An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.

The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the "youth nation" part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)

It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at.

(For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) 

And Edward did win his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later (and by the way “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him  they were if approached the right way).  No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.

That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late.  (For the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was a nine o’clock close just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including for Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).

Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual were well behind the curve  and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.

Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him.

But Markin was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.

That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.

More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground.  But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung out and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.

He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before,   who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land. 

That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, the Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.

Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).

Then came 1964 and  Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                   

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, after they had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by after giving up their "slave" names.)

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long lonely mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).

Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that had his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic way out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)     

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little shorter than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester.  

And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)

They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and had purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.

Blues Legend Henry Butler Passes To The Great High White Note Search Beyond

Blues Legend Henry Butler Passes To The Great High White Note Search Beyond 

Armistice Day, Not Weapons Day — Everything You Need for November 10th and 11th

Stop Trump’s Military Parade in Washington on November 10.

Celebrate Armistice Day and Peace Everywhere on November 11.

Sign up for any event on the world map here, or add a new one.

If you can be in Washington, D.C., to oppose the Trump military parade, also sign up here. There will be family-friendly, permitted, pro-peace events. There may also be opportunities to try to prevent the weapons parade. Or our public commitment to be there may discourage the parade planners from holding it. So it is important that we commit now en masse.

Join in the Women’s March on the Pentagon on October 21-22.

Come to a free peace concert in Washington D.C., November 9, 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. planned by Code Pink.

We’ll also be part of Catharsis on the Mall, November 10-12, in Washington, D.C.

Veterans For Peace is planning a silent march to all the monuments in Washington, D.C., on November 11.

November 11, 2018, is Armistice Day 100, a century since World War I was ended at a scheduled moment (11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918). For decades in the United States, as elsewhere, Armistice Day was a holiday of peace, of sad remembrance and joyful ending of war, of a commitment to preventing war in the future. The holiday’s name was changed in the United States during the U.S. war in Korea to “Veterans Day,” a largely pro-war holiday on which some U.S. cities forbid Veterans For Peace groups from marching in their parades. Trump has planned for this year a super-pro-war weapons parade — a Trumparade — for Washington D.C. on Saturday November 10th, the day before Armistice Day.

Our goal is to get the weapons parade (now planned for November 10th) canceled but to carry through with our own peaceful Armistice Day celebration in Washington, D.C., and everywhere else on earth. If the Trumparade is not canceled, our goal is to be bigger and make a more impressive showing for peace and friendship than the weapons parade makes for war and hatred and profiteering greed.

We need your help planning Armistice Day / Remembrance Day events everywhere on earth, and adding our presence to those already scheduled. If you can start an event or a contingent to participate in a larger event, we can help you. The first step is: please enter it into our system so that it shows up on our map for people to find.

Event Resources:

Find speakers, videos, powerpoints, activities, and ideas here.

One activity for 11 a.m. wherever you are, or some other appropriate time, is bell ringing. Here’s a kit from a Veterans For Peace chapter on a past Armistice Day.

Flyers:

World BEYOND War flyers.

Posters:

JROTC Out of Our Schools.

Social Media:

A graphic you can use.

Another graphic.

Another graphic:

Once Again -When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Dames” (1934)-A Film Review

Once Again -When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Dames” (1934)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Dames, starring Dick Powell, dances sequences by the legendary Bugby Berkeley, 1934

I might not have known coming into the profession, the film review profession, since they didn’t teach us this at graduate school although they should have but now I know that this is a cutthroat profession. Know that and can now give as good as I get thanks quite a bit to my attentive mentor Seth Garth who has shown me some of the pitfalls to avoid and how to handle the old wizened hunchback, maybe mountebank is a better term Sam Lowell who should have given up the film reviewing game ages ago. That according to good old boy Seth who is after all quite familiar with Sam’s schoolboy tricks and ruses since they grew up together in the same Acre neighborhood, so Seth knows the score, maybe taught Sam some of them himself as he admitted to me one night at dinner. Since Greg Green our beautiful site manager has encouraged his by-line writers of which I am now proud to say I am a member to let our readership know the ins and outs of this cutthroat business and because this film review of Dames is a lesser Dick Powell effort, in fact something of a turkey I will once against enter the lists to response to the latest Sam Lowell diatribe.  

 

One would think that a writer like one Sam Lowell who prides himself on being what Seth calls the max daddy of film noir, has written a book which some consider the definite study of the genre, but which left me cold would have enough to do in his latest review of the film adaptation of British mystery writer Agatha Christie’s 1961 crime novel The Pale Rider to stick to the subject. The subject being, if you can believe this, that since the rise of hard-boiled fictional private detectives like Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade what he called “parlor pink amateur private dicks” was passe. Like there is no longer a market for such material. Sam, look at the best-seller lists past 1970 when you wrote your opus and then fell asleep thereafter. If he had just kept to that task he might have not jumbled up the review, left us with more questions than answers as to why an amateur sleuth under the gun couldn’t do as good a job as guys who are willing to take a slug or two (of bullets and whiskey it seems) and a few punches for what Sam calls a little rough justice in this wicked old world.

But no Sam had to again wallow in the so-called dispute between us retailing the same old nonsense about how I had libeled him, legally libeled him to boot although having some code of the Omerta from boyhood that he would not snitch to the courts or cops under some awful penalty he would not pursue the matter there. Thanks, Sam I was having sleepless nights worrying about some massive pending law suit for about one dollar which is all the so-called libel would be worth-if it was libel. I have, and I will do so again here, mentioned on several occasions that I have information in my possession that in the old days, the days after that so-called definitive film noir study Sam would use stringers, generally female stringers whom he was romantically involved with or who in those male- dominated days were desperate to get a by-line, write his reviews for him under his by-line. The proof. I need go no further than fellow journalist here Leslie Dumont who could go chapter and verse on the times she bailed Sam out. She was desperate to get ahead (which she did with a big by-line at Women Today before she came back here part time in her retirement) and moreover was not immune to his charms. That Sam maneuver despite the fact that in those days she was writer Josh Breslin’s companion. Case closed as the lawyers say when they have the thing in hand.                     

Sam is also pissed off with my mentioning that when he wasn’t hiring slave labor to do his handiwork say when he was on a toot with some stringer who therefore couldn’t write the reviews he would just use the studio press hand-outs, clip the tops off and sent them in under his by-line. In one response to this allegation he lamely mentioned that “everybody did it” when they had a dog of a review to put out. Yet if you go to the archives of the hard copy editions of this publication in the days before it had to go on-line to survive or to the archives of American Film Gazette you will find Sam’s review of say The Devil Is Down admittedly a real dog you will find through a further look at the archives of the press releases of Avatar Studios that they form almost a perfect match-except title and by-line. Seth says you can almost draw a perfect trajectory between when he was screwing some stringer and the cut-off press releases use as Sam by-lines. Case sealed with seven seals.          

Those points I can deal with easily but the continual references to some kind of budding affair between Seth and I have got me really ticked off and have gotten my companion Clara ready to throw knives at me-and Sam. Sam’s proof of some hanky-panky on the side between me and my good friend Seth is that Seth took me to dinner one night after work. What Sam conveniently “forgets” to mention is the night in question is Seth took Clara and me to dinner that night. I have mentioned before and the reader can figure out that I am the “B’ in LGBTQ since I have had both male and female lovers. Right now I am very attached to Clara who is an “L” and is quite sensitive to any assertions that I might be looking elsewhere, might switch, might find a man interesting. I have stated this before and will do so again I find Seth very interesting and helpful and he has been a doll helping me with this Sam monster. He also unlike Sam who seems like he is one hundred years old maybe more keeps in pretty good shape for his age. Very good shape but that is the rub he is old enough to be my grandfather and although he is a teddy bear I don’t think I would want to go there. Moreover, nobody including supposed old corner boy Sam, has bothered to ask Seth if he was interested in me. Which according to what he told Clara and me that night at dinner he is not, not me personally but after three ex-wives, a parcel of kids, his term, and too many affairs to count he is not looking for an affair or anything else except to get me up the food chain. He did say, and Clara laughed although a sullen laugh if he was interested despite the age different he would not be afraid to take dead aim at me like she had. If that is not enough to keep Sam from his snide insinuations then the hell with it, Seth’s expression.            

I guess I should be getting to the review of this dog although I have tried to avoid it. This is my third review of a Dick Powell early career song and dance man musical before he went for better acting roles, tough guy roles in vehicles like Murder, My Sweet and Cornered which Greg Green let Seth review rather than Sam who was pissed at not getting those assignments. I got the musical bug from my grandmother whose mother had taken her to them in the 1930s and who wondered why I didn’t review more early musicals. I asked Greg for the assignment and now I guess I am the resident Dick Powell musical specialist. Not all Dick Powell films are born equally though and this is number three of three on the like list.

Why? Well the whole premise is silly. Some rich as Midas and as foolish has it in his head to improve the morals of America and has the dough to run the rack. He also has relatives who he wants to leave money to if they are up-standing enough. That bar is pretty low since his main peeve is Broadway musicals with those scantily clad chorus girls and such. That low bars means no truck, none with musicals under penalty of disinheritance. Trouble is the daughter of the relatives have a daughter played by Ruby Keeler who is crazy to dance and crazy about a wannabe Broadway producer Jimmy Higgins played by Dick Powell. So naturally the family gets into backing a Broadway musical by stealth. The show goes into production with Jimmy in charge and despite some snafus things work out okay, as Dick and Ruby trill away the night. The only redeeming art is the elaborate Bugby Berkeley productions which as usual are way over the top with a million chorines and two million complicated dance steps and maneuvers. If doing so would not be in such bad odor I might have considered running back to the archives to see what the studio press release looked like for possible use. Sweet thoughtful Seth though said Sam would have ten thousand daggers aimed right at my heart if I did. Cutthroat profession is right.    

The Racist Killing of Colten Boushie Capitalist Canada: Hellhole for Indigenous Peoples

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

The Racist Killing of Colten Boushie

Capitalist Canada: Hellhole for Indigenous Peoples

The following article is reprinted from Workers Tribune No. 1 (Summer/Fall 2018), the new English-language publication of the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada, section of the International Communist League.

On February 9, Gerald Stanley, a Saskatchewan farmer, was acquitted of second-degree murder charges by an all-white jury for the cold-blooded killing of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man. On 9 August 2016, after a day at the lake, Boushie and his four friends got a flat tire on their way home and drove onto Stanley’s farm seeking help. Stanley, aided by his son, chased the group away with gunfire and then shot Colten in the back of the head at close range. This was a racist atrocity that polarized the country for almost two years. After the not guilty verdict, thousands across Canada protested in angry response. Meanwhile, there was an eruption of racist reaction and a wave of support for Boushie’s killer.

This case lays bare the lie of Canada as a progressive, multicultural haven. Cree activist Erica Violet Lee captured this lie in her description of the courtroom during Stanley’s trial: “We looked up at the front of the court room and you could see everyone in charge of our fate was white.” She continued:

“And above it all, there is a picture of the Queen looking over the court room. We realized this is not a system set up for us: this is not a system set up to keep us safe.”

Indeed, this is the bourgeois justice system and for Indigenous peoples in racist capitalist Canada there is no justice. Rather, the courts, judges and prosecutors, together with the cops and prison guards, are at the core of the capitalist state. The state is an apparatus of violence whose purpose is to defend the class rule and property of the capitalist rulers against the working class and oppressed.

Canada was built on the dispossession of the pre-existing aboriginal inhabitants and the forcible subjugation of the Québécois nation. It is in the interest of the working class to take up the fight against Indigenous oppression and racist reaction. The historic task of the working class is to sweep away the capitalist system and forge an egalitarian socialist society where production is based on human needs and not profit. The trial and acquittal of Stanley provide a case study in how the machinery of the Canadian capitalist state works to oppress Indigenous peoples.

During his trial, Stanley claimed that his gun “just went off.” His lawyer argued that it was a “freak accident,” a rare “hang fire” malfunction which caused the gun to fire long after he had pulled the trigger, a defense that gun experts thoroughly refuted. As for the crown [prosecuting] attorney, he might as well have been on Stanley’s legal team. As a former chief of the Red Pheasant First Nation put it, “We had to encourage the crown prosecutor to prosecute and not help the defense.”

Gerald Stanley got away with killing Colten Boushie, while Boushie’s friends and family were treated like criminals. His grieving mother was abused and their home on the Red Pheasant First Nation was invaded and searched by an army of cops, guns drawn. The police detained Boushie’s friends, smearing them as potential thieves. One, a young woman, was held for 19 hours without food or sleep. The SUV Boushie was killed in was left unprotected by cops as heavy rain washed away blood, footprints and other evidence. Boushie’s dead body was left face down in the gravel on Stanley’s farm for over 24 hours.

Colten Boushie was killed for being an Indigenous man on a white man’s property. In the vicious backlash that erupted after the murder, local politician Ben Kautz declared that Stanley’s “only mistake was leaving three witnesses.” White farmers began setting up armed vigilante “community patrols” on the pretext that they are besieged by “rural crime,” racist code for Indigenous peoples.

This is the reality in capitalist Canada, where Indigenous lives mean nothing to the ruling class. From coast to coast, Indigenous peoples suffer massive disproportionate incarceration. In Saskatchewan, they are 16 percent of the population, but 81 percent of those sentenced to provincial jails. Women are especially subjected to police violence. A 2016 Human Rights Watch investigation uncovered dozens of cases of assaults, degrading strip searches, sexual abuse and harassment of Indigenous women by Saskatchewan cops.

Bourgeois Hypocrisy and Indigenous Oppression

Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau and his justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould responded to the Stanley verdict with empty promises to “do better.” Since coming to power in 2015, Trudeau has sought to rebrand Canada as a “progressive” player on the world stage, including by posing as a champion of Indigenous rights. In fact, Trudeau is the enforcer of capitalist rule. The Liberal Party has been the main party of the bourgeoisie in Canada for more than 100 years. Alternating with the Conservatives, they have overseen the theft of Indigenous lands along with ceaseless state brutality and repression.

Soon after the verdict, the Trudeau government went into damage-control mode, launching a “review” of the RCMP’s [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] actions following Boushie’s murder (the RCMP had already cleared itself of all wrongdoing). This is merely one more whitewash. For years, Royal Commissions and inquiries have documented the state’s violence against Indigenous peoples, the theft of their lands and children, the staggering suicide rates among young people who see no future for themselves.

The latest is the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry, created by the Liberals in 2016 in response to a decade of protest over the fates of the Indigenous women—as many as 4,000—who have been murdered or gone missing since 1980. Yet this inquiry, like all the other ones, will change nothing because it will not touch the material conditions of Indigenous life. The ruling class will not provide even the most basic needs for Indigenous peoples: quality education, health and housing programs, clean water and electricity. Rather, they conduct inquiries in order to quell outrage and regain public trust while deflecting attention away from the real workings of this capitalist system.

NDP: Social-Democratic Tool of Capitalist Rule

Federal NDP [New Democratic Party] leader Jagmeet Singh decried the Stanley verdict as an example of the injustice and systemic racism that plagues Indigenous peoples across Canada. But for Singh and the NDP the problem is that without the appearance of justice, people will lose confidence in the system. The NDP is a bourgeois workers party, linked to the trade unions but with a bourgeois program. Their central goal is to administer the capitalist state. By offering up this or that cosmetic reform they serve the interests of the ruling class, deflecting labour and other social struggles into safe parliamentary channels.

In Alberta and B.C. [British Columbia], where the NDP currently rules, the jails are as full of Indigenous peoples as ever, and the grinding poverty and police violence is unchanged. And when the interests of the capitalist class call for the sledgehammer, the NDP in power has not been found wanting, using the power of the state to break strikes and attack minorities. In B.C. in 1995, for example, the NDP government mounted one of the largest military/police operations in Canadian history against Indigenous protesters at Gustafsen Lake. As part of the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party, it is a strategic task to break workers from the politics of the Anglo-chauvinist NDP and its social-democratic doctrines which claim that the capitalists and workers share a common interest.

As revolutionary Marxists, we seek to expose illusions in bourgeois democracy and place the struggle for democratic rights within the framework of a class-struggle perspective for proletarian power. Pro-NDP “socialist” groups like Fightback [affiliated with the International Marxist Tendency] do the contrary and push the myth that the capitalist profit system can be reformed. In response to Stanley’s acquittal they declared, with respect to the police:

“In place of this unaccountable body, we need to fight for direct democratic control of security bodies by the workers and the oppressed through trade unions and marginalized community organizations. Judges and prosecutors at all levels need to be elected with the right of recall at any time, so that these ‘arbiters of justice’ are accountable to the people. Justice should be democratic.”

—marxist.ca, 12 February

This amounts to a call for “workers control” of the bourgeoisie’s apparatus of state repression. The reformist illusion in a “democratic” capitalist justice system “accountable to the people” goes hand in hand with Fightback’s longstanding position that the police are “workers in uniform.” This is false: the cops and courts are part of the capitalists’ state. Workers cannot take control of the bourgeois state but must sweep it away with a socialist revolution that overthrows bourgeois rule and brings the working class to power.

For a Class-Struggle Fight to Defend Indigenous Rights!

Indigenous oppression is rooted in the legacy of colonialism, first French and later British, and in the rise and consolidation of Canadian capitalism. Through centuries of unspeakable violence, disease, broken treaties and land seizures, aboriginal societies and economies were undermined and destroyed. Today, Indigenous peoples on the reserves are isolated and endure devastating poverty, while in the cities they face intense racism and social marginalization, and are largely blocked from participation in industry and from well-paid jobs.

It is vital that the social power of the working class be brought to bear in defense of Indigenous peoples. Because of its role in production, the working class uniquely has the power and class interest to liberate all who suffer under capitalist rule. There are a few important examples of the integration of Indigenous peoples into key sectors of the working class. In 2016, nearly half of the 2,500 workers at Cameco in northern Saskatchewan, one of the largest uranium mines in the world, were Indigenous. In Quebec and Ontario, Mohawk workers have been concentrated among the ironworkers. A class-struggle leadership of the unions would mobilize labour’s power to champion the fight against Indigenous oppression, taking concrete steps such as aggressive union-run recruitment and training programs. This would be a first step toward breaking the cycle of unemployment and social marginalization. Labour must also be mobilized against acts of racist state terror.

Only an egalitarian socialist society under workers rule will lay the material basis for the eradication of Indigenous oppression. This requires a socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state and replaces it with a workers state. A workers government would quickly move to mobilize the social resources and spend the money necessary to provide a decent life for Indigenous peoples and redress the hideous oppression from which they have long suffered, promoting their voluntary integration on the basis of complete equality while providing the fullest possible regional autonomy for those who desire it.

Mobilizing workers to champion the besieged Indigenous population is a key part of the Trotskyist League’s struggle to build a revolutionary workers party. Such a party would be a tribune of the people, championing the interests of all the oppressed, opposing every instance of bourgeois injustice while exposing the workings of the capitalist system for all to see. Indigenous militants will necessarily be an important part of such a revolutionary leadership.

Killed on the Docks Salute to Fallen ILWU Militant Byron Jacobs 1983–2018

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

Killed on the Docks

Salute to Fallen ILWU Militant

Byron Jacobs

1983–2018

On June 28, 34-year-old longshore worker Byron Jacobs was killed on the docks in Longview, Washington, when a mooring line being used to move a ship down the pier snapped, recoiled and hit Byron at a speed of over 450 miles per hour. The chief mate of the ship, 41-year-old Pingshan Li, who was struck by the other end of the line, died a few hours later. A fifth-generation longshoreman, Byron was secretary-treasurer of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 when he stood on the union’s front lines during its 2011-12 battle against the all-out union-busting offensive by the Export Grain Terminal (EGT) bosses in Longview. WV labor correspondent Gene Herson noted in a July 3 letter of condolence to Local 21 (printed below) that the courage and determination of Byron and other unionists, fighting with a militancy not seen in this country in decades, was an inspiration for all of labor.

At a July 6 memorial meeting, a WV representative joined hundreds of ILWU members and other unionists alongside the Jacobs family and friends to commemorate Byron’s life. His stepfather proudly recalled Byron leading the charge to defend ILWU International president Robert McEllrath, who was being dragged away by the cops who had brutally attacked a 300-strong picket line that blocked a train loaded with grain headed for the EGT terminal on 7 September 2011. Many others recalled Byron’s courageous defense of members of Local 21’s women’s auxiliary against the cops a few weeks later.

Despite facing multiple felony charges for his heroic actions, Byron never retreated from the fight. But the ILWU International leadership did. In the end, as military forces were mobilized by the Obama administration to escort the first shipment of scab grain out of the EGT terminal, an agreement between the union and company was signed. The contract set a trend for other Pacific Northwest grain bosses in their war against the ILWU. Sacrificing workers’ safety, these agreements allowed for dangerous 12-hour work shifts and undermined previous provisions allowing the union to “stand by” (stop work) when safety was threatened.

In a letter to the Longview Daily News (7 July) following the deaths of Byron Jacobs and Pingshan Li, one retired ship pilot wrote: “I don’t know the specifics what went wrong here, but in my years as a ship pilot, I learned how quickly Longview’s swirling, weaving river current can introduce sudden and extreme line stress.... I advocated hiring a pilot and tug for less than ideal conditions. However, I think cost-conscious ship’s captains still make the call.” In a recent phone call, Dan Coffman, former president of Local 21, noted that: “In the early days, we used to use a lot of tug assists and they’ve gotten away from that.” He went on, “It was all about dollars and cents and so they quit using the tugs.”

Byron’s wife Megan has filed a $16 million lawsuit against the ship’s owner and the company operating it. Although no amount of money could ever compensate for Byron’s life and his family’s devastation, the ILWU should make sure that she gets every penny.

For the shipping companies and terminal operators, workplace injuries and death are simply collateral damage in their pursuit of higher profits. A genuine tribute to the life of Byron Jacobs would be for the union to fight to build union safety committees with the authority to shut down unsafe work on the spot, and to set the terms for practices that would preserve the life and limbs of longshore and all maritime workers. Byron proudly traced his fighting spirit back to his Lumbee Indian kin who drove the Klan out of their North Carolina county in 1958. He embodied many of the qualities necessary to forge a union leadership that will mobilize labor’s power in defense of the interests of the working class, as well as all of the oppressed.

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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am writing to express my deepest condolences and those of my comrades to the members of ILWU Local 21 as well as the family and other friends of Byron Jacobs. His tragic and horrific death is a body blow to all fighters for labor’s cause against the cutthroat employers.

I met Byron during Local 21’s battle against EGT’s union-busting assault during which I traveled to Longview several times as a labor reporter for Workers Vanguard. He was not only a true union stalwart but someone who had a thoughtful and keen appreciation of the plight of others. In many ways, this was exemplified when Byron courageously came to the defense of Ladies Auxiliary members who were under police attack during the ILWU’s September 21, 2011 protest against a train bound for the EGT terminal. It was such militancy and determination which inspired many other trade unionists in the region and around the country.

My comrade Tony who got to know Byron recalls his amusement that rather than being made to serve jail time, the court sentenced him to an “anger management” class. Anyone who knew Byron knew him as a kind, gentle and big-hearted man. It was exactly those qualities that made him such a determined fighter against the real injustices perpetrated by the bosses with the backing of the police, courts and government of this country.

As a former member of the National Maritime Union for 20 years whose arm was pulverized in the process of shifting a ship, I know the deadly dangers longshoremen and other maritime workers face. More often than not this is at the hands of companies trying to save money by cutting corners on safety. Thus the deep sadness that I felt on learning of Byron’s death was also tempered by anger at those who would sacrifice the lives of working people in the service of their bottom line.

Myself and other comrades who met Byron send our deepest sympathies to all of you. It is a devastating loss. The best salute to his life will be to continue the fight for labor’s cause and that of all the downtrodden victimized by this brutal society.

In sympathy and solidarity,

Gene Herson

Labor correspondent for Workers Vanguard

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Donations for the Jacobs family can be sent to: Lower Columbia Longshoremen Federal Credit Union, Attn: Byron Jacobs Family Fund, 629 14th Avenue, Longview, Washington 98632.