Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling-Or Political Liberty Either-Grace Kelly And Gary Cooper’s “High Noon” (1952)-A Film Review

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling-Or Political Liberty Either-Grace Kelly And Gary Cooper’s “High Noon” (1952)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

High Noon, starring Grace Kelly, Gary Cooper, 1952

Sometimes in life, sometimes in the publishing business might be a more appropriate way of putting the matter, you get handed gratis something like the assignment of this film under review High Noon you would have given your eye teeth to get hold of. The way this one played out was recently added stringer Sarah Lemoyne, who apparently as she has advertised is indeed a quick learner, had been assigned the classic Technicolor Western Johnny Guitar starring an over the hill Joan Crawford and getting there Sterling Hayden despite the fact that she knew nothing, hated even, the genre. Her smart move was to attach that gripe to her review which while site manager Greg Green, the guy who hands out the assignments these days, called it a very good one from an unseasoned and unversed critic in the genre the rest of us, and maybe Sarah too, knew was a dog. Showed those tell-tale signs of somebody going through the motions. The fact of putting her gripe in a review left Greg kind of in a box when he wanted her to do this review, another Western, after she said no mas. So, to keep the inmates from getting restless he assigned this iconic beauty to me. Apparently in the back and forth over the issue it became clear to Greg that Sarah really was clueless about how important this film was cinematically and politically. Too young to know of red scares and such.

The reason that I would have been willing to give my eye teeth to review this film though has nothing to do with cinema or politics but my boyhood (and now still) “crush” on “the girl next door” Grace Kelly. I never tire of telling all who will listen the remark made by Seth Garth when I think he was reviewing Ms. Kelly and Cary Grant’s To Catch A Thief and he was so struck by her form of beauty that he could understand why her husband Prince Rainier of Monaco, a man not known for public displays of emotion openly wept at Princess Grace’s funeral after she was killed in a car accident. I could have told Seth that as well ever since my boyhood infatuation.

Now to the story and to the politics which are intertwined with what the creators, or one of the creators of the story line was attempting to do back in 1952 when the height of

the Senator Joe McCarthy-led red scare was hitting full stride and Hollywood was continually in the direct line of fire for alleged “communist influence” and as a hotbed of mostly former Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they were called then. People were forced, maybe against their better judgments to “snitch”, “fink,”  “rat out” their fellows who were under the Red Scare microscope but they still did it to their every lasting shame which hopefully caused more than a few sleepless nights when they “named names” to cover their own asses. Worse let the night-takers have their way without uttering a whisper against the madness. Would not stand up for the innocent, or the guilty if such a word is appropriate in this context. Cowards and other words I would rather no use here but which we used all the time in the old neighborhood when something smelled rotten.             

And that same understanding propels the action in this film where Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, soon to be ex-Marshall of a Western town which he did much to make hospitable for ordinary folks and taking action against the wild boys who ruled the roost previously. Leaving the profession, the job since he was now married to lovely Quaker convert Amy, played by Ms. Kelly and she insisted they move away and start a new less dangerous life. All well and god except the leader of the bad guys whom he had sent to prison for life had been pardoned and was heading back to town to seek his revenge against Will. Headed back to town on that regularly scheduled noon train which will get plenty of play via many shots of the endless railroad tracks, the ticking clocks and the bad guys waiting for their boss to come back to begin the slaughter. The question is put point blank-can Will leave where danger is afoot and all that he stands for is threatened.

Of course not everybody saw the question in that same way, didn’t see that he was a standup guy and could do no other.  Including Amy who was ready to leave town-with or without him. The story unravels around the fact that friend or foe, upstanding citizens or not, fearless or fearful not one goddam bastard was ready to stand up to the bad guys back in those late 19^th century days when the West was being tamed. Just like standup people were scarce as hen’s teeth when the deal went down in the Cold War red scare night. In the end Will stood down the bad guys alone, well almost alone because his sweetie Amy came through in the end. Best of all after the bad guys were no more and Will gave his fierce look of scorn and contempt on the scurrying town  rats after the dust had settled he and Amy wordlessly left town. Nice.

Celebrate May Day-The International Workers Holiday-Boston Common-Tuesday May 1st-5 PM

Celebrate May Day-The International Workers Holiday-Boston Common-Tuesday May 1^st-5 PM   

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Tet Offensive-Vietnam At The End- The American End- An Insider’s Story- Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval”- A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry on the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

Book Review

Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account Of Saigon’s Indecent End Told By The CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst In Vietnam, Frank Snepp, Random House, New York, 1977



Sometimes a picture is in fact better than one thousand words. In this case the famous, or infamous depending on one’s view, photograph of the last American “refugees” being evacuated from the American Embassy in Saigon (now, mercifully, Ho Chi Minh City) tells more about that episode of American imperial hubris that most books. Still, as is the case with this little gem of a book, ex- CIA man Frank Snepp’s insider account of that fall from the American side, it is nice to have some serious analytical companionship to that photo. Moreover, a book that gives numerous details about what happened to who in those last days in a little over five hundred pages and who the good guys and bad guys really were. Especially now, as two or three later generations only see Vietnam through the hoary eyes of old veterans (both military and radical anti-war) from that period like me to tell the tale.

Naturally, a longtime CIA man who in a fit of his own hubris decides, in effect, to blow the whistle on the American fiasco, has got his own axes to grind, and his own agenda for doing so. Bearing that in mind this is a fascinating look at that last period of American involvement in Vietnam from just after the 1973 cease-fire went into place until that last day of April in 1975 when the red flag flew over Saigon after a thirty plus year struggle for national liberation. For most Americans the period after the withdrawal of the last large contingents of U.S. troops from combat in 1972 kind of put paid to that failed experiment in “nation-building”-American-style.

For the rest of us who wished to see the national liberation struggle victorious we only had a slight glimmer that sometime was afoot until fairly late- say the beginning of 1975, although the rumor mill was running earlier. So Mr. Snepp’s book is invaluable to fill in the blanks for what the U.S., the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese were doing, or not doing.

Snepp’s lively account, naturally, centers on the American experience and within that experience the conduct of the last ambassador to Saigon, Graham Martin. Snepp spares no words to go after Martin’s perfidious and maniacal role, especially in the very, very last days when the North Vietnamese were sweeping almost unopposed into Saigon. But there is more, failures of intelligence, some expected, others just plain wrong, some missteps about intentions, some grand-standing and some pure-grade anti-communist that fueled much of the scene.

And, of course, no story of American military involvement anyplace is complete without plenty of material about, well the money. From Thieu’s military needs (and those of his extensive entourage) to the American military (and their insatiable need for military hardware), to various American administrations and their goals just follow the money trail and you won’t be far off the scent. And then that famous, or infamous, photograph of that helicopter exit from the roof of the American Embassy in just a nick of time makes much more sense. Nice work, Frank Snepp. The whistleblower’s art is not appreciated but always needed. Just ask Private Bradley Manning.

Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

From The Pen Of Zack James 

Sam Lowell, who had usually an easy going guy when not preoccupied with his profession, his lawyerly profession, was frustrated. No, better, was, had been, beside himself with frustration for a fairly long time. He had, as he wound down the management of the day to day operations of the small independent law firm that he had helped start with a fellow law school student, Ben Ames, decided that finally he could begin to pursue an avocation as a writer that he had been eager to do since high school. Back then the war, the Vietnam War if anybody is asking, intervened, and had caught him up in the draft call and after his tour of duty into the counter-culture night around San Francisco which had set him back several years when he couldn’t/did not want to face the return to the “real” world for a while.

More than that Sam found as he foundered and as his new “real” world foundered that he needed to move on. Moving on in the direct sense by taking up the law career that his mother, grandfather and several others had been harping on him since his youth. But he still hankered after that idea of being a writer, being a writer maybe in Paris, San Francisco, or some other town where blossoming the written word counted, counted a lot. But time and tide had passed that idea by and it had only been the previous decade or so that he got back to writing just for the hell of it.

Fortunately the times he choose to come back in were very propitious for amateur writers, writers who were not making their livelihoods trying to eke out a living at so many words per day. He had over the course of that decade, first very sporadically then more consistently, joined several writing-oriented blog and other self-publishing enterprises.        

That return to recreational writing however was really what Sam had been frustrated by. Or rather as he took his writing more seriously he realized that he had come to a block in the road, not a writer’s block fortunately because one way or another he could still produce the words, sometimes a torrid of words, but an understanding that he would always be a first rate third rate writer as somebody back in the day had said about some public servant whom the person who said the words was trying to smear.

This is the way Sam explained it to his long-time companion Laura, Laura Perkins, who had encouraged him in his writing as best she could. He had just written a short story based on a few episodes in the current love life of his old schoolboy friend, Bart Webber, from Carver where they grew up together. Bart had had a short torrent affair with a fellow student in their class, Melinda Loring, whom he had rekindled a relationship with after their 50^th anniversary class reunion. The affair, in the end, floundered on Bart’s inability to meet Melinda’s demands that they think about marriage which Bart, having suffered through three failed marriages (and more alimony, child support and college tuitions than any man should have rightly been required to do in that loveless legal world Sam inhabited along with some nasty judges),    was adamantly against, although he was open to the idea of living together or some such non-legal arrangement. Bart’s position set off a firestorm from which the relationship could never recover.

Bart, in telling Sam the details of the split up between him and Melinda, mentioned that he suddenly realized what the author Thomas Wolfe meant when he titled one of his books You Can’t Go Home Again. That idea, that hook, the notion that in some things you cannot go back stirred Sam into the thought of writing up a sketch, duly fictionalized, about Bart’s affair as some kind of cautionary tale for the generation of ‘68 now filled with plenty of regrets and sorrows about their pasts-and time to think about them as well. Bart agreed, although he was skeptical that anybody could learn anything from the exposition. In any case Sam wrote the piece up, about three thousand words, let Bart look it over and make corrections as well as check for any incidents revealed that might be tied to anything real that had happened in the Bart-Melinda relationship.

Bart satisfied, Sam sent the piece to various publishing outlets where there was a certain small interest expressed in publishing the story especially by one young female editor. It was a comment by that editor, Julie Stern, which riled Sam and set off his latest round of frustration. She said that the way he wrote the story, the way he defended his protagonist Jack Callahan, the piece as a whole read like, and this is a direct quote, “the closing argument of legal brief.”          

Initially stung by the comment Sam later, after several days’ reflection, realized that Julie was right, was right not only about that piece which she had read but after looking over some of his other earlier writings he had the same sense that she was onto something. All the years of dry legal writing had atrophied his creative writing skills, had left him thinking strictly inside the box. Had made him realize that he was a prime example of that first rate third rate writer he dreaded that he might become when he was young despite his junior and senior year English teacher, Miss Soros, at Carver High encouraging him in his creative endeavors.        

Sam thought it was funny that back in high school he had had such creative bursts, had stirred Miss Soros and his classmates with a few of his efforts mostly about the absurdities of teenage life, angst and alienation. He had fashioned himself, maybe imitated is a better word, after various heroic writers that he had read. In those days he was crazy for Ernest Hemingway’s sleek style, meaning crisp dialogue, clear short sentences yet with words that were power-packed to descript not only the action of the story but the environment in which the characters worked out their particular problems. Sam had been crazy to study about the Spanish Civil War after he had picked that event as the subject of his first term paper in high school. Along the way he found out that many Americans, not all of them communists or socialists, had supported the Republican side against the Nazi-infested Fascists and that Hemingway was one of them. Had written For Whom The Bells Toll as a result of his experiences (Sam would not find out until later that the American Communist Party and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades were not at all happy about Hemingway’s work on that book, its’ what would be today called its political incorrectness. Many years later when he had run into a veteran of the Lincolns at a conference at Brandeis where the Lincoln Archives were housed he had been still incensed that Hemingway had slighted them.

Sam had not known Hemingway’s work before his efforts around his term paper except maybe some film adaptation of one of his short stories, The Killers, but he was in thrall ever after, thought everybody wherever they might end up on their literary journeys should write following his style. Naturally, something that Sam was inclined to do when he was “hot’ on a writer he would read (and re-read later several times) all Hemingway’s works that he could get his hands on. Never could then though figure out why a guy who could write like a whirling dervish, a mad monk if you don’t like the dervish description, took his own life. That was then and like in a lot of things later Sam could understand that a person with declining stamina, some form of writer’s block, and a feeling that his best work was behind him, could take that way out. Not a way Sam’s would be inclined to take for those reasons since a first rate third rate writer would only bring laughter from the crowds upon himself if he fancied himself enough of a driven writer to contemplate that.    

Jesus, Sam thought, thinking back to the time when he first heard about how guys like Hemingway and Fitzgerald abandoned the vacuity of post-World War I America for the bright lights of Paris, or France anyway. Yeah, if Hemingway gave Sam pause on style then Fitzgerald was the master of the narrative, of telling a great story letting the reader sink beneath the pauses. Like the first time he read The Great Gatsby and realized that Jay Ganz was just like a lot of guys he knew, corner boy guys who had big dreams. Except Jay driven did more than dream about what he wanted. He had had to read that famous last page about the Dutch sailors reaching the New World around New York Harbor way and seeing the possibilities of the fresh new start once they had seen that unsullied “fresh green breast.”  Yeah, Fitzgerald knew a certain milieu and worked that minefield for all it was worth.

As Sam dozed off a bit while thinking about all the great literature around, all the stuff that was worthy of being read he was dazzled by the progression of great writers who had influenced him at various time. Thomas Wolfe, Edith Wharton (even though he was not at all familiar with Brahmin life), Dorothy Parker and her Big Blonde, the max daddy detective story writers Raymond Parker and Dashiell  Hammett (who Sam swore learned their dialogue  craft from Hemingway after reading The Maltese Falcon  and the Big Sleep by them) and a whole bunch of others. And now he is to go without a bang but with a whimper, maybe better a sigh. Sighs the fate of first rate third rate writers.

In Cambridge- Mystic Chorale concert, May 19/20 - From Selma to Soweto: Songs of Power

Mystic Chorale concert, May 19/20 - From Selma to Soweto: Songs of Power

Marilyn Levin

4/27/2018 2:59 PM

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Spring 2018
Mystic Chorale mysticchorale.org
From Selma to Soweto: Songs of Power
Led by Nick Page

Join the 200 singers of the Mystic Chorale singing songs of community, power and hope from the ongoing Civil Rights movements of South Africa and the US. We are thrilled to welcome returning guest, Dr. Ysaye Barnwell , who has spent three decades singing with Sweet Honey In The Rock and building communities of song throughout the world. Her central message—that together our voices matter—is sagely conveyed in the lyrics she wrote for Step by Step : “Many stones can build an arch, singly none.”

We also welcome back South African friends Nthabi Thakadu, Phakamani Pega, and Pumla Bhungane, as well as pianist extraordinaire Jonathan Singleton.

Audience and Chorale alike will enjoy Ysaye’s uplifting song-leading and a rich program that features several contemporary pieces, including one Ysaye wrote especially for Mystic that assures us, “We can rise higher than high, We can rise in love.”

All of the songs—past and present, South African and American—deliver powerful and relevant messages for today’s world!

Enjoy this video of the Mystic Chorale singing Usilethela Uxolo (Nelson Mandela, You Bring Us Peace) at a past concert.
SATURDAY , May 19, 2018, 7:30pm or SUNDAY , May 20, 2018, 3:30pm

Advance tickets are $15/ $20 at door.

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Celebrate May Day-The International Workers Holiday-Boston Common-Tuesday May 1st-5 PM

Celebrate May Day-The International Workers Holiday-Boston Common-Tuesday May 1^st-5 PM   

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Face (Book) Photo That Launched A Thousand Clicks- Or “Foul-Mouth” Phil Hits Pay-Dirt-Finally-With The Coasters Under The Boardwalk In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Face (Book) Photo That Launched A Thousand Clicks- Or “Foul-Mouth” Phil Hits Pay-Dirt-Finally-With The Coasters Under The Boardwalk In Mind

By Allan Jackson

[Once a corner boy always a corner boy as it turns out as the sketch below amply demonstrates. One of the pinnacles of corner boy-dom being always, and now apparently forever until some dying breathe, ready for the main chance-the main chance to grab (not literally in these #MeToo times-okay) some woman out of nowhere. Funny when I conceived of the rock and roll series I had expected the whole thing to revolve around the past and not have the fate of those characters still standing fifty years later come into play. So of course along the period of the two or three years that the series ran a few OMG situations cried out for coverage. Naturally Phil Larkin, a still standee, was a prime candidate if something weird turned up. And old brother Phil, a stand up corner boy in his day, did not fail us. Allan Jackson]          

*********** 

Yes, I know. I know damn well that I should not indulge my seemingly endlessly sex-haunted old-time corner boys. After all this space is nothing but a high-tone “high communist” propaganda outlet on most days –good days (“red” according to those very same corner boys who thought anything to the left of Genghis Khan in the old days was redder than the sun echoing an old history teacher of mine who unhappy with a surly answer I had given him had called me a “Bolshevik,” or rather asked that as question and Timmy Murphy one of the corner boys who was there in the class after he said that never let me live that one down so I am used to that velvet-handed red-baiting). I should, moreover, not indulge a “mere” part-timer at our old North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out be-bop night “up the Downs” like one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. (For those who do not know what that reference refers to don’t worry you all had your own “up the Downs” and your own corner boys, or mall rats as the case may be, who hung out there.) Despite his well-known, almost automatic, foul mouth in the old days Phil had his fair share, more than his fair share given that mouth, of luck with the young women (girls, in the old days, okay). I am still mad at him for “stealing” my old-time neighborhood heartthrob, Millie Callahan, right from under my nose. (And right in the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church after Mass to boot. If he is still a believer he stands condemned. No mercy. As for me, an old heathen, I was just glad that I stared at her ass during Mass. I stand condemned anyway, if things get worked out that way).

Well, that was then and now is now and if you read about “poor” Phil Larkin’s trials and tribulations with the ladies recently in a sketch entitled Sexless sex sites you know that his old Irish blarney ( I am being kind to the old geezer here) had finally given out and that he was scoreless lately. That is he was scoreless as of that writing. As Phil pointed out to me personally as part of our conversations while I was editing his story on that one he felt that he would have had better luck with finding a woman companion (for whatever purpose) by just randomly calling up names in the telephone directory than from that “hot” sex site that he found himself embroiled in. And, in an earlier time, he might have been right.

But we are now in the age of so-called “social networking” (of which this space, as an Internet-driven format is a part) and so, by hook or by crook, someone placed his story (or rather, more correctly, my post from this blog) on his Facebook wall. As a result of that “click” Phil is now “talking” to a young (twenty-something) woman graduate student from Penn State (that is why just a few minutes ago he was yelling “Go, Nittany Lions” in my ear over the cell phone) and is preparing to head to the rolling Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania for a “date” with said twenty-something. Go figure, right? So my placement of this saga, or rather part two of the saga (mercifully there will be no more), is really being done in the interest of my obscure sense of completeness rather than “mere” indulgence of an old-time corner boy. As always I disclaim, and disclaim loudly for the world to hear, that while I have helped edit this story this is the work of one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin, formerly of North Adamsville and now on some twisted, windy road heading to central Pennsylvania.

Phil Larkin comment:

Jesus, that Peter Paul Markin is a piece of work. Always rubbing in that “foul-mouth” thing. But I guess I did get the better of him on that Millie Callahan thing back in the day and he did provide me a “life-line” just now with his posting of my story on his damn communist-addled blog. It is a good thing we go back to “up the Downs” time and that I am not a “snitch” because some of the stuff that I have read from him here should, by rights, be reported directly to J. Edgar Hoover, or whoever is running the F.B.I., if anybody is. We can discuss that another time because I don’t have time to be bothered by any such small stuff. Not today. Not since I hit “pay-dirt” with my little Heloise. Yes, an old-fashioned name, at least I haven’t heard the name used much lately for girls, but very new-fashioned in her ideas. 

She is a twenty-five graduate student from Penn State and I am, as I speak, getting ready to roll out down the highway for our first “in person” meet.

You all know, or should be presumed to know to use a Markinism (Christ, we still call his silly little terms that name even forty years later), that I was having a little temporary trouble finding my life’s companion through sex sites. I told that story before and it is not worth going into here. [Markin: Fifty years Phil, and every other guy (or gal) from the Class of 1964. Do the math. I hope you didn’t try to con Heloise with that “youthful” fifty-something gag-christ, right back to you, Phil.] Let me tell you this one though because it had done nothing but restore my faith in modern technology.

Little communist propaganda front or not, Peter Paul’s blog goes out into the wilds of cyberspace almost daily (and it really should be reported to the proper authorities now that I have read his recent screeds on a Russian Bolshevik guy named Trotsky who is some kind of messiah to Markin and his crowd). So a few weeks ago somebody, somehow ( I am foggy, just like Markin, on the mechanics of the thing, although I know it wasn’t some Internet god making “good” cyberspace vibes or anything like that) picked it up and place it (linked it) on his Facebook wall ( I think that is the proper word). Let’s call him Bill Riley (not his real name and that is not important anyway) Now I don’t know if you know how this Facebook thing works, although if you don’t then you are among the three, maybe four, people over the age of five that doesn’t.

Here’s what I have gathered. Bill Riley set up an account with his e-mail address, provided some information about himself and his interests and waited for the deluge of fan responses and “social-connectedness” (Markin’s word). Well, not exactly wait. Every day in every way you are inundated with photos of people you may know, may not know, or may or may not want to know and you can add them to your “friends” pile (assuming they “confirm” you request for friendship). Easy, right?

Well, yes easy is right because many people will, as I subsequently found out, confirm you as a friend for no other reason than that you “asked” them to include you. Click- confirm. Boom. This, apparently, is what happened when Bill “saw” Heloise’s photo. I found out later, after “talking” to Heloise for a while, that she did not know Bill Riley or much about him except that he has a wall on Facebook. So the weird part is that Bill “introduced” us, although neither Heloise nor I know Bill. This has something Greek comedic, or maybe a Shakespeare idea, about it, for sure. In any case Heloise, as a sociology graduate student at Penn State, took an interest in the “sexless” sex site angle for some study she was doing around her thesis and, by the fates, got hooked into the idea that she wanted to interview me about my experiences, and other related matters.

Without going into all the details that you probably know already I “joined” Bill Riley’s Facebook friends cabal and through him his “friend” Helosie contacted me about an interview. Well, we “chatted” for a while one day and she asked some questions and I asked others in my most civilized manner. What I didn’t know, and call me stupid for not knowing, was that Heloise not only was a “friend” of Bill’s but, unlike me (or so I thought), had her own Facebook page with photos. Now her photo on Bill’s wall was okay but, frankly, she looked just like about ten thousand other earnest female twenty-something graduate students. You know, from hunger. But not quite because daddy or mommy or somebody is paying the freight to let their son or daughter not face reality for a couple more years in some graduate program where they can “discover” themselves. Of course, naturally old cavalier that I am said, while we were chatting, that she was attractive, and looked energetic and smart and all that stuff. You know the embedded male thing with any woman, young or old, that looks the least bit “hit-worthy.” (Embedded is Markin’s word, sorry.)That photo still is on Bill’s wall and if I had only seen that one I would still be sitting in some lounge whiskey sipping my life away.

Heloise’s “real” photos, taken at some Florida beach during Spring break, showed a very fetching (look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know what that old-time word means) young woman that in her bikini had me going. Let’s put it this way I wrote her the following little “note” after I got an eyeful:

“Hi Heloise - Recently I made a comment, after I first glanced at your photo wall, that you looked fetching (read, attractive, enchanting, hot, and so on). On that first glance I, like any red-blooded male under the age of one hundred, and maybe over that for all I know, got a little heated up. Now I have had a change to cool down, well a little anyway, and on second peek I would have to say you are kind of, sort of, in a way, well, okay looking. Now that I can be an objective observer I noticed that one of your right side eyelashes is one mm, or maybe two, off-balance from the left side. 

Fortunately I have the “medicine” to cure you. If you don’t mind living with your hideous asymmetrical deformation that is up to you. I will still be your friend. But if you were wondering, deep in the night, the sleepless night, why you have so few male Facebook friends or why guys in droves are passing your page by there you have it. Later-Phil.”

The famous old reverse play that has been around for a million years, right? Strictly the blarney, right? [Markin: Right, Phil, right as ever]. That little literary gem however started something in her, some need for an older man to tell her troubles to or something. And from there we started to “talk” more personally and more seriously. See I had it all wrong about her being sheltered out there in the mountains by mom and dad keeping her out of harm’s way until she “found” herself. No, Heloise was working, and working hard, to make ends meet and working on her doctorate at the same time. Her story, really, without the North Adamsville corner boy thing, would be something any of us Salducci’s guys would understand without question. (I was not a part-time corner boy by the way, except by Frankie Riley’s 24/7/365 standards and The Scribe’s). [Markin: Watch it, Phil. I told you not to use that nickname anymore.] I’ll tell you her story sometime depending on how things work but right now I am getting ready to go get a tank full of gas and think a little about those photos that launched a thousand clicks.

Markin comment:

Phil, like I said to Johnny Silver about what people might say about his little teeny-bopper love. Go for it. Don’t watch out. And like I said before we had better get to that “communist” future you keep thinking I think we all need pretty damn quick if for no other reason than to get some sexual breathes of fresh air that such a society promises.

Life According To The Mayfair Swells-Dick Powell’s “Happiness Ahead” (1934)-A Film Review

Life According To The Mayfair Swells-Dick Powell’s “Happiness Ahead” (1934)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Frank Jackman

Happiness Ahead, starring crooner cum actor Dick Powell, Josephine Hutchison, 1934

I am not exactly sure why I drew this film review assignment, an area which I haven’t dealt with much over the past several years doing mostly political commentary during that time. I have a sneaking suspicion current site manager Greg Green, who is the guy who after all makes the assignments of late, has an idea that I will make some pithy social and political comments about the time frame and content of this Happiness Ahead I am stuck with reviewing. A title which while it was produced in the heart of the 1930s Great Depression (I noted the National Recovery Act, NRA, logo a sure fire way to tell the times) could have been the campaign theme of any President or presidential candidate from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Donald J. Trump.

In any case I am sure Greg was not under the impression that he was trying to “broaden my horizons” with this assignment like he had increasingly tried to use as a reason among the younger writers. He knows, and if he does not I am here to tell him, that I was looking to mine political gold from such socially conscious 1930s films which were a specialty of Warner Brother films when he was reviewing B-film horror movies as a stringer for the American Film Gazette. Now if he assigned this beast under the sign of a 1930s “slice of life” nugget to be gleaned then all is forgiven and he will have hit the nail on the head as to why today’s readers would give a damn about this soapy romance posing as a tribute to the possibilities of the American Dream even when the soup kitchens were lengthening, banks were going bust, houses where being foreclosed, shanty camps were establishing new postal zones, and most germane, New York City financiers were jumping out of freshly “massaged” skyscraper windows.         

Wow the reader might ask all out of a film which is about the budding romance of a daughter of the Mayfair swells out slumming and an up and coming white collar go-getter and side door Johnny crooner in the pocket of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jack Sampson and the like. Well, yes, since as I mentioned Warner Brothers was in love with these social uplift sagas as long as they had enough boy meets girl, or is it girl meets boy here, to avoid some right-wing agents’ accusations of Communist International allegiance. Ms. Smith, in really Joan Bradford, played by 1930s film sweetheart Josephine Hutchison, of the very, very Mayfair swells Bradfords who first reached these shores on the old tug The Mayflower and who had ridden out the first rush of the Great Depression pretty well since Father Bradford not only did not jump out of some Windex skyscraper window but is around to advise his young daughter on the dangers of upsetting high society mother and her “plans” for an upscale marriage and doing what she damn well pleased attempts a jail break-out from the stifling confines of New York high society and a horrible marriage to some male scion of another such family. Fair enough.    

One New Year’s night Joan goes slumming amongst the ordinary folk and winds alone in a Chinese jazz joint where she “meets” Bob, get this Bob Lane, all-American Bob Lane, played by crooner Dick Powell last seen in this space as Phillip Marlowe getting knocked around, drugged and kicked in the teeth by some evil high society forces who don’t want him to find his Velma for the Moose in the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely dubbed Murder, My Sweet on the screen. One thing leads to another and they get dated up although dear Joan has to go through about six ruses to “prove” she is just ordinary folk. Joan is so starved for reasonable social interaction she plays along for a while even going with Bob to totally plebian roller skating and such holy goof stuff to be at one with the masses.  

Naturally, and that is exactly the right word, this pair are smitten. Big problem though is that while Bob is a go-getter right at that moment he is nothing but a cheapjack office manager for a company who washes the windows of half the skyscrapers in New York City. He has dreams though of running his own window washing company and there is the rub. No dough, or not enough dough and Mother Bradford of the very, very Bradfords is not going to have a window-washer for a son-in-law. That is when Joan to help things along made what looked like a fatal mistake by getting her Daddy Warbucks father to front the necessary dough and thereby incurring the manly wrath on one Robert Lane who finally gets wise to who his sweetie really is. I hope you were paying attention because I already told you this was a boy meets girl story and therefore requires the adequate happy ending, here happiness ahead ending of the title. Bob a little miffed but still head over heels for Joan (which you can tell is true since every once in a while a song telegraphs his desires) and after working out man to man a deal with her father the deal is done. Hope this has broadened your horizons.  

Celebrate May Day-The International Workers Holiday-Boston Common-Tuesday May 1st-5 PM

Celebrate May Day-The International Workers Holiday-Boston Common-Tuesday May 1^st-5 PM   

Songwriters' Corner- Spain 1936- The Irish Connection In Honor Of The Anniversary Of the Easter Uprising

Songwriters' Corner- Spain 1936- The Irish Connection

In Honor Of The Anniversary Of the Easter Uprising

A word on the Easter Uprising

In the old Irish working-class neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such memories of heroic “boyos”  (and “girlos” not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment. 

The easy part of analyzing the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the “shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.

The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops Out of Ireland.

In various readings on national liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).

As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.

That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.

Peter Paul Markin Commentary

I have spilled no small amount of ink, and gladly, writing about the heroic military role of those Americans who fought in the American-led Abraham Lincoln Battalion of 15th International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. The song "Viva La Quince Brigada" can apply to those of other nationalities who fought bravely for the Republican side in that conflict. Here's a take from the Irish perspective. Note the name Frank Ryan included here, a real hero of that operation.

Viva La Quince Brigada
(Christy Moore)

Ten years before I saw the light of morning

A comradeship of heroes was laid.

From every corner of the world came sailing

The Fifteenth International Brigade.

They came to stand beside the Spanish people.

To try and stem the rising Fascist tide

Franco's allies were the powerful and wealthy,

Frank Ryan's men came from the other side.

Even the olives were bleeding

As the battle for Madrid it thundered on.

Truth and love against the force af evil,

Brotherhood against the Fascist clan.

Vive La Quince Brigada!

"No Paseran" the pledge that made them fight.

"Adelante" was the cry around the hillside.

Let us all remember them tonight.

Bob Hillard was a Church of Ireland pastor;

From Killarney across the Pyrenees ho came.

From Derry came a brave young Christian Brother.

Side by side they fought and died in Spain.

Tommy Woods, aged seventeen, died in Cordoba.

With Na Fianna he learned to hold his gun.

From Dublin to the Villa del Rio

Where he fought and died beneath the Spanish sun.

Many Irishmen heard the call of Franco.

Joined Hitler and Mussolini too.

Propaganda from the pulpit and newspapers

Helped O'Duffy to enlist his crew.

The word came from Maynooth: 'Support the Fascists.'

The men of cloth failed yet again

When the bishops blessed the blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire

As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.

This song is a tribute to Frank Ryan.

Kit Conway and Dinny Coady too.

Peter Daly, Charlie Regan and Hugh Bonar.

Though many died I can but name a few.

Danny Doyle, Blaser-Brown and Charlie Donnelly.

Liam Tumilson and Jim Straney from the Falls.

Jack Nally, Tommy Patton and Frank Conroy,

Jim Foley, Tony Fox and Dick O'Neill.

Written in 1983

Copyright Christy Moore

apr97

Here are a couple more Yeats classics.

THE SECOND COMING

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming" is reprinted from Michael Robartes and the Dancer. W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

ON A POLITICAL PRISONER

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

HE that but little patience knew,

From childhood on, had now so much

A grey gull lost its fear and flew

Down to her cell and there alit,

And there endured her fingers' touch

And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing

Recall the years before her mind

Became a bitter, an abstract thing,

Her thought some popular enmity:

Blind and leader of the blind

Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

When long ago I saw her ride

Under Ben Bulben to the meet,

The beauty of her country-side

With all youth's lonely wildness stirred,

She seemed to have grown clean and sweet

Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced in the air

When first it sprang out of the nest

Upon some lofty rock to stare

Upon the cloudy canopy,

While under its storm-beaten breast

Cried out the hollows of the sea.

"On a Political Prisoner" is reprinted from Michael Robartes and the Dancer. W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1921.