Reopening The Emmett Till Case-The Case That Has Not Died, Nor Should It-The Murder Of Emmett Till- Once Again, "Mississippi Goddam"

Reopening The Emmett Till Case-The Case That Has Not Died, Nor Should It

A link to an On Point NPR program on the re-opening of the Emmett Till case.

  www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/07/17/emmett-till-timothy-tyson

By Frank Jackman

I have, as witnessed below, at various times reviewed some aspect of the Emmett Till case as a matter of historical importance although not to me individually directly since Emmett’s death, murder, happened when I was too young to realize what was going on. I picked up on the civil rights movement for black rights in the Mister James Crow South (and as it turned, turns out the North too) in the early 1960s when I went to downtown Boston and walked a picket line at Woolworth’s in support of the lunch counter demonstrators down South who wanted to have a freaking grilled cheese sandwich without having to face a civil war about it. That is when I first heard about the case, and it has never been far from the surface since.           

Now the Department of Justice, Alabama’s Jeff Session’s DOJ, has reopened the Emmett Till case that his family and partisans have tried to have reopened for many years. The DOJ motivation I am not quite sure of. What I know is that in this case justice will never be done, closure will probably never come but only a better idea of what really happened down in Mister James Crow Mississippi in the 1950s. Still some cases, and Emmett’s is one of them, will never die, nor should they.  

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DVD REVIEW

February Is Black History Month

The Murder Of Emmett Till, PBS Productions, 2003

This PBS production is a long overdue appreciation of the life the martyred civil rights figure, fourteen year old Chicago resident Emmett Till, down in deeply segregated Mississippi in 1955 at the hands of at least two white men while visiting relatives. Emmett’s crime- “eyeballing”, or whistling, or some such at a white woman while black. Sounds familiar from other later contexts, right (like today blacks being stopped in white neighborhoods, on the roads by white police, etc.)? For that childish indiscretion, however, Emmett paid with his young life. That these men, his later self-proclaimed killers were “white trash”, and considered as such by ‘gentile’ Southern society nevertheless insured that they would not suffer for their crimes. At least not under the Mississippi-style ‘justice’ of the times. They were white. And white was right. Case closed.

This documentary is also is a tribute, a much warranted tribute, to Emmett’s mother, the now deceased Mame Till, whose interview clips go a long way to understanding the nature of the case and her lifelong search for justice for her son- somewhere. As pointed out near the end of the film that never really occurred in her lifetime or the lifetimes of Emmett’s killers. Along the way the film details the why of that statement; the murder is graphically laid out, the ‘justice’ system in Mississippi is laid bare. The reaction of blacks in Chicago at Emmett’s funeral and later at the verdict, as well as those in the South who were just starting to organize for their rights, had a galvanizing effect. As one of the journalist interviewees noted, Emmett’s case highlighted that blacks were under attack, knew they were in a life and death struggle and had better start doing something about it. Moreover, this case provided the first solid evidence to the North, blacks and whites alike, that something was desperately wrong with the justice system in the Jim Crow South.

The beginnings of my personal awareness of the central role of the black liberation struggle in any fight for fundamental change in America did not stem from the Till tragedy but rather a little latter from the attempts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. This film and many of the interviewees (journalists, an ex-Governor of Mississippi, field hands who witnessed various aspects of Till’s abduction and/or the cover up of the murder, Southern white liberals, etc.) point to the Till case as the tip of the iceberg that exploded soon after in the famous Rosa Parks bus incident in Montgomery, Alabama. No matter where you trace the beginnings of the modern civil right movement from though, in Emmett Till’s case there is only conclusion- Nina Simone said it best in her song- “Mississippi Goddam”.

Here are the lyrics to Nina Simone's poignant and appropriate "Mississippi Goddam"


Mississippi Goddam
(1963) Nina Simone

The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam

And I mean every word of it

Alabama's gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama's gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can't you see it

Can't you feel it

It's all in the air

I can't stand the pressure much longer

Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune

But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail

School children sitting in jail

Black cat cross my path

I think every day's gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine

We all gonna get it in due time

I don't belong here

I don't belong there

I've even stopped believing in prayer

Don't tell me

I tell you

Me and my people just about due

I've been there so I know

They keep on saying "Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble

"do it slow"

Washing the windows

"do it slow"

Picking the cotton

"do it slow"

You're just plain rotten

"do it slow"

You're too damn lazy

"do it slow"

The thinking's crazy

"do it slow"

Where am I going

What am I doing

I don't know

I don't know

Just try to do your very best

Stand up be counted with all the rest

For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we

Picket lines

School boy cots

They try to say it's a communist plot

All I want is equality

for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years

You told me to wash and clean my ears

And talk real fine just like a lady

And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies

You're all gonna die and die like flies

I don't trust you any more

You keep on saying "Go slow!"

"Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble

"do it slow"

Desegregation

"do it slow"

Mass participation

"do it slow"

Reunification

"do it slow"

Do things gradually

"do it slow"

But bring more tragedy

"do it slow"

Why don't you see it

Why don't you feel it

I don't know

I don't know

You don't have to live next to me

Just give me my equality

Everybody knows about Mississippi

Everybody knows about Alabama

Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

That's it!

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Unholy Four, starring Paulette Goddard, Hammer Productions, 1954 (released in England as A Stranger Came Home)

In my long career in the film reviewing racket, a cutthroat where you are only as good as your last review and the vulture competing reviewers are ready with the long knives if you fall down profession. If you will though which is overall pretty subjective one, filled with personal predilections and snarls when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. As the headline above indicates I have been doing a serious of reviews of B-grade film noirs by the English Hammer Production Company from the early 1950s. A B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I have  contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different. In the current series the well-known Hollywood producer Robert Lippert contracted with Hammer for a series of ten films which would star let’s say a well-known if faded Hollywood star like Dane Clark or Richard Conte as a draw and a cheap purchase English supporting cast with a thin storyline.    

I had done a bunch of these reviews (minus a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my fifth review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover, and this is the heart of the issue, she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing. Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various contracts for work over the years but not that one.

The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped- down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (By the way one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not flame any blow-back).

Here is the “skinny” in any case and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. Four guys go fishing, fair enough, but only three came back. The missing one, Phillip, the husband of lure the audience in Paulette Goddard (on the downslope of her career with this nondescript effort), playing Angie the non-grieving wife. No foul play suspected, none that is until about four years later and probably a dozen unacknowledged Angie affairs later Phillip inconveniently shows up, claimed amnesia and maybe he did have it stranger things have occurred. Although being bopped on the head, drugged and left to die are rough things to have happen among friends. Those inconveniences Phillip showed up for were the murder of one of the boys and somebody who was unhappy since they were making a play, a gold-digger play for Angie. Angie playing on her best behavior helps Phillip out while keeping her options open in case her hubby takes the fall, takes the big step-off. Maybe Phillip should have picked better fishing partners or taken up golf because before he is done one of those good old boys, one of John Bull’s finest will actually be taking that big step-off. Oh, well, enough Nora, right.                  

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review

Book Review

By Zack James   

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, New York, 1920     

Josh Breslin, the old time cultural critic, mostly in the music and film milieu but occasionally with an adventurous foray into the printed word which had caused him more anguish from angry authors, had to laugh a couple of years back when approaching retirement after many years of free-lance journalism for publishing houses, small presses and an occasional off-beat journal he decided that he would review a wide selection of books by authors long dead. As one might expect he would therefore not have to deal with those troublesome and irate authors since they would have been long in the grave and beyond care for what some early 21^st century adventurer might have to say, or not say, about some literary gem. Or so he thought when he attempted to do a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early coming of age novel, This Side Of Paradise.     

Now everybody, everybody that counted for Josh anyway, mostly other reviewers and their hangers-on knew that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s masterwork, knew that it was one of the great classics of the old-time “dead white men” pantheon. He would not when reviewing Paradise try to take that masterpiece away from its proper place in the literary pantheon but instead to tweak a few laconic noses he decided to argue that Paradise was on a level with Gatsby, that it should book-end the classic. Published such deliberate effrontery in several small literary journals and more importantly the literary blog, American Musings, a blog which several well-paid professional book reviewers, college professors, semi-literate high school English teachers, a smattering of graduate students in American Literature and most importantly a cohort of doctoral and post-doctoral literary lights out to make a reputation as gunslingers in the mad dash of that lightless world read and wrote for. Naturally the damn thing caused something of a fire storm as a result. Maybe you did not hear about it if you are not a devotee of such endeavors and just went about your life in ignorance of such earth-shattering blazes. But in that good night circle guns were drawn and ready, acid was added to the pen of many who saw that they could take down a two-bit has-been reviewer who obviously had not read anything since about age twelve-except maybe comic books.

That was the exact reaction that Josh had expected, had savored the prospect of igniting on fire. Had worried, worried to perdition that when he wrote the review nobody, no sensible person could, give a rat’s ass (his corner boy expression never entirely dismissed from his adult vocabulary) a couple of books almost one hundred years old from a guy who was on that “dead white men” extinction list mentioned above. He smiled with secret glee when the first review by a lonely undergraduate student who was trying to muscle herself up the food-chain by condemning Josh to East of Eden took him to task for even mentioning both books in the same universe much less in the same small breathe. Dared Josh to come up with one paragraph, one which she put in bold-face for emphasis as if Josh was some errant schoolboy that came up to that last couple of paragraph when voice Nick talks after Gatsby’s bloody demise about the feeling of those long ago Dutch sailors who came upon the “fresh, green breast of land” that would later become Long Island and had upon viewing had enflamed their sense of wonder. A paragraph she had written her freshman term paper on for American Literature which the professor had given her an A on-so there.

Josh, again acting as the provocateur, in return cited the dance scene in the club in Minneapolis with Amory and his prey, Isabelle, as he attempted against all convention to grab a small kiss from her sweet lips. Argued that after all Paradise was about the roamings and doings a young adult trying to figure out his place in the world and who was finding it not easy to find his niche. Josh contrasted that with the too uppity habits of a small-time hood from nowhere USA hustling whatever there was to hustle trying to step up in class out with the big boys and got pushed back down the heap once he got in over his head with Daisy and what she stood for-wealth, conformity and letting the servants clean up the mess.        

That comment seemed to have put that earnest undergraduate in her place since she went mute before Josh’s logic but no sooner had that dust-up settled down that Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary efforts of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances. So the battle raged.    

Josh laughed as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison. Let the sparks fly.   

As The 100th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Approaches A Look At The Ottoman Empire (Which Did Not Survive The War)-“The Ottoman Lieutenant” (2017)-A Film Review-Of Sorts

As The 100^th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Approaches A Look At The Ottoman Empire (Which Did Not Survive The War)-“The Ottoman Lieutenant” (2017)-A Film Review-Of Sorts

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

The Ottoman Lieutenant, starring Hera Hilmar, Micheil Huisman, Josh Garnett, 2017  

I asked to be assigned this review of The Ottoman Lieutenant from Greg Green the site manager who these days hands out the assignments according to his lights. I was somewhat surprised when Greg e-mailed that he had granted my request  and that he would sent the DVD ASAP (as soon as possible, which is used a lot around the office coming not from “Internet speak” but a term they learned in the military which really meant you would want you ass off for an eternity) since I had expected fellow reviewer Leslie Dumont to grab the brass ring. She has known Greg for a long time through her film review work at Women Today when he was at American Film Gazette. I had assumed like my reason for wanting to do the assignment that she wanted to comment on the increase in strong women roles among the younger set of female Hollywood actors.

I will get to that in a minute but please be aware that I did not create the title for the piece but it was written by Greg who wanted to use the opportunity of a film about World War I to push the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day that he has had Seth Garth, Sam Lowell, and Si Lannon, all veterans, writing articles on about the significance of that designation. Frankly, when Greg e-mailed me his idea for a title I did not know what he was talking about, did not know that what the guys are trying to do beside commemorate what they, and history, snidely call “the war to end all wars” is return to the originate intent of the day, November 11, 1918 which was to observe the Armistice negotiated for that day. Somewhere along the line, Sam, who in the seemingly current need to mention in the interest of transparency has been my long-time partner, gave me the date of the switchover in America to Veterans Day when who knows who hijacked the significance of the day but I have forgotten it. While the armistice plays no part in this film since it concentrate on the first year or so of the war I am proud to add my two cents worth to return it to its original commemoration as a day of peace and thanksgiving that the war was over.        

As I noted above I took this assignment when I heard from Greta Smythe at The Film Digest that the lead female role, the role of Lillie an American nurse played by Hera Hilmar, was to highlight a strong, independent, thoughtful woman, which fed into my recent feelings that there has been a shift in the roles younger woman actors are asked to play. Sadly, that does not apply in general to older woman roles. Sam, remember long-time companion Sam, and I discussed this issue after we had seen the film together. Sam, a well-known expert in the film review profession for writing the definitive tome on classic film noir, noted that strong roles for women in those times usually meant they were femme fatales, ready to trap any man who crossed their paths, or shrews, butts of male jokes or some other way to reduce the impact of their performances.  I had to laugh at a few of the observations Sam made about particular female actors in the past, but his point was well-taken as we both agreed unfortunately.

The current review is a good example of what a young woman can portray these days and not be tagged with the above pigeonholes. To the contrary Lillie is a well-brought up, well-mannered fashionable member of the Philadelphia Main Line who has a plan, a mission in life after hearing a lecture about a hospital in nowhere Anatolia, then part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire which was servicing those most desperately in need of medical care out in the rugged mountains. Serving Turks, the mainstay of the empire, and locals, meaning Armenians, their generally hated enemies alike. She came on board bringing with her a very useful car and a load of medical supplies as she left the comforts of the Main Line and headed out to do her share in the wide world. Had, additionally, previously trained as a nurse, which made her valuable if in some danger as the war clouds hovers over the world. She gets there after a few off-hand adventures escorted in-country by the young Ottoman lieutenant of the title, Lt. Veli, a Moslem which matters in the film, played by Micheil Huisman. During the length of the movie Lille more than hold her own assisting a resident doctor, Jude, played by Josh Harnett, tending to the wounded, getting the doctor-founder of the hospital, a laudanum junkie well, and a thousand other things as the Turks, now allied with the Germans ready to face the dreaded Russians. Lillie is somebody who has your back and you don’t have to worry about it a trait much appreciated among men-and women these days. 

         Now for the other part, the love interest part, which drives much of the movie once we agree that Lillie is a strong independent woman. There is no contradiction between Lillie being a strongwoman and having an affair, having as many as she would want if it came to that. The problem is that the love interest parts are rather pedestrian and predictable. For starters that doctor whose work she so admired, Jude, figured to have Lillie as his wife once he entered the picture again when she showed up at his door and they do go on in that direction for a while. But what had Lillie all aflutter was that Ottoman lieutenant who swept her away during their journey to the hospital since he acted as military escort to insure her safety. Jude was bitterly jealous but is left by the wayside as she picks a soldier over a doctor, a Muslim over a Christian, and the knowledge that whatever happens she made her choice despite the odds of anything working out in the mix of those stumbling blocks and the impeding war. And they don’t. The dashing heroic lieutenant got wounded trying to save what were not identified but were a small group of Armenians heading to their deaths by hateful Turkish soldiers during what is not officially acknowledged in the film as the Armenian genocide during 1915. Despite that death she continues on at the hospital. Yes, a strong woman indeed.       

   [Postscript: Sam, dear Sam, who watched the film with me and mentioned at the time during the scene of the Turkish soldiers executing what would if left undisturbed every Armenian in the area that represented the unacknowledged Armenian genocide of 1915, was furious at me for not castigating the film-makers for not making a clear stand on what was happening in that scene since to this day the Turkish governments, avidly and persistently deny the events occurred-and attack those who do believe that the events occurred inside and outside Turkey. I, again frankly as with the Armistice Day significance did not know, or knew only vaguely, about the genocide. That said on the question which has to be drawn from that which is whether to recommend anybody to see the film I have to concede that I have to say no and respect the boycott initiated by an Armenian youth organization.

Look I only grabbed this film to look at the strong female lead and that really is all I can vouch for. And do. Having been burned twice I will shortly, Greg Green willing, do another review featuring a strong female role-and avoid the thickets of the dual controversies here.]   

   

Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP

Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP

By Frank Jackman

Recently I wrote a comment in this space about “street cred,” anti-war street cred in that case placing the anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out directly in the front line of those who have earned that honor, earned it big time as those of us, even many veterans like myself could expect out in those mean sullen anti-war streets. In that comment I had placed Military Families in the same company as those from my generation, my war generation, the Vietnam War, who too “got religion” on the questions of war and peace and who ran into the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s to put muscle into that understanding. I noted that there was no more stirring sight in those days than to see a bunch of bedraggled, wounded, scarred, ex-warriors march in uniform or part uniform as the spirit moved them, many times in silent or to a one person cadence, in places like Miami and Washington with the crowds on the sidelines dropping their jaws as they passed by. Even the most ardent draft-dodging chicken hawk in those days held his or her thoughts in silence in the face of such a powerful demonstration.       

That was then and now is now. Now that spirit of military-borne   resistance resides a greying, aging, illness gathering relatively small group of veterans who have formed up under the dove-tailed banner of Veterans for Peace (VFP). While that organization is open to all who adhere to the actively non-violent principles stated below who are veterans and supporters the vast bulk of members are from the Vietnam era still putting up the good fight some forty plus years later. Still out on the streets with their dove-tailed banners flailing away in some off-hand ill-disposed wind stirring those crowds on the sidewalk once again. Still having that very special “street cred” of those who had have to confront the face of war in a very personal way. Listen up.

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-”Beat” Writer’s Corner- A Jack Kerouac Potpourri

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-”Beat” Writer’s Corner- A Jack Kerouac Potpourri

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation.  Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.          

Book Review

The Portable Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, edited by Ann Charters (also a Kerouac biographer) Penguin Books, New York, 1995

Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.

“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s lesser work under review here, “Big Sur”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. Excerpts, in some cases like from “On The Road” large excerpts, from those dozen or so works form the core of this compilation,” The Portable Jack Kerouac”. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of this six hundred page ‘teaser’.

And 'teaser' is exactly the right word, for anthologies in general, but Kerouac’s work in particular. I have tried in previous reviews to start to distinguish between what you NEED to read of Kerouac’s and what is merely repetitious. The editor, who is very familiar with Kerouac’s work both a devotee and something of an early and definite biography, has taken pains to give excerpts from all the main volumes mentioned above like “Dharma Bums”, “Maggie Cassady” , “Vanities Of Duluoz” and the like. The problem for me is that they just whetted my appetite. However for the novice this should be the place to start AFTER you have read the master work “On The Road”. As for self-styled aficionados like myself what is probably more interesting is various miscellany, poems, interviews and the like that give a better sense of this tormented working class fellaheen's writing thoughts. Nicely done for an anthology.