A View From The Left-For Labor/Black Mobilizations to Stop the Fascists!-Build The Anti-Fascist United Front

[Frank Jackman comment September 9, 2017: on a number of ocassions I have stated in this space thta I place some material here from other generally left-wing perspectives without comment that the liberaland radical public might be interested in. I have also noted that some material does not get placed here if I think it is off-the-wall or just weird (which seldom happens as it turns out from a look at past practice.    Somtimes and here is one of them I stand in solidarity with the piece posted. If have placed a post related to this same issue as a sort of solidarity introduction refelcting my own views.]   In The Aftermath Of Charlottesville-Remember The 1960s Freedom Riders And You Will Understand Why We Hate The KKK (and their ilk on the Alt-Right) Frank Jackman comment:    I have just spent the weekend making myself hoarse, once again, over the issue of “free speech for White Nationalists, Nazis, KKK, Alt-Right and whatever other para-military operations work under the assumption that “history is on their side.” (I will use the term Alt-Right hereafter as the generic expression for this right-wing rabble.) On their side programmatically with their calls for race war, ethnic cleansing, genocide and political atomization and destruction of any political opposition. Hell any opposition at all under the premise that if you are not with me then you are against me (somewhat the way their “fifth columnist” President Trump operates in his universe). The reason for the hoarse throat was my attendance at the hugely successful counter-protest to the tiny “free speech” rally at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common put on by the Alt-Right. (Hugely successful as the first in probably a long line of protests and other actions by being well-organized unlike Charlottesville where the Alt-Right out organized the counter-protesters and showing a strong sense of solidarity with the anti-fascist united front being formed now).              I had mentioned in a series of pieces advertising the counter-protest on Saturday August 19, 2017 on the Common that a number of issues had to be clarified and thought through about how to best fight the emerging Alt-Right threat. In short to examine and learn from the lessons of history. The first, and for right now, the key issue is to understand the “enemy” and its program. That entails further understanding that no self-respecting anti-fascist activist should even consider defending the Alt-Right’s right to free speech as a measure of elementary political hygiene. We of the anti-fascist resistance are under no obligation to accept the Alt-Right’s fiction of covering their hate rallies within the umbrella of free speech. The potentially murderous armed demonstration in Charlottesville should disabuse anybody of that notion. More importantly and this is where I began to get some headway in my argument against defending “free speech” for the Alt-Right is the program these organizations espouse. These are not merely bad ideas floating out in the political biosphere like getting rid of Obamacare or in some academic debating setting. The logic and aim of their programs for a “white nation” can only mean race war, genocide, ethnic cleansing and political destruction of the opposition. Free speech leads to the concentration camps if they get their way. They will have, and do not now have, any qualms about denying us our rights, including free speech wherever they can get the upper-hand. All of the above comments got a rather concise exploration early Sunday morning when I happened to be travelling for a meeting early and had the BBC on the radio. Early Sunday morning they have a Bit of History show on. This particular show dealt with the heroic civil rights freedom riders of the early 1960s in the American South trying to desegregate interstate transportation-the buses, trains, and other facilities connected with interstate transportation. The commentary that stopped me in my tracks was the story related by one of the early leaders about when they got to Anniston, Alabama and met up with some rabble who were intent on murder, had tried to set the bus they were riding on fire and holding the doors closed. Only a late intervention by a previously standing-by policeman saved them. That is the program we have to look forward to if we don’t stop this rabble in the egg. No free speech for Nazis, KKK and their ilk.                   Workers Vanguard No. 1116

25 August 2017

Fascist Killers Strike in Charlottesville

For Labor/Black Mobilizations to Stop the Fascists!

AUGUST 21—As the August 17 Spartacist League statement printed below underlines, the growing outrage against the fascists needs an organized expression based on mobilizing the social power of the multiracial working class. The day after we issued the statement, we learned that Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the Bay Area had unanimously passed a resolution on August 17 calling for the union to march against a fascist rally in San Francisco’s Crissy Field on August 26. The motion resolved to “march to Crissy Field to stop the racist, fascist intimidation in our hometown and invite all unions and antiracist and antifascist organizations to join us.”

We welcome this call. Other unions and all opponents of racist terror should mobilize with the ILWU on August 26! The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee will be mobilizing a contingent emphasizing that for labor to bring its power to bear against the fascist terror gangs, it must be mobilized on the basis of its own independent strength—not as an adjunct to the Democratic Party politicians who are trying to get the fascist rally banned by the federal government. Unfortunately, the Local 10 leadership is pushing the efforts of the Democratic Party administration of San Francisco and Democratic Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi to get the rally banned, with Local 10 president Ed Ferris telling KPFK on August 18, “I am hopeful that they’ll just deny this permit.”

As we warn in our statement: “Don’t buy into the delusion that the capitalist state is going to protect you against the fascists! Its cops are the central perpetrators of violence against black people and the oppressed in this society. State bans on the fascists can and will be used against the left and any perceived opponent of the capitalist state, its cops, courts, prisons and military.” It is precisely the trade-union bureaucracy’s reliance on the “benevolence” of the state of the capitalist class enemy and its subservience to the Democratic Party that has for decades sapped the power of labor, setting the stage for the devastation of wages, benefits and working conditions.

With consummate hypocrisy, Pelosi denounced the fascists in Charlottesville, declaring, “The perpetrators of this violence insult our fundamental American values.” Racial oppression and the brutal subjugation of black people at the bottom of society are the cornerstones of the American capitalist order. And that order—with its routine violence against working people and the oppressed at home and its imperialist atrocities against the masses of the world—is administered and enforced by the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

As Jeffrey St. Clair aptly put it, the U.S. has “entered the time of mock outrage” (counterpunch.org, 18 August). After howling their moral indignation at Trump’s condemnation of “both sides” in Charlottesville, the Democrats and their media mouthpieces quickly turned around and are now doing the same thing. From the New York Times to the Washington Post and CNN, story after story has pointed to the “violence” of antifa activists. An editorial in the New York Daily News (20 August) calls on “calmer voices on the left” to “disavow” antifa, who are denounced for “unprovoked violence” and being “bent on initiating conflict” in Charlottesville.

The purpose behind such statements is to lay the basis for even more intense state repression against anti-fascist activists. When tens of thousands came out in Boston on August 19 to protest a fascist provocation, Democratic Party mayor Marty Walsh declared, “It’s clear today that Boston stood for peace and love, not bigotry and hate.” For their part, the Boston cops attacked crowds of anti-fascist protesters and arrested at least 33 people. Drop all charges now!

The bourgeois rulers and their state are opposed to any and all manifestations of militant opposition to their decaying order. The working class must be imbued with class hatred against the capitalist exploiters and oppressors, against the parties and politicians that administer the capitalist order, against the capitalist system itself that gives birth to the fascist race-terrorists. No illusions in the capitalist state or Democratic Party! Mobilize labor/black power to stop the fascists!

*   *   *

Waving the Confederate flag of slavery and brandishing the swastika of Hitler’s Nazis, fascist stormtroopers armed with assault rifles, clubs and brass knuckles descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend. They came looking for blood and they got it. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who had come out to protest these racist terrorists, was murdered by a Nazi-lover who drove his car at high speed into a group of anti-fascists. Nineteen of the many others who were hit were hospitalized, some with critical injuries. A black hip-hop artist, Deandre Harris, had his skull cracked open by a club-wielding gang of fascist thugs. The night before, a torchlight parade of hundreds of white-supremacists chanting, “You will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” marched onto the University of Virginia campus and surrounded and pummeled a small group of young protesters who were chanting “black lives matter.”

The fascists are the shock troops for racist genocide—the creation of an all-white America where black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims and other minorities do not exist. This program was written in the blood of Charlottesville. Would-be führer Richard Spencer boasts of scoring a “moral victory in terms of a show of force.” Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party—whose thugs stabbed, slashed and clubbed anti-fascist protesters in Sacramento last June—brags: “We achieved all of our objectives.” Emboldened, racist terror gangs are mobilizing for their next provocations in cities across the country from Boston to the Bay Area.

The guns that the fascists were carrying in Charlottesville are aimed at every black person, Latino, union militant, leftist and anyone else they see as an enemy of their drive for a “racially pure” America. Since Trump’s election, there has been an increase in racist murders, attacks and provocations. The ultimate aim of the fascists is to destroy the workers movement, including the unions and the left. It was no accident that a noose appeared twice on the Oakland docks this May, a calculated and deadly threat against the majority black longshore workforce. When the ILWU longshore workers walked off the job to protest the lynch rope, they gave a small taste of the power that must be mobilized to crush the fascists.

The outrage against the fascists needs an organized expression: a disciplined, militant and military mobilization of the social power of the multiracial working class. It is this power that is feared and hated by the bosses, their kept labor lieutenants in the trade-union bureaucracy and capitalist politicians of all colors and genders. The working class has the power and objective interest not only to stop the fascists but also to overturn the whole capitalist system that spawns these vermin. This is why the bosses keep the fascist killers in reserve, to be unleashed when the capitalist social order is threatened by an insurgent proletariat.

Republican and Democratic politicians alike are now trying to lull any outrage over Charlottesville with cynical condemnations of white supremacy and racial hatred. Beware the crocodile tears of your exploiters and oppressors! Their entire capitalist system is based on racial oppression, the increasingly brutal exploitation of labor, joblessness, poverty and starvation, and the mass murder of millions around the globe.

The bourgeois media, which has railed against antifa “extremists” who have tried to stop the fascists, now pontificates against Trump’s grotesque apologias for these racist killers. That Trump is a raving racist who has coddled and encouraged the fascists is hardly news. But what about the other representatives of American imperialist rule who are now denouncing the fascists? Former Democratic Party president Bill Clinton weighed in early with a tweet decrying the “hatred, violence and white supremacy” in Charlottesville. This from the man who rode into the Oval Office making a point of going to witness the execution of a brain-damaged black man and when in power probably did more to destroy the lives of the black working people and poor than any president since World War II. The politicians’ oceans of hypocrisy are in the service of obscuring the inherently racist nature of capitalist America.

Virginia’s Democratic Party governor, Terry McAuliffe, took to the pulpit of a black church in Charlottesville to tell the fascists to “go home” proclaiming, “You are not wanted in this great commonwealth.” Actually, Virginia was the birthplace of American slavery and the seat of the Confederacy. It took a bloody Civil War, with 200,000 black troops, guns in hand, to smash the chains of black chattel slavery. But the promise of black freedom was soon betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, which allied with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of the black freedmen. No less than the Klan terrorists that arose to suppress the newly freed slaves, the fascist gangs today seek to reverse the verdict of the Civil War.

Barack Obama, under whose reign joblessness, poverty and rampant cop terror against black people flourished, now obscenely preaches that the fascist killers “can be taught to love.” This idiotic, and ultimately suicidal, notion finds expression among black preachers and liberals, from the NAACP to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which argues that “every act of hatred should be met with an act of love and unity.” Joining this chorus of “love and unity” are the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), several of whose supporters were injured in Charlottesville.

In early June, the ISO and DSA called a “Portland Stands United Against Hate” rally in response to a fascist mobilization that came on the heels of the murder of two men who had intervened to stop a racist assault on two young women—one black, one Muslim—by a white-supremacist. While gun-toting militia thugs mobilized to defend the fascists and cheered police attacks on antifa activists with chants of “blue lives matter,” those at the ISO/DSA rally were singing, “We are gentle, angry people.” A “Bay Area Rally Against Hate” is now being called several blocks away from an August 27 fascist rally in downtown Berkeley. Advertised as a celebration of non-violence and solidarity against the white-supremacists who “try to intimidate us and incite violence,” it is promoted as an opportunity “to speak to each other about the world we want.”

No amount of singing and hand-holding in the name of non-violence is going to stop the violently racist fascist terrorists. Such actions reinforce the lie that racist terror is anathema to “American values,” serving to channel outrage against the fascist murderers into support for the “kinder, gentler” Democrats. The Democratic Party mayor of Berkeley is promising to investigate “all legal means” to shut down the fascists’ rally. Across the Bay in San Francisco, Democratic Party mayor Ed Lee and Congressional Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein are demanding that the federal government ban a rally by Patriot Prayer, the same outfit that organized the fascist provocation in June in Portland.

Don’t buy into the delusion that the capitalist state is going to protect you against the fascists! Its cops are the central perpetrators of violence against black people and the oppressed in this society. State bans on the fascists can and will be used against the left and any perceived opponent of the capitalist state, its cops, courts, prisons and military. And beware those treacherous liberals like the ACLU who go to bat for the fascists’ right to rally for genocide in the name of “free speech.” Fascism is not about speech; it is about racist terror! Every “free speech” victory the fascists score in the courts only whets their appetite for greater violence.

Nor will confrontations by small groups of anti-fascist militants stop the fascist gangs. While the antifas have demonstrated real courage and determination in action, their politics are simply the streetfighting face of liberalism and moral suasion. Incredibly, many are now saying that Charlottesville was a victory! The anarchist It’s Going Down website boasts that “anarchists and anti-fascists were in Charlottesville to shut down a nazi rally, and they did.” In fact, the Nazis successfully rallied Friday night, laying the groundwork for Saturday’s carnage, including the murder of Heather Heyer. That day, the fascists’ rally was shut down only after McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, sending in the National Guard and ordering the cops who had allowed the fascists to get away with their murderous assaults on protesters to close down the “Unite the Right” rally site. This did nothing to stem the fascists’ violence and bloodshed.

What is needed is to mobilize the class hatred of the multiracial working class. Standing at the head of all the intended victims of fascist terror, labor has the power to drive these racist thugs and killers off the streets. The idea that the union movement would flex its muscle in its own defense much less in defense of the growing ranks of the dispossessed doubtless strikes many as a utopian pipe dream. Responsibility for this can be laid squarely at the doorstep of the trade-union misleaders, who for decades have allowed the unions to be hacked to pieces while turning a blind eye to the mounting attacks against black people, immigrants, the poor and oppressed.

The labor bureaucrats’ accommodation to the rulers’ onslaught flows from their allegiance to American capitalism and to its political parties, particularly the “lesser evil” Democrats. The only “action” taken by the AFL-CIO leadership in response to Charlottesville was for its president, Richard Trumka, to resign his seat at the table with many of the wealthiest CEOs of U.S. capitalism on Trump’s manufacturing council! It is its own statement of the cravenness of the labor bureaucrats that Trumka was shamed into making this meaningless gesture by the resignation of several CEOs before him.

But there are union battalions that could have been mobilized in Charlottesville, from workers in the Norfolk shipyards to longshoremen in Southern ports. Their social power lies in the fact that their labor is essential to the functioning and profitability of American capitalism. The majority black membership of these unions in turn could have provided a critical link to mobilizing the black masses behind the power of labor in struggle against the fascists.

As we wrote in “‘Alt-Right’ Fascists: Shock Troops for Racist Genocide” (WV No. 1115, 28 July) in the lead-up to Charlottesville:

“Labor can and must be organized to smash the fascists. The potential for such action was shown in a small but real way by the labor/black mobilizations initiated by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee to stop Klan and Nazi provocations in several cities in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Through flexing their muscle in massive, multiracial mobilizations against the fascists, the workers will come to recognize their power as a class. What must be done is to build a revolutionary workers party that will wield that power to finally fulfill the promise of black freedom and emancipate all the exploited and oppressed. It will take nothing less than a third, socialist American Revolution to break the chains of racist capitalist rule and bury the fascist gangs for good. For labor/black action to stop the fascists!”

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise”

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise” 

By Zack James

No question as Josh Breslin has seemingly gracelessly aged he has become more perverse in his greedy little mind. That trait has exploded more recently as he has finally hung up his pen and paper if one can do such a feat and stopped writing free-lance articles for half the small press, small publishing house, small artsy journal nation. All this hubbub boiled over recently when he told his old friend from his growing up in Riverdale days, Sam Lowell, about his “coup,” his term, in upsetting the applecart of the American literary pantheon by claiming on very flimsy evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, the one that gave him his first fame, This Side Of Paradise, could be compared with his masterwork The Great Gatsby. The perverse part came when he told Sam that he had only  written the article as a send-up of all the literary set’s fretting about who and what works belong in, or don’t belong in, the pantheon also based on as very little evidence.       

The whole faux dust-up came up because now that he was retired he could write a little more freely since he had neither the pressure of some midnight deadline from some nervous nelly editor waiting impatiently for him to dot that last i before rushing off to the printer nor the imperative of reining in his horns to insure that he could keep up with the gathering payments for alimony, child support and college educations for a three ex-wives and a slew of well-behaved kids. The latter being a close thing that almost broke his spirit. He had accepted a free-lance at-your-leisure assignment from Ben Gold, the editor of the Literary Gazette, who told him he could write a monthly column on some topic that interested him. As long as it was about three thousand words and not the usual five or six thousand that had to be edited with scalpel in hand and arguments every other line about its worthiness as part of the article.         

Josh admitted to Sam that he was intrigued by the idea and after thinking about the matter for a while decided that he would concentrate on reviewing for a 21^st century audience some of the American masterworks of the 20^th century. The beauty of this idea was that he would no longer have to face the dagger-eyed living authors, their hangers-on and acolytes every time he noted that said authors couldn’t write themselves a proper thank you note never mind such a huge task as writing a well-thought out novel that they had forced him mercilessly to review the relatively few times he entered the literary fray. He had made his mark in the cultural field by reviewing music and film mostly but would when hard up for dollars for those aforementioned three wives and slew of hungry kids take on anything including writing bogus reviews of various products like dish detergent and mouthwash although more recently a spade of reviews on technical gadgets like things for computers which he frankly didn’t know or give a fuck about. Couldn’t even figure out how to attach the damn things to the computer. Now he could leisurely delve back into the past and cherry-pick a few bright objects, write a few thousand words and move onto the next selection.

Or so he thought. Josh had made Sam laugh, had made himself laugh as well, one night when they were at Sam’s favorite watering hole, Teddy Green’s Grille over Lyons Street in their old hometown after he had finished and Ben had published his first “thought” article in the Gazette. He had admitted that his take on the issue was perverse, was a low-intensity tweaking of all those in the literary racket who labored long, hard, and winded to specialize in “deconstructing” some famous author in order to make hay in their own bailiwicks, making their own cramped careers out of the literary mass of real writers. He had stirred up the hornet’s nest by his “innocent” comparison of the two Fitzgerald works.                 

Josh told Sam that he had been rather naïve to think that the literary gurus would take his little heresy as mere grumbling of an old man and pass it off as so much blather. He had reasoned that one could get passionate about who would win the World Series or the Super Bowl, one political candidate over another, some worthy cause but that the almost one hundred year old vintage of a couple of books set in the Jazz Age 1920s by a now unfashionable “dead white man” author long since, very long    since, dead should be passed in silence. Not so. No sooner had the Gazette come out than some silly undergraduate English major had e-mailed Josh about how wrong he was to compare the “juvenile antics,” her term, of privileged white college boy Amory Blaine over up from nowhere strivings after fame and fortune of one Jay Gatsby when all the old-time money and position was against him. Of course he had had to defend his position and sent her a return e-mail summarily dismissing her championship as so much sophomoric half-thinking “politically correct” classist claptrap that has overrun the college campuses over the past decades, mostly not for the better.  

End of debate. No way since thereafter a couple of academic heavyweights, known Fitzgerald scholars, had to put their two cents worth in since an intruder was invading their turf, an odd-ball free-lance music and film critic well past his prime according to one of their kind as if he himself had not been pan-handling the same half dozen admitted good ideas for the previous forty years since he had gotten tenure. In any case no sooner had that undergraduate student dust-up settled down than Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby.

Pointed out to ignorant Josh that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary effort of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances to country club and New York Plaza Hotel intrigues. So the battle raged.   

Josh laughed loudest as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his own  favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison.

It was that idea that Josh wanted to use Sam as a sounding board for, a guy to tussle out the pieces with. After Josh had received the response that he did from well-paid hucksters in the academy to the first article in his monthly column he decided to change tack and actually act as a provocateur, a flame-thrower, and rather than placid kind of educational pieces he would go slightly off-the-wall dragging some of those in the literary pantheon through the mud. So that throwaway idea of pitting two titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to fight mano a mano for kingpin of the Jazz Age literary set began to geminate as the fodder for the next article for his column. Hence, Sam, Sam as devils’ advocate, since Josh and he had had many go arounds over literary subjects ever since they were in high school English classes together. Watch for the bloodless blather from the literati on that one when he gets done.     

The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight-Owen Wilson’s “Masterminds

The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight-Owen Wilson’s “Masterminds

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

[Sometimes even a well-oiled, hard-bitten film critic or heck even somebody just into the cinema will get caught out by a big name star in a production or some actor that you really like for some personal reason. The “forget” part is that not everything these favorites do on screen is pure gold (except maybe in their pockets if they are bankable and the film really needs their name to float, or not go under). A whole separate branch of the criticism business could be devoted to some of the reasons why established stars wind up as in the film under review below playing in “turkeys.” Maybe it is just money, maybe the lure of their names always on the marquee, maybe after reading the script they really believe the thing can work. I am too close to retirement to figure the motivations out but some younger mind could make a nice career out of working that racket. S.L.]         

Masterminds, starring Owen Wilson, 2016

Sometimes when a friend recommends a film it turns out to be a dud, turns out to be less than expected and in the case of the film under review, Masterminds, make that much less than expected considering the cast. Makes one wonder why a great comedic actor like Owen Wilson took the job, took the chance to work on a funky film that had a chance to go in one of two directions, a straight line comic look at a true story or a farce that bombed. It took the latter. The direction toward the farcical led the vehicle astray when all is said and done.  

Here is the skinny, here is why the title of this piece can be called the gang that couldn’t shoot straight taking a page from an old Jimmy Breslin book. The story line based on a true incident about the doings around one of the great cash robberies in banking history, the Loomis heist in North Carolina in 1997 for seventeen big ones-17 mil, okay not chicken feed then nor now. David Scott Ghantt, a security guard on a Lommis armored truck was hook-winked, no make that bewitched and bewildered by his sexy armored truck partner, Kelly, who had walked  out on the job over some harassment. A while later she wound up working hand and hand with a low-life short end of the stick criminal Steve, played by Wilson, who wants her to con, I am being kind here since this is a family sensitive outlet, David into being the inside man on a big heist of the company’s loot. David balked at first but Kelly lured him with her charms despite the fact he was two minutes to midnight away from getting married to another woman.       

The heist was a piece of cake for an inside job and David was told to lay low in Mexico until the coast was clear. The false lure to get him to go minus the dough was Kelly joining him soon, yeah, soon. The idea Steve thought though was that David was to get the short end of the straw, was the odd man out as he, Steve, was not going to share the dough with anybody but his loving wife and two unlovable kids.

Meanwhile David was still forlornly expecting Kelly to join him in Mexico. Sucker. Double sucker because Steve threw the Feds onto him and he led them a merry chase before he got wise to what Steve, and Kelly, were up to. Steve in a panic, putting greed before good sense ordered a hit on David by a screwball hit man who couldn’t hit right-as was to be expected. They wind up switching their identities (it’s a long unfunny story so just go along with me) so that David wound up at Steve’s over-the-top mansion ready to get even. And he does in a way after the Feds got definitive proof that low-life greedy Steve and not pure-heart David was the evil mastermind behind the caper. Steve did 11 years, David pure-heart drew seven and Kelly a bunch too. With that enticing story-line it was a shame that the film was marred with so many unfunny slapstick jokes, some much low-rent bathroom humor and such a waste of an obviously talented cast. Yeah, what was Owen Wilson thinking. Some day when they do a retrospective of his work this one will not be included, I hope.      

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

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

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

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

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

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

*******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two  

By Sam Lowell

[I come by this remembrance of Zack James not directly but through my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex, with whom I had been a corner boy in our old growing up hometown of North Adamsville south of Boston. A corner boy for those not in the know since you do not see such sights around small towns and urban neighborhoods anymore was a guy who hung around with other guys at some variety store, pizza parlor, bowling alley or some such place with a corner for a young man, young men, to stand against on weekend nights when cash, cars, and cuties were as sparse as hen’s teeth, maybe sparser. Alex and I had been brought together in ninth grade in high school by a mutual friend the late wild man Peter Paul Markin known as “The Scribe” back in the day and the three of us and a few others were bosom buddies for several years before we went our separate ways.     

I recently reconnected with Alex around the commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which San Francisco and other places is making a big deal out of in its 50^th anniversary year after he had come back from a trip there, a business trip, and tried to get all the old corner boys still standing together to honor the Scribe. He had seen an exhibition at the de Young Museum there called the Summer of Love Experience and had flipped out. His idea was to put together a book of remembrances in honor of the Scribe and had contacted his youngest brother Zack, a writer, to edit and spruce the thing up.

The reason for the book of remembrances?  See the Scribe is the guy who went out to San Francisco during the early spring of 1967 and after a few months came back and got a bunch of us, Alex and I included to go back out with him. The Scribe wound up in the hellish Army the next year, and would serve in Vietnam which fucked up his sweet short life for the few years he had left after that experience but Alex and I stayed for a couple of years. While Alex and I were cutting up old touches he mentioned this story about Zack just so I would know a little about his youngest brother who way too young for me to even remember when we were corner boys. Sam Lowell]   

****** 

Zack James when he was younger, much younger back in the early 1960s younger, now too for that matter was, well, how can we put it, maybe women-addled would be best. Ever since the end of high school, the beginning of college except for one short period he had always had some kind of woman relationship to confuse his sweet ass life (he hadn’t been very successful in high school too shy and too poor to make a hit with any of his female fellow high-schoolers so the end of high school seems the right place to start his women-addledness [sic, I assume]). Of late that streak had taken a sudden stop his latest flame of the past few years, Loretta, had flown the coop, had given him his walking papers, had decided that they had drifted too far apart, that she wanted to find herself, see who she was and what she would do with the rest of her life. Fair enough although the pain of her departure for parts unknown left a big hole in his heart, left him bereft for a while. But had also given him time to see what he was about, where he wanted to head.   

A lot of what Loretta had said about the need for her to cut Zack loose was dead-on, was right as she had been usually right about what ailed Zack. He always found himself behind the curve when it came to what Loretta was thinking about, what he was able to reflect in the lonely hours that he had recently spent in the house they had shared together over the previous several years. Had had to agree that the last year of so as his health had declined with some fairly serious medical issues which had required that he take some medicines that seem to pile up on each other and had made him, well, grumpy and cranky, a grumpy cranky old man if the truth be known especially as those medical problems dove-tailed with his turning three score, turning sixty to not be cute about it. Had made him aware as never before of his own mortality and instead of taking it easy, instead of increasingly relaxing, instead of being at peace with himself, instead of trying to put out “the fire in his head” he was more driven than ever to find his place in the sun, to have his life have meaning at the end. As to his relationship with Loretta he had let himself drift apart, left her unattended, and okay left her to seek her own newer world.

During some of those lonely hours in that desolate house which creaked eerily to his ears Zack began to think through his whole life, who was he kidding his whole relationship with the women who had festooned his sweet ass life, had made life bearable for him. What he had found out, was trying to think through is that he really needed, very much needed the companionship of a woman, and if it was not going to be Loretta, hell, she essentially left no forwarding address all he had was her cellphone number so she could be anywhere, then it had to be somebody else. Rather than go right out and jump into the “meat market,” that is what they called it when he was younger and if they had a different name for the process it was still the same ordeal he decided that he had better take stock of himself and where he has been, and what he wanted out of a relationship now. Any reflection on his apart about failed relationships, and there were plenty, always, always, always led him back to the “cowgirl in the sand,” always led him back to Mariah Welsh, back when he decided  he wanted his first serious relationship.      

That “cowgirl in the sand” was no cute inside joke and it still pained Zack to even think about Mariah and how she led him a merry chase in that one summer, the summer of 1976, they had stayed together. See Mariah was actually from the West, had grown up on a big cattle ranch just outside of Cheyenne out in Wyoming country and had some certain set western ways for a young woman of twenty. He had met her down in Falmouth, down in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts about fifty miles from where he lived, down near the beach in the summer of 1976 just after his sophomore year in college. He had been renting a place with several other fellow college students for the summer who were as dedicated to partying as he was and that was that. He had actually seen her a couple of times on the beach at Falmouth Heights near where they had rented the cottage and thought that she looked very fine in her skimpy bikini (then skimpy which today would be considered modest) but was not sure how to approach her. One day he decided to go up and invite her to the weekly weekend party that his cottage put on and see what happened. (That weekend party almost literally true as the party would start early Friday afternoon and end at some Happy Hour bar early Sunday evening inevitably a few people, including Zack, would carry over until Monday or Tuesday if the spirit moved them or they had some hot date that kept the fires burning that long).

As Zack approached her she had brought him up short when she saw him coming and shouted out “Here comes the boy who had been checking me out, checking out my shape as far as I could tell and who knows what else he was thinking about, but was afraid to come up and say hello.” Yeah, that was the kind of girl, young woman, Mariah was all through that hot summer relationship. She claimed one night when they had gotten better acquainted that unlike uptight people from the East Coast people from the West, from cattle country, were more plainspoken, less hung up about speaking out about what they wanted-or who they wanted. Needless to say Zack and Mariah spent the rest of that afternoon talking about this and that, mostly dreary college stuff since Mariah was also a student at the University of Wyoming studying art. (She was an exceptionally good artist, had drawn a couple of charcoal drawings of him which he had kept for years afterward even when he was married to Josie, his first wife, and Josie had asked who had done them and he had foolishly told her and he had to hide the damn things. Josie had later when they were separating torn the works up-yes, it was that kind of breakup).

As they talked Mariah made no bones about showing off her very fine body, slender, small but firm breasts which he was attracted in woman, well-turned long legs and thin ankles, blondish brown hair, sea blue eyes and a wicked smile that would melt butter on a cold day. They made that primal connection that said they had something to do together what it would be who knew but something.

Mariah had told Zack that she had come East with a couple of her college girlfriends since none of them had ever been east of the Mississippi and had been thrilled when they first saw the ocean, had frolicked in the waves and one girl had almost gone under when a sudden riptide which they were totally ignorant of started pulling her down. But that scare was soon over since the girl had allowed herself to drift until the current subsided. They were staying for the summer over on Maravista a few blocks away from the beach (and maybe half a dozen blocks away from Zack’s cottage) in a tiny cottage in back of the landlord’s yard which he usually let out to students who worked in the restaurants and such places for the summer. As the hot tanning sun began to fade a bit by four Zack then popped the question of whether she and her girlfriends were up for a party that weekend. All Mariah asked about though was would there be booze and dope there. When Zack answered yes Mariah said they would surely, her word, be there and she had better not see him talking to some other girl when she arrived. Bingo.

That booze and dope stuff needs a little explaining since Zack and his fellows were all under official drinking age (as were Mariah and her friends at least in Massachusetts) so they “hired” an older guy who was living with a bunch of his older friends up their street to “buy” for them and he would get a big bottle of liquor, usually scotch, as his service charge. The dope thing was a little more problematic since dope, marijuana, maybe some speed when a connection could be made, were not that widely used then by the youth fresh college generation he hung around with although that movement was beginning to build up a head of steam. At that time “booze heads,” representing a more working class ethos and “dopers” were at loggerheads something that would get settled out later. Jazz, one of his roommates at their cottage and at school, had connections in Cambridge and so they never lacked for dope although more than a few girls would back off once they smelled the dope and didn’t know what the hell they were in for. So Mariah already was ahead of that crowd.      

As they were getting ready to part company after Zack gave Mariah his address and had told her to come by anytime on Friday afternoon or later Mariah told him to wait a minute until she put her street clothes on and they could walk off the beach together toward her car (Zack had walked over to the beach since he unlike several of his roommates did not have a car and was driven down by Willy another roommate). Zack was shocked, mildly shocked anyway, when Mariah put on her blue jean shorts, a frilly lacy cowgirl-type blouse, and, get this, her cowboy boots, and her cowgirl hat what he would later find out was called a Ladies’ Stetson. She looked like she had just gotten ready to go to the rodeo, or the state fair. Something told Zack that this was going to be an interesting ride indeed. Mariah must have sensed that because as they approached her car for her to leave she asked Zack whether he liked her outfit, and then said in her plain spoken Western way, “Maybe you can play cowboy with me if things work out.” Giving Zack a soft sexy look like if things worked out she would give him a ride he would not forget. Whoa!                            

That Friday evening Mariah and her two girlfriends arrived, guess what, dressed up very similarly to the way Mariah had been dressed as she and Zack left the beach a few days before which caused a sensation, a sensation at the novelty of the garb in Falmouth in the summer and also that the two girlfriends were “hot” as well. Zack fortunately was alone when they entered (he had earlier been talking to Cissie, an old flame whom he figured to rekindle a flame with that night since he had frankly given up the idea that Mariah was going to show, it would not have been the first time, or the last, some young thing had promised the moon to him and never showed up. Mariah came right over and asked if he had a joint, a joint she said to calm her nerves, make her feel good among the party-goers all of whom were eying her the guys for obvious reasons the women also for obvious reasons if they were with a guy.

Zack called over to Jazz who delivered a huge joint from the bag of dope he had “connected” with only that afternoon which made Mariah eyes widen and after taking a few “hits” said to Zack “You may be playing cowboy tonight after all.” In that instance her statement proved not to be true because she got so “wasted” that she fell asleep but the next night’s party, or really a continuation of Friday’s party she and Zack got it on in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs (not his room, the room where he had all his possessions, but nobody was particular about such arrangements when a “hot” date needed a place to put her head down).                         

What struck Zack about Mariah (beside that Western plain-spokenness that he was not used to with the local girls, mostly Irish girls who descended on the Cape with as the saying went “ten dollars and their virtue” and left with both intact or standoffish WASPish girls from the better colleges who were sometimes more trouble than they were worth in trying to get next to them if you were not seriously looking to be upward mobile after your college hijinks) was how sexually experienced and into doing sex she was even that first night when she did a lot of stuff that most other girls he knew were not into, like giving a good blow job. When they talked about it later Mariah told him that those cowboys out in the West, the ones who worked for her father broke her in early at thirteen and she liked it, liked it enough to read books in high school about various sexual positions and practices from a manual. (It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian bible of sex for those who are clueless).

So for several weeks that summer Zack and Mariah were what would be called an “item” today, were almost inseparable. Went to the beach, partied, had great sex (mostly based on her knowledge and Zack’s willingness as a subject) and Zack assumed would find some way to continue their relationship at summer’s end. When that time came though Mariah told him straight out that theirs was a summer fling and that she was heading back to school in Wyoming and back to her boyfriend. The night they parted though, despite Zack’s futile pleading that they stay together some way and then giving up when she cut him off which she said was also a Western way, she gave him a parting sexual bout that he still remember forty years later. Yeah, Zack was women-addled, always was being played by them. Praise be.         

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

By Guest Film Critic Lance Lawrence   

[Regular readers of this blog (and of the on-line American Film Gazette) can be excused if they are a little perplexed about this posting or at least the title of this posting since it appeared her in its original form a month or so ago. The reason that the piece is getting what I would call an encore performance is that the writer, Lance Lawrence, who has placed occasional pieces here in the past, felt that he had short-changed Ruth Snyder by writing her off as just another frustrated middle-aged dame going through an inevitable mid-life crisis down in nowhere Texas and had latched onto the first male than gives her a passing glance.  Here the glance was by a younger guy, hell, she was robbing the cradle since he was still in high school, still wet behind the ears. Wrote her off too as just another backwoods Texas gal doing what generations of Texas women have done before her and instead let the youngster, Sonny, the inevitable Sonny or Bubba or Mac of the Texas panhandle, steal her thunder. Lance hopes that this revised edition reflects better on the virtues of this hardy Texas woman who might have come up the hard-scrabble way in the West Texas night but who has some virtues in the clutch maybe formed out of that hard-scrabble existence. Peter Markin]      

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns like Houston, Austin, Johnson City, and Galveston in the state).

Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was “burned over” in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before. (As to that “colored” prejudice Ruth had played with Ella Speed the daughter of a black woman who took in washing in the small Negro-town section which her mother resorted to when she was too sick to do it herself but that ended well before puberty when such race-mixing was frowned upon. She never in public or private expressed hostility to the black race although she stuck to the “code” like everybody else in town. There had in any case been few Negros in town since the days in the late 1920s when the KKK strung up a couple of Negro men allegedly for touching white women.)          

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting of some woe begotten up against it farmer and his drag on the household unmarried daughter with no prospects, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind, the women of easy virtue, the whorehouse kind in oil fields male Texas as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. (She was a good-housekeeper and cook little good it did her in the end.) But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would soon after their marriage come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was to just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or two.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse between Tom and her as time went by and especially after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  (Although she did not lack for female friends around the neighborhood something inside her made her keep her distance, keep things to herself which she committed only to her diary or expressed in her finely wrought poetry which kept her afloat on those lonely long weeks alone.)  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system. Got his ass hauled to frozen Korea when hot war was afoot there to freeze his brain over to forget her. (As Duane told Sonny in one of his few, very few, candid and reflective moments before he shipped out for the unknown future he would never totally short of the grave get Jackie out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-cat oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town who had the dope on everything happening in town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye on Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Tom, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting strictly in that manner. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, any teenage kid. Nothing happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would met at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy and reportedly “played the flute” with him the universal high expression for giving a blow job) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with yes without hesitation. And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. Tom either never found out about it or didn’t care if he did know which hurt Ruth at first blush when she had been half doing that affair to make him jealous. That open secret though would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair, was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller, Rufus Wright, employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.        

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

By Guest Film Critic Lance Lawrence   

[Regular readers of this blog (and of the on-line American Film Gazette) can be excused if they are a little perplexed about this posting or at least the title of this posting since it appeared her in its original form a month or so ago. The reason that the piece is getting what I would call an encore performance is that the writer, Lance Lawrence, who has placed occasional pieces here in the past, felt that he had short-changed Ruth Snyder by writing her off as just another frustrated middle-aged dame going through an inevitable mid-life crisis down in nowhere Texas and had latched onto the first male than gives her a passing glance.  Here the glance was by a younger guy, hell, she was robbing the cradle since he was still in high school, still wet behind the ears. Wrote her off too as just another backwoods Texas gal doing what generations of Texas women have done before her and instead let the youngster, Sonny, the inevitable Sonny or Bubba or Mac of the Texas panhandle, steal her thunder. Lance hopes that this revised edition reflects better on the virtues of this hardy Texas woman who might have come up the hard-scrabble way in the West Texas night but who has some virtues in the clutch maybe formed out of that hard-scrabble existence. Peter Markin]      

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns like Houston, Austin, Johnson City, and Galveston in the state).

Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was “burned over” in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before. (As to that “colored” prejudice Ruth had played with Ella Speed the daughter of a black woman who took in washing in the small Negro-town section which her mother resorted to when she was too sick to do it herself but that ended well before puberty when such race-mixing was frowned upon. She never in public or private expressed hostility to the black race although she stuck to the “code” like everybody else in town. There had in any case been few Negros in town since the days in the late 1920s when the KKK strung up a couple of Negro men allegedly for touching white women.)          

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting of some woe begotten up against it farmer and his drag on the household unmarried daughter with no prospects, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind, the women of easy virtue, the whorehouse kind in oil fields male Texas as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. (She was a good-housekeeper and cook little good it did her in the end.) But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would soon after their marriage come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was to just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or two.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse between Tom and her as time went by and especially after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  (Although she did not lack for female friends around the neighborhood something inside her made her keep her distance, keep things to herself which she committed only to her diary or expressed in her finely wrought poetry which kept her afloat on those lonely long weeks alone.)  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system. Got his ass hauled to frozen Korea when hot war was afoot there to freeze his brain over to forget her. (As Duane told Sonny in one of his few, very few, candid and reflective moments before he shipped out for the unknown future he would never totally short of the grave get Jackie out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-cat oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town who had the dope on everything happening in town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye on Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Tom, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting strictly in that manner. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, any teenage kid. Nothing happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would met at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy and reportedly “played the flute” with him the universal high expression for giving a blow job) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with yes without hesitation. And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. Tom either never found out about it or didn’t care if he did know which hurt Ruth at first blush when she had been half doing that affair to make him jealous. That open secret though would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair, was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller, Rufus Wright, employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.