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
Centro Presente invites you to a PEACEFUL AND URGENT PROTEST!
IMMIGRANT RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ARE NOT NEGOTIABLE!
WHERE:
Massachusetts State House, 24 Beacon St, Boston, MA
WHEN: Tomorrow Friday at 11:00 a.m.
Governor, Charlie Baker
STOP criminalizing the
immigrant community.
Was it only two weeks ago that Governor Baker announced the formation of a Latino Advisory Committee? And now he is coming out in favor of undermining community policing efforts, opening the door for potential racial profiling, and providing support for the Trump Administration's hateful campaign of scapegoating, fear and bigotry. Not all Latinos are immigrants but the vast majority of immigrants and undocumented immigrants are, and are they not worthy of consideration by their Governor?
If the Governor will not stand up for the basic human rights of undocumented people in our Commonwealth, then we call upon the leaders in the Legislature, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate President Stan Rosenberg to do right by their immigrant forebears and uphold what the state's highest court has already declared -- federal law must be enforced by federal authorities NOT state and local law enforcement and court systems.
We condemn all types of stereotyping and criminalization of our communities.
*Dump The Bosses Off Your Backs: Putting Class Struggle Back On The Agenda*
*Thursday, August 3 – 6:00 p.m.*
*Somerville Public Library*
*79 Highland Avenue, Somerville*
*
How work and society were organized prior to the rise of capitalism
*
How the wage system was viewed by workers as it arose
*
How workers organized and fought to oppose it, particularly the insurrectionary general strikes of 1877, May Day 1886, Pullman, Homestead, Lawrence, etc.
*
The Knights of Labor, the IWW, the role and nature of the AF of L and the CIO
*
The NLRA and the changes it wrought in the labor movement
*
The terrain since the Patco disaster of 1981
*
How we can recover the ability to fight back
Sponsored by Boston Labor Solidarity Committee (617) 702-2784
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has
happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search
looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the
bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean
indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to
its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the
“fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat”
generation. Beat, beat of the jazzed up
drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what
somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money,
women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the
desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you
will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at
home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell,
let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy
Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a
dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast
on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the
club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean
streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five
cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and
cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as
well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by
the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the
wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and
Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I
like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation
documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down
to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a
few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in
connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned. Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer
odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and
out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that
Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in
the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could
give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those
cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly
attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that
aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers,
conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the
Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of
other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same
generation as them but of a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had
caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and
even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had
for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part).
Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through
the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not
hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains,
mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys,
other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their
niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to
their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in
the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army
and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years
upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack
Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class
kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking
up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at
the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to
struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on
your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the
James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us
boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough
and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you
don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe”
from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high
school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although
Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for
books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most
of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds
would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as
silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader
then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did
not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all
the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of
intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who
was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than
otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his
head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to
do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his
wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which
Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll.
So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th
anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.
******
From The Pen Of Zack James
Josh Breslin, as he drove in the pitch black night up California Highway 156 to connect with U.S. 101 and the San Francisco Airport back to Boston was thinking furious thought, fugitive thoughts about what had happened on this his umpteenth trip to California. Thoughts that would carry him to the airport road and car rental return on arrival there and then after the swift airbus to his terminal the flight home to Logan and then up to his old hometown of Olde Saco to which he had recently returned. Returned after long years of what he called “shaking the dust of the old town” off his shoes like many a guy before him, and after too. But now along the road to the airport he had thought that it had been a long time since he had gotten up this early to head, well, to head anywhere. He had in an excess of caution decided to leave at three o’clock in the morning from the hotel he had been staying at in downtown Monterrey near famous Cannery Row (romantically and literarily famous as a scene in some of John Steinbeck’s novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as a site of some of the stop-off 1950s “beat” stuff if for no other reason than the bus stopped there before you took a taxi to Big Sur or thumbed depending on your finances and as famed 1960s Pops musical locale where the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rose to the cream on top although now just another tourist magnet complete with Steinbeck this and that for sullen shoppers and diners who found their way east of Eden) and head up to the airport in order to avoid the traffic jams that he had inevitably encountered on previous trips around farm country Gilroy (the garlic or onion capital of the world, maybe both, but you got that strong smell in any case), and high tech Silicon Valley where the workers are as wedded to their automobiles as any other place in America which he too would pass on the way up.
This excess of caution not a mere expression of an old man who is mired in a whole cycle of cautions from doctors to lawyers to ex-wives to current flame (Lana Malloy by name) since his flight was not to leave to fly Boston until about noon and even giving the most unusual hold-ups and delays in processings at the airport he would not need to arrive there to return his rented car until about ten. So getting up some seven hours plus early on a trip of about one hundred miles or so and normally without traffic snarls about a two hour drive did seem an excess of caution.
But something else was going on in Josh’s mind that pitch black night (complete with a period of dense fog about thirty miles up as he hit a seashore belt and the fog just rolled in without warnings) for he had had the opportunity to have avoided both getting up early and getting snarled in hideous California highway traffic by the expedient of heading to the airport the previous day and taken refuge in a motel that was within a short distance of the airport, maybe five miles when he checked on his loyalty program hotel site. Josh though had gone down to Monterey after a writers’ conference in San Francisco which had ended a couple of days before in order travel to Big Sur and some ancient memories there had stirred something in him that he did not want to leave the area until the last possible moment so he had decided to stay in Monterrey and leave early in the morning for the airport.
That scheduled departure plan set Josh then got an idea in his head, an idea that had driven him many times before when he had first gone out to California in the summer of love, 1967 version, that he would dash to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun came up and then head to the airport. He had to laugh, as he threw an aspirin down his throat and then some water to wash the tablet down in order to ward off a coming migraine headache that the trip, that this little trip to Big Sur that he had finished the day before, the first time in maybe forty years he had been there had him acting like a young wild kid again.
Funny as well that only a few days before he had been tired, very tired a condition that came on him more often of late as one of the six billion “growing old sucks” symptoms of that process, after the conference. Now he was blazing trails again, at least in his mind. The conference on the fate of post-modern writing in the age of the Internet with the usual crowd of literary critics and other hangers-on in tow to drink the free liquor and eat the free food had been sponsored by a major publishing company, The Globe Group. He had written articles for The Blazing Sun when the original operation had started out as a shoestring alternative magazine in the Village in about 1968, had started out as an alternative to Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, an alternative to all the safe subscription magazines delivered to leafy suburban homes and available at urban newsstands for the nine to fivers of the old world for those who, by choice, had no home, leafy or otherwise, and no serious work history.
Or rather the audience pitched to had no fixed abode, since the brethren were living some vicarious existences out of a knapsack just like Josh and his friends whom he collected along the way had been doing when he joined Captain Crunch’s merry pranksters (small case to distinguish them from the more famous Ken Kesey mad monk Merry Pranksters written about in their time by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) the first time he came out and found himself on Russian Hill in Frisco town looking for dope and finding this giant old time yellow brick road converted school bus parked in a small park there and made himself at home, after they made him welcome (including providing some sweet baby James dope that he had been searching for since the minute he hit town).
Still the iterant, the travelling nation hippie itinerants of the time to draw a big distinction from the winos, drunks, hoboes, bums and tramps who populated the “jungle” camps along railroad tracks, arroyos, river beds and under bridges who had no use for magazines or newspapers except as pillows against a hard night’s sleep along a river or on those unfriendly chairs at the Greyhound bus station needed, wanted to know what was going on in other parts of “youth nation,” wanted to know what new madness was up, wanted to know where to get decent dope, and who was performing and where in the acid-rock etched night (groups like the Dead, the Doors, the Airplane leading the pack then). That magazine had long ago turned the corner back to Time/Life/Look/Newsweek land but the publisher Mac McDowell who still sported mutton chop whiskers as he had in the old days although these days he has them trimmed by his stylist, Marcus, at a very steep price at his mansion up in Marin County always invited him out, and paid his expenses, whenever there was a conference about some facet of the 1960s that the younger “post-modernist” writers in his stable (guys like Kenny Johnson the author of the best-seller Thrillwere asking about as material for future books about the heady times they had been too young, in some cases way to young to know about personally or even second-hand). So Mac would bring out wiry, wily old veterans like Josh to spice up what after all would be just another academic conference and to make Mac look like some kind of hipster rather than the balding “sell-out" that he had become (which Josh had mentioned in his conference presentation but which Mac just laughed at, laughed at just as long as he can keep that Marin mansion. Still Josh felt he provided some useful background stuff now that you can find lots of information about that 1960s “golden age” (Mac’s term not his) to whet your appetite on Wikipedia or more fruitfully by going on YouTube where almost all the music of the time and other ephemera can be watched with some benefit.
Despite Josh’s tiredness, and a bit of crankiness as well when the young kid writers wanted to neglect the political side, the Vietnam War side, the rebellion against parents side of what the 1960s had been about for the lowdown on the rock festival, summer of love, Golden Gate Park at sunset loaded with dope and lack of hubris side, he decided to take a few days to go down to see Big Sur once again. He figured who knew when he would get another chance and at the age of seventy-two the actuarial tables were calling his number, or wanted to. He would have preferred to have taken the trip down with Lana, a hometown woman, whom he had finally settled in with up in Olde Saco after three, count them, failed marriages, a parcel of kids most of whom turned out okay, plenty of college tuitions and child support after living in Watertown just outside of Boston for many years.
Lana a bit younger than he and not having been “washed clean” as Josh liked to express the matter in the hectic 1960s and not wanting to wait around a hotel room reading a book or walking around Frisco alone while he attended the conference had begged off on the trip, probably wisely although once he determined to go to Big Sur and told her where he was heading she got sort of wistful. She had just recently read with extreme interest about Big Sur through her reading of Jack Kerouac’s 1960s book of the same name and had asked Josh several times before that if they went to California on a vacation other than San Diego they would go there. The long and short of that conversation was a promise by Josh to take her the next time, if there was a next time (although he did not put the proposition in exactly those terms).
Immediately after the conference Josh headed south along U.S. 101 toward Monterrey where he would stay and which would be his final destination that day since he would by then be tired and it would be nighttime coming early as the November days got shorter. He did not want to traverse the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1 for the natives) at night since he had forgotten his distance glasses, another one of those six billion reasons why getting old sucks. Had moreover not liked to do that trip along those hairpin turns which the section heading toward Big Sur entailed riding the guardrails even back in his youth since one time having been completely stoned on some high-grade Panama Red he had almost sent a Volkswagen bus over the top when he missed a second hairpin turn after traversing the first one successfully. So he would head to Monterrey and make the obligatory walk to Cannery Row for dinner and in order to channel John Steinbeck and the later “beats” who would stop there before heading to fallout Big Sur.
The next morning Josh left on the early side not being very hungry after an excellent fish dinner at Morley’s a place that had been nothing but a hash house diner in the old days where you could get serviceable food cheap because the place catered to the shore workers and sardine factory workers who made Cannery Row famous, or infamous, when it was a working Row. He had first gone there after reading about the place in something Jack Kerouac wrote and was surprised that the place actually existed, had liked the food and the prices and so had gone there a number of times when his merry pranksters and other road companions were making the obligatory Frisco-L.A. runs up and down the coast. These days Morley’s still had excellent food but perhaps you should bring a credit card with you to insure you can handle the payment and avoid “diving for pearls” as a dish-washer to pay off your debts.
As Josh started up the engine of his rented Acura, starting up on some of the newer cars these days being a matter of stepping on the brake and then pushing a button where the key used to go in this keyless age, keyless maybe a metaphor of the age as well, he had had to ask the attendant at the airport how to start the thing since his own car was a keyed-up Toyota of ancient age, he began to think back to the old days when he would make this upcoming run almost blind-folded. That term maybe a metaphor for that age. He headed south to catch the Pacific Coast Highway north of Carmel and thought he would stop at Point Lobos, the place he had first encountered the serious beauty of the Pacific Coast rocks and ocean wave splash reminding him of back East in Olde Saco, although more spectacular. Also the place when he had first met Moonbeam Sadie.
He had had to laugh when he thought about that name and that woman since a lot of what the old days, the 1960s had been about were tied up with his relationship to that woman, the first absolutely chemically pure version of a “hippie chick” that he had encountered. At that time Josh had been on the Captain Crunch merry prankster yellow brick road bus for a month or so and a couple of days before they had started heading south from Frisco to Los Angeles to meet up with a couple of other yellow brick road buses where Captain Crunch knew some kindred. As they meandered down the Pacific Coast Highway they would stop at various places to take in the beauty of the ocean since several of the “passengers” had never seen the ocean or like Josh had never seen the Pacific in all its splendor.
In those days, unlike now when the park closes at dusk as Josh found out, you could park your vehicle overnight and take in the sunset and endlessly listen to the surf splashing up to rocky shorelines until you fell asleep. So when their bus pulled into the lot reserved for larger vehicles there were a couple of other clearly “freak” buses already there. One of them had Moonbeam as a “passenger” whom he would meet later that evening when all of “youth nation” in the park decided to have a dope- strewn party. Half of the reason for joining up on bus was for a way to travel, for a place to hang your hat but it was also the easiest way to get on the dope trail since somebody, usually more than one somebody was “holding.” And so that night they partied, partied hard.
About ten o’clock Josh high as a kite from some primo hash saw a young woman, tall, sort of skinny (he would find out later she had not been so slim previously except the vagaries of the road food and a steady diet of “speed” had taken their toll), long, long brown hair, a straw hat on her head, a long “granny” dress and barefooted the very picture of what Time/Life/Look would have used as their female “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences coming out of one of the buses. She had apparently just awoken, although that seemed impossible given the noise level from the collective sound systems and the surf, and was looking for some dope to level her off and headed straight to Josh. Josh had at that time long hair tied in a ponytail, at least that night, a full beard, wearing a cowboy hat on his head, a leather jacket against the night’s cold, denim blue jeans and a pair of moccasins not far from what Time/Life/Look would have used as their male “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences so Moonbeam’s heading Josh’s way was not so strange. Moreover Josh was holding a nice stash of hashish. Without saying a word Josh passed the hash pipe to Moonbeam and by that mere action started a “hippie” romance that would last for the next several months until Moonbeam decided she was not cut out for the road, couldn’t take the life, and headed back to Lima, Ohio to sort out her life.
But while they were on their “fling” Moonbeam taught “Cowboy Jim,” her new name for him, many things. Josh thought it was funny thinking back how wedded to the idea of changing their lives they were back then including taking new names, monikers, as if doing so would create the new world by osmosis or something. He would have several other monikers like the “Prince of Love,” the Be-Bop Kid (for his love of jazz and blues), and Sidewalk Slim (for always writing something in chalk wherever he had sidewalk space to do so) before he left the road a few years later and stayed steady with his journalism after that high, wide, wild life lost it allure as the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and people drifted back to their old ways. But Cowboy Jim was what she called Josh and he never minded her saying that.
See Moonbeam really was trying to seek the newer age, trying to find herself as they all were more or less, but also let her better nature come forth. And she did in almost every way from her serious study of Buddhism, her yoga (well before that was fashionable among the young), and her poetry writing. But most of all in the kind, gentle almost Quaker way that she dealt with people, on or off drugs, the way she treated her Cowboy. Josh had never had such a gentle lover, never had such a woman who not only tried to understand herself but to understand him. More than once after she left the bus (she had joined the Captain Crunch when the bus left Point Lobos a few days later now that she was Cowboy’s sweetheart) he had thought about heading to Lima and try to work something out but he was still seeking something out on the Coast that held him back until her memory faded a bit and he lost the thread of her).
Yeah, Point Lobos held some ancient memories and that day the surf was up and Mother Nature was showing one and all who cared to watch just how relentless she could be against the defenseless rocks and shoreline. If he was to get to Big Sur though he could not dally since he did not want to be taking that hairpin stretch at night. So off he went. Nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur, naturally he had to stop at the Bixby Bridge to marvel at the vista but also at the man-made marvel of traversing that canyon below with this bridge in 1932. Josh though later that it was not exactly correct that nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur but that was not exactly true for he was white-knuckled driving for that several mile stretch where the road goes up mostly and there are many hairpin turns with no guardrail and the ocean is a long way down. He thought he really was becoming an old man in his driving so cautiously that he had veer off to the side of the road to let faster cars pass by. In the old days he would drive the freaking big ass yellow brick road school bus along that same path and think nothing of it except for a time after that Volkswagen almost mishap. Maybe he was dope-brave then but it was disconcerting to think how timid he had become.
Finally in Big Sur territory though nothing really untoward happen as he traversed those hairpin roads until they finally began to straighten out near Molera State Park and thereafter Pfeiffer Beach. Funny in the old days there had been no creek to ford at Molera but the river had done its work over forty years through drought and downpour so in order to get to the ocean about a mile’s walk away Josh had to take off his running shoes and socks to get across the thirty or forty feet of rocks and pebbles to the other side (and of course the same coming back a pain in the ass which he would have taken in stride back then when he shoe of the day was the sandal easily slipped off and on) but well worth the effort even if annoying since the majestic beauty of that rock-strewn beach was breath-taking a much used word and mostly inappropriate but not this day. Maybe global warming or maybe just the relentless crush of the seas on a timid waiting shoreline but most of the beach was un-walkable across the mountain of stones piled up and so he took the cliff trail part of the way before heading back the mile to his car in the parking lot to get to Pfeiffer Beach before too much longer.
Pfeiffer Beach is another one of those natural beauties that you have to do some work to get, almost as much work as getting to Todo El Mundo further up the road when he and his corner boys from Olde Saco had stayed for a month after they had come out to join him on the bus once he informed them that they needed to get to the West fast because all the world was changing out there. This work entailed not walking to the beach but by navigating a big car down the narrow one lane rutted dirt road two miles to the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot since now the place had been turned into a park site as well. The road was a white-knuckles experience although not as bad as the hairpins on the Pacific Coast Highway but as with Molera worth the effort, maybe more so since Josh could walk that wind-swept beach although some of the cross-currents were fierce when the ocean tide slammed the defenseless beach and rock formation. A couple of the rocks had been ground down so by the relentless oceans that donut holes had been carved in them.
Here Josh put down a blanket on a rock so that he could think back to the days when he had stayed here, really at Todo el Mundo but there was no beach there just some ancient eroded cliff dwellings where they had camped out and not be botheredso everybody would climb on the bus which they would park by the side of the road on Big Sur Highway and walk down to Pfeiffer Beach those easy then two miles bringing the day’s rations of food, alcohol and drugs (not necessarily in that order) in rucksacks and think thing nothing of the walk and if they were too “wasted” (meaning drunk or high) they would find a cave and sleep there. That was the way the times were, nothing unusual then although the sign at the park entrance like at Point Lobos (and Molera) said overnight parking and camping were prohibited. But that is the way these times are.
Josh had his full share of ancient dreams come back to him that afternoon. The life on the bus, the parties, the literary lights who came by who had known Jack Kerouac , Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the remnant of beats who had put the place on the map as a cool stopping point close enough to Frisco to get to in a day but ten thousand miles from city cares and woes, the women whom he had loved and who maybe loved him back although he/they never stayed together long enough to form any close relationship except for Butterfly Swirl and that was a strange scene. Strange because Butterfly was a surfer girl who was “slumming” on the hippie scene for a while and they had connected on the bus except she finally decided that the road was not for her just like Moonbeam, as almost everybody including Josh figured out in the end, and went back to her perfect wave surfer boy down in La Jolla after a few months.
She replied with a wicked smile that her name was Morning Blossom, didn’t he like that name. [Yes.] She had been born and raised in Big Sur and planned to stay there because she couldn’t stand the hassles (her term) of the cities, places like San Francisco where she had gone to school for a while at San Francisco State. Josh thought to himself that he knew what was coming next although he let Morning Blossom have her say. Her parents had moved to Big Sur in 1969 and had started home-steading up in the hills. They have been part of a commune before she was born but that was all over with by the time she was born and so her parents struggled on the land alone. They never left, and never wanted to leave. Seldom left Big Sur and still did not.
Josh said to himself, after saying wow, he had finally found one of the lost tribes that wandered out into the wilderness back in the 1960s and were never heard from again. And here they were still plugging away at whatever dream drove them back then. He and others who had chronicled in some way the 1960s had finally found a clue to what had happened to the brethren. But as he got up from the counter, paid his bill, and left a hefty tip, he though he still had that trip out here next time with Lana to get through. He was looking forward to that adventure now though.
The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s “Strike” (1925) In Mind
DVD Review
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
Strike, starring a cast of hundreds of working people and others, directed by Serge Eisenstein, 1925
No question, no question at all that some political films whether they were intended as propaganda for a certain viewpoint as with the film under review, Russian mad man filmmaker Serge Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Strike, or because as the story line developed everybody was compelled to think through the implications of the cover-up and preclude to coup in a film like Costa-Garvas’ Z remain in our consciousness long after mere entertainment films have faded from view. Here is the beauty of Eisenstein’s work whether with Strike or in an effort like Potemkin, the one with the famous baby carriage scene on the Odessa Steps. The medium is the message to steal a phrase from an old-time social media commentator like Marshall McLuhan. The whole thing is done, powerfully done, with nothing but absolutely stunning cinematography, a few signboards (in Russian with English subtitles), and some very interesting and varied mood music which if I am not mistaken included some jazz theme stuff from Duke Ellington, and if not him then definitely some jazz riffs along with that inevitable classical music that one would have expected from a Russian filmmaker who grabbed what he could from the Russian Five.
Now the question of who a film is directed at is usually pretty much just to lure in general audiences, maybe if it is cartoonish then kids but usually general audiences. Eisenstein in this film though is directing his efforts to working people in order for them to draw some important lessons about the class struggle. Of course Eisenstein was working shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 in his country and so he probably was more or less committed to this type of film in the interests of the Soviet government and of the world revolution that was still formally what the Bolsheviks and their international allies were all about. (I might add though that a later film about Ivan the Terrible had the same fine cinematic qualities and that was not particularly directed at the world’s working classes but to ancient Russian patriotic fervor as the smell of war, war on the doorstep became apparent.) That drawing of lessons about what happened during the strike is the force that drives the film.
Here is how this one played out in all its glory and infamy. The workers at a Russian factory of unknown location and for that matter of unknown production had been beaten down by the greedy capitalists and stockholders, had had no say in what they made and how much dough they made. (The scenes with the greedy capitalists are a treasure, something out of any leftist’s caricature of the old time robber barons complete with fat bellies, cigars and top hats). Like any situation where tensions are strung out to the limit it did not take a lot to produce a reason for a strike for a better shake in this wicked old world. Here it was an honest workman’s being accused of a theft which he couldn’t defend himself against and so in shame he committed suicide. After have previously spent several weeks talking about taking an action to better their conditions the leaders of the underground “strike committee” decided to have everybody “down tools.” (The scene of this action with a rolling shutdown as section after section left their benches was breathtaking.)
Of course in turn of the century (20th century) Russia (and elsewhere) the capitalists were as vicious as one would expect of a new class of exploiters dealing here with people, men and women, just off the farm and so in no mood to grant such things as an eight-hour day (a struggle that we in America are very familiar with from the Haymarket Martyrs whose chief demand a couple of decades before the time of this film was for that same eight hour day) and a big wage increase. So the committee of capitalists and their hangers-on gave a blanket “no.” Said the hell with you to the strikers.
The aftermath of this refusal is where the real lessons of this film are to drawn. Needless to say the capitalists were willing, more than willing to starve the workers into submission (the scenes of some workers pawning off their worldly possession for food for the kids, for themselves are quite moving).But not only were they willing to starve the mass of workers back to the factory but did everything in their power to break the strike by other means. First and foremost to send spies out to stir up trouble in order to get the class unity broken, then tried to get some weak-links to betray the movement from within, and if that didn’t work then try might and main to round up by any way possible the leaders of the strike in order to behead the movement. In the end though they were not above using their “Pharaohs,” their mounted cops and troops to suppress the whole thing. In the final scene after the cops and troops have done their murderous assaults on unarmed strikers the corpses spread out widely on the massacre field tell anybody who wasn’t sure about the role of the cops and troops in preserving the social order of the rulers all they need to know about the way the strike was defeated.
From what I could gather from the last signboard (one which mentioned the Lena gold strike which was I believe was suppressed in 1912) the time period of this strike was between the 1905 revolution that went down in flames and the victorious revolution in 1917. The implications of the failure of the strike, of the need to take the state power, were thus through Eisenstein’s big lenses there for all to see. Hey, even if you don’t draw any political conclusions from this film just watch to see what they mean they say a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. Eisenstein has a thousand such pictures that will fascinate and repel you.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned. Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.
Book Review
On The Road, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1957
As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s seminal ‘travelogue’, “On The Road”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space.
Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. They all show up, one way or another (under fictional names, of course), in this book. So that is why we today are under the sign of “On The Road”.
I have also mentioned elsewhere in this space that my appreciation of Jack Kerouac did not come from being a latter-day devotee of his spontaneous prose writing style or his standoffish, sideline view of life and consciously apolitical lifestyle, as was emphasized in a famous segment on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” public television show where he went out of his boozy way to dump on the counter-cultural movement (“hippies”, okay) of the 1960s. From early on in my youth I was more likely to be immersed in reading things like “The Communist Manifesto” (if only to dismiss it out of hand-then) and had no time for reading a “beat” travelogue like “On The Road” although I was personally struggling along those same lines to ‘find myself’ (sound familiar?) . Later I would devour the thing (repeatedly) along with the rest of his major works like “Dharma Bums", "Visions Of Cody”. “Big Sur”, “Doctor Sax” and others.
To appreciate Kerouac and understand his mad drive for adventure and to write about it, speedily but precisely, you have to start with “On The Road”. There have been a fair number of ‘searches' for the meaning of the American experience starting, I believe, with Whitman. However, each generation that takes on that task needs a spokesperson and Jack Kerouac, in the literary realm at least, filled that bill not only for his own generation that came of age in the immediate post-World War II era, but mine as well that came of age in the 1960s (and perhaps on later generations, as well, but I can only speculate on that idea here).
The big different between Whitman and Kerouac though for me was that those old pent-up energies, frustrations and fears (of aging, of not having sex, of the bomb, of industrial society, etc.) of Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s character), the legendary Dean Moriarty (the real life “beat”/hippie legend Neal Cassady), Carlos Marx (super-poet Allen Ginsberg) and the supporting cast were familiar, very familiar. I would argue that such a story could only have been written at that time when automobiles, highways and a good “thumb”, or fast feet to “ride the blinds” met , and we have been living off the crumbs of that adventure ever since. Not bad, Jack, not bad at all.
Note: I, on re-reading the book very recently, was struck by something that never even came to my attention when I first read the book in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and on later re-readings. Although this may be a 'search' for America it is very much a man’s book, young or old. The women in the book, and I believe in the “beat” movement itself, seemed to be mere appendages of some male, or washing dishes or as sex objects. Now this book was written well before the rise of the women’s liberation movement and one would not expect to see a great deal of male sensitivity, especially from a guy coming out of the French-Canadian/Catholic milieu of a working class mill town of the 1940s and 1950s. However, I would be interested in knowing how women today, or who read it back then, would react to it. Mainly, in my circle, the women think, with the obvious acknowledgement of the politically incorrect caveats mentioned above, that it is great literature. I agree.
