*****Reaching For The Stars-With The Apollo Moon Flights In Mind

*****Reaching For The Stars-With The Apollo Moon Flights In Mind 

By Bradley Maxwell

Several years ago, in a period when Larry Turner after years of studied denial and distain began to think about the matter both as a way to clear up his head on the issue and to satisfy a growing curiosity, he through the beauties of modern high-tech got in contact with some old classmates of his from Riverdale High. The fact of the matter was that he had been thinking about doing so for a number of years before that but somehow that studied denial and distain always got in the way. The impetus of an upcoming class reunion, or rather knowledge that it had been almost fifty years since he had graduated from high school with the Class of 1963, had sharpened his senses about clearing things up, getting some questions answered about why so many years ago he had as he called it “brushed the dust off his shoes” from any connection with the town, and those whom he had known there.

Despite the fact that so many years had passed and some questions would never be answered for the simple fact that some of those who would have known the answers to Larry’s inquiries, including his parents and a couple of his best friends who had died in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, he decided to “suck it up” and find out what he could find out about where the roads had gone awry on him. That said Larry was not thinking only about the dramatic and heavy burden of family misunderstanding and the like but about his youth, and about the days when he was in his way filled with wonder, filled with a desire to reach for the stars at a time when that was physically no longer out of the reach of humankind. Yeah, so Larry wanted to think about the days when if he had stuck with it he could have reached for the stars, gone on a different road.  

Getting in contact with old classmates these days from fifty years ago with all the modern social networking apparatuses to choose from is almost as simple as walking across the street in the old days to see if “Jimmy” was home and did he want to go to the courts and play a little hoop. In Larry’s case that was made easier by the simple expedient of Googling on the Internet for the Riverdale High School Class of 1963 and he came up with two quick possible sources of information. First a Facebook page put up by Nora Morris (nee Daley), who had been the Class secretary, had been a head cheerleader, and had been the chief social butterfly on all the committees that mattered in high school, the Fall and Spring dance, class day, prom, and Civic Pride committees. Moreover she still lived in town, still lived in Riverdale, and had a million connections that Larry would make some use of later. The second source which had been linked from the Facebook page was a website dedicated specifically to the upcoming class reunion. So Larry was in business.

Now Larry was not all of the following: a class officer, a sports player, a dance, Fall or Spring, class day, prom, or Civic pride committee member, or any school clubs. So he had not particular affinity with Nora Daley, and she probably did not even know he existed, but he nevertheless contacted her about joining the class website (he had seen nothing on Facebook that except some names, most of which he recognized if he did not know personally, and what they had been doing since high school, which would have helped him in his quest except that link to the class website). He sent her an e-mail via the website saying he wished to join the group.

Now the way this website stuff works, or the way it worked for the Class of 1963, was that all two hundred and seventy-three members of the class who graduated had their class photographs listed on the site (those who had not had their photographs taken for the yearbook simply had their names listed). If you wanted to join the site you just clicked on your name, provided some information, as much as you desired to tell a candid world, clicked on a “submit” icon and you were, pending webmaster Nora’s okay, a member of the site. Larry cleared all those low-bar hurdles and Nora sent him a personal e-mail via the site both to welcome him and to tell him that as he suspected she did not remember him from school.

And why should she have remembered him since in many ways he had been the angry young man, for lots of reasons including a hazardous home-life, had been as filled with teen angst and alienation as Johnny (Marlon Brando) in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel  Without A Cause  two films which he closely associated himself. Although when he was younger, when he was eleven or twelve, he had been as full as pipe dreams and good will as any kid at Danner Junior High.                            

Nora Daley in her role as class site webmaster, and probably just the way she was as a personality, in order to generate some on-going conversation would put up a bunch of questions on the homepage of the website. Silly things like-who did you have a secret “crush” on, who did you go to the prom with (Larry hadn’t), do you remember those great night before Thanksgiving rallies in support of the football team’s struggle against arch-rival Overton High in the gym (Larry did attend the one senior year), and who was your favorite teacher (Miss Soros, Larry’s  English teacher but she did not like him, or rather thought he was an underachiever, a bad sign in her book).

But Nora also posed more serious questions like how did it feel to live in the red scare Cold War night during school with all those crazy air raid drills which were worthless if you thought about it if the Russians decided to throw the big bomb at us. Like what was your attitude, if any, about the black civil rights movement down south that was filling up all the newspapers and televisions with its details. And like the question that Larry felt very comfortable with-what did you think about the exploration of space and what it would do for humankind (Nora used the more old-fashioned “mankind” reflecting perhaps an older learned ethos in her question).           

Larry was not sure whether Nora was asking these questions based on some rote recitation from some on-line time-line for the late 1950s and early 1960s when those events were current and came up with the questions that way or whether these were issues that she was interested in knowing the answers to for some other purpose. The way the thing worked was that if you had an opinion on a question you would write it up and submit it on that particular class opinion and comment page. Larry had briefly mentioned that he had attended the Thanksgiving football rally in senior year and had written a paragraph about it-mainly about how he was supposed to meet an unnamed girl who promised to be there who never showed up. And that was that.  

Larry did the same thing, or almost the same thing, wrote a couple of paragraphs on the question of space exploration, a subject that had fascinated him when he was in junior high when he fancied himself a budding rocket scientist like a million other kids, a million other guys mainly. He had also mentioned in that posting that he had recently gone down to Washington, D.C. on some business. After that conference was concluded on a whim, or not so much a whim as curiosity  since he was knee-deep in reading Norman Mailer’s literary account of the latter part of the “space race,” the struggle to put a man on the moon, Of A Fire On The Moon, he visited the Air and Space Museum just off the National Mall and noted that the old time thrill of wanting to be a rocket scientist (rather than his profession as a lawyer) came back, including memories about what it was like to have a sense of wonder back in those times. Stuff he had not thought about in many years.    

That little posting got Nora to response and ask him to expand on what he was talking about. About that sense of wonder and intrigue connected with space flight, with being part of, if only vicariously, the efforts to win the space race. Larry’s posting had also prompted several other classmates to tell of their interests, a couple who were actually as he remembered serious about science and were members of Mr. Roberts’ science club after school and who went on to have roles in the NASA programs. Larry wasn’t sure he wanted to expand on what he had written in that first posting but Nora had as the Noras of the world will do “pretty pleased” him into writing something. This is what Larry wrote:   

Space Wars, Circa 1960-by Larry Turner

Nora’s Question: In school in the early 1960s did you ever get caught up in the euphoria over the space program?

“We, all of us, are now old enough and presumably have seen enough of this sorry old world, to have become somewhat inured to the wonders of modern technology. Just witness the miracle of cyberspace that we are communicating through this very minute from all our diverse locations. My answer goes back to the mist of time when humankind had just developed the technology to reach for the stars, and we had the capacity to wonder.

For myself, I distinctly remember, as I am sure that you do as well, sitting in some Riverdale classroom as the Principal came over the P.A. system and hooked us up with the latest exploit in space. John Glenn's trip around the earth comes readily to mind. My friends, I will go back even further, back to junior high school, when we were just becoming conscious of the first explorations of space. The reaction to the news of Sputnik, the artificial satellite that the Russians had put up in 1957, drove many of us to extend our range of scientific knowledge.

I vividly remember trying to make rockets, in the basement of our family apartment, by soldering tin cans together fused with a funnel on top. I also remember taking some balsa wood, fashioning a rocket-type projectile, putting up wiring between two poles, inserting a CO2 cartridge and hammering away. Bang!!! Nothing.

After that failed experiment my scientific quest diminished. Moreover, I, a few years later became much more concerned about the fate of my fellow earthlings and trying to correct a few injustices in this world, but that is another story. Now that I think about it the question posed above really is aimed at those, unlike myself, who moved beyond boyish (or girlish) fantasies and used that youthful energy to get serious about science. Maybe you should tell us your stories.”

That little “dare” prompted William James Bradley, that is the moniker he uses now in his very successful car dealership in Overton, but back then, back when he was Larry’s best friend, or something like that, they never quite figured it all out, he was just Billy, to post the following “true” story about Larry’s early space exploits. This is a very different take on the meager offering that Larry provided. Here is what Billy had to say in his comment in response to Larry’s posting:  

Billy, William James Bradley, comment:

Yeah, I know I haven’t talked to most of you in too long a while like I told you I would when I came on this class website. But Larry Turner’s very somber post at Nora’s request about his youthful interest in space got to me. Got to me when he cut short a lot of the details that really happened back then. Guess who was with him all the way with his rocket science inventions. Yeah, me. 

So I am going to set you straight and tell you all about my best friend, Larry Turner, I always considered him my best friend so I don’t know where that “something like that” came from over at Danner Junior High, and his ill-fated attempts to single-handedly close the space gap they kept talking about once the commies put that Sputnik satellite up in orbit in 1957. Some of you who know me, knew me and my troubles back then at Danner, know that I was still kind of broken up about something around that time. Yeah, for you that don’t know I got caught up in some, well I might as well just come out with it, woman trouble, alright girl trouble, okay. So that colors the story a little, explains why I had time to spend with Larry and his foolish experiments. Just to let you know shortly after these space events I helped Larry with, once I discovered Elvis’ real take on the honeys, One Night Of Sin I got a new girlfriend, well, really an old girlfriend, an old stick girlfriend, Cool Donna O’Toole, that I had, as Larry always kidded me about, “discarded” when love Laura who had ditched me came into view. That isn’t getting us to the Larry space odyssey you’ve been waiting breathlessly to hear about so forward.

And I will get to that in just a second now that I think about it, or the heart of the story, but let me just take a minute to tell you this background story. It seems that Larry had had no objection, and shouldn’t have had, after all of Nora’s prodding, to having his space odyssey story told but he just wanted to tell the story himself. That is why we got that cock and bull whitewash  he posted but after I sent an e-mail and confronted him I said no way, no way on this good green earth are you going to get away with telling it that way. Hell, by the time he got done we were all to be weepy, girl weepy, or something about his tremendous contribution to space science rather than the simple truth- Larry should not be let with fifty miles, no, make that five hundred miles, no, let’s be on the safe side, five thousand miles from anything that could even be remotely used for launching rockets. Yeah, it’s that kind of story.

Besides, here is the real reason that Larry shouldn’t get away with his story, and I told him so. Larry, no question is a history guy, that’s probably why he wound up as a lawyer. He was crazy for people like Abigail Adams, and her husband and son, the guys who used to be Presidents, John and John Quincy, back in the Stone Age, and who Adamsville a few towns over is named after, one of them anyway. He also knows, although I have no clue why, about old times Egypt from going to the Thomas Cromwell Public Library branch at school and taking the Greyhound bus, taking the bus for that reason, can you believe this, over to Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out their mummy stuff, and tombs and how they dressed and all that. Yawn.

Larry was also crazy for reading, not stuff that was required for school reading either, and writing about it, a book guy, no doubt. Get this, as an example that I have never forgotten whenever his name comes up, one time he told me about a book of short stories that he was reading about by a guy, an Irish guy, a chandelier Irish guy, Fitzgerald or something like that, who wrote stories about rich kids, very rich kids, rich guys with names like Basil mooning over rich girls. And rich girls with names like Josephine swooning over guys. Nothing big about that but like I told Larry at the time how was reading that stuff going to do anything for you, for us, trying, trying like crazy to get the hell, excuse my English, out of small town Riverdale. He’s was a cloudy guy see, even if he was my best friend.

But here is something funny, and maybe makes this reading stuff of some use sometimes. Larry read in the Foreword, who the hell, excuse my language again, in this good green earth reads the Foreword, that one of the stories, one of the Basil stories wasn’t published because the publishers didn’t believe back in the early part of the last century that ten and eleven year old boys and girls would be into “petting parties.” Jesus, and I make no excuse for saying that, where had those guys been, and what planet, not earth. Definitely not then in Riverdale with us poor small town boys and girls. So history and book reading that sums up Larry in those days. Does that sound like a guy who can tell a space story, a nuts and bolts space story? No, leave this one to old Billy, he’ll tell it true.

I don’t know about you but I was not all that hopped up about space exploration, space races, or Jules Verne although I will admit that I was a little excited about the idea of those space satellites going up in the sky, those that started with the Soviet Union’s first object in space, Sputnik. But when they started sending robots, monkeys, mice, and small dogs I lost interest. I figured how hard can it be to do the space thing if rodents can make the trip, unmolested. Besides I had my budding career as a rock star of the Elvis sort to worry about so other kinds of stars took a back seat.

Not so Larry. The minute he heard, or maybe it was a little later but pretty soon after, that Sputnik had gone up, that it had been the Russkies who were first in space, he was crazy to enlist in the space race. I swear I had to stop talking to him for a few days because all he wanted to talk about, with that certain demented look in his eye that told you that you were in for a lecture like at school, was how it was every red-blooded student’s, make that every red-blooded American student’s, duty to get moving in aid of the space front. It was so bad that he would not even heard me talk about the latest rock hit without saying, hey, that’s kid’s stuff I got no time for that. Bad, right.

Now this was not about money, you know going around the neighborhood collecting coins for the space program like we did to restore the U.S.S. Constitution when it was all water-logged or whatever happens to wooden ships when they get too old. And it was not about maybe going to the library to get some books to study up on science and maybe someday become a space engineer and go to Cape Canaveral or someplace like that. No this was about our duty, duty see, to go out in the back yard, go down in the cellar, go out in the garage (if you had a garage) and start to experiment making rockets that might be able to make it to space. See what I mean. Deep-end stuff, no question.

Now I already told you, but in case you might have forgotten, Larry was nothing but a books and history guy, and maybe a little music. I had never seen him put a hammer to a nail or anything like that, and I am not sure that he has those skills. I do know that when we were making papier mache dinosaurs in class one time his thing did not look like a dinosaur. Not close. But one day he got me to go with him up to Riverdale Center to the hardware store to get materials for making a rocket. Larry was nothing if not serious in his little projects, at first. At the store we got some balsa wood, nails, aluminum poles, guide wire, a knife built for carving stuff, and about ten CO2 cartridges. The idea was to build a model (or models) and see which ones have the contours to be space-worthy.

Over the next couple of weeks I saw Larry off and on but mainly off because he was spending his after-school time down in the cellar of the apartment house where his family lived working on those balsa wood models. Then one day, one Saturday I think, yeah, it was Saturday he came over to my house looking for help in setting up his launch pad. The idea was that he would put up two aluminum poles, stretch the guide wire between the two poles and demonstrate what he called the aerodynamic flow of his models by attaching his balsa wood models on the wire with a bent nail. Propulsion was by inserting a CO2 cartridge in a crevice in the rocket and hitting one end of the cartridge by lightly hitting it with a nail. I was to observe at the finish while he covered the start. After about half an hour everything was set to go and Dr. Von Turner was ready to set the explosion. Except moon man Larry hit the nail into the cartridge at the wrong place and, if it had not been for some quick leg work that I still chuckle over when I think about it (like now) my friend would have lost an eye. Scratch balsa wood models.

Oh, you thought that was the end of it. Christ no. After catching some hell from his mother (and a little from me) he was back on the trail blazing away. This time though he kept it very low. I didn’t even know about it until he asked me to help him get some materials from that same hardware store and the Rexall Drug Store uptown. So here is the brain-storm in a nut shell. He said he saw the error of his ways in the balsa wood fiasco- he had used the wrong fuel and the whole guide wire thing was awry. This time he intended to simulate (yeah, I didn’t know what that meant either until he told me it was like practically the same but not the real thing, or something like that) a launching like he had seen on television and in the Bell Laboratories Science films we saw at school. Okay, get this, he built, using his father’s soldering iron, a small rocket out of tin soup cans (Campbell’s, naturally, just kidding) with a tin funnel on top and flattened metal for wings. Hey, it really didn’t look bad. The fuel, I swear I do not know all the ingredients but they all came from either the hardware or drug store so that gives you an idea about something. Apparently he read about it somewhere.

So, again on black Saturday, we are off to the back field to launch the spaceship Billy (named after me, of course) into fame and fortune. We set the rocket on a small launch pad that he made; he put in the fuel from a can, and then closed it off with a fuse device at the end. I, as honoree, was to light the match for take-off. I lit the match alright except a funny thing happened- the rocket quickly, very quickly turned into an inferno, and almost me along with it, except I too did some fancy leg work. Christ, Larry enough. And the lesson to be learned- you had better be young, quick, and have your insurance paid up if you are going to hang out with maddened rocket scientists.

After that experiment I think old Larry lost heart. A few days later I saw him reading a book about Abraham Lincoln so I guess the coast was clear. Oh yeah, and at school a week or two later he asked me if I had heard Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless yet. Welcome back to Earth, Larry.

Larry laughed when he read Billy’s posting. Sent him an e-mail with one word-Touche. But here is the funny thing Billy’s little missive got him thinking about something he saw at the space museum down in Washington. They had on display for the whole world to see the actual vehicle, or a test model, of the landing craft which the Apollo 11, the first men to land on the moon, used. Larry was amazed by the sight and spent some time looking at all aspects of the vehicle.  What startled him was how amateurish the whole thing looked (as some of the other exhibit did as well). The thing with its odd-ball hooks, its off-center antennae, it patches of foil here, some misshapen boxes there, it funny landing pods looked like something he might have created in those halcyon days when he had enlisted himself in the space program when it counted. His conclusion; maybe he had given up too early on his rocket scientist dreams. Maybe he shouldn’t have been bullied by Billy to go back to reading books and listening to music.     

Thinking about Billy though and his posting Larry began to think about that F. Scott Fitzgerald reference that Billy mentioned. Not about Fitzgerald’s Basil and Josephine stories but about The Great Gatsby and that haunting last few paragraphs that kind of summed up something about humankind. Larry wondered if those Apollo astronauts when they landed on the moon had the same sense of wonder about the prospects for that place as those long ago Dutch sailors did as they saw the first “fresh green breast” of land as they hit Long Island Sound. He hoped so.    

Scenes From An Ordinary Be-Bop Life-Scene Seven-Moline Meltdown Madness-An Interlude, Late Summer 1969

Scenes From An Ordinary Be-Bop Life-Scene Seven-Moline Meltdown Madness-An Interlude, Late Summer 1969



Defeat takes many forms, no question, no question at all, but on the hard-scrabble, white-lined hitchhike highway nothing augured defeat like three or four days of hard, hard-driving, hard-bucket, squishing, swirling, streaming, overflowing the drain spouts, rain. But see, at just that minute on just that road we, Angelica and I, did not know though that we faced that sock in the jaw by dear Mother Nature, having only been out there for a couple of hours. The rain, steady, steady as the homeward-bound after a hard day’s work traffic that passed us by, had started about an hour earlier. Not long, but long enough to get ourselves rain-dripped to perdition.


Rain, rain that dripped deep into your bones, and maybe to your soul if you had one handy that could get wet, and added at least five hundred pounds to your load. No, not the soul the rain soak, and more consequentially, dripped down the back of your neck into your collar despite the best efforts of your seaman’s cap to absorb and contain all before the deluge. And pancho-ed Angelica, patient yellow pancho-ed Angelica, hood up covering half her face, and maybe all of her peripheral vision, acted the trouper, as usual. Drawing strength, drawing vital strength, from somewhere deep in that pioneer American Midwest good night stock from whence she came. The road, the far too long road from gentle, restful, lazy farm, joints and music, edenic commune Springfield of the last scene has sapped some of her energy, and, hell, mine as well.


Ya, but take a guess at what human solidarity, or at least what one would hope would rise from the human sink on such an occasion, and would provide as a natural curative in these circumstances. One could guess, and hopefully not too be far off that the sight of two young, not too disheveled, if somewhat “hippie” attired, rain-beaten people standing on the shoulder of a hitchhike 1969 road would cause at least one lonely-hearted car, one battered truck, one moseying hay wagon, one misplaced mule team, or whatever was out there on State Route 5 in Moline, where our last ride let us off, Moline, Illinois, the one near the Mississippi River, the Quad Cities one that is, in case there is another Moline that I don’t know about and might curse by mistake. But one would be wrong.


No, these were all fair-weather farm people who had that look on their faces as they passed by, not of fear or menace, but that those young folk on the road, meaning us, on their industrious road, did not work. Not at least at anything respectable, this out here means something to do with the land, the sweet sweat of backbreaking labor on the land, and of endless toil. No these two young vagabonds were not like their Johnnies and Sues already lined up by age fourteen to take over the farm, to marry that nice girl or guy the next few farms over, have their fair share of children, and then…on some 1989 or 1999 rain-soaked, white-lined hitchhike road they will be able to give some young nature-devastated couple that selfsame look, if there are still any such hearty souls left by then to tweak their ire.


But enough of that, by this time things were serious and I could tell by the look of Angelica’s stance, or rather her ballooning yellow poncho-covered half-stance against the hardness of the rain that I had better come with some idea, some idea better than standing on this side road being sneered at, or worst, ignored by the local kulaks. And I did. Look, if I had been out there on that windswept piece of flatland alone I could have found myself some old barn to share with the local farm animals, or if that didn’t work out then some lean-to. A fallback option, although I would have rather not, was to draw a beeline to the railroad yards and seek shelter in an empty freight car. Except every hobo, bum, tramp and faux vagabond within fifty miles of there would have had has the same idea and while I can respect the lore of the comradely road as well as the next man, frankly, that lore is overrated when you get twenty males of various physical and mental conditions communing in a freight. But right then I was a respectable “married” man and I had to seek some more appropriate shelter at least for this night for my better half, or else.


And, of course, we were not in covered-wagon, prairie schooner days but in a heartland city so off we went back up the road a bit to find some kind of cheap, flea-bitten motel to wait out this, hopefully, passing storm. Sure, we were pinching pennies and we certainly did not expect to have had lay over there but such is the such of the road, the “married” road. Needless to say I already knew the motel we would wind up at. No, I had never been in Moline before; at least I did not think so. But I did know the motel. I didn’t know the actual name of the place, although Dew Drop Inn rated pretty high as a quick guess. And I did not know the exact layout of the rooms except that there would be about sixteen to twenty identical units, all on the first floor; park the car, if you had a car, directly in front of your little bungalow. After the formality of payment and registration, that is.

Thereafter, open the plywood-thick “security” door, cheaply painted, to gain the first view of your “suite” and inhale the ammonia, bleach, smoke-stained smells that are guaranteed with the room key. And as a bonus whatever odors the previous tenants had left. These cheap, flea-bitten places frown upon pre-inspection, and those who find themselves, like us, in reduced circumstances, would rather not “inspect” the room anyway.

Take my word for this, please. Go on then to view your slightly sagging twin bed, with almost matching pillows and sheets, usually lime and pink. Your deluxe color television (guaranteed to run, the colors that is). Your complimentary tray, your Salvation Army-found bureau and night table (complete with Gideon’s Bible) and your bathroom (shower, no bath) with about seventeen sets of laundry over-bleached towels for every possible usage from face to figure. Set off by a genuine reproduction of a reproduction of some seascape on the wall to add a homey touch by an artist whose name will just escape your remembrance. But I have now given it all away, even before we found our cozy cottage. Not to worry there it is. No, not Dew Drop Inn this time, E-Z Rest. All for sixteen dollars a night, plus tax (and two dollar deposit on the television, returnable on departure, returnable presumably if you didn’t decide in a frenzied moment to “steal” the damn thing). Oh ya, I was off on the picture on the wall, it was a farm scene. Silly me.


I will say this for Angelica, for the several weeks that we had been on the road, through all the hassles we have faced up until then; she has been remarkably good-natured about things. Remarkable, as well, I might add for the first time out on the road. Remarkable, moreover, for an Ivory soap naïve Midwestern gal who a few months before had hardly ever left Muncie, as she related parts of her life to me while we, sometimes seemingly endlessly, waited for rides. Remarkable, above all, for her innate ability to face adversity without having a nervous breakdown about it every five minutes. Flame, Boston flame, that I had just run away from, Joyel, would have been a pretty high up number in her one thousand frustrations wearing on my nerves by now. The reason I mention this is that out back there on the Route 5 no-ride road, the rain-swept road that drove us inside I had a feeling for just a minute, but a feeling just the same, that the wilds of the road, the “freedom” of the road, the adventure now not when we are too old to do anything about it, was starting to weight down on her, and on her dreams. Not a good sign, especially not a good sign as the rain kept tap-tapping relentlessly down the spout outside and on top of the creaky rooftop that made you think that it was going to come in the room in about five minutes. And as if she too caught a glimpse of that notion that I felt she sidled up to me and said to me that we needed to take a “nap” to get the chill off from the road. I was only following doctor’s on that command, okay, well the future radiologist’s orders, if that‘s how things worked out. It’s kind of the same, right?


“Married” or not. Remarkable or not. After what turned out to be three days of steady rain and three days of a foul, cumbersome room with nothing but drippy-runny colored television and some light (meaning non-political for me, romance novels for her) reading material bought up the road at a very strange bookstore that ran the gamut in light reading from 17th century novels to soft-core porn (smut, okay) to while away the hours we both were getting severe cases of cabin fever. Remind me to tell you about the bookstore, and another one out in the middle of the desert in California some time but right then I could sense, and more importantly, fair Angelica could sense, that something was wrong. Wrong, right now. And so wrong that it needs to be fixed, right then. It boiled down to this (I will give her version but it will do for my sense of the thing as well). Why were two seemingly sane young people sitting in some dusty, broken down, rain-splattered, motel room in god-forsaken yes, god-forsaken, Moline, Illinois waiting for the rain to stop, or to let up enough so that we could move on to the “bright lights” of Davenport, Iowa or points west.


I will not detail all the talk back and forth that ensued except to say that that momentary glance I had noted back on the road a few days ago when we hit town had some meaning behind it. Angelica was road-weary. Hell, I was a little weary myself. But, I was not ready to go off the road, not ready to go back to the same old, same old. And here is the truth. Just at that minute my delights in Angelica were running just about three to two in her favor, and dropping. This called for drastic measures. I had to unwind the story of the search for the blue-pink great American West night that I had been holding back on. You already know the story, but old Angelica didn’t. Seemed clueless about what I meant when I even mentioned the words. Before this it just seemed too complicated to run by someone who was just traveling on the road to travel on the road. Not someone looking for some ancient, unnamed, unnameable quest that spoke more to the stuff of dreams than anything else.


If you know this old saga, although I did touch it up a little here, then you can kind of skip this part and proceed to find out what Angelica though of the whole thing. Or, maybe, you can re-read it to rekindle that old time wanderlust that drove your dreams, you name the color, you name the place, and you name the pursuit of them:

“I, once was asked, in earnest (by an old flame), what I meant by the blue-pink western skies. Or rather the way I would prefer to formulate it, and have always taken some pains to emphasize it this way, the search for the blue-pink great American West night. Well, of course, there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that the hitchhike road meant heading west.


So that night was clearly not in the vicinity of the local Blues Hills or of the Berkshires back in ocean-fronted Massachusetts, those are too confined and short-distanced to even produce blues skies much less that west-glanced sweet shade just before heaven, if there was a heaven shade, blue-pink. And certainly not hog-butcher-to-the-world, sinewy Midwest Chicago night, Christ no, nor rarefied, deep-breathed, rockymountainhigh Denver night, although jaded sojourner-writer not known for breathe-taking, awe-bewilderment could have stopped there for choice of great western night. Second place, okay.


But no, onward, beyond, beyond pioneer, genetically-embedded pioneer America, past false god neon blue-pink glitter Las Vegas in the Nevada desert night to the place where, about fifty miles away from sanctified west coast, near some now nameless abandoned ghost town, nameless here for it is a mere speck on the map you would not know the name, you begin, ocean man that you are, if you are, and organically ocean-bred says you are, to smell the dank, incense-like, seaweed-driven, ocean-seized air as it comes in from the Japanese stream, or out there somewhere in the unknown, some Hawaii or Guam or Tahiti of the mind, before the gates of holy city, city of a thousand, thousand land’s end dreams, San Francisco. That is where the blue-pink sky devours the sun just before the be-bop, the bop-bop, the do wang-doodle night, the great American Western star-spangled (small case) night I keep reaching for, like it was some physical thing and not the stuff of dreams.”


See, though Angelica got all confused by this way of telling about the night, hell, I started to get a little balled up on it myself. She was getting fidgety toward the end and I could tell by her facial expressions that, rain beating down outside, I had not made the right “adjustment” this time. Okay, off came the gloves, here is the” real” story, and as the rain started beating harder I got into a trance-like state telling Angelica of the following:


“Okay, let me tell this thing straight through without questions even though I know that it will sound off-kilter to you anyway I say it, hell it will sound half off-kilter to me and I lived through the thing. But let’s get to it anyway; we can gab about it later. See, back a few years ago, ya, it was a few years back when I was nothing but a summer-sweltered sixteen year old high school kid, a city boy high school kid, with no dough, no way to get dough, and nobody I knew who had dough to put a touch on, I went off the deep end. Plus, plus I had about thirty-six beefs with Ma, around par for the course for a whole summer but way too many for a couple of weeks in, and not even Fourth of July yet. Worst, worst, if you can believe this, I had a few, two maybe, beefs with the old man, and having a beef with him with Ma the official flak-catcher meant things were tough, too tough to stay around.


Sure, I know, how tough can it be at sixteen to stay put waiting for the summer heat to break and maybe have some clean clear wind bring in a change of fortune. But don’t forget, don’t ever forget when I’m telling you this story that we are talking about a sixteen year old guy, with no dough and plenty of dreams, always plenty of dreams, whatever color they turned out to be. So I threw a few things together in an old green beaten up knapsack, you know enough to get by until things break, that stuff and about three dollars, and I headed out the door like a lot of guys headed out that same kind of door before me in search of fame and fortune, Looking back on it I’ll take the fortune, if I have a choice.


I hit the main street with a swagger and immediately start thumbing as if my life depended on it, or at least that I had to act that way to click the dust of the old town off my heels pronto. And right away a car, although I hadn’t seen where it had come from before it came into my view, a late model car, looked like a 1961 Ford, came up on me, slowed down, the driver rolled down his passenger side window and asked where was I heading. I said “west, I guess,” he says “I’m heading up to Maine, Portland, Maine to work. Too bad I can’t help you.” As he readied to make tracks I say, “Hey, wait a minute, I‘ll take that ride, North or West it’s all the same to me.” Whoever said that my fortune could not be made in Maine just as easily as in California.


This guy, if you are thinking otherwise, turned out to be pretty interesting, he wasn’t any fruit like a lot of guys who stop when they see a young guy with a dour, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders pan like mind, and are ready to pounce on that fact. Seems that Kenny, Kenny of a thousand ships, his name was, worked the boats, the ferries out of Portland and Bar Harbor over to Nova Scotia and filled the time we traveled with stories about different funny things that happened on the trips back and forth. Funny things that happened to landlubbers that is, those who were not used to the open sea and who got seven shades of seasick. And he told this one story that I didn’t think anything of, just a guy puffing himself up like a million other guys, like I have myself when I’d brag about how I had so many girlfriends that I was going to have invent some extra days in the week and really I’d, usually, just be scratching and crawling on all fours for one date, and praying for that to come through.

Like I say, just puffing. He went on a bit about how one time out in the misty mist his uncle, Captain he called him, some old swamp Yankee, whom he served under in some boat saved a bunch of people off an island ferry off of Portland Light, got them to shore, and went back out looking for more.


Well, he is telling his stories, and I am telling mine about this and that, but mainly about my love of the sea, and about going west to see the Pacific when I get tired of the Atlantic but it looks like not today because where we are heading is nothing but cold hard, windy fighting Atlantic. But that dream, as I start talking myself around it, that getting tired of the Atlantic, is only a maybe because today now that I have made my break-out I can see where going to the coast of Maine to start my new life seems just about right. Suddenly, Kenny says out of the blue, “Hey, if you’re gonna bum around I’ll leave you off at Old Orchard Beach, right at the beach, there’s plenty of places to sleep without being bothered. And besides…” But before he can get the words out I say, hey, there is an amusement park there, right?


Hell, this was getting better all the time. I remember one time we, meaning me and my family, went up there and I played Skees, which I love, and I met a girl there who was watching me play and I impressed her by winning a penny whistle for her. I think I was ten or eleven then, okay, so lay off. See, though this guy, Kenny, was so good, such a good guy, that when we get to the Old Orchard exit he doesn’t just let me off on Route One and so I have to thumb another ride into town like most guys would do but takes me right down to the pier, the amusement park pier. Then he says you know it is probably better to get away from this crowded area, let me take you down Route 9 to the Saco jetty where you can set yourself up in an empty boat. Okay, that sounds right and besides it’s won’t be dark for hours and it’s not dark enough yet for me to make my big teenage city boy, Skeet champion city boy, amusement park moves on the local twists. Nice guy, Kenny, right, a prince of the road. We shook hands as he left, saying see you around.


I can see right away that Kenny was right, this place is quiet and there are many boats just waiting to be used for housekeeping purposes. But, what got my attention was, maybe fifty yards away, the start of the longest jetty in the world, or so I thought. Hey, I had walked a few jetties before and while you have to be careful for the ill-placed boulders when you get to the end you feel like the king of the sea, and old Neptune better step aside. I started walking out, Christ this is tough going I must be a little tired from all the travel. Nah it’s more than that, the granite slabs are placed helter-skelter so you can’t bound from one to another and you practically have to scale them. After about a hundred yards of scraping my hands silly, and raw, I say the heck with this and head back. But put sixteen, hunger for adventure, and hunger to beat old fellaheen king Neptune down together and you know this is not the end. I go around looking at my boat selection just exactly like I am going to rent an apartment. Except before I set up housekeeping I am going to take the old skiff I select out along the jetty to the end. So I push one off the sand, jump in and start rowing.


Now I am an ocean guy, no question. And I know my way around boats, a little, so I don’t think much of anything except that I will go kind of slow as I work my way out. Of course a skiff ain’t nothing but a glorified rowboat, if that. It’s all heavy lifting and no “hi tech” like navigation stuff or stuff that tells you how far the end of jetty is. Or even that there is a heavy afternoon fog starting to roll in on the horizon. Ya, but intrepid that’s me. Hey, I’m not going to England just to the end of the jetty. I said that as the fog, the heavy dark fog as it turned out, enveloped the boat and its new-found captain. I started rowing a little harder and a little more, I ain’t afraid to say it, panic-stricken. See I thought I was rowing back to shore but I know, know deep somewhere in my nautical brain, that I am drifting out to sea. I’m still rowing though, as the winds pick up and rain starts slashing away at the boat. Or course, the seas have started swelling, water cresting over the sides. Christ, so this is the way it is going to finish up for me. What seemed like a couple more hours and I just plain stopped rowing, maybe I will drift to shore but I sure as hell am not going to keep pushing out to sea. Tired, ya, tired as hell but with a little giddy feeling that old Neptune is going be seeing me soon so I decide to put my head down and rest.


Suddenly I am awoken by the distinct sound of a diesel engine, no, sounds about six diesels, and a big, flashing light coming around my bow. I yell out, “over here.” A voice answers, “I know.” Next thing I know an old geezer, a real old geezer decked out in his captain’s gear is putting a rope around the bow of my boat and telling me to get ready to come aboard. Ay, ay, Captain. After getting me a blanket, some water and asking if I wanted a nip of something (I said yes) he, old Captain Cob his name was, said I was lucky, lucky as hell that he came by. Then he asked what I was doing out here in the open sea with such a rig, and wasn’t I some kind of fool boy. Well, I told my story, although he seemed to know it already like he made a daily habit of saving sixteen year old city boys from the sea, or themselves. So we swapped stories for a while as we headed in, and I had a nip or two more. As we got close to Saco pier though he blurted out that he had to let me off in my boat before the dock because he had some other business on the Biddeford side.


Here is where it gets really weird though. He asked me, as we parted, did I know the name of his boat (a trawler, really). I said I couldn’t see it in all the fog and swirling sea. He told me she was the “Blue-Pink Night”. I blurted out, “Strange name for a boat, what is it a symbol or something?” Then he told me about how he started out long ago on land, as a kid just like me, a little older maybe, heading to California, and the warm weather and the strange blue-pink night skies and the dreams that come with them. I said how come you’re still here but he said he was pressed for time and left. Here is the thing that really threw me off. He gave me a small dried sea shell, a clam shell really, that was painted on its inner surface and what was painted was a very intricate, subliminally beautiful scene of what could only be that blue-pink California sky. I said, Thanks; I’ll always remember you for this and the rescue." He said, “Hell lad that ain’t nothing but an old clam shell. When you get over to that Saco café at the dock just show it to them and you can get a meal on it. That meal is what you’ll remember me by.”


Hungry, no famished, I stumbled into the Saco café, although that was not its name but some sea name, and it was nothing but a diner if you though about it, a diner that served liquor to boot so there were plenty of guys, sea guys, nursing beers until the storm blew over, or whatever guys spend half the day in a gin mill waiting to blow over. I stepped to the counter and told the waitress, no, I asked politely just in case this was a joke, whether this old clam shell from the captain of the “Blue-Pink Night” got me a meal, or just a call to take the air. All of a sudden the whole place, small as it was, went quiet as guys put their heads down and pretended that they didn’t hear or else though the joint doubled up as a church. I asked my question again and the waitress said, “What’ll you have?” I called my order and she called it to the short order cook. The she said did I know anything about this captain, and how did he look, and where did he meet me, and a whole bunch of questions like this was some mystery, and I guess maybe there was at that.


Then the waitress told me this (and I think every other guy in the room by the loudness of her voice), “ A few years back, yes, about six or seven years ago, there was a big storm that came through Portland Light, some say a perfect storm, I don’t know, but it was a howler. Well, one of the small ferries capsized out there and somehow someone radioed that there were survivors clinging to the boat. Well, the old captain and his nephew, I think, started up the old “Blue-Pink Night” and headed out, headed out hard, headed out full of whiskey nips, and one way or another, got to the capsized boat and brought the survivors into shore and then headed out again. And we never saw them again. And here is the funny part; when he was unloading his passengers he kept talking, talking up a perfect storm about seeing the blue-pink night when he was out there before and maybe it was still there. I guess the booze got the best of him. But hear me son, old captain was square with every one in this place, he used to own it then, and some of his kin are sitting right here now. He was square with them too. So, eat up kid, eat up on the house, ‘cause I want you to save that old clam shell and any time you are on your uppers you can always get a meal here. Just remember how you got it.” “Thanks, ma’am,” I said. Then I slowly, like my soul depended on it, asked, “Oh, by the way, what was that old captain’s nephew's name?” and I said it in such a way that she knew, knew just as well as I did, that I knew the answer. “Kenny, Kenny Cob, bless his soul.”


And that story my friends, got me a week’s reprieve from being abandoned by Angelica on the road. Not bad, right? Ya, but she didn’t believe the story really, just like you, but tell me this what is this now faded, scratched and worn out painted blue-pink great American West night clam shell that I am looking at right now anyhow.

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Australia, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, 2008 

I suppose I am not supposed to talk about it under some bogus agreement Sam Lowell made with the current boss but I will test the waters while I am still here. Still have a job. Finally I have gotten a goddam assignment that doesn’t belittle my intelligence, belittle the intelligence of anybody except maybe “stable genius” Donald Trump. (I know, I know you are not supposed to mix politics with movie reviews but I couldn’t resist the comparison after what I have had to endure the last few months and my time is short here anyway from the look of things). Finally have gotten away from a steady diet of super-hero flicks, Batman, Superman, Ironman, those clowns, whose collective plotlines wouldn’t fill a whole page unless I did my puffing-out magic. Got those silly assignment as “punishment” called “broadening my horizons” by certain influential parties. (I do still have the right to characterize the nature of the work without recrimination, don’t I?) So I bled over the carpets a little and drew if not a great film then an adequate one to sink my teeth into Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s great blue-pink  Australia Western night film, ah, Australia (those Aussies know how to promote themselves).       

Funny except for the Aussie English accents and local slang words like “sheila” for woman, the names of the major cities, the time frame of the film just before and during World War II with the Japanese breathing fire on Australian ports, the  positive spin on the native population, the Aborigines, the weather and seasonal differences since Australia is as they say “down under,” and the stuff the ranch hands and citizens drink for hard liquor this film could have been a classic cowboy movie set in the America Wild West before the taming in the late 1800s. And that is the riff I think that the film-makers were trying to play off of in this one what with the desperate cattle drive through the desert making one think of John Wayne trying to get the herd to market in Rio Bravo, the “good injun” coming  to manhood through some rites of passage (read here Aborigine) versus the bad gringo white bastard land grabber trying to grab the neophyte landowner’s land, the feeding at the public trough with Army meat contracts and the shoot ‘em up stuff every few minutes.       

That might be what the film-makers in their cinematic dreams were looking for but this film is really about two things. The “cat and mouse” game played by that neophyte land-owner rancher Lady something from England played by the handsome and still at times eye-catching Nicole Kidman and the everyman every cowboy man “Drover” played by the beautiful, no, that is too good a description for him, pretty boy Hugh Jackman. From the minute Lady eyes Drover and he her you know, you can bet six, two, and even that they will be messing up some sheets before this one is over, well before it is over. The other point is an interesting look at what in old time American Westerns would never be looked at except as an aside-at best-at what coming of age means in Native cultures. We have come a long way from the idea that “the only good injun is a dead one” in relationship to Native cultures in the struggle to tame the west-America or Australia.       

The latter idea is pretty straight up with a precocious youth and a wizen wise old man of the earth showing the way that the culture gets passed through (and in the clinch saving some gringo asses as well). That leaves the boy meets girl thing, man meets women, in this one via the common struggle of Drover and Lady to save her inherited ranch from bankruptcies, unscrupulous cattle barons, and deadly “land hungry” upstarts. Like I said the stars were aligned and Lady and her Drover man  hit the sack not without prior and subsequent differences as befits to culturally different characters (he had had an Aboriginal wife whose death was a result of white racism in not getting her medical treatment and she had shown up without a clue shortly after her husband had been murdered by parties at first unknown but later proven to be that land-grabbing son of a bitch ). So now you have the “skinny” as old Sam Lowell who apparently has lost a step or two with that silly pact with the devil site manager used to like to say in the days when he wrote reviews hot and fast.          

Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up- Sean Connery’s “You Only Live Twice” (1967)-A Film Review

Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up- Sean Connery’s “You Only Live Twice” (1967)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon  

I am not sure what to say right now after reading Leslie Dumont’s scathing polemic cum review of one in the apparently never-ending series of James Bond films which new manager Greg Green went out of his way to have her write even though young Alden Riley and I have been running the rack on this series. The film, Tomorrow Never Dies with the lovely delicious Pierce Brosnan going through the paces of the legendary indestructible MI6 agent in the 1990s. That “apparently never-ending” no joke despite the fact that the original creator of the character Ian Fleming has long passed the shades (they were diddling with the plots when he was alive in any case including on the film I will attempt to review). James Bond, although I am not sure either party will like the comparison, now joins Bob Dylan in the never-ending category (for concerts still performed and Bootleg CD series never finished).

All of that though is not the beef today since Leslie whom I knew for a short time when she was a stringer for the American Film Gazette after she left her stringer job on this site and before she finally, finally landed a by-line at New York Today has thrown down the gauntlet. Leslie in that review of hers took on the whole James Bond male chauvinism bullshit mystique. (Although the fact that he is never really scratched despite an armada of weaponry thrown his way by every bad ass in the world, male or female, apparently does not bother her or the not so veiled battles between the good British Empire and the heathen commies of whatever designation.) But what has me in dither is that she went after the little pseudo-battle that Alden Riley, the former Associate Film Critic under the previous management and I, the former Senior Film Critic under that same management about who was the epitome of the James Bond character. When the deal went down it came down to two contestants-subtly handsome Connery or pretty boy Brosnan. She took us apart for not dwelling on the obvious 1950s sense of the male-female relationship. Seemingly the woman that I knew, even if slightly, with the wicked sense of irony has ditched that persona for the crusading third-wave feminist.

And Leslie might be right. No, not right about Alden and my little fisticuff but in light of the sexual harassment and sexual crimes of Harvey Weinstein and a now long trial of powerful Hollywood power brokers, Washington heavies, media hotshots, and hell the guys next door against women maybe this is a time to shed some light on the way business was done in the old days. Maybe the way the female eye candy in the various Bond films are portrayed aids and abets those real life situations but I believe that is Leslie’s place to speak about. And she did.

Look I have spent a zillion years doing freaking film reviews here and at American Film Gazette (according to the new site manager here Greg Green who also came over from that publication it has racked up forty thousand plus reviews in its long hard copy and on-line history). The angle I was looking at, Alden too except he wanted to look at it from the view of the more recent Bond films, was in the context of the silly plotlines, the improbable escapes and the silly concept of sexual allure developed in those films. It would have been false, and maybe that is wrong but that is the way it comes down, for me, Alden can speak for himself, if I started going on and on about the sexploitation inherent in the romanticizing of what after all in real life is a pretty dull and unrewarding profession-covert spying.  This is probable not the last of the dispute between Leslie and me on the social issues as she called thet but let’s fight that out on more serious looks at what is wrong with the still prevalent sexually unequal society that we live in. As we have found very graphically in the immediate past we do not live in a post-racial society and now we know we have been living in a “bubble” as well about living in a post-sexual inequality world.        

It almost seems silly to go through the plot now except there is no heavy lifting once you have seen a few of these formula films and can do a quick, very quick, summary since we have already hit Leslie’s male chauvinist pig aspect, my hero unscathed aspect, and that anti-communist angle as well. All we really have left is whether Sean Connery is the real Bond, James Bond or is that sniveling pretty boy the champ.   

An American spaceship is dragooned in space whereabouts unknown except it was probably brought down somewhere near Japan. Naturally in anti-communist, pre-Soviet meltdown times that country would be the number one fall guy. But the Bolsheviks don’t figure although not for trying since before long a second space almost goes missing and the POTUS (you know what that means today in text-speak) is ready to rain hell and damnation on Moscow and Leningrad if the caper goes off. Not to worry because not only is WWIII avoided but private citizen bad guys are put to the screws (although not forever since, as usual, the mastermind bad guy makes his escape to fight another inevitable day).

The whole caper was an outsourced job by the infamous SPECTRE organization that knows no limits, no boundaries and will do whatever is necessary for the highest bidder. Here the Reds, Red China, People’s Republic. After ten million kicks, about six millions rounds of ammo fired his way, a few new techno-toys driven escapes, some cavorting with women after a hard day’s work Bond, James Bond, once again saves the world. As Leslie quoting mad monk Phil Larkin, another wild man writer here, WFT. And maybe that is really what we should all take out of this stuff.      

To Seek A Newer World- With Alfred Lord Tennyson In Mind

To Seek A Newer World- With Alfred Lord Tennyson In Mind

I have used the expression “to seek a newer world” or variations of that expression any number of times the past several years when presenting sketches and pieces about what made my generation tick, the politically and culturally progressive active part of it anyway, who tried might and main to change the course of American history and sensibilities in the 1960s, my Generation of ’68 which I use for shorthand. The expression cribbed from a Bobby Kennedy pre-1968 presidential campaign book that I had read about what the world was in desperate need of in the face of the bloodbath in Vietnam and other pressing social problems who cribbed it from the 19^th century English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson seemed to me all these many cyberspace years later a fitting way to describe what the Generation of ‘68 was in search of. What we are still in search of since we have been, mostly unsuccessfully, fighting a rearguard action against the progeny of the night-takers we faced in the 1960s. Here, in any case, is the original poem from which Bobby (or his speechwriter although I sense that he probably picked that one himself) and I cribbed our expression.

Many of those sketches can be found on the American Left History blog.  

Ulysses

Ulysses

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809–1892 Alfred, Lord Tennyson

        

       

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The Conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases Kicks Off January 12th!

The Conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases Kicks Off January 12th!

From January 12 to 14, 2018, scholars and activists from around the United States, as well as people from countries impacted and displaced by U.S. bases abroad, will gather at the University of Baltimore for a conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases, with a focus on how to close them.

The conference will be preceded by a public rally at 3 p.m. on Friday, January 12. Location: Centre and N. Charles Streets (One block south of Washington Monument)

Here's the conference schedule and joint statement.

The conference is being live-streamed over this upcoming weekend.  Make sure to check out all the amazing speakers!  You can check out the livestream from our website on the front page!

To see the full press release.

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35 Peace Groups Demand Congress Protect Public From Nuclear 'Bomb Threat' Trump

35 Peace Groups Demand Congress Protect Public From Nuclear 'Bomb Threat' Trump

In an open letter (pdf) to lawmakers, they write that the president's "bellicose rhetoric and reckless actions pose a clear and present danger to national security."

"Time and time again, Trump has proven just how dangerous it is for him to have thousands of nuclear weapons at his fingertips. He doesn't believe in science and doesn't consult experts," the progressive groups, including Greenpeace USA, Indivisible, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Ultraviolet, and Veterans for Peace, write.

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Veterans For Peace Applauds Korea Talks for Olympic Unity

Thusday, January 11th Veterans For Peace Applauds Korea Talks for Olympic Unity At this hopeful juncture, we call upon the U.S. government to seize this historic opportunity to build further momentum for peace on the Korean Peninsula by commencing talks with North Korea soon, without any preconditions. We must absolutely stop any tragic resumption of the horrific Korean-U.S. War – possibly a nuclear war this time that would kill millions of people and imperil human civilization. In order to pave the way for bilateral talks with North Korea, we urge the U.S. government to discontinue its large-scale joint war drills in and around Korea, even after the end of the Olympic Games. These provocative military exercises are not "games." They are preparations for a war that should never happen. The people of Korea, United States, and the world are eager for peace. Together, we must seize the historic opportunity afforded by the Winter Olympic Games in Korea to change the course of history. Read the entire statement.