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
Defend DACA! Extend TPS! Jail Joe Arpaio! No Ban! No Wall!
Defend Transgender Rights! Resist Fascism!
Mobilize Saturday, September 16
Rally 1:00 PM, Boston Common
On the steps across from the Statehouse
followed by a March to the JFK Federal Building
The government in Washington has stepped up attacks on migrants to levels not seen in years. Trump's attacks on Muslim migrants were only the beginning. Deportations are accelerating. Trump is terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and has pardoned the racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. He also threatens to shut down the government if a Mexican border wall is not built. He threatens the Temporary Protected Status program. This comes on top of his recent bigoted executive order against transgender troops in the US armed forces and his defense of Fascists in Charlottesville, NC. Millions of youth and decent hard working people are under attack! Trump and his cheerleaders in the U.S. Congress are leading a generalized assault on our lives, rights, and living conditions. The leading edge of this assault today is the stepped up attacks against migrants. An injury to one is an injury to all! Mobilize September 16!
Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film “Summer
Of 1942” (1971) In Mind
By Fritz Taylor
Seth Garth, the once well-known
free-lance music critic for many of the big music and specialty publications
that have come and gone over the years since he first put pen to paper some
forty years ago, including the long gone alternative press where he got his
start and first breaks (literally put pen to paper, forget beauties of the
world processors then), had been thinking about the old days a lot recently.
Had been, having the luxury of semi-retired status, also doing a run through of
films via the good graces of Netflix
that he had first seen when he was a youngster sitting in the dark every week
for the double feature at the old Strand Theater in his hometown of Riverdale,
a town a few dozen miles from Boston. Or else films that due to publication
commitments that he had not run through when they came out in the 1970s in the
days when he was determined to catch the wave of being a music critic and
missed many of those films, left them by the wayside.
One night at Jack’s, his watering hole
hang-out over in Riverdale that he increasingly frequented on his forays back
to his old hometown to see if he could “channel” the past by being physically
present on the old sacred soil (although not the Strand long ago turned into a
condominium complex), Seth had mentioned to Brad Fox, an old friend from high
school days who went through many of the experiences with him, that he had just
reviewed a film, Summer of 1942, for
Sal Davis the editor of Cinema Now who
was looking for copy to fill a space quickly. The film which had been released
in 1971 and was about coming of age, coming of sexual age during the early
years of World War II. The big point he made to Brad, who had told Seth that he
had seen the film when it came out but did not remember the details except that
this foxy older woman played by Jennifer O’Neil had “robbed the cradle” and
bedded a teenage boy, swore the film could have been about their generation,
the generation of 1968 as easily as of 1942.
Seth had mentioned, before giving Brad
the details that he had missed about the film, he had started his review
speculating on the fact that each generation goes through its coming of age
period somewhat differently. “Coming of age’ in this context meaning after Brad
had been unclear about what aspect of the term Seth meant, meaning the
beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and
commotions once you got to puberty. He said he had taken the one he, and Brad,
had known about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of
the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet
unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old
values, to turn the world upside down, from their parents’ generation. He said
he tried to contrast that with the one before theirs, the one represented in
the film about the coming of age of their parents’ generation. The generation
that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great
Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging through World
War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and
its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth
who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla
perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares
and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll.
The funny thing at least on the basis
of a viewing of the film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge
and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents
who, at least in their case and the case of their growing up friends, went
through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding.
(Of course in talking about parents and their sexual desire both Seth and Brad
admitted they would have had a hard time linking up their own respective
parents with sexual desire but their own kids if asked would probably say the
same thing about them.)
Brad mentioned that his memory wasn’t
so good of late and that although while they were talking he had been trying to
dredge up some more facts about the movie other than the one he had mentioned
earlier in the conversation about that sexy older woman cradle robber making
Seth laugh that whatever the taboos were about intergenerational sex they both
would have given their eye-teeth if some world-wise fox had come across their
paths. Seth then went on to give Brad a rough outline of how the film had
played out.
He told Brad that his habit of late was
after viewing a film, particularly a film that he was being paid good dollars
to produce a review on, was to go on-line and look up what somebody had to say
about the film on Wikipedia. Wistfully stated that service was
something he wished had been around earlier in his career which would have
saved him a lot of time in the library or looking at the archives of various
publications of the time and allow him under the constant press of deadlines to
be able to write better thought out copy. The story line of the film had been
based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer
Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two
companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, known as “the Three Terrors,”
three virginal teenage boys, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the
beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the
American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese
bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island had been Nantucket Island in the book
published after the movie but had been filmed off desolate Mendocino in
California). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or
peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual
experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.
That chase had been on at two levels.
The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see
what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for
“meaningful” love in the person of an older foxy woman, Dorothy, played by
Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her
husband headed off to war. The “own age” part, funny in parts, driven mostly by
pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he
finally got his wish with one night at the secluded end of the beach with his
most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he
had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was.
The “older woman” (in our circles she
would have been a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion
of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was
spying on her and her husband in their cozy cottage so he was “saving” himself
for her. And after a series of innocent (and some goofy) encounters with
Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been
killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the
matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the
cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.
Having given Brad those details Seth
mentioned that those were the main lines that got played out but what had made
this film more than of ordinary interest to him was the whole lead-up, the
whole “foreplay” if you will of the desire of the trio to be doing something
about getting out of that dreaded virgin status. Said all the guys were fearful
of being tagged with the “homo” tag and didn’t Brad remember how vicious
teenage guys could be about the “manhood” question. Before he could go further
Brad mentioned how when they were fourteen or fifteen he could not remember
when how all the guys from around the corner that they hung on, including Seth
used to “fag” bait him because he had refused to kiss Sarah Langley at a
“petting” party and had actually run out of the house where the party was being
held he had been so embarrassed. At the time he had been sweet on Jenny Price
who had been at the party although nobody was aware of that situation. Nothing
ever came of that desire and so he had spent some time living down the “fag”
tag until he found Sandy Lee in junior year and she took him out of that status
since she was something of a fox herself. Although nobody thought anything of
calling another guy a “fag” as masculine craziness about sex and sexual
identity erupted nobody seriously thought that the guys were gay or anything
like that it was just a separation expression. Who knows who at the time really
wasn’t interested in girls, wasn’t into “getting in their pants” although Seth
speculated that some guys around the block must have since not a few guys lived
at home with their mothers and were not seen with women companions.
Nowadays nobody would think twice about
it although the usual baiting in school and among the jocks would still go on
given the unchanged nature of certain heterosexual young males. Seth mentioned
that he could not believe the pressure to “lose your virginity” that all the
guys suffered through, although he admitted that it also took him a long time,
long after the Christopher Street riots in the Village that began the serious
modern gay rights movement to stop his calling gays “fags.” Not until his eyes
were opened up when gay musicians and actors whom he interviewed and assumed
were straight came out of the “closet.”
Seth had laughed at the very realistic
scenes when Hermie and Oscy picked up a couple of girls at the movie theater
(playing Bette Davis and Paul Henried in Dark
Voyage, a film that he actually had reviewed when it came out in a film
retrospective at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square for the old Avatar alternative newspaper). The scene
which showed the guys “feeling up,” or trying to, had been amazing with Oscy
grabbing his just met girl almost from minute one and Hermie, missing the mark
thinking his girl’s shoulder was her breast. Jesus. Brad laughed but reminded
Seth that no way would that kind of thing have happened in their days since
everybody, or almost everybody knew the drill at the Strand Theater Saturday
matinee double-header or Saturday night date it did not matter. Some ancient
tradition, hell, maybe going back to 1942 for all anybody knew about the
original of the practice made it clear that those who sat in the orchestra were
not going to “make out.” If they were in the balcony then whatever went on,
went on from “feeling up” to blow jobs. It was solely a question of asking your
date where she wanted to sit. That sealed the deal, and in many cases meant a
last date.
Brad’s reminder of the old “policy”
reminded Seth of the time that he was cray for Rosalind Green in junior high,
they had gotten along well, had been a couple of chatterboxes in English class
about books by a bunch of foreign guys to show they were “hip.” One day after a
few weeks after all this “foreplay” Seth had finally asked her to a Saturday
matinee (the usual strategy for dealing with a girl you were not sure would
accept your date by making in the daytime to soften the blow) and she accepted.
When after paying for their tickets and hitting the refreshment stand for
popcorn and sodas he asked her where she wanted to sit she had answered “silly,
of course the balcony why else would I have come with you.” Bingo. Of such
events decent youthful memories are made. Brad on the other hand spent many
hours in the orchestra section once he latched onto Betsy Binstock (whom he
eventually married and was still married to) who was “saving” whatever she was
saving for marriage. Okay, too-now if it did have Brad pulling his hair out then.
Seth quickly mentioned the scene, the
awkward scene, where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and
he got sexually excited, okay, okay, had an erection, by her off-hand helping
hand touch since neither man wanted to talk about those nighttime wandering
hands that came down when they got an erection.
Nor did he spent much time on the scene where the three friends
“discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of
Benji’s mother’s medical books since that scene rang false in their old
neighborhood where sexual information was passed from older brother or sister
to younger, a lot of it wrong, very wrong when the girl had to go out of town
to see “Aunt Emily” (a street expression that she was pregnant and had to leave
town during her term usually not coming back) in other works right out on the
streets. Nobody back in 1942, or 1962 expected uptight parents who were assumed
to probably not have had sex to give any serious information except some
twaddle about the birds and the bees.
And of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his
first sexual experience with the girl he had picked up at the movies. That
scene had little over the top and as reticent about talking about sex as
parents were guys and gals might give an inkling about what they were doing
behind the bushes but a “free show” was off the charts.
The best scene of all though and it
really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations
can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in
schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate
enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village
drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Brad automatically remembered
that scene once Seth recalled it. Remembered too, as he told a disbelieving
Seth that night, his own confusion when he was in junior high and had found
some condoms in a bottom bathroom drawer in his family house when he was
looking for some band-aids. Had asked a kid at school, actually had shown a kid
at school one and the kid had said they were like balloons you fill them with
water and throw them at somebody. It was not until high school and he had begun
his own sexual explorations (obviously not with his ever-loving Betsy) that he
found out their real purpose and blushed silently about his parents’ sexual
practices. Hence another example of the very general understanding about the
young that their own parents never had sex. Whatever else being a youth today
may be about in terms of trauma at least there is a hell of a lot of good
information hanging out there on the Internet for the young to inquire into
without embarrassment.
Yeah, Seth gave Brad the word as they
finished up that last round of drinks and began to head to their respective
homes -watch this film and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling
around coming to terms with sex.
“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”- Sally Field’s Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015)
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Hello, My Name Is Doris, starring Sally Field, Max Greenfield, 2015
You know if you watch enough movies and review them as well every once in a while a film will knock you for a loop. Take the film under review Sally Field’s Hello, My Name Is Doris. Now usually when the subject of a film is an older (oops, mature) woman who is involved romantically in any way with a younger man the natural assumption is (or used to be) that he was “her kept man,” “her handy man,” if you want to invoke a blues expression, her rasping at faded youth, maybe a gigolo, maybe just looking for the main chance or she was on a lark merely “robbing the cradle” (the term used in my old corner boy neighborhood growing up but usually in reverse-guys around the corner once they got out of high school still sniffing around from “jailbait” if you get my drift). This one turns that idea, that 20th century older woman pursuing a younger man idea in the early 21st century on its head. Makes the whole thing of all things a romantic comedy-and socially okay.
Now intergenerational sex (or sexual attraction as here) has always been a thorny issue as mentioned above. Here though mainly through AARP-worthy stalwart actor Sally Field’s extraordinary performance as the Doris of the title makes the idea the stuff of legitimate dreams. (Field, who for the oldsters reading this will remember that she started as a flying nun in the 1960s, is thus no spring chicken). Takes the new-fashion idea that 60 is the new, let’s say 40, and runs with it.
Here’s the play. Doris is a holdover from an old-line company which got bought up by some tech-savvy outfit. One day John is introduced to the staff as the new art director and thus starts Doris’ flights of fancy (although she had already “met” him in the elevator coming up). Now Doris is starting out kind of dowdy, definitely not “hip” having lived her pedestrian life caring for her now departed aged mother on Staten Island. And like dear mother had turned into an inveterate pack-rat. But she is smitten by John and come hell or high water she after attending a “power of positive thinking seminar” is ready to rock the boat of her humble and dreary existence and make her play.
This fantasy though would only be a fantasy without the help of a feisty thirteen year old granddaughter of Doris’s best friend. You automatically know you are in the 21st century because the way Doris will attempt to hook her man is via that feisty granddaughter’s use of Facebook to find out what makes dear John tick and that otherwise Doris would have been clueless if not for this timely intervention. Problem: a young good-looking upwardly mobile guy in New York City is not going to “friend” some dowdy AARPer so, like a lot of people on the Internet they make up a fake profile for Doris. Bingo it works.
Works better when she finds out what his musical interests are and forms a live friendship through that association. Problem” John is already “spoken for” by a beautiful younger woman. Problem solved: that younger beauty breaks it off with John when she suspects he is fooling around with some assumed to be young woman on the Internet. Uh, Sally of course. Sally makes her big move but no way is John going for her except in her dreams (and maybe at the end). What makes this one worth watching is how Sally Field takes a tough subject and makes it seem totally normal and without overdoing the sappy pulling for emotion part. Attention all AARPers see this one-younger folks better ask your parents’ permission.
The Last Thing On My Mind-With Folksinger Tom Paxton’s Signature
“Last Thing On My Mind” In Mind
By Guest Writer Lester Landry
Eric Long didn’t know exactly how it had happened, didn’t
know how the whole blessed thing fell apart after so many years together.
Didn’t know that his sweetie, his “sweet pea” his pet name for her, his Mona,
was so radically dissatisfied with their lives together the night that she laid
out her future plans, future plans that did not include him. Had to take some
journey of discovery to find her spiritual being Mona called it. He could never
quite figure out what she meant by that since the “spiritual,” that New Age
business that she lived by and for and he was leery, very leery of, was totally
foreign to the way he operated in the world, the world of hard-boiled radical
anti-war politics and taking heed, being guided by in fact, the notion that
this was a dangerous world and watch out, watch your back (and she fragile and
defenseless against the villains watch her back as well, maybe watched it too
much and smothered her ability to breathe on her own). Could never quite talk
the same language with her on those issues where to use an expression that she
had come to use more frequently to describe their relationship of late they
were like “two ships passing in the night,” could never get the idea that she
was drowning in some Mona-made sea, that she was unsure of her place in the
sun, and worst of all not sure of who she was. For him who knew exactly what he
was about, well, maybe not exactly as it turned out but at least for public
consumption he appeared to be driven by a set of specific tasks and
orientations and so could not follow her on that path she has set for
herself.
Funny the night in question was their “wine date” night, a
time they had established a couple of years before as a way to be together and
share whatever there was to share, usually day to day stuff and not such a
decisive split. That too had been predicated on a prior series of
misunderstandings and falling apart that was only staunched for that precious
moment by his willingness to join her in couples counselling (That
“willingness” subject to his understanding that he was under the gun and that
if he had not done as she had asked then that first lowering of the boom would
have been the last and they would now have been separated for about two years
now.)
Although at first he was as leery about this process as he
was about the more outlandish and bizarre New Age therapies he actually had
come to as he called it see that this was significantly different from what he
had expected and had embraced the process whole-heartedly what he called “being
in one hundred per cent” (they had unsuccessfully done the procedure many years
before both agreeing then and now that the counsellor was not particularly helpful).
The thrust of this new procedure was that it was less driven by trying to
figure out what in their mutual troubled childhood pasts had made them both
attracted to each other but also too scarred by those experiences to let the
past slip away against their love for each other. So the counselling would
spent each session looking for “today” ways that they could relate to each
other and hence the “wine date” idea. Simple but effective since they previously
either had a going out date or they did not really relate to each other in the
vast amounts of time over the previous few years when both have effectively
retired from the workaday world. Eric found the sweet wines a way to relax (a
problem that as we shall find was the crux of what went south in the current
lowering of the boom).
Oh sure Eric as he told his friend Peter a few days later
when the initial shock had worn off a bit he and Mona had had their problems
over the previous few years but they were supposed to be working on getting
closer like with that wine date business. For several years before that they
had definitely been drifting apart, had become in his term “roommates” and hers
“ships passing in the night” until one day on U.S. 5 just outside of San Diego
he had exploded at her in the car telling her they couldn’t keep going on the
way they were going, something had to give. The underlying reason for his
outburst though was that he had kindled up a relationship with an old high
school classmate whom he did not know in school but whom he had met on-line
when he was searching for information about his high school class reunion that
was coming up. In the back of his mind he was half-way ready to quit the whole
thing himself. After that incident it had gotten pretty heavy with that old
classmate but when push came to shove, when he was confronted with the thought
of total separation and good-bye with his sweet pea he had backed off. The
price for that thought, the price that he was willing to pay to stay with Mona was
to go into couples counselling in which he gave what he thought, and more
importantly she thought, was good faith effort to reconcile their differences,
her grievances against him. That was the source of the wine date idea provided
by the counsellor as way they were to make connections in a quiet and cozy environment.
Eric thought when Mona lowered the boom on him this time that a lot of what was
driving her as much as her need to find her own path in life was deep and
unspoken continued resentment over that “affair” with the old classmate.
The couples counselling went on for about a year until
around the time they had gone to Paris, a place that she had never been to but
had desired to go to since she was a young girl like a lot of romantic young
girls sniffing the wonders of that town. They had had a great time there. But
about a week after they came back Laura lowered the boom on him the first time.
She wanted out under similar conditions to the latest episode. The result of
letting him stay was for him to go into individual counselling which he agreed
to do. He committed himself to a year in her presence but the year had not been
up before this fatal night. That separation had been the last thing on his
mind. Once he thought about Mona and his loss despite his good intentions Eric couldn’t finish his story to Peter that night
and maybe ever ….
Artists’ Corner-Frank Stella And The Abstract Expressionist Movement
Thad Lyons comment: I was crazy for abstract art when I was a kid and that genre was fresh with guys like Jackson Pollack breaking through the last vestiges of representational art which dominated Western art for a few precious centuries. Then that movement kind of turned on itself, or maybe better, ran out of steam once one could not tell a piece of art work from the walls which surrounded the picture. Frank Stella put himself front and center of some new energies when he took that basically sound abstract art push away from representational art and brought back form, forms geometric and curvilinear to tell his stories in paint. Not all of it worked, some of it left the viewer bewildered but some of it pushed art forward when things looked tough.
*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind
By Bradley Fox
Back in 2014, the summer of 2014 to hone in on the time frame of the story to be told, Josh Breslin the then recently retired old-time alternative newspaper and small journal writer for publications like Arise Folk and Mountain Music Gazette who hailed from Olde Saco, Maine was sitting with his friend Sam Lowell from Carver down in cranberry bog country out in Concord in the field behind the Old Manse where the Greater Boston Folk Society was holding its annual tribute to folksinger Woody Guthrie he had thought about all the connections that he, they had to Woody Guthrie from back in the 1960s folk minute revival and before. He mentioned that orphan thought to Sam whom he queried on the subject, wanted to know his personal take on when he first heard Woody. And as well to Laura Perkins, Sam’s long-time companion who had been sitting between them and whom Josh had an on-going half flame going back who knows how far but who had made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue to Sam although she had thanked him for the attention compliment. Sam was aware of Josh’s interest but also of Laura’s position and so he and Josh got along, had in any case been back and forth with some many collective wives and girlfriends that attracted both of them since they had similar tastes going back to ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that they just took it in stride. Here is what Sam had to say:
Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out to chapter and verse. Like those church hymns like Mary, Queen of the May, Oh, Jehovah On High, and Amazing Grace that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit first bought by poor but proud parents for first communion when that time came complete with white matching tie on or if you were a girl your best frilly dress on, also so white and first communion bought, when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which had made the hymns make sense.
Like as well the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry, first name Chuck, black as night out of Saint Lou with a golden guitar in hand and some kind of backbeat that made you, two left feet you, want to get up and dance, told Mr. Beethoven, you know the classical music guy, and his ilk, Mozart, Brahms, Liszt, to move on over there was a new sheriff in town, was certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things.
One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind causing westward treks to do re mi California in search of the Promise Land). Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and where the song had gotten full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right some vagabond Sunday night and for a time on television, after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene which scared the wits of square Ike American that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment).
No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.
Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally as he lay wasting away from genetic diseases in Brooklyn Hospital, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest centered on making current event political protest songs from ban the bomb to killing the Mister James Crow South, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before that dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him.
He spoke in simple language and simpler melody of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels like dams and bridge spans of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Uncle Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley fought to the bitter end by heroic fellow American Abraham Lincoln Battalion International Brigaders in civil war Spain during the time when it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.
The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).
It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.
Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers, the forever night-takers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.
As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary Airs- Another Time To Try Men's Souls- The Detroit Winter Soldier Investigations-1971
DVD Review
Winter Soldier, various soldier witnesses, Winterfest Productions, 1972
I am rather fond of invoking, especially in writing of the American Revolution that we have just again celebrated, Tom Paine’s little propaganda piece in defense of that revolution which hails the winter soldiers of 1776 for staying at their posts when others either ran away or became faint-hearted at the prospects of defeating the bloody English. It is those efforts by those long ago winter soldiers that other leftists and I have honored in the past and continue to honor today. We will leave the hollow holiday rhetoric and mindless flag waving to the sunshine patriots. Needless to say, given the title of the film under review, I am not the only one who appreciates that description and the producers here, I believe, have caught the essence of the spirit of those long ago winter soldiers in this documentary about the rank and file soldier-driven investigation in 1971 into the atrocities and horrors produced by the American military in the Vietnam War.
Needless to say, an investigation into atrocities and torture is not something that the American military establishment wished to have aired in public (and as the fate of this film indicates raised hell to successfully keep it out of the major media markets of the time). That establishment was much more comfortable with internal governmental investigations or whitewashes of their actions as occurred, ultimately, in the case of My Lai. However the traumatic reaction of a significant element of the rank and file soldiery in Vietnam caused this 'unofficial' investigation to take place. For those who grew up, like this reviewer, believing something of Lincoln’s expression that the American democratic experience was the ‘last, best hope for mankind’ this was not pretty viewing. For one, also like the reviewer, who was a soldier during the Vietnam War period and who had friends and ‘buddies’ just like those that populate this documentary AND DID SOME OF THE SAME THINGS it was doubly hard. But, dear reader, for the most part what the citizen-soldiers- our brothers, sons and other relatives- have to say here needed to be said.
Naturally in a documentary that films an investigation into atrocities, torture and military standard operating procedure (SOP) during the Vietnam War the interviewees are going to be a little more articulate, a little more remorseful and a lot more angry than the average soldier who went through Vietnam came home and tried to forget the experience. These soldiers had an agenda- and that agenda was to get their buddies- the troops still in Vietnam- home. Nevertheless one must be impressed by the way they expressed themselves –sometimes haltingly, sometimes inarticulately, sometimes from some depth that we have no understanding of. Moreover, their testimony has the ring of truth. Not the SOP military truth but this truth- humankind has a long way to go before it can, without embarrassment, use the word civilized to describe itself. No, my friends, these were not our soldiers but, they were our people-these were the winter soldiers of the Vietnam War.
The Committee for International Labor Defense joins with the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the French Communist Party, and the European United Left / Nordic Green Left of the European Parliament, in calling on Israeli authorities to release field researcher and human rights defender Salah Hamouri, 32, who has received a six month administrative detention order.
Hamouri, a Palestinian-French dual citizen was arrested in a pre-dawn raid on his home last Wednesday, August 16, 2017, by the Israeli army.
The Israeli practice of arbitrary detention is a grave violation of international laws and human rights standards, particularly articles 78 and 72 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which state that an accused individual has the right to defend himself or herself. Hamouri’s administrative detention also violates article 66 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the basic standards of fair trial.
This case is not simply the arrest of an individual. It is part of a systematic policy of oppression and exploitation on the part of the Israeli government against the Palestinian people, and as such, it should not be tolerated by the working people of either country who are the basis of their societies and economies.
We join with organizations, activists, and parliamentarians across Europe and the Middle East who are mobilizing to demand Hamouri's freedom and to pressure the French government to take action on this case.
The Committee for International Labor Defense urges French president Emanuel Macron and European officials to act now to demand Hamouri’s release.
The Committee for International Labor Defense entrusts the safety and good health of Salah Hamouri, and the hundreds of other Palestinian political prisoners held at Al-Moskobyeh and other detention centers, in the hands of Israeli government.
Finally, we call on organized labor in Palestine, Israel and other countries to rise up and defend the human rights of those detained by the Israeli authorities, and especially Salah Hamouri and his comrades.
The following protest letter to the Sacramento County District Attorney was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on August 16. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.
The Partisan Defense Committee protests the arrest and prosecution of Yvonne (Yvette) Felarca, Porfirio Paz and Michael Williams. All three face multiple felony and misdemeanor charges for defending themselves and others against the fascists of the Traditionalist Worker Party and the Golden State Skinheads who stabbed, slashed and clubbed anti-fascist protesters at the state Capitol in Sacramento on June 26, 2016. In their own words, these fascist terrorists had come armed to carry out a “fight to the death.” At least seven people, including Felarca, were stabbed, two of them hospitalized with critical wounds.
Over a year later, Felarca was met by a dozen police officers when she exited a flight in Los Angeles on July 18, handcuffed, thrown in jail and charged with felony assault, rioting and incitement to riot. Paz and Williams, who were also thrown behind bars, face similar charges. The transparent purpose of these outrageous charges is to intimidate any who would mobilize in defense of themselves and all the intended victims of these growing gangs of fascist thugs.
The Partisan Defense Committee demands that all charges against Yvette Felarca, Porfirio Paz and Michael Williams be dropped immediately.
In Boston-Resist DACA Deportations-And Every Other Trump "Cold Civil War" Action
Resist Deportations!
Defend DACA! Extend TPS! Jail Joe Arpaio! No Ban! No Wall! Defend Transgender Rights! Resist Fascism!
Mobilize Saturday, September 16
1:00 PM Park Street T
followed by a March to the JFK Federal Building
The government in Washington has stepped up attacks on migrants to levels not seen in years. Trump's attacks on Muslim migrants were only the beginning. Deportations are accelerating. Trump is terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and has pardoned the racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. He also threatens to shut down the government if a Mexican border wall is not built. He threatens the Temporary Protected Status program. This comes on top of his recent bigoted executive order against transgender troops in the US armed forces and his defense of Fascists in Charlottesville, NC. Millions of youth and decent hard working people are under attack! Trump and his cheerleaders in the U.S. Congress are leading a generalized assault on our lives, rights, and living conditions. The leading edge of this assault today is the stepped up attacks against migrants. An injury to one is an injury to all! Mobilize September 16!
