban. Aside from permanent residents and current visa holders, the new executive order bans anyone trying to get into the U.S. from select Muslim-majority countries (with Iraq now removed from that list) as well as all refugees for a 120-day period. Even while the initial January ban was held up in the courts, customs agents in Florida detained Muhammad Ali Jr., son of the late boxing great and a U.S. citizen, for two hours after he returned from Jamaica and grilled him about his religion because of his “Arabic-sounding” name.

While the U.S. imperialists slaughter the peoples of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, at home, Muslims and immigrants from Islamic countries are portrayed as “internal enemies.” Similar to what happened after the September 11 attacks, the current anti-Muslim hysteria is fueling murderous extralegal terror. Last month, a Navy vet in Kansas shouted, “Get out of my country!” as he gunned down two software engineers from India, killing one. Just two days ago, a Sikh American was shot in the driveway of his Kent, Washington, home by a masked white man snarling, “Go back to your own country.” With fascist gangs emboldened by Trump’s election, Jews are also a target, with bomb threats at over 100 community centers to date and gravesites across the country being vandalized.

White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who helped craft both anti-Muslim bans, has described immigrants—and Muslims in particular—as a threat to “the Judeo-Christian West.” You can be sure that for this notoriously racist “white nationalist,” the “Judeo-Christian West” does not include black people (or Jews, for that matter).

Make no mistake: The same forces taking aim at those most vulnerable—undocumented immigrants, Muslims trying to enter the U.S.—also have their sights set on the black masses and the entire working class. Trump’s shock-and-awe campaign is all about ramping up police powers and sowing fear and loathing in the population. Trump may have a long way to go to break Barack Obama’s record of more than 2.5 million deportations, but he does promise to throw a lot more money and manpower into I.C.E. and police agencies and to unshackle them from whatever nominal restraints they might have felt.

This was the message Trump delivered in his address to Congress last week when he announced the creation of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office (V.O.I.C.E.). After railing yet again at the murder rate in Chicago, Trump introduced the program by shining a spotlight on Jamiel Shaw, the token black point man from his campaign whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant. With this bit of theater, Trump declared his intent to give the cops even freer rein to enforce “law and order.” As the black population knows all too well, this means a war on them. No wonder the cops cheer Trump’s battle cry to “make America great again,” a slogan that conjures up an earlier time of U.S. supremacy when black people supposedly “knew their place.”

Immigrant Rights and the Fight for Black Freedom

The current anti-immigrant drive makes abundantly clear that an injury to one is an injury to all! It is the duty of the labor movement and of all fighters against racist oppression to defend immigrants with or without papers. We oppose all racist, nationally discriminatory immigration laws and regulations. We demand: No deportations! Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it to this country!

It’s notable that recent demonstrations in defense of immigrants have included a sizable number of black protesters, who understand that the cops’ guns are loaded and aimed at them. A vocal supporter of racist “stop and frisk” police tactics, Trump is pumping up not only the immigration cops but also county and city police forces. He has even threatened to “send in the Feds” to combat “crime” in Chicago.

It is crucial to link defense of immigrants to the fight for black rights in this country, where the capitalist system, founded on chattel slavery, is rooted in the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of society. As the Spartacist League/U.S. and the Grupo Espartaquista de México wrote in a joint declaration during a wave of immigrant rights protests more than ten years ago (printed in WV No. 867, 31 March 2006):

“Opposition to anti-immigrant racism in the U.S. is directly intertwined with the struggle against black oppression. It is particularly important to combat anti-immigrant chauvinism among U.S.-born black and white workers, while immigrant workers must grasp that anti-black racism remains the touchstone of social reaction in the U.S.”

The integrated trade unions should be in the forefront of the defense of immigrant workers. But the American labor movement is crippled by a flag-waving leadership whose fundamental loyalty is not to the workers but to the profitability of U.S. capitalism. And this “America First” chauvinism plays right into the capitalist bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes, to the detriment of all workers.

There is no better example of this treachery than AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka. The morning after Trump’s address to Congress, Trumka told Fox Business Network that he was pleasantly surprised by the speech, saying, “This was the first time the president has talked about legal immigration being used to drive down wages. We’ve been saying that for a long time.” Trumka & Co. sure have, and it’s a lie. It’s the capitalist bosses, not any sector of the working class, that drive down wages, and it is the labor tops’ class collaborationism, politically expressed mainly through their ties to the Democratic Party, that has disarmed workers in the face of the bosses’ relentless anti-union drives.

Back when Obama was trying to push through his bogus immigration “reform” package, Trumka gave his backing to the E-Verify program, a database of everyone legally permitted to work in the U.S. that has facilitated the mass firing and deportation of immigrants, including those involved in union organizing. Trumka’s vile immigrant-bashing is part and parcel of his program of “American jobs for American workers,” as he hails Trump’s calls for aggressive economic protectionism. The labor tops’ chauvinist protectionism poisons the consciousness of U.S. workers, preaching the lie that their class interests lie with American capitalism against foreign competition and pitting them against their class brothers and sisters south of the border and overseas.

For a Multiracial Workers Party!

To get the unions back on their feet will take some hard struggle based on the understanding that the interests of the American working class are counterposed to those of their U.S. bosses, at home and abroad. To unite workers for such struggle, the labor movement must take up the fight for immigrant and black rights against the capitalist rulers’ attacks.

Black people remain that section of the population that is most keenly aware of the vicious nature of racist America. And along with black workers, who have a higher rate of union membership than white workers, immigrants are bound to play a leading role in future class battles. The throwing together of workers from different lands in the factories and workshops of the capitalist economy serves to break down national divisions as well as the parochialism of native-born workers. The foreign-born often bring with them a keen understanding of the depredations of U.S. imperialism in their homelands, as well as experience in hard-fought class battles. Indeed, the tiny handful of union victories over the last couple of decades were in the main delivered by predominantly immigrant labor in the service industries and meatpacking.

Labor needs a new leadership committed to class struggle and proletarian internationalism. That requires breaking labor’s ties to the Democrats, Trump and all capitalist parties and politicians. While Trumka dances with the devil, Maria Elena Durazo, head of the UNITE HERE’s immigration and civil rights committee, has just been re-elected vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. There she will work to keep union activists and immigrants wanting to fight Trump reaction shackled to the other party of racist U.S. capitalism.

The starting point for defending immigrant rights must be opposition to all the political parties and state agencies of the capitalist rulers. A number of Democratic mayors have responded to the anti-immigrant crackdown by declaring their domains “sanctuary cities,” where cops have discretion to not check on immigration status. For the likes of New York City’s Bill de Blasio, waging the racist “war on drugs” and “war on terror” are higher priorities than checking papers. For undocumented immigrants, any arrest—including for minor offenses—can prompt I.C.E. detention and deportation. Fingerprints are automatically shared with federal immigration authorities, regardless of the city’s professed “sanctuary” status. As we warned in “Trump Escalates Obama’s War on Immigrants” (WV No. 1105, 10 February), “It is downright delusional to believe that local agents of the capitalist state will establish oases of refuge for immigrants. The cops who gun down black and minority youth with impunity will not protect immigrants from the Feds.”

Today, as the government sets its sights on immigrants, Muslims and many others, the Democrats are working to refurbish their false credentials as friends of workers and the oppressed, including by playing a leading role in organizing the protests against Trump. The crying need is to forge a revolutionary leadership—a 70 percent black, Latino and other minority workers party that will champion all the exploited and oppressed in a fight for a workers America. By seizing the productive wealth of society and building a new order of material abundance and social equality, the multiracial working class in power will put an end to poverty, joblessness and other miseries produced by the capitalist profit system. With our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México and other sections of the International Communist League, the Spartacist League/U.S. works for the victory of this cause internationally by struggling to reforge the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.

A Story Goes With It-The 1947 Film Adaptation Of Earl Derr Bigger’s “Seven Keys To Baldpate”-A Film Review

A Story Goes With It-The 1947 Film Adaptation Of Earl Derr Bigger’s “Seven Keys To Baldpate”-A Film Review

DVD Review  

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Seven Keys To Baldpate, starring Phillip Terry Jacqueline White, adapted from Earl Derr Bigger’s crime novel of the same name, 1947 (there were earlier cinematic versions). 

You never know what guys will bet on, even guys who don’t look like they need dough, serious dough anyway. That is the “hook” behind this film adaptation of crime novelist Earl Derr Bigger’s Seven Keys To Baldpate (Bigger better known for his classic Charlie Chan series). The bet: that left to his own devices, left alone crime writer Kenneth McGee, played by Phillip Terry, can finish a crime novel in a short specific period of time. The prize: five thousand in cash (yeah I know nothing but walking around today as one of my fellow film critics mentioned when commenting on the money stolen in some 1950s bank robbery in a film he was reviewing). The chase is on.     

Part of the idea behind the bet was for McGee to head for the quiet of a shutdown for the season New England inn in order to pursue his work in peace. McGee is given the only key to the inn and heads up smacking his lips that this bet would be like money found on the ground. But as the title of film tips us to he is not the only one with a key to access that well-worn front door. The place turned into Grand Central Station as people with very mixed motived keep popping up in this isolated snow drifted place. Toward the end I thought maybe I had a key and got mad that I didn’t have one.

The cast of rogues who show up include, let’s count them, since we know McGee has one, an unexpected caretaker who greets him at the door, a hermit, a femme, a professor, a gunman, and the fetching secretary of the guy who McGee made the bet with, Mary played by Jacqueline White to add a little off-hand romance while McGee figures out the motives of his co-residents. That’s seven in my book.  Here’ where you have to look twice at some guys, some guys you bet with, since Mary’s motives are straight up. She had been sent by the guy McGee bet to make sure that he didn’t finish the novel on time. Not fair, not fair at all.      

As for the others, except the hermit who is just there for effect, they are in this Podunk out of the way place to divvy up the spoils from a big jewel heist. Among themselves they manage to shoot up the place as they double-cross each other leaving two dead in the end when the coppers come to put paid the whole enterprise. Just your average crime story. Hey a story McGee could write in a jiffy and still collect the dough. Except that fetching secretary with the long legs showing to good effect got him all brain-addled when she flopped herself on his lap and dared him to ignore her. McGee should have known the fix was in.          

The Mayfair Swells Kick Up The Jams-Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby And Frank Sinatra’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

The Mayfair Swells Kick Up The Jams-Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby And Frank Sinatra’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

[Since the formal retirement of Sam Lowell as the long time film critic in this space (and of other publications going back to long defunct The Eye out in the Bay Area where he started out back in the 1970s) Sandy Salmon has stepped in to do the main chores. However Sandy, a longtime colleague of Sam’s, is also heading toward his own eventual retirement from the day to day film review grind and he has asked his associate Alden Riley to “pinch hit” on occasion. This is the first occasion for Mister Riley.] 

High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, based on the play The Philadelphia Story which in turn was adapted for the screen starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, by 1956   

The Mayfair swells have their problems too as the film under review tries to give us plebeians a glimpse at in this 1956 cinematic musical version of the play The Philadelphia Story, High Society.  No, we are not going to be feted to their struggles to keep a roof over their heads (although the then high tax rate was alluded to), provide food for the table or figure a way to dress their kids. No need for that but to show us that they too, at least 1950s too, have as many problems with affairs of the heart as ordinary folks. The Mayfair swells have many private and exclusive watering holes. This one takes place in old money Newport down off the ocean in Rhode Island against a backdrop of the Newport Jazz Festival which George Weir had put together a few years before (and would when the folk minute hit high speed a few years later produce the Newport Folk Festivals).       

Although in the 1950s divorce wasn’t a national epidemic especially among the staid old money rich who deathly feared the breakup of their generational trust funds that is the central problem behind what is agitating the swells. Or rather one swell, Tracy played by fetching Grace Kelly who would move on to real royalty over in fairyland Monaco after this film. Tracy had dumped one man and was as the film opens getting ready to wed another. That dumped guy, Dexter, a successful jazz composer which in high society was just too plebeian a professional (and black an unstated premise), played by Bing Crosby was still holding the torch for his ex. Adding to the complexity of this whole show is the fact that a scandal sheet which has the goods on Tracy’s father’s philandering had been given permission to get the inside scope on what the Mayfair swells are up to when wedding bells are ringing. That rag sent a team of two, a from hunger reporter Mike, played by Frank Sinatra and a photographer, Liz who is carrying her own torch for Mike, played by Celeste Holms. They are supposed to get the inside dirt. (By the way with the starring billing of Crosby and Sinatra backed up by jazzman Louis Armstrong and his boys this one had no right to exist except as a musical.)   

Back to the fetching Tracy though who leads not only her intended staid uptight businessman bridegroom a merry chase but hard guy Mike as well. Of course we already know what she thinks of Dexter. Last year’s news. So between songs we get the drama of Tracy trying to discover who she really is, what her place in the sun is. Well you know the minute Bing and Frank showed up that the bridegroom was out. After a fling (a chaste fling remember this is the 1950s when sex wasn’t invented yet or something like that) with Mike (to Liz’s chagrin) she decided that Dexter was the one for her after all. Frankly this choice made more sense in the film adaptation of The Philadelphia Story where Katharine Hepburn decided on Cary Grant. Bing might have been a good singer but for fetching woman like Tracy Mike should have won the brass ring.    

[A note on Louis Armstrong and his role in the story. The famous jazz man was included as part of the play for the Newport Folk Festival and that part made sense. But his role, according to some sources, as an “Uncle Tom” type playing “ah, shucks” up to the swells was subject to some controversy among blacks and their white supporters. Remember this was 1956 and the start of the militant “New Negro” black civil rights movement which rocked this country.]      

The Great White Way-Katharine Hepburn And Ginger Rogers’ “Stage Door” (1937)-A Film Review

The Great White Way-Katharine Hepburn And Ginger Rogers’ “Stage Door” (1937)-A Film Review

DVD Review

   

By Seth Garth

Stage Door, starring Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, and an ensemble cast of many well-known actresses from the 1930s and 1940s, based very loosely based on from the scuttle- bud on the play of the same name by Edna Ferber and George S Kaufman, 1937 

There was a time in an earlier part of the 20^th century when the lure of New York’s Broadway, the Great White Way, was what serious aspiring actors aimed for, serious theater, and considered Hollywood work fit for only upstarts and ragamuffins. Until the dough and the publicity shifted West. The film under review, Stage Door, based loosely, very loosely on the successful Broadway play by the same name by the Algonquin Roundtable’s Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman takes a look, a hard if somewhat humorous look, at Broadway before the glitter out West swamped the place to the sidelines.      

I don’t know about now although I would be hard-pressed to think of a film almost totally centered on women but back then there were at least several where women, women as an ensemble, even if a star-studded ensemble, did some very good and fruitful work. That is the case here where a group of female actors are left to their own devices in a boarding house for mostly star-struck young actors where the rent is cheap and the food the same. Although Terry, a Brahmin upstart crashing the working life of the theater played by Katharine Hepburn (who else) and Jean, a salt of the earth working stiff played by Ginger Rogers, lead the cast, and grab a great deal of the story line there is plenty of repartee by the other denizens of this mad house. So we get a glimpse at all the aspects of trying to make it on Broadway from last year’s big thing now down on her uppers, a few gals happy to get chorus line work, to some waiting on the bright lights to shine before going off to wife-hood and motherhood-an expected path in those days.   

But the central story is the tension and ultimate friendship though sorrow of Terry who if slumming on the Great White Way is earnest about making it, or trying to, even if she is trying to the other less privileged working stiffs shuffling to try-outs and endless appointments to get a measly job and Jean, who is a world wise and world wary wisecracker making her way through her paces. The tragedy of a young boarder’s suicide after failing to stay in the bright lights brings them together. 

As for the guys they are mainly around as vague dates and butts of jokes except Adophe Menjou who as Anthony Powell is the great maker and shaker producer of plays and of nefarious efforts to snag any gullible stray young actress from hunger (Jean almost gets that snag). Grab this one if only for the great repartee among the denizens. I know I sure would not like to be around a roomful of what in the old days were called catty women as the butt of their rapier wit.   

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind  

By Seth Garth 

[Bernie, O., we will avoid his last name since he has recently retired from the force and we will let him enjoy his peace, after twenty-five of decent and honorable service. The “force” for those who are clueless any police department but here the Bay City Police Department a comfortable California seaside town as its name would indicate, although not as sleepy a town as the seaside designation would connote, That last phrase about Bernie, we can skip the “O” now that we can without rancor leave him to his peace was at one time up for grabs. Had been challenged back when he had been on the force maybe five years in the days before the war (World War II) when anything went in the fair city from gambling, dope, un-bonded booze and women, women who would take you around the world or around the block where a male confederate with a handy blackjack waited in earnest for any unsuspecting goof, not Kerouac’s unsuspecting holy saintly beaten down by the grind of modern society and left to rust along the empty roadside goof either but just some drunken wayward tourist who thought he still had that old sex appeal that his Martha used to brag to her friends about.

And that anything goes, the dope to girls action, especially that latter category since he had started out as a hustling jack-roller grabbing marks some whore he was working with was steering his way was strictly the bought and paid for territory of one Eddie Miles, Mister Edward Raymond Miles when they let him into the swanky Bay City Golf Club-or else- but plain run of the mill gangster Eddie now. We can use his last name since he is finishing up the last five years of a twenty-five year gaff at the Q for plenty of stuff-extortion, pandering, armed this and that,  everything except the one the jury couldn’t pin on him-murder one, murder for hire if you want the full kick. They had a raw assistant D.A. assigned to the case since everybody had the case down to a shoo-in for sure and the D.A. had his own set of problems having let a few Eddy non-murder crimes go under the sea (and “sponsoring” Eddie in that swanky club where he was ostracized after the rap sheet on Eddie became public- probably would have been worse except it is always good to have a D.A. sweating and forgetting stuff-criminal or country club).   

Bernie, Bernie O. when you think back about those days was the straightest rightest cop that ever put on shoe leather in Bay City. The problem back those twenty some years ago was that every other freaking cop on the force was “on the take” to Eddie, or knew guys on the take to Eddie which was the same thing. Somebody, without a shred of evidence had fingered Bernie as a bad cop in Eddie Miles hip pocket. Bought and paid for- a tough charge to defend against when everybody was on the take and wanted to cover their asses. Of course in those days a cop, a five year cop anyway, couldn’t pursuit a case on his own where he had been accused of corruption. Against Department policy. A great set-up for a set-up. So he clamped Phil Marlin, a guy who had been on the force with him, had gone through the academy with Bernie but had been fired for insubordination, fired good, when he wouldn’t tumble to looking the other way when one of Eddie’s boy took some underage girl into a backseat out on the back roads of the Pacific Coast Highway for a blow job and whatever else she was offering-or he was taking. Phil had turned private investigator, private dick, keyhole peeper to most cops. Took the case strictly as a favor to Bernie, no charge, you see, that was how tight they had been back when they had each other’s back in the days they were flat-footing beat cops down in the tough Five Points neighborhood.

Bernie had been in on the bust of Eddie Miles, after the Staties had taken over based on what Marlin had dug up from the sewer and they insisted that Bernie be in on the nab so he had some satisfaction that he was cleared by his own actions. The problem for Bernie and for Marlin came later when Marlin decided he wanted to tell the story to the general public-maybe as a cautionary tale, maybe to show how fragile a grip every human has on life, or maybe he just wanted his name up in lights in some fake private dick’s hall of fame. What Marlin did was get this writer, kind of well- known for writing racy pulp fiction crime detection novels, a guy named Raymond Chandler, to “ghost” the story for him. Between Marlin’s vivid imagination and Chandler’s excessive literary license they balled the whole story up, balled it up pretty bad. So Bernie with his own leisure time, his peace time, hired me to “ghost” his true version of the case-the Eddie Miles bust. The only thing that Bernie and Marlin, the late Phillip Marlin who had his check cashed down in sunny Mexico one back alley night when he was looking for a fugitive named Terry Manning, agreed on was that Bernie had handed him a private job for General Guy Sternwood. Yeah, Sternwood the guy who turned the La Brea tar pits into gold-for himself and his. He was having trouble with one of his wild daughters and needed a guy who could handle the fix he had been put in by her posing for raw, today they would say kinky, nude photographs and guys were looking for dough, serious dough for the negatives-or else. Here is how it really played out from that agreed point on.             

****

Marlin had shown up at the General’s mansion one sunny summer afternoon up in the hills of Bay City far from the humidity and dust and far from the sight of those still-producing oil pumps that got him the place on the hill. Before he could be invited into the General’s bedroom (the General would enumerate more health issues than seemed possible for a breathing human being and he had been under doctor’s to keep to his bed, his now bed-office) he was confronted by one of the wild daughters, the younger one Carol. She had asked him, once she had looked him up and down in a way usually reserved for guys and figured him for a tumbler, if once he had finished talking to her father he wanted a good time in her room. She also told him that she did not care what her father wanted she wanted those nude photos circulated, wanted to be a Hollywood starlet just like Eddie Miles had promised. Wanted all the boys to get big in the pants when they snuck a peak at her luscious body doing nasty little things (and it was luscious according to Marlin-Bernie rated her as a good afternoon fuck and then get the hell out of town).

Phil had told Bernie, and more importantly had told Chandler who retailed the story, that he never had gone into her room after speaking with the General with whom he had accepted the assignment to act as go-between to Eddie in order to get the freaking photos and negatives back to be burned. According to Norris, the trusty butler, a guy who had no ax to grind then, was the General’s eyes and ears in those days (and was stealing him blind since he had control of household checking accounts-like manna from heaven if a guy knew how to fudge the books just so and old Norris had the game down pat) told him that he had seen Marlin coming out of Carol’s room disheveled and glassy-eyed like she had taken him around the world.

That is the real reason Marlin never got anywhere trying to get those photographs back. He would always argue that the General was maybe hot to trot to get the pictures after all he could hardly face his social equals when his daughter was front and center in some low-rent “girlie” magazine (where in the end they would wind up courtesy of Carol sending an agent to one of those publications begging them to put them in the magazine). But the real reason he hired Marlin was he was looking to find out what had happened to his trusted confidante, Rex Randall, who had apparently run off with Eddie Miles’ girlfriend to parts unknown. (Phil had dismissed the run away and elope story as so much eyewash but Bernie knew, had reason to know that Eddie was carrying a big torch for the broad and who knows what he might have done with Rex). Rex a guy Phil knew from the days when Rex was managing a guy in Half Moon Bay dope operations and grapping all the ass he could from young things who were ready to do anything to get something for the head-anything. Bernie knew of him but even then knowing about Eddie’s big torch figured that Rex was sleeping out in the bay somewhere with a sack of rocks tied to him.                

So Phil went through the paces, went through the motions of trying to earn his big bonus-attached (not for the Rex part-for the fucking nude pics), and had met Laura the older daughter as he was leaving his sister’s room. He always claimed he never met her then but had been in the General’s bed-side office after having swigged a couple of high-shelf brandies to seal the deal and then left to pursue justice some such bullshit. Although she wasn’t as photograph pretty as her younger sister Carol she was just as wild, her lovely vices gambling and cases of scotched devoured. Needless to say the story gets jumbled up again when Marlin later denied that he tumbled to her bedroom eyes proposition but Norris once again put paid to that lie since early the next morning he had seen Marlin, disheveled, glassy-eyed and looking sexually-sated (how Norris knew that was the case in England where he had learned the butler trade he had had his fill of such meanderings from the nobility that he had been in service  to-said they had the morals of a great white shark-none). The worse part of that tryst with Laura was that he had spilled the beans about the General’s desire to see what had happened to Rex to Eddie Miles whom she was in hock to for gambling debts at his off-shore casino (and as it turned out had been trying to get out from under by fucking Eddie and a couple of his boys to death-yeah, the morals of a shark- a resourceful girl no question).

Marlin after having his fill of the Sternwood young women then “got to work,” hit the library to see about old rare books and their provences since he assumed that the photos of Carol would wind up in some high-end antique bookstore used as a front for select clientele to “borrow” such fare (some of them when the lists became public later friends of the General who must have gloated and a veritable who’s who at the Bay City Golf Club-yeah, the morals of a shark all the way around). (It was only later that Carol got that agent to hustle his photo-ass to the “girlies” once they had been used at Eddie’s trial since they “belonged” to her). Phil did a perfunctory search of all the old-timey bookstores in town, got nowhere and laid low for a few days before telling the General he was hot on the case and told him that he needed some walking around money to go to Eddies’ casino off-shore. Norris set him up with a cool thou-not bad for walking around money-then anyway. 

One night, the first night he ran into one Eddie Miles, he also ran into Laura losing a load at the tables but smiling about it as she gave him a come hither look that would snow (later when they were in closer proximity she offered to take him out to her car for a little off-hand tryst-which after he had finished up with Eddie he gladly took her up on funny how that time appeared on his bill when it came time to close up accounts with Norris. Services rendered. So another glassy-eyed night with a Sternwood sister. He had gotten nowhere asking Eddie Miles where his wife was and about the rumor that she had taken a powder with Rex-the General’s confidante.  Getting nowhere fast on this case. Getting nothing on Eddie either. 

Then the great break-through although it was really only Marlin falling into something after another guy, a guy he could have saved by all the evidence but he had gotten “cold feet” when the deal went down. It seems that one of the clerks, Iris, a comely female clerk that he had taken into the stockroom one rainy afternoon, at Ye Olde Bookstore had had a boyfriend who had been acting as an agent for Eddie Miles in trying to unload Carol’s sulky nude photos. Somehow he had had trouble moving the merchandise and Eddie dumped him-dumped him literally in the bay for some purpose-or np purpose. Oh, not Eddie personally-Edward Miles did not do his own dirty work but had his number one boy, The Camino Kid, a bad-ass no question throw a sack over the boyfriend’s head and put a few stones in the mix and let him sink and sleep with the fishes off the bow of  Eddie’s casino liner. Nice boy. The girlfriend after getting friendly with Phil that afternoon loosened up by a few drinks had spilled the beans about the boyfriend number one after she had got herself another beau. To even the score with Eddie though she was ready to tell Marlin where Eddie’s wife was-for a couple of hundred bucks to blow town with. Marlin agreed and was to meet the new beau, a square little guy who probably was too short for that ravishing clerk.        

                 

That boyfriend number two, Harry, wasn’t any luckier than number one since he was acting as go-between for Iris with Marlin (Iris a girl who had her charms apparently but who always left standing unlike her beaus). They were supposed to meet at Harry’s office but the Camino Kid got there first while Phil was hiding in an anteroom. The Kid’s chore that day to get Harry to clam up about Eddie’s wife’s whereabouts. The little guy held out though-Iris must have had something he had not noticed that afternoon in the stockroom. Yeah, paid with his life for protecting his honey while Marlin stood breathless in the next fucking room. Here is where the wheels turned though. The cops, Bernie and his partner, were tailing the Camino Kid since the Iris’ boyfriend number one washed up on shore tied up in a sack just the way the Camino Kid liked to finish up his handiwork. They were able to follow him to the backroads of Ocean City the next town over where he stopped at an old house set back from the road. Waiting at the door was Eddie Miles’ wife. No sign of Rex though.         

Earlier back at Harry’s office Marlin had gotten out of his deep freeze long enough to follow Bernie’s police vehicle to that lonely country road. That is why Marlin claimed he took the Camino Kid out. That the fire -power that did the Kid in when he resisted arrest and started ban-banging had come from his weapon. Claimed he “saved” Bernie’s partner who was a dead man if he hadn’t shot the Kid first. Since he was using a police special (he had never turned in his gun when he was fired from the cops figuring he would need a weapon as a private dick) who the hell would have known. Bernie knew for a fact that he had winged the Kid and then doubled-down on him. He had heard no additional shots. Chalk one bad guy gone up for Bernie if you are keeping score. That action is what got him in on the deal when the Staties went after Eddie Miles and his henchmen.

As for Rex, well, here is where things get weird, where what the rich or do not do gets sealed with seven seals. Carol, and Marlin should have seen this coming given his own experiences with the girls, had killed Rex one afternoon when he would not give her a tumble. Carol did not like not being obeyed when she had her wanting habits on. That is why Marlin got taken around the world that day he went into the General’s hire. Laura had covered up for her sister-also why he gotten taken around the world by her. They had him figured as a sex-addled guy and they knew their mark. Marlin out of respect for the old man and his troubles with those wild sisters let it ride. Let the old man fade into his endless sleep not knowing he had sired two monsters. Before he left that hillside mansion though he made sure he got his full rate and expenses. That’s the real “skinny” forget all that other self-serving stuff.          

***"A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose"- Gertrude Stein In Exile

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Gertrude Stein.

"A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose"- Gertrude Stein In Exile

BOOK REVIEW

March Is Women’s History Month

The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Vintage Books, New York, 1990

Okay, Gertrude so there was no there, there in Oakland. (I agree, having lived there for a period at a much later time-San Francisco, however, is a different matter). So, by hook or crook, Miss Gertrude Stein gets herself (along with her older brother) by a circuitous route to turn of the century Paris (turn of the 20th century that is) and becomes not only an international literary and cultural figure in her own right but a veritable magnet for every "advanced' bourgeois cultural tendency in the then known Western civilized world. Starting with the nova Paris anti-academy art world as the likes of Picasso, Braque and Matisse and their schools take it by a storm on through to the sparse World War I years when the flower of European culture was almost destroyed to a re-emergence in the aftermath of that war with "lost generation" types like Hemingway and Fitzgerald we get a bird's eye view of important trends in modern cultural history during the first third of the 20th century. And of Stein's own struggle to get the kind of literary recognition she craved and desired.

What we do not get is anything that, even with the looser standard for such endeavors in the beginning of the 21st century, that we recognize as autobiography either of the ostensible subject of the book, Stein's long time companion (to use a quaint term of the time for two women living together) Alice B. Toklas or Ms. Stein herself. Nor as we suppose to. What we are treated to is a `modern' writing sensibility trying to free up the language (and grammatical constrains) from their 19th century moorings. More conventionally we are given a travelogue, gossip column, some helpful hints and some very witty writing that gives tidbits of what Ms. Stein thought of literature, her place in it and the place of others in her literary pantheon.

In some sense this book, while quite readable even today, is not for the faint-hearted, or those who are not modern Western literature majors or readers of something like "The New York Review Of Books". Fortunately I am a devoted reader of that magazine and therefore the seemingly hundreds of literary figures that Stein `name drops' along the way I had at least passing familiarity with. Some of the many art figures that passed through I was less sure of. What is clear is that Ms. Stein's `mobile salon' (for lack of better words to trace this pair's movements) and her literary achievement here is an echo from a bygone era. Nobody today, as least in the circles I run in or want to run in, could stand up to the `precious' visits by English and other celebrities that dropped in Stein's residences. Or the standard variations on the European grand tour by American college students or young marrieds that made a stop obligatory. Or the stifling aimlessness and routinism of many the various denizens of the Paris of the day, famous or not. But in a world that currently suffers from serious disconnects with its cultural past it is interesting to read about those who had time to "do' the literary scene. But, mainly, get this book for some very clever writing by Ms. Stein.

In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-*In Honor Of The Late Bo Diddley-"Who Do You Love?", Indeed

In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-*In Honor Of The Late Bo Diddley-"Who Do You Love?", Indeed

CD REVIEW

The Best of Bo Diddley, Chess Records, 1997

The last time I had occasion to mention the late Bo Diddley in this space was in connection with a series of interviews and performances along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others in Keith Richards' Chuck Berry tribute film "Hail, Hail Rock and Roll." The talk centered, rightly, on the dismal fate of many black recording artists who developed what would become Rock 'n' Roll when the white artists like Elvis took it over and reaped the benefits of a mass audience. Well, those interviews occurred a while ago, back in the 1980's, but Bo's sense of not having been properly recognized I believe remained until his death. Yet, when one thinks of the sounds created by the founders of Rock 'n' Roll can anyone deny that Bo's primal beat was not central to that explosion? I think not.

Here, in one album we have, if not all of Bo's creative work then a good part of it, at least a good place to start. Of course, the classic song Bo Diddley and its offshoots and variations are here. However, the one Diddley song that will probably outlive them all is "Who Do You Love?". Although not a theme song it nevertheless expresses the raw energy of rhythm and blues/ rock/ carib sound like not other. Hell, George Thoroughgood was able to make a whole career on the basis of having covered that song and other of Bo's work (and to be fair, covering the work of Elmore James and Hound Dog Taylor as well).

And that is a good point to finish on. The really great rockers, and Bo is in that company, unlike the one-shot johnnies get covered because their work expresses something that someone else later wishes to high heaven that they had created. (George has been quoted directly on that point.) Finally, I give the same warning here as others have given in their comments about the sameness of this Chess 50th Anniversary CD from 1997 and a current one entitled "The Definitive Bo Diddley Collection" issued in 2007. Get one or the other and save those pennies to get more of Bo's work. "I said- I'm just 22 and I don't mind dying. Who do you love?" Thanks for that line Bo. Kudos


Who Do You Love?
Bo Diddley

I walked 47 miles of barbed wire,
Used a cobra snake for a neck tie.
Got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made out of rattlesnake hide.
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of human skulls.
Now come on darling let's take a little walk, tell me,
Who do you love,
Who do you love, Who do you love, Who do you love.

Arlene took me by the hand,
And said oooh eeeh daddy I understand.
Who do you love,
Who do you love, Who do you love, Who do you love.
The night was black and the night was blue,
And around the corner an ice wagon flew.
A bump was a hittin' lord and somebody screemed,
You should have heard just what I seen.
Who do you love, Who do you love, Who do you love, Who do you love.

Arleen took me by my hand, she said Ooo-ee Bo you know I understand
I got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind,
I lived long enough and I ain't scared of dying.

Who do you love (4x's)

by Bo Diddley

Out In The Anti-War Night-Reflections On The Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade-2015

Out In The Anti-War Night-Reflections On The Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade-2015

 

[Saint Patrick’s Day 2012 represented something of a high point in the efforts of Veterans for Peace, their peace and social justice activist allies, their gay LGBTQ community allies, to either gain entrance in the “official parade” which should have been opened to all or to be given a reasonable start time either immediately before or after the “official” parade. In 2013 and 2014 they wound up finishing their peace parade almost in the dark to half empty streets filled party-going drunks and assorted misfits. In 2015 after some very sour and self-serving maneuvers by City Hall and the official parade committee the peace parade had to be cancelled as it will be again this year. Damn.]

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

Funny Lenny Baxter had not seen Frank Jackman for few years, not since those halcyon days antiwar days in 2006, 2007 he guessed when they had met at a meeting over at U/Mass-Boston to plan an anniversary anti-war march around stopping the continuing Iraq war. Yes, now that he thought about it, it was 2006 since they had been planning a third anniversary march. Frank was closely associated with an anti-war veterans group, Veterans For Peace (VFP), and Lenny had been part of an ad hoc committee that was composed of a number of anti-war activists ranging from Quakerly pacifists (little old ladies in tennis sneakers his had called them, kindly called them, from some ancient mother mention about the type when he was a kid) to stanch anti-imperialists, and maybe a few old-time socialists and communists too. Since Lenny was a veteran as well, although of the first Iraq war back in 1991 not the second, he had gravitated toward Frank’s VFPers and had gotten to know Frank and his fellow vets pretty well although they were mainly from the Vietnam War era. They had worked together that year and through 2007.  Then things kind of just fell apart in the anti-war milieu and they had drifted apart. Lenny had subsequently had a few personal problems, a broken marriage, a small drug problem that might have gotten bigger had he not sobered up, and some injuries, mental and physical and so he had not been active since that period.

Not so Frank  as Lenny approached him at the Park Street MBTA  in downtown Boston  on the Saturday before Saint Patrick’s Day where he was passing out those never-ending flyers that seem to go with passing through the downtown territory. Lenny had not been downtown, at least on a Saturday, for a long time so he had forgotten about the mishmash of  cause barkers (with or without soapboxes like some old time Eugene Debs figures or Wobblie flame-throwers ), harkers (the “good word” people harmless Christian sect cranks), card-sharkers  (more nefarious hustlers, drifters, grifters, and midnight shifters, intermingled with the homeless who have historically made the area their “home,” and flat-out crazies released against all good caution from some institution ) and the like who populate the area in front of that station on any given Saturday. Frank was passing out flyers informing one and all that VFP and others, other peace and progressive activist groups, were staging a parade, a peace parade, the fifth annual one according to the flyer, and to Frank’s barking that information over a jerry-bilt mic system he had in front of him in South Boston before the regular Saint Patrick’s Day parade and was pitching that everybody was welcomed to watch or join in on that event the following afternoon.       

After Lenny identified himself to Frank and they shook hands Frank invited Lenny over for the next day’s event. Lenny, having been out of the loop for a while, asked Frank what the whole thing was about. Frank quickly pointed out that a couple of years before, maybe three, VFP had applied to the organizers of the official parade to participant as a contingent. They had been denied ostensibly because the organization was political or some such excuse. In reply they had quickly organized a counter-parade that year inviting other groups, notably the gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-sexual community that had also been historically excluded from the official parade (Lenny knew some of the details of that exclusive from events back in the 1990s) and marched after the official parade. The upcoming event, with added details that Frank did not elaborate on and told Lenny to read about in the flyer, was a continuation of that new-found tradition. Frank pressed the issue of Lenny’s attendance along with any other people he might know from the old days to come and march. Lenny said he would try to make the event.    

As Lenny walked away from the station and headed toward Government Center to catch the Blue Line home he pondered whether he would go or not. He had not been politically active for some time what with this and that personal problem, had not followed what was going on much, and was not sure exactly the point of marching separately in a parade right before or after another parade because you had been excluded from that other parade. Why not just go elsewhere and have your own parade at your own time and  place like a million others have done, including many of those excluded groups signed up as sponsors for tomorrow’s event.  Moreover he was not sure, not sure at all, that he wanted to return to Southie, return to place where he had long ago family connections and where more recently, before he got sober, he had some drug deal problems. As he entered the Blue Line train and sat down he started to read the details of the history of the Peace Parade efforts. As he rode home some stirrings from the old days told him he should go the next day, and so he resolved to do so.

The plan according to Frank and the leaflet was for the Peace Parade to step off at 12:00 PM, a while before the official parade began (VFP and the others were under legal restraint to stay one mile in front of or behind the official parade per some judge’s order) from the corner of West Broadway and D Street. Lenny decided to go a little early to see if any of his old activist friends were still around and maybe march with them. (He felt funny about the idea of marching up front with VFP). As he headed down D Street from the Convention Center with throngs of people, most dressed in some form of patriotic Irish-flamed green attire, he noticed the VFP flags fluttering in the wind that told him he was at the staging area. If that sight hadn’t informed he could see and hear Frank, good old Frank with his VFP tee-shirt on and greens ribbons embossed with Easter 1916 on them, bellowing out from that same jerry-bilt mic seen the previous day at Park Street for one and all to get ready for the peace parade. He went up to Frank to “report in” and they again shook hands and knowing Frank was busy Lenny moved on. He thereafter milled around the crowd forming up to look for old faces.

As Lenny was milling around he did run into some old activists from the anti-imperialist committee who held a banner proclaiming No New War In Iraq and after introductions and chit-chat he decided to march with that contingent. March if they ever got going. He had been to enough marches to know that they never start on time, maybe on principle, maybe as a matter of karma, but in any case they were always late but this one was burdensomely so.   

While he was talking with his old time associates before the step off they informed him that the previous year’s march had been good, the day had been unseasonably warm, unlike this day, and the crowds or some substantial parts of them had stayed to watch the second parade. They had also told him that the first year there had been about five hundred participants (on short notice) and the previous year about two thousand with bands and other parade- type things. When the stepped off he looked back to estimate this year’s crowd he did not feel, at least to his eye, that there were that number here this day. (Frank had empathized at Park Street that they needed to increase the numbers this year to make a political point to the official organizers and to the city.) There were certainly not more than two thousand and he was a pretty good judge of crowd sizes from his pervious anti-war work. So he was feeling some trepidation as they stepped off.       

As they made the turn from D Street onto West Broadway he noticed that masses of people, mostly young people, were moving down toward the Broadway MBTA station which indicated they were heading home. He again felt something was wrong, or maybe not wrong so much as against the expectations he had told about. As they marched up West Broadway there were small clots of attentive by-standers here and there but mainly he noted people were moving either toward the bars, restaurants, stores, or to the side streets for parties and whatever is done on Saint Patrick’s Day by the faithful. That same, frankly, indifference, was felt throughout West Broadway and then down through East Broadway as well. Something did not connect, something was not happening, and he could feel it in the sullen manner of marchers as they passed the emptying streets as they reached the neighborhood section part to the march. What topped things off though was the walk down Dorchester Avenue, a wide thoroughfare toward the end of the parade, where there were very, very few spectators.

At the end the VFPers had formed up on each side of the street to thank the marchers and band members for coming and he ran into Frank and asked him his assessment of the event. Frank said, “We have to figure out another way to reach people, this thing was a failure, and will not help our message.”  Lenny told Frank he was glad he had marched although he shared some of Frank’s political estimate. Frank brightened at that remark a little as they shook hands again. Lenny as he headed toward the Andrew MBTA station starting thinking, thinking  about how and where the excluded might celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day more fruitfully next year. Lenny was back…