Inside The Social Media Buzz Saw-The
Struggle For A Historical Perspective At The American Left History Blog-The Complete Down And Dirty Saga
By Sam Lowell
Introduction
No question I was, am, a
central figure in the still on-going fallout over the purge, and that is
exactly the right term although half the writers here who were down and dirty
in the fight prefer to tell the tale that the previous site manger “retired.” Like
Allan Jackson, yes, I am using his given name despite the notice from new site
manager Greg Green that we were in the future in the interest of “moving on”
not to mention him by name or speak of his accomplishments (presumably Allan’s
down sides are still fair game), would voluntarily retire from something he
helped create and loved. I also acknowledge here that although I was Allan
closest and longest known friend going back to elementary school that I sided
with the young rebel writers, the self-styled “Young Turks” although I hate
that term when it came to choosing sides.
Allan was getting more
and more wrapped into some 1960s and forget the rest of the world, of history thing
that disturbed me no end as I continually told him especially when he went over the edge in that
overkill of the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967
stuff in 2017. So when I “conspired” with the younger writers (some of who had
before Allan went hog wild over the situation never heard of that event, were
too young to give a fuck about the legendary in the mist 1960s) I told everyone
straight up that this would have to be a purge-no quotation marks needed. We, Allan
and me, had come up in the rough and tumble of radical 1960s politics so he
knew that my defection meant only one thing if we were to be successful. He
would be out, in exile, although don’t believe all that stuff about him being
holed up Utah sucking up to Mitt Romney and that white underwear Mormon crowd
or Kansas with the hard-shell flat-landers trying to cadge and interview with
Dorothy and Toto that is just urban legend stuff. Stuff that he, or somebody at
his direction, made up to make this whole thing seem like a Stalinist coup and
he, Leon Trotsky-like heroically suffered defeat and exile in some American
Siberia for his efforts. I know my Allan and I would not be surprised that a
counterattack against me and the blog, “his” blog, will come any day now.
As part of the change in
course and presumably as a safeguard against things going haywire like they
began to do under the Jackson regime Greg initiated on his own a seven member
Editorial Board to filter ideas and motions through. Some people, some
opponents have called the board a group of toadies and “yes” people for
whatever Greg has in mind. That is their opinion. In any case I was asked to
sit on the board and I have along with several younger writers and one of the
older writers who had abstained on the Jackson removal vote (there were several
abstentions by older writers which makes me think I was not alone in thinking
Allan had gone over the edge but didn’t want to buck him for any number of
reasons. I would argue that had any one of them voted for Allan then my
“desertion” would have meant nothing except I might have been the guy rumored
to be in Utah or Kansas looking for the ghost of Tom Joad. Such is life.)
Although the board has
been up and running for a few months now
it has only been asked to approve one item-the “erasing” of Allan’s name from
this site in the interest of whatever Greg thought that erasure served. I have
been around enough to know that it is beyond poor form to “erase” the past
especially on a site dedicated to putting a big shining light on that past
particularly the parts that get short shrift in the history books and
mainstream media. I voted “no,” the lone dissenter with that one older writer’s
abstention which may be his mode of operation on tough questions. Maybe that
dissent will put me in better grace with Allan.
This introduction was originally
posted as a segment when I took a jug band CD review assignment, a Jim Kweskin
and the Jug Band assignment because I am still crazy about this kind of music
and because at least three of the original members of the band, Jim, Geoff,
Maria are still performing occasionally together but usually individually and
over the past several years I have seen them in various admittedly small venues
around Greater Boston. I was surprised though when Greg mentioned to me that he
no longer wanted to see pieces about “f—king” jug band music in the future and
that this would be the last time he would let it pass since nobody under about
the age of sixty gave a damn about this kind of music anymore. This is another
cause for my concern of the future despite what we did to long gone John Allan.
Since Greg is
considerable younger than I am I could see where it did not mean anything to
him when he was growing up in Westchester County in New York but to cancel out
in advance any reference to an important part of Americana in the 1920s and the
revival in the 1960s seemed short-sighted. Allan who also was crazy for jug
music and who turned me onto the stuff in high school when he took me and our
dates to the Unicorn Coffeehouse in Back Bay Boston to hear the legendary
Harper Valley Boys do their jug, washtub, wringer magic would freak out if knew
Greg’s position on jug. I will be bucking Greg a little on this one in the future
if I can find a spot to sneak a jug piece in.
Finally, and this part
has nothing directly to do with jug music or anything else that has been
presented here over the past almost fifteen years of this blog’s existence and
prior to that the hard copy of it and it predecessors. I, like a number of
irritated readers and a not a few writers have grown tired of seeing more than
enough coverage of the internal crisis of the past few months here leading to
the new regime. This new mandate by Greg with the majority of the Ed Board’s
approval of “erasing” Allan Jackson’s name and work is kind of a watershed
making me think the whole public airing has gone too far. Moreover the story is
all over the place depending on who has their hackles up. This must stop and a
return to ordinary commentary and reviews is in order.
As a decisive member of
the Editorial Board I have been able to negotiate with Greg a truce, an “armed
truce” as one older wag put it which seems strange since the majority of
personnel here have some very strong anti-war views. The “truce” has two parts.
The first- all articles now in the pipeline, about fifteen, can carry whatever
commentary about the internal dispute the writer wants to talk about. In return
after that amnesty cohort is posted there will be no overt references to the
previous site manager or his achievements or failures. The second is that I
will write as probably the most knowledgeable person around about all aspects
of this publication and its personnel a full history of the site and of the
internal dispute to be after it completion referenced in the archives as such
for anybody to cite and refer others to -either writer or scholar. No guidance
was given about how to do this task but I have decided to cut it up among the
various parts of the American Songbook series which the jug band piece was one
example and then post the whole thing with comments from the two Ed Board
members Greg has assigned to me for this work on February 10th.
********
If anybody has read the
introduction (see above) to my review of an early part of these American
Songbook series about the legendary Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band dated January
11, 2018 In The Beginning Was The Jug…in the archives you will
already know that I have been given the task of writing the history of this
site and it personnel as well as the internal in-fighting that roiled the
publication over the last few months of 2017 in order to finally put an end to
the turmoil. Below is one part of that history which I have decided I need to
cut into parts or the whole project will overwhelm me.
***********
Present At The Creation
The American
Left History blog has been in cyberspace, on-line, for the past
fifteen years or so which readers can reference to any particular article via
the ALF archives. What many people do not know is that there
has been a much longer history to the ideas and purpose of the site going back
to the 1970s and maybe even a little to the 1960s if you add in Peter Paul
Markin’s work, the real Peter Paul Markin who I will talk about later when I
explain why I used the word “real” before his name. In those days, the Summer
of Love, 1967 days the 50th anniversary last year which started
the firestorm that followed over the latter part of 2017 at this publication
Markin worked on and off for The Eye and The East Bay
Other two of what were called in those days alternative newspaper to
distinguish them from the main stream media which gave short shrift to the
political and cultural events that stirred us, you know the New York
Times and Washington Post. Sound familiar? Except
those alternative publications did not deal with so-called alternative facts or
carry on about conspiracy theories like today but other things of interest to
young people, “hippies” for lack of a better word like acid rock, drugs,
communal living, that the mainstream media were clueless
about.
That Peter Paul Markin
that I mentioned above won a few awards for his articles, his series on his
fellow Vietnam War veterans some who like him had a hard time adjusting to what
they called the “real” world, the non-Vietnam world and set up camps and such
along the rivers and railroad tracks out in Southern California where he joined
them for a time because he himself had a hard time adjusting as well and told
their stories. No, that is wrong, let them tell their stories. The series
entitled The Embattled Brothers Of Westminster (one of the
biggest railroad campsites) would from what I heard inspire Lenny Lawrence to
write a very popular song about those lost souls using that title if I recall.
So that was one early piece of what would follow over the next forty years or
so.
Markin, everybody called
him Scribe when he was growing up and that name stuck but I will use Markin
here was not alone in working for those publications. After he got back from
Vietnam he reunited with Josh Breslin, yes, Josh Breslin who writes for this blog
even now so you can start to make the long drawn out connections, a guy from up
in Olde Saco, Maine whom he met out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love,
1967 (you can also start to see how that event, how those times played a key
role as well in what followed) and Allan Jackson whom he, we, had grown up with
in North Adamsville and had followed Markin, as I did as well, out to the
Summer of Love. The three of them were all crazy to write, write about the war,
write about the counter-culture everything and The Eye and
later The East Bay Other were ready-made for guys who wanted
to look at the steamy, seamy side of life down at the baseof society.
Like most things in the
1960s when the hammer went down, when the war turned everybody sour, and then
later in reaction the other side decided that things had gone too far and
started a counter-offensive which more than one writer, young or old, in this
space has noted has been going on for the past forty years or so things like
grassroots, fly-by-the-seat-of –your-pants and woefully underfunded alternative
newspapers were going to ground in droves. That was the fate of those two
papers. Josh, Markin, Allan and I would join them as well in the mid-1970s
after I had been roaming around the country “sowing my oats” as my grandfather
used to say although he would have been mortified at my motto, our generational
motto-“drugs, sex, and rock and roll” were crazy to continue writing, writing
the kind of stuff they had been writing but with a little more of a political
twist than those mainly culturally-oriented papers had been. That is where the
idea for Progressive Nation came from in the beginning.
The Progressive Nation that a number of us still write for on
occasion although it had changed from our hands and from our brand of left-wing
street politics many years ago.
That idea though almost
went stillborn for a while for one main reason-that real Peter Paul Markin who
I have been alluding to. We had gathered some seed money from a few still
extant “hippies” with trust funds to get the publication started mainly through
Markin and Josh’s connections via The Eye and The East
Bay Other. The rest of the financing would come from advertisers (we
were totally naïve about the horrible influence that source would have on what
we were trying to do with our good idea. If you want a current day example of
just how off the rails a good idea can go once the advertisers sink their claws
in check out an early version of Rolling Stone and one
today-Egad) and other “angels” and subscribers. Then Markin ran away with the
money to buy dope, to buy into the emerging cocaine high that he would
eventually become addicted to and which would cost him his life down in Sonora,
Mexico over a busted drug deal when he was the loser, the six feet under in a
potter’s field grave which still has unexplained parts to the story until this
day.
That obviously is the
bad part about Markin, that “from hunger” part that he more than the rest of us
from the old North Adamsville neighborhood never got over. And which Vietnam
only accentuated. Not that the war did him in like many others but it did not
help either the few times he would talk about his experiences, about what he
had had to do, and had seen others do as well in that hell-hole. But the good
part, the part that wanted the revolution to win, the world to be turned upside
down is the part we knew and loved. Not all the guys we grew up with had those
same feelings, the guys who had no dough like us and hung around street corners
to get out of tumultuous home life, but a small crew did, a crew that was always
led by Markin. Not a leader in the organizational sense that was Frankie Riley
who has written a few things here about Markin, but in the spiritual sense is
the best way I can put it.
That is what has bound
Allan Jackson, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Frank and me over the
long years. That buying into Markin’s vision even though he personally could
not go the distance, came up short. Funny before we lost track of him, or
really Josh Breslin lost track of him since he was his housemate in Oakland in
the days when they had a communal house there and he was the last person to see
Markin alive in America Markin would always say that Progressive Nation would
carry us into our old ages. That did not happen since I have already mentioned
he flew the coop and later when we got some more dough and published for a
while we sold that enterprise off when the political winds shifted dramatically
in the 1980s and we had to cut our loses. What did happen and made Markin a
prophet after all was that we then established the hard copy version of ALH and
then went on-line I think in 2003. All from that original ideal spawned by the
real Markin. So it was a no-brainer when we started the on-line version that
Allan Jackson our site manager when it came time to take cyberspace necessary
monikers would go back to the old days, to our growing up days and honor our
fallen brother by using his moniker in this space. Hell, it just seemed right.
**********
Getting Through The Dog Days
With the seed money we were able to gather after the sale of Progressive
Nation we put together the hard copy version of ALH. We, as well, got a big financial boost from our old high
school friend and great running back for the North Adamsville Red Raiders, Jack
Callahan, who now is Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and has
sold a million cars based on his charming ways (and that of Mrs. Toyota,
Chrissie McNamara, his forever high school sweetheart whom he is still married
too unlike the rest of us who have at least two marriages per person, a ton of
kids, and two tons of college tuitions which are still being paid for or only
recently extinguished). Our idea, really Allan’s idea, no again,
really way back when Markin’s idea was to do in a journalistic way what Boston
University professor the late Howard Zinn did with his book The
People’s History of the United States which is to say look under the
rocks, the crevices, the off-beat places in the American experience. Tell the
story that doesn’t make the mainstream media, or didn’t for a long time
certainly in the time of Reagan’s time in the 1980s when everybody but us it
seemed was keeping his or her head down.
So in a funny way we were running against the stream, having only
a small steady dedicated readership and writing staff made up of guys I have
already mentioned and who readers will know including Josh Brelin from up in
Maine who we treated like one of our own. That last statement is important
because what happened (and might be the real genesis of what brought about
Allan’s downfall) was that for financial reasons, emotional reasons, and a
certain tendency on the part of all those involved to get wrapped up in a nostalgia
trip back the halcyon days of the 1960s when you couldn’t walk a block in most
cities and college towns without running into fellow kindred spirits, some
cause bringing people to the streets, and a feeling that the new breeze that
Markin had talked endlessly about from high school days on was going to happen
almost by default. We were going to turn the world upside down and for keeps.
Obviously at the height of the Reagan era (1980-1992 throwing the
first Bush, number 41 in the succession, into the mix) and beyond for a while
that was a very tough dollar to pull off as the years going by would develop a
divide between the old-time “hippie” base and the generation turning into two
generations who were off in a different direction, could as I mentioned in the
recent internal wrangling “give a f- - k” about the 1960s except maybe the dope
and cool fashions now somewhat revived in a retro movement. For years though
Allan and the rest of us were in a running battle over where to go and still
deal with our basic mission which is still on the masthead of this blog. Allan
would wax and wane with that deep tendency to drift back to the 1960s and cover
stuff like all the folk movement stuff when the folk minute (almost literally)
was in bloom.
Against a reality, against the real world where except Bob Dylan,
and even that would be suspect, nobody knew any of the folk singers and the
spirit that drove Allan and me as well, probably everybody but Si Lannon who to
this day cringes whenever anybody mentions a guy like faded folksinger Erick
Saint Jean whom we thought would be the next Dylan. Spent much cyber-ink of
stuff like film noir which was all the rage in college town 1960s film festival
retrospectives, Bogie, Robert Mitchum, the French “New Wave.” And deeply into
reviewing and commenting on books and the politics of the times which had
clearly faded into the dust and that even our older readership got tired of
hearing about since they had drifted out of politics seeing the whole thing as
a “bummer” to use a 1960s-etched expression or had drifted rightward to the
party of the possible-the Democrats. They definitely did not want to hear about
the finer points of the Russian Revolution, the Stalin-Trotsky fist fight, or
the food fight among American radicals toward the end of the 1960s and early
1970s.
Every once in a while we would change course a bit, would get more
into contemporary politics, move onto the newer versions on the musical scene,
review more current books and films but there was something missing. Something
that the younger writers in the recent dispute hollered about endlessly when
asked to write about the 1960s 24/7/365 when Allan finally went off the deep
end for good in the summer of 2017. Having to endlessly write about the Summer
of Love, 1967 which set up the explosion that brought everything to a head.
Having to write about stuff they were clueless about which is what we were
feeling when we confronted the changes in the 1990s. Even then Allan would try
an end around and force everybody like he did last year with Alden Riley to
write stuff as “punishment” for not knowing every single piece of arcana from
the 1960s even if was about, oh I don’t know, plastic surgery, something weird
like that.
As you could expect off of this lack of focus drained individual
writers, we lost Sal Rizzo, Danny Shea, Henry Sullivan to the ennui, to hubris
and lack of candor. Lost a lot of money too, a lot of Jack Callahan’s dough
although he was always too much of a good guy to complain (and would tell us “I
will just sell more Toyotas”). So we had to when we saw an opportunity to keep
going with an on-line publication we did. That would cut expenses dramatically
(and Jack would say I don’t have to carry such a large car inventory now) not
needing a large office, paper costs and such. We also, or rather Allan came to
a big decision which we rubber-stamped, a very big decision once we did
transfer to an all on-line operation-bringing in new blood, bringing in younger
writers with the original idea to get a more current take on the American
political, cultural, social experience. It was a tricky proposition since the
older core, including me and Allan, were worried that bringing in more
professionally trained writers which is the norm these days since nobody can
get anywhere without some kind of Iowa Writers Workshop pedigree would run
circles around us. They, I, could not see then that this was necessary, In the
end we, Allan, squandered that talent by the straight-jacket maneuvers
mentioned earlier driving them to write second-rate stuff just to fill space
and fill Allan’s ego when crunch time came.
**************
Prancing Through Cyberspace
Maybe it is best to go back a little, go back to what we
who started back with the predecessor to this publication Progressive
Nation, a publication which has veered very sharply toward the
Democratic Party since we sold it many years ago and which is now heading
on-line as well for many of the same reasons we took ALH in
that direction, were trying to achieve with our work. Almost all of us
initially had come out of some aspect of the radical politics of the 1960s
either through having gone through the military during the Vietnam War period
or having been deeply affected enough by it to go round the radical bend.
Moreover the core, almost totally male, although we had many women stringers
who would eventually goes elsewhere when the women’s liberation movement seemed
better suited to their talents and politics. While we males formally accepted a
lot of the tenets of that movement in the day to day reality this was a “guy”
place, still is, although with the addition of Leslie Dumont, who was around
for part of the old days, and the expected arrival of more women writers, including
my long-time companion Laura Perkins on a more steady basis, hopefully that
will change.
See we had come from “from hunger” backgrounds like the
few guys whom Allan Jackson and I had grown up with who came over to the left
with us (not all the old neighborhood guys did, not many really). So many of us
toyed with, no, more than toyed with Karl Marx’s idea of the working class
taking power and making the world a better place for poor folk like the stories
of most of us growing up, That infatuation too drifted away a bit although
there is still a very working class-oriented atmosphere here even when most of
us through cunning or guile left our working class origins
behind.
But back then we were gung-ho to change the world and
thought it would happen until the mid-1970s at the latest told us that the tide
had ebbed, that we had once again been thwarted in our efforts, as the late
Peter Paul Markin used to say before the drugs got the better of him “turn the
world upside down.” But we still had a “holy remnant” idea even though most of
us had moved away from day to day radical politics and while not necessarily
going whole hog back to bourgeois society started families (that plural meaning
not only one family but the first of several in most cases including my own
three failed marriages and parcel of kids, mostly good kids). What we had
become aware of during that whole radical- Marxist-ebb tide movement was that
we were woefully ignorant of the subtext of history in America and worldwide.
The stuff we had to painfully pick up from places like the late Boston
University professor Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United
States and reading Phillip and Eric Foner’s books on slavery, 19th radicalism,
and the intense labor struggles of those days. Our idea then, and still is
although we had gotten away from it a bit of late to my regret, was to provide
a space to look at a lot of the history, politics, culture through the prism of
our own experiences. To do some educational good waiting for the next time that
people rise up to “turn the world upside down.” That was our idea anyway and
everybody still around today including the exiled Allan Jackson will formally
agree that those ideas are still good
currency.
Except, a big except, two interconnected things happened,
or one didn’t happen. First the push to turn the world upside down, or the
American part, has not surfaced as yet after a forty plus year hiatus and
secondly the original core got old, got old and in a few cases passed to the shades
or fell off the wagon. Got old and maybe as aging people do start to dwell on
the halcyon days of their youth and deny the current reality a bit. I don’t if
there is a strong physiological explanation for some of that but it certainly
when looking at the archives of ALH became apparent to me a
couple of years ago that were trending water over the 1960s hump. Neglecting
not only post-1960s events of historical and social importance but falling down
on our educational task of being a source for long ago important milestone
events, movements, intellectual currents.
I should step back a shade here and point out that it was
not a straight line withdrawal but the trend was there. We all got caught up in
the promise when a goodly portion of the world, especially the youth came
storming out of the gates before the Iraq War of 2003 which is still with us
today one way or another and started protesting like we hadn’t seen since our
youths. But that proved ephemeral, proved to be a blip. When we realized that
was the case maybe in 2006, 2007 a certain dark atmosphere began to descend and
really kick-started the rush back to 1960s memories, Including Allan who in his
own way encouraged that perspective.
The hard fact was that as we collectively turned sixty-ish
we started losing writers to the grim reaper, writers like Ricky Rizzo, Dean
Morrison, Lenny Long, and a bunch of stringers who had been a little older than
us and had a perspective from the 1950s, especially on the classic age of rock
and roll which we of the 1960s generation grew up on at the edges. Lost a few
more to tiredness and retirement. All understandable but also death to what we
were trying to accomplish in that silver-aged youth. It wasn’t that we had
retired from the political struggle. As I and others have written about,
notably Ralph Morse, we took our political perspectives back to the streets,
through vehicle of Veterans Peace Action which kept us hopping and still does.
The problem again is that organization was at its core made up of Vietnam War
era veterans and not the younger kids, young women and men, who fought the Iraq
and Afghanistan war. Those kids dealt with whatever anti-war feeling they had
in a different way-not on the streets like we were very familiar with, had down
to a science. So the same problems crept up sliding back to the nostalgic 1960s
.
In about 2010, maybe early 2011 we had an important
meeting of those still standing, almost all old white guys which more and more
reflected what was being written about. Like I said, and Allan really does bear
the brunt of criticism on this, we had been very poor on bringing women in as
the case of Leslie Dumont brought out graphically when she and I were talking
that issue out as part of this piece. She had been our Josh Breslin’s companion
and was a hell of a writer, better than most of us who were untrained, and
perhaps untrainable when it got right down to it. Josh begged Allan to bring
Leslie on board but no he kept her as a stringer like he had many other women
who came and went until she left and eventually got that coveted by-line
at New York Today.
The same was true of Josie Davis and Laura Perkins and
both of them had been Allan’s companions when they were stringers. (Although
Laura and I had known each other for many years then it was not until much
later that we became companions after she left to teach at a local college and
then became an executive at a high tech company before retiring a few years
ago.) Again both could, and did, write circles around us looking again at the
old Progressive Nation archives. Here is the sad part beyond
that trio I can’t think of any other female stringers who stayed long enough
for me to remember.
If we were bad on the reality of women writers we were
even worse on black writers, or as the term latter more inclusively gained
currency writers of color. That despite Allan personally having been involved
in the 1960s black civil rights movement down South (much to our growing up
neighborhood displeasure at the time which we have both written about
elsewhere). Allan, and I will admit that I had a little of the same perspective
for a while, never really broke from the quasi-black nationalist idea that
black writers should write for black audiences and white writers for white
audiences. Meeting who knows when to beat down the beast. That issue came up
again a couple of years ago when the Black Lives Matter movement took off and
we had a chance to grab DeShaun Lewis and Allan nixed the idea (as did
DeShaun’s literary agent). Other than that forlorn attempt the only two black
writers of note in the long forty year history I am detailing were Preston
Thomas and Harold Bonner. Both of them were from our days on the Captain Crunch
bus when we were travelling up and down the California coast which I have also
written about extensively elsewhere in this space.
Sorry to go off on a little tangent but those two
examples are specific cases of the need to bring in new blood in. And we did,
although not without a little resistance from Allan and a couple of the older
writers who felt threatened by the idea of new blood coming in almost certainly
with professional training and writing circles around them. I will discuss that
more in the concluding section when I run through the internal struggle from
last year, from 2017. That is how we got Zack James, our friend Alex’s youngest
brother who recently did such a great job on editing our remembrances of Peter
Paul Markin and the magical ride he took us on for a time in the 1960s. Of
course Allan might have considered that catch as a double-edged sword since
Zack was and is one of the “Young Turks” who rode Allan out of town on a rail.
Same with Lance Lawrence, Brad Fox, Jr. and Lenny Griffin to name just the
leaders.
Alan brought these younger writers, by the way none of
them as young as twenty-something Kenny Jacobs brought in by Greg Green, but
younger than the hoary old mass we were until the new blood arrived, but didn’t
really know what to do with them. Or did know what to do with them but that was
not the way to go as I knew telling him for maybe the past two years when I saw
what was brewing. First off to appease the older writers, including me, Allan
out of nowhere, and contrary to every 1960s instinct we still possessed, gave
all the older writers the title of “Senior” whatever department they were
writing for like my title was Senior Film Critic although I wrote other stuff
for other departments. Secondly and this would rear its head in the open last
year finally he would assign the younger writers what would be called in the
internal dispute “the leavings” of what the older writers didn’t want or worse
have to do a rehash of the older writers’ subject from a younger perspective
whether they knew or cared about the subject or not. He let the older writers
write whatever they wanted without question even if it retreaded fifty million
times 1960s stuff, maybe especially if it was that kind of piece. The younger
writers from early on had to wage a “civil war” to get clearance for any
independent project. The smell of rebellion was in the air although I was by no
means on top of it from the beginning.
[I will put this as an aside since it reflects my
personal fall a couple of years ago and I am still not sure how much it
affected my “treason” of siding with the “Young Turks” when the deal went down,
when it was time to vote up or down on Allan’s demise on this site. A couple of
years ago I started seriously questioning Allan about the direction of the blog
and of the uses he was putting the younger writers too which was making our
perspective even narrower than in previous years. That is about the time he
started making noises about my “retirement,” about how maybe we needed a new
face, new faces, at the film critic desk.
What I didn’t know was that he was in touch with his,
our, old friend Sandy Salmon over at American Film Gazette who
told Allan he was looking to finish his career out on less stressful note than
the day after day film reviews. (Greg Green who also had come over
from the Gazette amazed us one night when he mentioned that
publication had produced over 40, 000 reviews.) That led, not without a smidgen
of relief, to my being “pushed up the ladder” in Allan’s famous around the
water cooler words, to “film critic emeritus” and Sandy taking over the day to
day operations. Allan also bringing in Alden Riley as an associate film critic
since he planned an expansion of the number of films reviewed that was a
condition that Sandy insisted on when coming over. Things were okay, I won’t
say great, for a while but I noticed that I was first not getting many assignments
and then was getting turned down for ideas that I had for pieces. So when I
mentioned earlier that Allan knew he had been “purged.” I knew he had been
purged since I know from whence I speak have been “purged” myself just like in
the old day cutthroat politics we grew up
on.]
************
The Buzz Saw Of Social Media Down
And Dirty
In a sense this last section is a bit anti-climactic since I have
laid out the history leading up to the split, my part in it, and the result
with the removal of the former site manager Alan Jackson in what I have
described truly as a purge. (Some “fragile” types on both sides have backed off
from that designation saying it is too rough but Allan knows, just as well as I
do both of us veterans of many old-time political struggles in radical circles,
that he had been purged.) That elevated Greg Green who had originally come over
from the American Film Gazette to run
the day to day operations to site manager. As part of the post-Allan regime
Greg decided that he would create an Editorial Board to oversee everything and
back up his decisions. For transparency reasons I should note that I sit on
that board. I should also note that although it has only been in existence the
past few months that there has been gripping about it being a rubber-stamp, a
group of Greg toadies, and other derogatory remarks from young and older
writers alike. Greg has also hired a couple of younger writers, really twenty
something out of journalism schools and English majors. Brought on Josh
Breslin’s former companion, Leslie Dumont, who many years ago worked here as a
stringer but getting nowhere with Alan’s regime left and finally wound up with
a big by-line at New York Monthly.
Brought on my long-time companion Laura Perkins who also worked as a stringer
and got nowhere with Alan and left for an academic and high tech career. Still
no soap on getting any black writers, or more generically “writers of color.”
Those are the results thus far not without controversy and some
hard feelings especially by the older writers who have been stripped of their
titles, younger writers too who had worked for titles. Worse and which almost
caused another explosion every writer now can be assigned any topic on any
subject to as Greg says “broaden their horizons.” But enough of the current
doings and back to the spring of 2017 and the genesis of the in-fighting that
has brought these changes.
It almost seems like some twisted kiss of fate that Alex James,
Zack’s oldest brother (who by the way is about ten years older than Zack
showing a good example of the relative sense of “younger” writers Allan was
bringing in. Certainly nobody as young as twenty something Kenny Jacobs), an
old friend of ours from the old neighborhood, who went on to become a
successful lawyer, went on a business trip to San Francisco last spring (2017).
While there out of the blue Alex saw an advertisement on the side of a bus for
something called The Summer of Love
Experience, 1967 at the de Young Museum in famous Golden Gate Park.
Sneaking (according to Alex) out one afternoon he saw the exhibition and was positively
floored by the experience. See, he, we, under the “guidance” of the late Peter
Paul Markin had been in the thick of the “drugs, sex, and rock and roll” mantra
which all of that experience went under. When he got back to Boston Alex called
or e-mailed everybody he knew from back in the days who was still standing and who
had gone out there to see what was happening, to see as Markin had called it “the
world turned upside down.” He gathered a number of us, including Zack who had
gone to journalism school and was a veteran of various workshop programs,
together in order to propose that in honor of our fallen brother Markin each
write our “memoirs” of those times with Zack as editor and publisher. Those who
agreed included old friend Allan Jackson who had also gone out there with us.
The venture was a great success and various portions were posted last summer on
the ALH blog as well as in booklet
form.
That seemingly small exercise in 1960s nostalgia apparently
snapped something in Allan’s head. I have already mentioned the drift of the
blog on the part of the older writers who were allowed by Allan to pick
whatever subject they wanted (with the left-overs to the younger writers). Last
summer right after the memorial booklet was published and articles posted Allan
decided to do a massive blanket coverage of the 50th anniversary of
the Summer of Love by assigning a million topics related to that time. If you
couldn’t link the Summer of Love, or the 1960s “hippie” experience, into your
article he would red-pencil what you had written. (Allan liked to use a red
pencil to “edit” something about his radical red youth he said when asked why
he didn’t use the usual blue pencil.) This was no joke on Allan’s part. I was
doing a little piece on figure skating after reviewing a Sonja Henny 1930s
film. Allan asked me why I didn’t bring up the ice skating rink at Fillmore and
Pacific where “hippies” would go to skate during 1967 when we were out there.
WTF.
All of this came to a head when young Alden Riley, a new hire for
the film department to help Sandy Salmon out with the increased load of films
that were projected by Greg on the site. He was “assigned” by Allan, over
Sandy’s head, to do a review on a bio/pic about Janis Joplin, a key musical
figure in the heady days of the Monterey Pops Festival. Reason? After Sandy had
done a review of D. A Pennebaker’s documentary about the first Monterey
Festival he mentioned Ms. Joplin’s name and Alan said he did not know who she
was. Allan heard about that blunder and ordered the assignment as “punishment’
is what he told Si Lannon, another of our old friends. Things only got worse
from there as Allan double-downed on the Summer of Love connection for each
article.
I am not quite sure who called the first meeting of essentially
the whole rank of younger writers (average age somebody figured out about
forty-five years old) to see what they would do about Allan’s manic behavior
and their dubious assignments which to a man they could give f - -k about to
quote Zack. Maybe it was Zack since he Lance Lawrence and Bradley Fox were the
three ringleaders of the uprising who in water cooler legend were dubbed the
“Young Turks.” They decided to go to Allan and put their cards on the table. He
rebuffed them out of hand. That is when I came in, came to one of their meetings
being invited by Alden, to see if I could reason with Allan. I proposed to
Allan that we get Greg Green from American
Film Gazette to come in to do the day to day operations leaving Allan time
to write some stuff on his own or think about future assignments. He bought my
argument once I explained that we might lose the whole cohort if things didn’t
change. They didn’t as Allan pressed Greg to hand out these never-ending
freaking 1960s world assignments.
To make a long story short the “Young Turks” (and me) had another
meeting, an ultimatum meeting with me as the emissary to Allan again. The
proposal of the group was either Allan “retire” or they collectively would
quit. The decision to be determined by a majority vote-for or against. For some
reason even I don’t understand to this day Allan agreed. You know the rest
including my “traitorous” vote with the “Young Turks.” My decisive vote since
we won by one vote. What you may not know is that while the split was almost
directly along generational lines there were several abstentions among the
older writers from the tallies. Any one of them casting a vote for Allan would
have shifted the totals the other way and I would have been the one “purged”
and working in Kansas someplace. So some of the older guys had also doubts
about the wisdom of going back to the past. Now that you have the whole story
this episode should be at rest. (With the exception of any articles still in
the pipeline before the truce with Greg was negotiated.)
