Present At The Creation-The French Revolution Comes To Spain-Natasha Portman’s “Goya’s Ghosts” (2006)-A Film Review

Present At The Creation-The French Revolution Comes To Spain-Natasha Portman’s “Goya’s Ghosts” (2006)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Bradley Fox, Junior

[As of this post under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

Goya’s Ghosts, starring Natasha Portman as Inez and Alicia, Javier Bardem as Lorenzo, Stellan Skargard as Goya, a Spanish production done in English, 2006)

[I find it ironic that one of the first assignments that new site administrator Greg Green has handed out deals with the turmoil of the French Revolution through the prism of the famous Spanish artist Francisco Goya which roiled through Spain during the height of the revolution in France and later during various Napoleonic conquests including Spain. Sometimes apparently, and this may have been Greg Green’s point in assigning the review life mirrors art as in the case of Lorenzo, the Spanish priest turned exiled partisan of the French Revolution and Napoleonic agent during the French occupation in the early 1800s before his downfall at Waterloo.

Seemingly a parallel example exists between Lorenzo’s topsy-turvy career and fate and that of the previous site administrator Peter Markin, who not so coincidentally was a good friend of my father Bradley, Senior and who has recently retired from that position after a vote of “no confidence” by the writers. The main reason given was Peter’s obsessive tilting of the coverage of subjects in this space toward events from the turbulent 1960s when most of the older writers came of age exemplified by the over-the-top coverage of the Summer of Love, 1967 he ordered the writers, young and old, familiar with the period or not, to cover. There has been, and here the parallel with Francisco who would go to his execution under the Inquisition once the French were defeated and swept out of Spain by the British with the aid of Spanish guerillas, a persistent rumor that Peter was purged and that the retirement ploy was just that a cover for the more aggressive removal mainly through the efforts of the younger writers which in the interest of transparency included me. So maybe Greg Green is trying to make a cautionary tale out of using this film plot as a review. I will try to track this down as I get more information by if you heard that one Peter Paul Markin has fallen under the wheels of a modern day Inquisition don’t be surprised. Don’t be surprised at all.]

*******

Artists, artist like the title’s Goya sometimes have the uncanny sense to be at the right place at the right time-at least the plot of this little gem of Spanish production film would indicate that. He lived and worked in the time of the French Revolution which was bringing a serious breathe of fresh air to feudal remnant Europe with the overthrown of the monarchy and of the attempt to bring the new democratic forms to the rest of the continent-including Spain which is where that revolution intersects with what Goya was observing and painting. In a sense Goya is all over the place in his work from the court painter to the royal family to the painter of the horrific effects of war on civilians and soldiers alike to the famous, or infamous if you like, painting of the Maja, the naked Maja which may or may not have scandalized European sensibilities. That is the subtext to the plot here where a Spanish priest, played by Javier Bardem, and Goya, played by Stellem Skargard, intersect through a rich merchant’s daughter model, played by Natalie Portman, whom Goya used and who inflamed the priest to lustful and criminal desire.  

Spain was, and maybe still is, a tough dollar place to be a dissenter, dissenter mainly being anything but a Roman Catholic and a hardened monarchist (and possibly a closet Francoist fascist if the recent struggle for the legitimate right to independent statehood of the Catalan peoples is any indication). Spain after all was the land of Inquisition which did not take kindly to any dissenters and had the means (torture and the rack, ultimately the auto de fe and the stake) That is where the action in this film starts (so the faint-hearted should push the stop button now). Lorenzo is the main prosecutor for the tribunals always looking for victims via his extensive stoolie spy network and he finds one in the person of the lusted after Inez. She goes into the dock after being tortured for her confession and before long Lorenzo has had his way with her. That way with her leading to her bearing his child. Eventually Inez get out of the slammer but the place took a lot out of her, left her mentally damaged.

Meanwhile the Church has no place for Lorenzo who is now considered an albatross around its neck and he gets out of Spain by hook or by crook landing in France. The scene then shifts back to Spain some fifteen years later. Like a lot of hard-boiled men who seek the main chance he became a senior bureaucrat in Napoleon’s administration of Spain after its conquest. Such men changing allegiance as easily as changing their shirts. Inez has seen better days but Lorenzo is still interested in finding his daughter. That search is interrupted by the British invasion which finds Lorenzo unsuccessfully fleeing but being caught and once the old order is reestablished the Inquisition in reinstated as well. Live by the sword die by the sword Lorenzo is condemned and in a defiant and honorable finish refuses to recant before he is executed.

What about Goya who after all is the hook for anybody with artistic sensibilities to have even bothered to watch this rather dragged out epic. He hovers over the scene doing his sketches and plotting his painting while trying to help Inez as best he could. But this film is mainly about Lorenzo and that is really the problem for me since we all know every revolutionary period brings certain figures from the old regime with them-after the masses have brought the changes and have fallen back exhausted. The French and Russian revolutions were full of such men who landed on their feet- for a time. Not enough Goya here to make this one move off dead center.

Artists’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Dada Takes A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath Which Mowed Down The Flower Of The European Youth

Artists’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Dada Takes A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath Which Mowed Down The Flower Of The European Youth     

By Lenny Lynch

I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20^th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios. 

I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.          

Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Those former were forever your brethren and breathe. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,  would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.      

Step up Max Ernst and show us your stuff, show us what four fucking years of war did to the brain.  Ernst was drafted and served both on the Western and the Eastern front. Such was the devastating effect of the war on the artist that in his autobiography he referred to his time in the army thus: "On the first of August 1914 M[ax].E[rnst]. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." How could one any longer draw bowls of fruits or natty portraits of high society fashion or even peaceful fishing villages like their forbears. The times were out of joint, connected only by the most tenuous thin reed bonds.   

In Massachusetts-Veterans Know Your Rights And Benefits-A Handbook

In Massachusetts-Veterans Know Your Rights And Benefits-A Handbook

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

Nowadays as the Veterans Administration is increasingly talked about as being ripe for privatization by the Republican-controlled Congress and The Dump The Trump Administration. Talked about by people who are unlike us not veterans for the most part we need to be aware of all the benefits that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provides in addition to VA benefits. Also local governments as well. The Commonwealth has put out this handy little handbook which contains a lot of information that even I was not aware of so check it out.   

I have been a supporter of Veterans for Peace for a long time and while we are concerned out in the streets with the struggle against war and other social issues we are also concerned that all veterans whether they agree or hot-temperature disagree with us get all the benefits to which they are entitled. And knowledge of those benefits and rights is the start of the process. Read on.  

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program Three- A Shop Of One’s Own

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program Three- A Shop Of One’s Own  

“Doc” Jackson  (first name William but nobody, including his wife, Lucille, ever  called him anything but Doc, so Doc) had been dispensing pills and sundries and notions (not one knew what that mean, including Doc, but it sounded good, good to the tongue, when one said it reading it off the front door sign) at his corner drugstore for over thirty years in that spot at the intersection of  First Avenue and Grand Boulevard  and Third Street in the high Detroit Southward  neighborhood, what some called the “colored section” when he first started out back just a few years after World War II, others, black and white, called “niggertown” showing some contempt or self-contempt in the snarly way that they pronounced it, still others, reflecting the new sociology of the 1960s called it by some seemingly pathological name, “ghetto,” and he called just plain ordinary vanilla home. See Doc had lived over that drugstore of his for all the time that he had been dispensing those pills, those sundries, and those notions. That apartment’s value and an adjacent rented one had helped when money was tight, when things were slow, or when the neighborhood and the times changed. He was proud that he had held on, held on tight.     

He had seen some changes, from the high side money coming in during the “golden age of the automobile” when everybody was looking, looking hard to upgrade to a new car every few years (he had even caught the bug going from an old Packard, to a Chevy, to a high-end Buick, the one sitting out in the back of the store just then) to the hard time’60s when they, those bastard black brothers, burned everything they could get their hands on after Doctor King was assassinated, and almost got the drug store and its environs but the neighbors, his black and brown neighbors, had drawn a line in the sand and said, no, no more. And now, he was seeing some very disturbing signs that the town was going to be further devastated because they, as a result of some world oil situation which even he didn’t understand, were going to close Dodge Main, a place where in good times and bad, a lot of the neighborhood worked, or had somebody working.         

Worst though, much worst, was that his old clientele was pulling up stakes, or was dying off he hated to admit and so his old seven in the morning to ten at night speedy service of those in need of their medicines (or their liquor, which he carried for those with prescriptions, and those without, but the less said about that the better) and he was being squeezed out, squeezed out by the new chain drugstores, the new one they want to build right on his corner spot. And there was nothing that he could do about it. See, despite what everyone believed, even Lucille, he didn’t actually own the building, the apartments or anything but had leased them from Mister Reed, a good white man who had run the drugstore before him and seen the neighborhood change and seen that Doc was someone who could be trusted to keep the place going, long ago. Mister Reed, who had recently died, had a son who, as sons will do, wanted to convert his legacy to cash and was willing to sell out to that Osco Drug chain. So here he was now with nothing much to show for a lifetime of work, of sweat, of service except to rekindle his dream of a shop of his own somewhere, anywhere to close out his days…              

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.



2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.



3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.



4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.



5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.



We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.



6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.



We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.



7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.



8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.



9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.



We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.



10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.



When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.



We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Corporation Are Not Citizens Despite The United States Supreme Court-The Fight For An Article 5 Consitutional Convention

Corporation Are Not Citizens Despite The United States Supreme Court-The Fight For An Article 5 Consitutional Convention 

The Struggle Continues...Support The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project

The Struggle Continues...Support The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project   

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know 

 Frank Jackman comment:

One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.    

To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).

Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.

Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.         

In Black History Month-All Honor To The American Civil War Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

In Black History Month-All Honor To The American Civil War Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

By Hank Jones

“No more, no more,” had become Shep Wilson’s new mantra once he go over his rage against his long-time companion, Sarah Long, after she had set him adrift, had as she said “moved on” to fine herself whatever that might have meant when she uttered the ugly words of separation one night and then the next day was gone, leaving no forwarding address and only the thin reed of a cellphone number and e-mail address to remember her by. It had not been like Shep had not known it was coming, or could see it come since Sarah had been making noises about leaving, and under what conditions for a couple of years prior to that sneaking out the next day door. It seemed that every few years she had to lay down the law, her law about what was good or bad about what was happening in their as she called it “relationship.”  The last two times had been shortened up though a couple years before it had been a week, only a week after they had arrived home from a great week of museums, good dining and mad walks along the Seine and the previous year a week, only a week after they had had a great and nostalgic time in Maine going to the old Saco Drive-In and a record hop like they were kids again.

Maybe she had been right to lay the law down (his expression but she never disagreed with that characterization, never either when he was joking or serious) had been right to make her anguish knew after those vacations which contrasted in her mind with what they had had in their early relationship. Maybe she had been right to make a clean break, to go out some forlorn unadorned door without a lonesome good-by which had been as hard to as if she had gone in the middle of the day bidding him a personal, upfront fond adieu. Hell, in his heart of hearts Shep knew he was only fooling himself, only acting out of his version of male alleged indifference to her, to his fate which had been part of the problem between the pair for the past several years. They had gone to couples counselling over that indifference a few years back when he really was indifferent under the throes of a small, unknown to her, cocaine, snow, cousin whatever you want to call it which he had been able to break without further destroying their relationship, although that was a close thing, was not as easy as it sounded. Especially when he thought about going back to the stuff lately to get rid of the never-ending depression he felt each day as he had trodden through his absent life.  

Shep kept trying to think through what he could have done differently, where he had fallen down bad enough to make her leave. And make him take up her chant of “no more” (not  really put that way by her since she would have used more gentile language that fit her persona but that was the way that it rang through this latest fire in his head and that was the way he was trying to think the matter through). He knew that he shared the blame, shared in the debacle of their love, had lost that magic that held them together for so many years, and that the little saying that she had in sunnier times about how they had been so much in love in those early years and though it would continue forever. (The actual way she put it was “when he had loved her so”)  And in the early days, hell, up until the last few years that love had been as genuine as any emotion that he had ever held dear. Then a whole series of events, a whole personal deluge of troubles laid him low, and had made him a grumpy old man. The last month or so, maybe two months he had tried to take stock of himself (and of her role in their decline after all as she admitted she could have signaled him more concretely about what was ailing her, what make her say her own “no more” however she might have actually put the matter). Had tried to put as he constantly told her to put his best foot forward. Unfortunately it had been too late.      

After Shep thought about those early days when they were so in love, were so sympathetic to each other, fed off each other’s needs, faced the wicked old world as a pair of waifs, soul-mate waifs was the way she put it one time early, sipping on a little light wine to numb himself a bit against the emptiness in his heart (and to keep the cocaine blues at bay-even singing the lines from the old song-“cocaine, cocaine running up and down my brain, cocaine’s for horses not for men they say its’ going to kill you but they don’t say when” to ward off the evil spirits gathering in his mind), he tried to retrace where he had fallen down (her shortcomings were her business now and so he looked at the lonely world through his future path and  how he could become the “new” Shep, get rid of that mantra of “no more” into a better place. 

Shep had never been much for reflection, never much to think how his actions, or better his omissions, would affect Sarah, would make her withdraw, make her close her heart to him. Had dismissed at least in his “put out the fire” head much of what she would speak of when she was seriously trying to signal him that things had dramatically drifted downhill. Would not take the signals about getting help, psychiatric help foremost, that she first gently and then more insistently tried to get him to undertake. He has seen that formula as her New Age Cambridge background thing that she was forever trying out (and to his mind without much success but he kept that to himself especially as she seemed more and more to withdraw into that world as she got more distraught about them and as well about her place in the sun, about who she was).

Funny in the end, or rather toward the end, in one of those previous downhill moments he had a few years back agreed to go with her to couples counselling (they had tried that route about twenty years before but both had been dissatisfied with the counsellor who seemed to be more interested in what she, the counsellor, had to say than what they had had to say). Funny as well that he, not she though, had gone into that counselling with some of that usual indifference, and if he had been wise enough to see what that meant he could have seen what was coming, he felt that the then current counselling, and the counsellor, was a worthwhile endeavor every week (Sarah, before they decided, or rather she decided, to discontinue the work, had told him that she thought the counsellor was “championing him” because, as a gregarious type in such situations he had the better of it against her more quiet and thoughtful responses which tended to be short, if to the point.)          

Shep’s troubles really had started with the advent of his medical troubles, with what he called “the poking and prodding” of the medicos, a few years before. Yeah, he knew growing older, getting to be an old grumpy man, meant that health issues would surface, would especially as he reached his seventh decade (he knew first-hand as well from his friends of similar ages that this was the “deal,” the real deal). Shep had prided himself on keeping a semblance of fitness, of keeping himself heathy as measured by very infrequent visits to the doctor’s office and of not feeling sick most of the time except for an occasional cold. Then the deluge, first trouble with breathing and eating necessitating an endoscopy which found some problems, and required medications. After that bladder problems associated with his smoking many years before according to the urologist, more medications, and then more recently the final nail in the coffin (his expression as stated to Sarah many times and a silly foolish thing to say), the early discovery of bladder cancer after a scope had shown unusual inflammations. More procedures and more medications.        

One day Shep just erupted, started yelling at Sarah, started to approach her for which she would later say she stood in fear of physical danger he seemed so out of control (not said anything at the time though as she thought that saying anything would only enflame him further). After a few minutes he settled down, because something of the old Shep, but then the line, some line in Sarah’s sand had been crossed. Shep swore he would stop taking the medications since they seemed to be making him more aggressive, more sullen, and angrier. As it turned out one of the medications was reacting poorly with another one and had aided in Shep’s angry responses to the world-and to Sarah.    

If the medications, if the health issues were all that there were bothering Sarah as pointed told Shep before she departed she could have worked around that. What she could not work around was what Shep called one night the “fire in his head” (not helping that inability to “work around” were long-time, long-held issues around Sarah’s own worth, around who she was, around what was she to do in the world now that she too was retired, issues about her place in the sun which had plagued her since childhood). In the end that “fire in his head,” that not being “at peace” with himself was the way she expressed her take on the situation was what made something snap in her psyche.

Shep, as he would admit to himself in a moment of candor several weeks after she had gone, had reacted to his health issues and graceless aging rather than getting more rest and taking it easier in life had in true Shep form driven himself even harder in order to leave what he told Sarah was his mark on the wicked old world. The snapping point for her was that he seemed indifferent to her needs, seemed to be in a world of his own, and had begun again to question every move that she made like he did not trust. In a final stab to his heart she had told him that her own increasing medical problems were being aggravated by his foul behavior(after being fearful of doing so since she still worried about his anger if she did tell him this hard truth).       

So this was Shep’s sad demise. Or could have been but one night a couple of months after Sarah left he woke up one night and said “no more.” No more acting like a crazed maniac, no more fruitless search for some netherworld place in the sun. He had read a book, a book on meditation that Sarah had left behind talking about the benefits of doing such a therapy, backed up by scientific evidence. (Shep was not sure that Sarah had not left the book behind on purpose since she, like in a lot of things around his well-being, had mentioned his doing meditation on numerous occasions in the past.) So Shep started practicing the art, had real trouble at the beginning in focusing away from his two million “pressing” forward that day issues and trying to live “in the moment.” But as with many things when he got “religion” Shep was still at it after a month. His mantra, his focus term, not surprisingly “no more.”    

[Shep would wind up meeting Sarah in a Whole Foods grocery store in Cambridge several months later and remarked after telling him she had spent the previous several months in California that he seemed calmer, seemed to have lost some of that fire in his head, and seemed more at peace with himself. Had said also that they should keep in touch now that  she was back in town and that he wasn’t such a maniac (her term for his previous late innings conduct). So who knows. All Shep knows is that he wanted “no more” to do with the old Shep). 

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

By Hank Jones

“No more, no more,” had become Shep Wilson’s new mantra once he go over his rage against his long-time companion, Sarah Long, after she had set him adrift, had as she said “moved on” to fine herself whatever that might have meant when she uttered the ugly words of separation one night and then the next day was gone, leaving no forwarding address and only the thin reed of a cellphone number and e-mail address to remember her by. It had not been like Shep had not known it was coming, or could see it come since Sarah had been making noises about leaving, and under what conditions for a couple of years prior to that sneaking out the next day door. It seemed that every few years she had to lay down the law, her law about what was good or bad about what was happening in their as she called it “relationship.”  The last two times had been shortened up though a couple years before it had been a week, only a week after they had arrived home from a great week of museums, good dining and mad walks along the Seine and the previous year a week, only a week after they had had a great and nostalgic time in Maine going to the old Saco Drive-In and a record hop like they were kids again.

Maybe she had been right to lay the law down (his expression but she never disagreed with that characterization, never either when he was joking or serious) had been right to make her anguish knew after those vacations which contrasted in her mind with what they had had in their early relationship. Maybe she had been right to make a clean break, to go out some forlorn unadorned door without a lonesome good-by which had been as hard to as if she had gone in the middle of the day bidding him a personal, upfront fond adieu. Hell, in his heart of hearts Shep knew he was only fooling himself, only acting out of his version of male alleged indifference to her, to his fate which had been part of the problem between the pair for the past several years. They had gone to couples counselling over that indifference a few years back when he really was indifferent under the throes of a small, unknown to her, cocaine, snow, cousin whatever you want to call it which he had been able to break without further destroying their relationship, although that was a close thing, was not as easy as it sounded. Especially when he thought about going back to the stuff lately to get rid of the never-ending depression he felt each day as he had trodden through his absent life.  

Shep kept trying to think through what he could have done differently, where he had fallen down bad enough to make her leave. And make him take up her chant of “no more” (not  really put that way by her since she would have used more gentile language that fit her persona but that was the way that it rang through this latest fire in his head and that was the way he was trying to think the matter through). He knew that he shared the blame, shared in the debacle of their love, had lost that magic that held them together for so many years, and that the little saying that she had in sunnier times about how they had been so much in love in those early years and though it would continue forever. (The actual way she put it was “when he had loved her so”)  And in the early days, hell, up until the last few years that love had been as genuine as any emotion that he had ever held dear. Then a whole series of events, a whole personal deluge of troubles laid him low, and had made him a grumpy old man. The last month or so, maybe two months he had tried to take stock of himself (and of her role in their decline after all as she admitted she could have signaled him more concretely about what was ailing her, what make her say her own “no more” however she might have actually put the matter). Had tried to put as he constantly told her to put his best foot forward. Unfortunately it had been too late.      

After Shep thought about those early days when they were so in love, were so sympathetic to each other, fed off each other’s needs, faced the wicked old world as a pair of waifs, soul-mate waifs was the way she put it one time early, sipping on a little light wine to numb himself a bit against the emptiness in his heart (and to keep the cocaine blues at bay-even singing the lines from the old song-“cocaine, cocaine running up and down my brain, cocaine’s for horses not for men they say its’ going to kill you but they don’t say when” to ward off the evil spirits gathering in his mind), he tried to retrace where he had fallen down (her shortcomings were her business now and so he looked at the lonely world through his future path and  how he could become the “new” Shep, get rid of that mantra of “no more” into a better place. 

Shep had never been much for reflection, never much to think how his actions, or better his omissions, would affect Sarah, would make her withdraw, make her close her heart to him. Had dismissed at least in his “put out the fire” head much of what she would speak of when she was seriously trying to signal him that things had dramatically drifted downhill. Would not take the signals about getting help, psychiatric help foremost, that she first gently and then more insistently tried to get him to undertake. He has seen that formula as her New Age Cambridge background thing that she was forever trying out (and to his mind without much success but he kept that to himself especially as she seemed more and more to withdraw into that world as she got more distraught about them and as well about her place in the sun, about who she was).

Funny in the end, or rather toward the end, in one of those previous downhill moments he had a few years back agreed to go with her to couples counselling (they had tried that route about twenty years before but both had been dissatisfied with the counsellor who seemed to be more interested in what she, the counsellor, had to say than what they had had to say). Funny as well that he, not she though, had gone into that counselling with some of that usual indifference, and if he had been wise enough to see what that meant he could have seen what was coming, he felt that the then current counselling, and the counsellor, was a worthwhile endeavor every week (Sarah, before they decided, or rather she decided, to discontinue the work, had told him that she thought the counsellor was “championing him” because, as a gregarious type in such situations he had the better of it against her more quiet and thoughtful responses which tended to be short, if to the point.)          

Shep’s troubles really had started with the advent of his medical troubles, with what he called “the poking and prodding” of the medicos, a few years before. Yeah, he knew growing older, getting to be an old grumpy man, meant that health issues would surface, would especially as he reached his seventh decade (he knew first-hand as well from his friends of similar ages that this was the “deal,” the real deal). Shep had prided himself on keeping a semblance of fitness, of keeping himself heathy as measured by very infrequent visits to the doctor’s office and of not feeling sick most of the time except for an occasional cold. Then the deluge, first trouble with breathing and eating necessitating an endoscopy which found some problems, and required medications. After that bladder problems associated with his smoking many years before according to the urologist, more medications, and then more recently the final nail in the coffin (his expression as stated to Sarah many times and a silly foolish thing to say), the early discovery of bladder cancer after a scope had shown unusual inflammations. More procedures and more medications.        

One day Shep just erupted, started yelling at Sarah, started to approach her for which she would later say she stood in fear of physical danger he seemed so out of control (not said anything at the time though as she thought that saying anything would only enflame him further). After a few minutes he settled down, because something of the old Shep, but then the line, some line in Sarah’s sand had been crossed. Shep swore he would stop taking the medications since they seemed to be making him more aggressive, more sullen, and angrier. As it turned out one of the medications was reacting poorly with another one and had aided in Shep’s angry responses to the world-and to Sarah.    

If the medications, if the health issues were all that there were bothering Sarah as pointed told Shep before she departed she could have worked around that. What she could not work around was what Shep called one night the “fire in his head” (not helping that inability to “work around” were long-time, long-held issues around Sarah’s own worth, around who she was, around what was she to do in the world now that she too was retired, issues about her place in the sun which had plagued her since childhood). In the end that “fire in his head,” that not being “at peace” with himself was the way she expressed her take on the situation was what made something snap in her psyche.

Shep, as he would admit to himself in a moment of candor several weeks after she had gone, had reacted to his health issues and graceless aging rather than getting more rest and taking it easier in life had in true Shep form driven himself even harder in order to leave what he told Sarah was his mark on the wicked old world. The snapping point for her was that he seemed indifferent to her needs, seemed to be in a world of his own, and had begun again to question every move that she made like he did not trust. In a final stab to his heart she had told him that her own increasing medical problems were being aggravated by his foul behavior(after being fearful of doing so since she still worried about his anger if she did tell him this hard truth).       

So this was Shep’s sad demise. Or could have been but one night a couple of months after Sarah left he woke up one night and said “no more.” No more acting like a crazed maniac, no more fruitless search for some netherworld place in the sun. He had read a book, a book on meditation that Sarah had left behind talking about the benefits of doing such a therapy, backed up by scientific evidence. (Shep was not sure that Sarah had not left the book behind on purpose since she, like in a lot of things around his well-being, had mentioned his doing meditation on numerous occasions in the past.) So Shep started practicing the art, had real trouble at the beginning in focusing away from his two million “pressing” forward that day issues and trying to live “in the moment.” But as with many things when he got “religion” Shep was still at it after a month. His mantra, his focus term, not surprisingly “no more.”    

[Shep would wind up meeting Sarah in a Whole Foods grocery store in Cambridge several months later and remarked after telling him she had spent the previous several months in California that he seemed calmer, seemed to have lost some of that fire in his head, and seemed more at peace with himself. Had said also that they should keep in touch now that  she was back in town and that he wasn’t such a maniac (her term for his previous late innings conduct). So who knows. All Shep knows is that he wanted “no more” to do with the old Shep). 

Spend 1.2 Trillion Dollars On Nuclear Weapons....We Don't Think!

Spend 1.2 Trillion Dollars On Nuclear Weapons....We Don't Think!  

Black Lives Matter-The Late Class-War Prisoner Mondo we Langa's -"When It Gets To This Point"

Black Lives Matter-The Late Class-War Prisoner  Mondo we Langa's -"When It Gets To This Point" Workers Vanguard No. 1086	25 March 2016

“When It Gets to This Point”

by Mondo we Langa

Michael Brown?
I had never heard of him
had never heard of anything he’d done
before the news of his death came
whoever he might have become
whatever he might have achieved
had he lived longer
not been riddled lifeless by
bullets from Darren Wilson’s gun
and crumpled on the pavement of a ferguson street
for more than four hours in
the heat of that august day
and before
I’d never heard of Trayvon Martin
had known nothing of who he was
until I learned of his demise
and cause of death
a bullet to the chest
George Zimmerman, the shooter
a badge-less, pretend police
with a pistol
and fear of the darkness
Trayvon’s darkness
and after a while
the pictures, the names,
the circumstances
run together
like so much colored laundry in the wash
that bleeds on whites

was it Eric Garner or Tamir Rice
who was twelve but seen as twenty
Hulk Hogan or The Hulk
with demonic eyes it was said
who shrank the cop in ferguson
into a five-year-old who
had to shoot
just had to shoot
and John Crawford the third
in a walmart store aisle
and air rifle in his hands he’d pick up
from the shelf
and held in the open
in an open-carry state
was it John or someone else
killed supposedly by mistake
in a dark stairwell
I know Akai Gurley fell
I hadn’t heard of him before
nor of Amadou Diallo or Sean Bell
prior to their killings
which of these two took slugs in the greater number
I don’t recall
my mind is too encumbered
with the names
of so many more before and since

the frequent news reports of
non-arrests, non-indictments,
non-true bills
and duplicitous presentations by “experts in the field”
the consultants put out front
to explain away
that which is so often plain as day
to coax and convince us that we’re the ones
who can’t see straight and
can’t hear clearly
who are the ones replacing facts with spin
to mislead and mystify
as the beatings and the chokings and shootings
of our boys and men
by these wrong arms of the law
proceed in orderly fashion
before the sometimes sad
sometimes angry faces of
our uncertain
our hesitant
disbelief.