Who Was That Guy With Jane Russell And Why Is He A Noir Guy- With Jane Russell And Robert Mitchum’s “His Kind Of Woman” In Mind

Who Was That Guy With Jane Russell And Why Is He A Noir Guy- With Jane Russell And Robert Mitchum’s “His Kind Of Woman” In Mind  

DVD Review, sort of

By Sarah Lemoyne

His Kind Of Woman, starring buxom and bubbly Jane Russell, jut-jawed barrel-chested Robert Mitchum, stone-cold evil gangster Raymond Burr and pussycat Vincent Price, directed by legendary director John Farrow, 1951  

Seth Garth, my dear friend and mentor help! No, not on advising me about what Sam Lowell, my newfound nemesis is gibbering about but how to tackle a film noir that is not a dark and mysterious presentation and one without a bad girl lure femme fatale. Sam, by the way paid me a left-handed compliment when he at least had the sense to understand that I have a future in the film review business whether he personally likes me or not. (Despite the lack of femme fatale I am sure than many a guy, maybe gals too like my companion, partner Clara who swooned over her, over lead female actor Jane Russell, Howard Hughes’ then, ah protégé, when we watched the film under review His Kind Of Women together one night when Greg Green assigned the review, commentary to me and Seth was out of town, was up in Maine trying to cajole Allan Jackson to come back and do the introductions to some 1960s throwback series about a couple of working class stiffs, maybe Robert Mitchum hunk -type guys who were still keeping whatever the 1960s faith was still around.)

Maybe I had better explain why I am in this conundrum, why I need once again like some maiden is distress Seth’s help in figuring out the intricacies of the film review profession. I know as I will explain a little below the cutthroat nature of the business, know it and through dueling with one Sam Lowell, back in the dark ages supposedly the max daddy, Seth’s term, of the critical world, especially after writing what was then considered the definitive study of film noir which everybody back then consulted to get an idea of what to write. Except “expert” Sam “forgot” to explain a film where there is a heavy who needs to be brought down not by the coppers but by a private citizen, usually a private investigator, a bad ass no holds barred criminal chieftain, where there is a guy, Mitchum, who could take a punch but who also certainly could have his buttons pushed by a femme fatale, where there are some funny, I can’t believe I am saying this about a noir, moments provided by a tin can actor on vacation, Mark Cardigan who I guess was the real deal swash-buckling hero when I looked up his bio on Wikipedia, played by usually scary bad boy Vincent Price, and most importantly for my purposes no femme fatale although Clara and I agreed that Jane Russell could have led almost any man by the nose-and made him like it.

That last point the real sticking point since in my very first film noir review a few weeks ago of another Robert Mitchum minor classic Where Danger Lives I made a very big point, a very big point against male interpretation of the role of a woman in a film noir as evil incarnate, made that point directly counterpoised to Sam Lowell’s silly theory of such efforts. There I noted that the Robert Mitchum character in that film, a budding young doctor named Jeff, had about seven places where he could have turned back, could have avoided almost taking the big step-off for a crime he did not commit and which his damsel in distress Margo had committed for her own insane, literally insane, reasons. Seth helped me through the finer points of that view, said he almost came to believe in my version against his old friend Sam’s demented sense that “the weaker sex” could only act as lure to some skirt-chaser, some long gone daddy sniffing jasmine scents and helpless against all male humankind history going back to Adam, maybe before, to resist.

Seth who has thoughtfully guided me along the way, and Sam too before he became my nemesis, said that when in trouble for a “hook, for a way to drag the reader kicking and screaming into your storyline. Look when all else fails to the tried and true Hollywood formula that has saved many a film with a worse plot that this one, has saved half of Western literature too if you really look deeply at the situation-boy meets girl. Bingo, thanks Seth in absentia, thanks too Sam if you will accept thanks. It may not fulfill my dreams of taking over the mantel of millennial film noir diva but it will let me float for another day until I get a better handle on some of these B-noirs that flooded the movie houses in the heyday 1940s and 1950s.

Of course it makes perfect sense to use the hook of the boy meets girl thing and if I hadn’t been so focused on the noir aspect and Clara hadn’t been Clara oohing and ahhing Jane Russell trying to make me jealous to counter her jealousy of my imaginary “romance” with grandfather Seth I would have seen it right away. Hell, I should have known when Robert was putting his moves on Jane in some dirt-water cantina buying expensive B-girl cheapjack champagne waiting for further instruction under mysterious conditions and she brought her own bottle up she was no femme, that this would work as a boy meets girl vehicle. When they wind up flying on the same small plane to renegade Baja California down in sunny Mexico then the deal was done, finished.

Let’s take a step back though. The reason Robert was hanging around some low-rent dive on the border was to head to Mexico on some unexplained but lucrative assignment which would get him off of cheap street. Jane was trying to woe that paper tiger hero actor Mark Cadigan to make her own way to easy street. Perfect. Along the way they take meaningful glances but for a while Robert is more intrigued by why he is down south of the border getting high society resort treatment and a fistful of cash. Trying, reasonably to figure out who he has to kill to keep afloat. Jane, for a while too was trying, God knows why, to lure Mark to the altar and easy street but was getting some resistance since Mark’s wifie was gumming up the works.

Jane’s case was easier to resolve when wifie showed up not wanting a divorce Jane was then mainly on the plane or something like that and was free to get her hooks, get her hooks deep into Robert. Robert’s was a tougher haul once he found out from a government agent who subsequently wound up very dead for his efforts that he had been in the employ of one Nick Ferraro, everybody remembers the minute his name comes up who he was and how much graft he poured around, slugs too,  a bad hombre who ran the rackets in Chi town, Seth’s term, before being deported, played by pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr. And trying might and main to get back to his own easy street via a little plastic surgery and Robert’s identity. Nice, except poor Robert takes a fistful of beatings, some of them bare-chested, barrel-chested I think his physique is called, which made me swoon a little quietly when Clara went to the bathroom. Not to worry Mark, Mark Cadigan, the papier Mache hero of many a Hollywood swash-buckling adventure saved the day-sort of. Saved the day as a gesture for love, for romance as Jane and Robert lighted up the screen with some torrid kiss at the end after Nick had gone to sleep with the fishes. This effort should get me at least one more noir assignment although I wish like crazy Seth was around to see if this is the right angle.                         

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

When The Whole World Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth-When Broadway Was Broadway- “Angels Over Broadway”- A Film Review

When The Whole World Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor Of The Commemoration of 100^th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth-When Broadway Was Broadway- “Angels Over Broadway”- A Film Review

By Si Lannon  

You know the Internet is a wonderful tool at times especially for sites like this one very interested in history, of everything from governments to holy goofs. Most of the time you can find out information or information comes your way when you are perusing for something else. That was the case last year when I was looking something up at the archives of American Film Gazette and noticed they were doing a serious commemoration of the 100^th birthday of ruggedly handsome and versatile male hunk from the 1940s Robert Mitchum. That information led to a full-scale retrospective of his work, or the best of it anyway. The best being his noir stuff where he is hunk style and manly ready to take a few punches, throw a few, take an errant slug or two, bang-bang a few too for some dame, for some femme who had him all twisted up inside trying to find the mystery of her. Fat chance of discovering that as a million guys since Adam, maybe before have found out the hard way, although usually not  at the end of some femme fatale gun.

Not so with the way I got the information about 1940s sex siren and maker of guys, who knows maybe gals too and not just lesbians or bi’s either although they can have their stares just like anybody else but in their own right beautiful women who will concede that she has bested them, steamy midnight dreams Rita Hayworth. I was in Harvard Square on some unrelated business when I passed the famous and historic Brattle Theater a place I knew well in my 1970s cheap date period and have probably seen more films there than any other place. But video stores, studio comps, and lately Netflix and Amazon have taken the place of going to the big screen theater for me for many years now just because it is easier and more efficient to see the films at my discretion. For old-time’s sake I decided to take an “upcoming schedule” broadside which was provided in a little box in front of the theater entrance. When I opened it up later there was one of the icons of icons of Hollywood glamour when that burg was the only game in town and when glamour meant something to eye candy hungry soldiers and sailors, airmen too, during World War II and their waiting for the other shoe to drop anxious honeys sitting in dark movie houses too. Yes, Rita in a 1940s provocative, although what would now draw nothing but a snicker from even naïve eight grade girls, sun suit with that patented come hither if you dare look that every guy, every cinematic guy, begged to get next to. Was ready to take the big step off for like her then husband Orson Welles almost did in the fatal Lady From Shanghai.   

What the theater was doing and was famous for in the old days when the classic no money classic college date world was when I lived was a big retrospective of her work from early B-film stuff as she made her way up the Hollywood stardom food chain to some astonishing dance routines with Fred Astaire making you watch her moves not his something hard to do believe me to the later femme fatale classics like Gilda and the previously mentioned Lady From Shanghai  and then the drop back to B-films and cameos at the end of her career. Since the theater had treated her to this royal treatment I decided the least I could was to do a retro-review of those efforts for a now glamour-hungry world. That type of “innocent” glamour will never come back, the world is just a bit too weary and wary for that to happen but the younger sets should at least know why their grandfathers and grand-grandfathers stirred to her every move, pinned her photo up on a million lockers and in a million duffle bags.

My own Rita experience is like many things in the film business when Hollywood was top dog, rightly or wrongly, second hand from those cheap date retrospectives and earlier, high school earlier with Allan Jackson who used to rule the roost at this publication. In those old Acre neighborhood days, usually Saturdays, we would hike a couple of miles up the carless road to the old Strand Theater in Adamsville Center and watch plenty of 1940s films since to save money Sal Cadger the gregarious owner of the theater on first run features from the studios filled up the screen with this older material. We loved it, have loved it ever since. Bang-the first time I saw Rita sa-sashing into her hubby’s casino down in Buenos Aires, I think that is right, and stumbles onto ex-flame down and out gambler on a losing streak Glenn Ford, to find him working for her old man. Electricity beyond whatever words I could use to describe that tension in the air which spelled some hard times for somebody. I hope the reader will get an idea of that is this series as we commemorate Rita’s 100^th birthday year.       

  

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Angels Over Broadway.

DVD Review

Angels Over Broadway, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell, screenplay by Ben Hecht, 1940

The first paragraph below is taken from other reviews about Rita Hayworth although the male stars playing against her are different here. Except they all have a similar feature; they all are smitten very smitten by Ms. Hayworth’s charms. Join the line, boys:

“Okay, let me bring you up to speed on the obscure meaning of the headline. See, a while back I was smitten by a film star, an old time black and white film star from the 1940s, Rita Hayworth. The film that sent me into a tailspin: the black and white noir classic Gilda where she played a “good” femme fatale who gets in a jam with a no good monomaniacal crook. But that part is not important femme fatales, good or bad, get mixed up with wrong gees all the time. It’s an occupational hazard. What is important though is that I got all swoony over lovely, alluring Rita. And as happens when I get my periodic “bugs” I had to go out and see what else she performed in. Of course Lady From Shang-hai came next. There she plays a “bad” blondish femme fatale (against a smitten Orson Welles). And then a couple of song and dance films partnered with Fred Astaire." And now this film under review, Angels Over Broadway. We are caught up.

After watching Ms. Hayworth going through her paces as a femme fatale and as a song and dance partner in other reviewed films it was somewhat surprising to see her play a “hayseed” (Brooklyn-born “hayseed”, okay) trying to get her big break on Broadway, one way or another. Old Rita had been around but had not lost faith in humanity, or what passed for humanity in her circles. Now this Ben Hecht vehicle is very much in the old Damon Runyon Broadway gamblers, con men, criminals, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters tradition with a full compliment of failed characters, a drunken playwright (naturally, its Broadway) played here by Thomas Mitchell, a fast-talking wanna-be con man who knows all the angles, and all the angels (played by Douglas Fairbanks, Junior), the wanna-be gold digger with the heart of gold (Rita) and a suicidal embezzler.

Said embezzler and his problem are the focus of the film as the playwright makes one last bid at humanity and attempts to come out of the alcoholic haze by helping the embezzler make restitution, the con man makes his big bid to play with the real hard guys (and to play, fitfully, with Rita) setting up the embezzler for a fall, and the failed gold-digger (Rita) gets “religion” and tries to bring that wisdom to Mr. Con Man. Needless to say this plot is thin, thin if you have been immersed in the serious Broadway shenanigans of one Damon Runyon, and the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired.

I would put it this way for those of you who, like me, sometimes go off the deep end and need to see or read everything about something or some one that has stuck your fancy lately. Take this as case study in artistic development; as a first, halting, unsuccessful step by Rita in femme fatale-ism. That makes Gilda just that much better. Still even here Rita has her charms.

Those Who Honor Sacco And Vanzetti Are Kindred Spirits- "Sacco's Letter To His Son"

Those Who Honor Sacco And Vanzetti Are Kindred Spirits- "Sacco's Letter To His Son"

SACCO'S LETTER TO HIS SON

If nothing happens they will electrocute us right after midnight
Therefore here I am, right with you, with love and with open heart,
As I was yesterday.
Don’t cry, Dante, for many, many tears have been wasted,
As your mother’s tears have been already wasted for seven years,
And never did any good
So son, instead of crying, be strong, be brave
So as to be able to comfort your mother.

And when you want to distract her from the discouraging soleness
You take her for a long walk in the quiet countryside,
Gathering flowers here and there.
And resting under the shade of trees, beside the music of the waters,
The peacefulness of nature, she will enjoy it very much,
As you will surely too.
But son, you must remember; Don’t use all yourself.
But down yourself, just one step, to help the weak ones at your side.

The weaker ones, that cry for help, the persecuted and the victim.
They are your friends, friends of yours and mine, they are the comrades that fight,
Yes and sometimes fall.
Just as your father, your father and Bartolo have fallen,
Have fought and fell yesterday. for the conquest of joy,
Of freedom for all.
In the struggle of life you’ll find, you’ll find more love.
And in the struggle, you will be loved also.

Words by Niccola Sacco (1927)
Music by Pete Seeger (1951)
© 1960 (renewed) by Stormking Music Inc.

From The Archives- Rosalie Sorrels Passes At 83 (2017)-A Rosalie Sorrels Potpourri-Idaho, Cafe Lena, Childhood Dreams and Such

From The Archives- Rosalie Sorrels Passes At 83 (2017)-A Rosalie Sorrels Potpourri-Idaho, Cafe Lena, Childhood Dreams and Such

If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83

By Music Critic  Bart Webber

Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in (and the former two never got over since they will still tell a tale or two about the times if you go anywhere within ten miles of the subject-I will take my chances here because this notice is important) all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. That is where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, and a whole crew of younger folksingers who sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.  

But there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some other colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s where some of those names played but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.

The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. She was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember her cover of Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels 

A Folk Holiday Tradition

An Imaginary Christmas In Idaho, Rosalie Sorrels & Friends, Limberlost Books&Records, 1999

The first paragraph here has been used in reviewing other Rosalie Sorrels CDs in this space.

“My first association of the name Rosalie Sorrels with folk music came, many years ago now, from hearing the recently departed folk singer/storyteller/ songwriter and unrepentant Wobblie (IWW) Utah Phillips mention his long time friendship with her going back before he became known as a folksinger. I also recall that combination of Sorrels and Phillips as he performed his classic “Starlight On The Rails” and Rosalie his also classic “If I Could Be The Rain” on a PBS documentary honoring the Café Lena in Saratoga, New York, a place that I am also very familiar with for many personal and musical reasons. Of note here: it should be remembered that Rosalie saved, literally, many of the compositions that Utah left helter-skelter around the country in his “bumming” days.”

I do not usually do Christmas holiday-oriented CD reviews but I am on something of a Rosalie Sorrels streak after getting, as a Christmas gift, a copy of her “Strangers In Another Country”, her heart-felt tribute to her recently deceased long time friend Utah Phillips. Thus, in the interest of completeness I will make some a couple of comments. I will skip the obvious Christmas-oriented material here, although the spirit of anti-Christmas at least as the CD unfold is ‘in the air’ on this CD, including a little send-up of the old yuletide season by the above-mentioned Brother Phillips (“Jingle Bells’- Phillips style). The core of this presentation is the alternative take on the various traditions of Christmas out in Idaho (“The Fruitcake” and “Christmas Eve” , out in Minnesota (“Just A Little Lefse”)and among those who live a little closer to the edge of society (“Winter Song” and Grandma”), like Rosalie and her friends.

I need not mention Rosalie’s singing and storytelling abilities. Those are, as always, a given. I have noted elsewhere that Rosalie and the old curmudgeon Phillips did more than their fate share of work in order to keep these traditions alive. Old Utah handled the more overtly political phase and Rosalie, for lack of a better expression, the political side as it intersected the personal phase. That is evident here, especially in her recitation of a note and poem written by a Native American woman in response to the lingering death of her grandmother. Powerful stuff, at Christmas or anytime, and a rather nice way to come to terms with the tragedy of death that we all sooner or later face. Listen to this fine piece.

A special note to kind of bring us full circle. My first review of Rosalie’s and Utah’s combined works together mentioned a spark of renewed recognition kindled by long ago PBS documentary about the famous folk coffee house “The Café Lena” in Saratoga Springs, New York whose owner, Lena Spenser, sheltered them at various times from life’s storms. Lena, from all reports, was something of a 'fairy godmother' to many later famous folk singers and artists when they were either down on there luck or just starting out (or both). I have my own strong ties to Saratoga, its environs and Café Lena but Rosalie’s tribute to her late friend here, “Bufana and Lena”, about the Italian version of the Santa Claus myth can stand as the signpost for what this CD has attempted to do, and what that long ago folk revival that Lena represented was trying to do as well.

Romance-19th Century Style-The Film Adaptation Of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (2007)-A Review

Romance-19^th Century Style-The Film Adaptation Of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (2007)-A Review  

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Northanger Abbey, starring Felicity Jones, JJ Field, based on Jane Austen’s novel, 2007 

Those readers who have followed me in this space or in the American Film Gazette know as with my predecessor in this space, Sam Lowell, that we tend to go for broke when we get around an idea or that interests us and find every possible connection. That is the case here with the Masterpiece film adaptation of 19^th century English novelist Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (not the original working title or published title but what has come down to us).Perhaps not so strangely the genesis of this review lies in a previous review of The Jane Austen Book Club a film which took a modern look at romance in all its various manifestations by mimicking Jane’s six major novels as part of monthly book club selections. That film automatically got me thinking that while I had read some of Austen’s novels (later in life because as a young man Austen’s work had the “knock” of being “girl books” and hence off-the-charts for guys, guys around my growing up working class neighborhood anyway) my main knowledge of her work was through various film adaptations. That got me on the road, what will be the continuing road, of reviewing all the film adaptations of her work, or at least the best versions. Northanger Abbey since it is based on Jane’s first novel (although not the first published which would not occur until after her untimely death) leads off here.         

That girl’s book author “knock” mentioned above at a younger age would have thrown me off this film completely (except if I had had a hot date with a girl who was seriously interested in Jane Austen novels and I would have played along feigning interest for obvious reasons but that is a separate story. This effort is centered on the romantic fantasies of a young well-brought up and educated country estate girl, Catherine, played by Felicity Jones and her devotion to the gore, mayhem and, well, sexual attractions of then popular Gothic novels. I would not have been able on my own to overcome Austen’s attempts mock the genre when younger and it was a close thing as I watched here as well.         

Here’s the thrust of what Austen was trying to get at in her never-ending look at the mores and social customs of early 19^th century England when it was becoming a big-time world power. Young Catherine gets an opportunity to break out of the cloistered country estate life and head to Mayfair swells Bath along with a local magnate and his wife. While there she is introduced to all the charms and hypocrisies of upper-crust English life which puts something of a crimp in her vivid imagination of what such life entailed gleaned from the plots of those feverish pot-boiler Gothic novels her budding sexuality was forcing on her imagination. The long and short of the matter though is that she met one Henry, a younger son of the magnate of Northanger Abbey. They were almost immediately smitten with each other through a series of encounters. Encounters encouraged by Henry’s father a classic old-time gold-digger who believed, incorrectly it turned out, that Catherine had come from wealthier circumstances than was actually the case.             

That father’s search for “gold” and the increasing attraction between Catherine and Henry is what drives the major part of the film. Naturally as with all of Austen’s novels there are side stories, stories such as the one about a perfidious young woman who supposedly loved Catherine’s brother, the seduction and abandonment of that woman by Henry’s Army officer older brother and her eventual return to the brother. Naturally as well there are plenty of misapprehensions about motives and gestures as Catherine’s vivid Gothic novel-driven imagination draws conclusions about the possible murder of Henry’s mother by the father. It was a close thing but in the end Henry and Catherine are reunited and wed once it became clear that Henry’s father’s real motives toward his wife, and with Catherine, were to grab as much dough as possible from whatever arrangement could be made. A classic Romantic era novel with a close following of the novel storyline by the film.            

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 

From The Archives-No- From Today's Front Pages In Portland- As The First Anniversary Of Charlottesville Approaches-We Are In A Cold Civil War In America-No Platform For Fascists-No Platform For Nazis Or KKK Either-Join And Built The People’s Resistance

From The Archives-No- From Today's Front Pages In Portland-   As The First Anniversary Of Charlottesville Approaches-We Are In A Cold Civil War In America-No Platform For Fascists-No Platform For Nazis Or KKK Either-Join And Built The People’s Resistance  

August 6. 2018 Update-

A few friends, close friends at that, have taken me up short when I mention to them, to the political world beyond them as well that we are in the throes of a “cold civil war.” They look at me in disbelief. Look at me as if I was in some 1930s Germany time warp (even there they are wrong it is the 1920s which set the stage for the 1930s horrors not out of the blue) harping on the divide in this American society. A divide I did not make or make up but through plenty of things, tensions, from race to class have brought things to a boiling point. Then things like Charlottesville last year, things like Portland this weekend where the cold civil war took at heated turn between the alt-right and anti-fa and who knows what next weekend in Washington, D.C. on first anniversary of Charlottesville. Those friends still smirk a little but all I know is that as I have repeated mentioned I did not believe that in my six decade I would be seriously discussing the danger from the fascists small as it seemed a while back but more menacing now. More later-much more.

By Frank Jackman

[I really hate to start a piece with a bracketed introduction, really a double bracketed introduction since I had to do the same when I introduced the original piece last year around this time in the wake of the events in Charlottesville down in Virginia, down in the college town of the University of Virginia. However given the nature of the subject, no, given the impeding urgency of the subject the heating up of the cold civil war in America, a phenomenon not seen in this country since the decade before Civil War which ended slavery only after a series of compromises proved illusionary to end the damn institution and the only way to resolve the situation was with arms in hand and its concurrent phenomenon the rise of the organized fascist movement, aided not a little by the rabid occupants of the White House and the rest of the governing apparatus we need to talk.

This heating up of the cold civil war is a phenomenon which I have been noting for maybe a decade, maybe a little less but certainly since the big Great Recession as the economists call it now in historical hindsight when many people’s live were hung out to dry, hung out big time which started toward avalanche toward the big break of the have-nots, or maybe have not enough toward the right after flirting with Barack Obama to no avail. During that time, say since 2011 when I reported heavily on the wisp of the will phantom Occupy movement in these pages (and in Progressive Nation now on-line but which I was one of the hard copy founders of back in the 1970s but which was subsequently bought to a writers collective), I have interviewed many of those who have not move forward, no, who have been left behind for no fault of their own and no reason that they can figure out why they lost out except that now they have a handle on the damn thing as victims of globalization, liberal cabal globalization.

Still in 2016 despite knowing, feeling this unsatisfied undercurrent I was as taken aback, as shocked, and plainly speaking as clueless as any other of the talking class, of the political pundits who are supposed to have a ide about what was what in the political arena. Worse on the second point, on that rise of the fascistic elements from their cubbyholes and warrens in backwoods America, was not that I was unaware of it, hell, I had done a whole series on militias, survivalists and others who had a morbid fear ignited by their race hatreds, by their hatred of Barack Obama despite their generally have no contact ever with black people and despite not living within fifty miles of any black communities, barrios, Asian enclaves or urban Jews. Jesus. What had, has me stumped in that after fifty years or more of political struggle, fifty years since I wrote my first term paper on fascist groups in America (think of the name George Lincoln Rockwell as the poster child of that movement back then) I have to go out on the streets and hold the bastards off. Below is a quick review and summary of the past year complete with that bracketed introduction, now second introduction, that I have threatened you with. Frank Jackman]              

Original Introduction

[Under the now not so new direction of site manager Greg Green who has made some mistakes and made some very right decisions as is usual for chief editors and assignment impresarios we writers, young and old, free-lance or staff, stringers or by-line worthy have been given the green light as part of our works to discuss how we got the assignment or any other material the reader may find interesting as back story. I will do so here in a review of what I have called the impeding cold civil war in American over the past period. Frank Jackman]  

Sometimes out in the political hustings you come across a piece of written propaganda which hits you exactly where you live. Expresses your sentiments better than you could on your own. That is the case with the small, inexpensive paper leaflet that I picked up, or was handed to me, at an anti-fascist demonstration last summer on the Boston Common which I was covering for this publication. I subsequently received the same copies at a few other anti-fascist rallies and stand-outs again not sure which I picked up and which were handed to me although that is of no import to the political message stated. This “pick-up” “handed” conundrum the result of the fact that I grab one way or another every piece of literature that I come across at any rallies or such events that I cover or take part in.        

I headlined the beginning of this piece with the statement that we are in a cold civil war in this country, in America, and have been for a while, maybe the last twenty years at least but that fact has only been pushed in our faces bigtime since the age of Trump began where all the contradictions, all the divisions and all the cultural clashes have become part of the daily political battleground. There have been over the past year or so some important nodal points making that cold civil get at least momentarily hotter-one was horrendous Charlottesville which put all on notice that the divisions were deep and maybe had reached some boiling point. Make no mistake that Charlottesville was a “victory” for what passes as the Alt-Right, Nazi-Fascist-KKK-Militia combine which has been emboldened by the rise of the Trump reaction. Another was the recent nationwide student lead-high school student-led March for Our Lives demonstration, so you know this is something very different on the political horizon which was a “victory” for our side, for the people’s resistance which is important if we can keep up the momentum.  

One of the problems if you will of our side is that some people, a lot of people, many of whom have only recently come to political life have many mixed and confused feelings about what to do to stop the Alt-Right-Nazis-Fascist-KKK in their tracks. Have bought into at least partially the notion that these bastards have some “right” to free speech that we must respect. That we must expend political capital defending. “Forget that noise” as the late Pete Markin, a guy I grew up with and who gave me plenty of political insights said and would say today as well. We are private citizens and not governmental agents so have no obligation to defend such rights to free speech under any constitutional theory.

But the Constitution is only the bedrock of running a civil society. We the people of the resistance have to be clear that we do not support any right for the Alt-Right-Fascist-Nazi-KKK-Militia cabal to free speech to spew their genocidal, ethnic-cleansing, race war programs. And that, as history shows us, and everybody should read the history of the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, is their calling card, their intention and we had better be clear that we have to nip that movement in the bud. Not only by confronting them across the police lines, police lines there to protect them and their so-called right to free speech since the police are governmental agents but to make sure they find not havens, no platforms, to spew their hateful messages. So yes so-called free speech issues take a very far back seat to the fight against the intentions of these monsters if we don’t stop them. Believe me they don’t give three-fifth of a damn about our free speech rights, will see us in hell first another sign we are in a cold civil war situation. More later.    

In Boston –The Latest Bash Back Boston-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18^th on Boston Common  

Frank Jackman comment:

I have mentioned on more than one occasion that we have been for a while in a state of cold civil war in America that has only had fuel to the fire added to it, make it tend toward a hot civil war, by the massive frauds, midnight rip-off actions, and general ignorance promoted by the Trump Administration. This rightly, and I think most thankfully, has gotten the previously moribund left, the bewildered and the oppressed up in arms enough to slowly begin a counter-attack against the night-takers from corrupt and venal right-wing bourgeois politicians like Trump and his ilk to the more dangerous extra-parliamentary forces-call them alt-right, fascist, KKK, etc. that have been unleashed-have been given fresh wind in their sails.

Not everything the left and its allies argue for in counter-attack either makes senses or provides a road forward in the anti-fascist struggle for example RefuseFascism has identified the Trump-Pence regime as fascist and to call for a parliamentary impeachment process to get rid of the bums. This Bash Back Boston grouping seems to be more militant but not quite sure that confrontation in itself without more gets us anyplace. I leave it an open question today. But for now as we sort things out, or as they get sorted for us which is as likely and has actually been the case over the past several months, let’s keep to the united front idea going until further notice. In short Saturday November 18^th in Boston be on the Boston Common to stop the Nazis, fascists and their ilk in their tracks whatever anti-fascist ideas you march under. 

           

In Boston Nov 4 -ResistFascism Rally Report From Allan Franklin

By Political Reporter Frank Jackman

[I have recently at Allan Jackson’s, the site administrator, request done a review of a lesser Humphrey Bogart movie Sirocco from the early 1950s because it had a political theme-or at least touched about what World War I wrought on the world beyond murder and mayhem in the trenches on all sides. Because I spent some time on that and a few other projects I missed a local event in Boston on the Boston Common on November 4^th sponsored by an organization called ResistFascism.org who were attempting to build some momentum to publicize an upcoming counter-demonstration against a thing called “Rally For The Republic,” a seemingly innocuous front name for a cohort of Nazis, Alt-Rights, KKK, White Supremacists, wacky Trump supporters and street thugs to be held at the Parkman Bandstand on November 18^th . The grouping had applied for but had been rejected for a permit to use that facility by the City of Boston but nevertheless intended to demonstrate that day for “free speech” rights or whatever other cover story they were pushing. The “call” for the rally itself told the real story that what they wanted was a street fight, especially targeting their nemeses the Anti-fa black-clad anarchists and Black Lives Matter.

Not to belabor the point the idea of a gathering momentum rally on the 4^th sounded like a good idea and so I detached my associate at the on-line Progressive America, Allan Franklin, to go check out and report back on the event. My premise for even bothering him with the assignment was that the literature associated with the event, including a full- page ad in the New York Times by ResistFascism made it appear like it was going to be a prelude similar to the massive 40, 000 plus counter-rally in Boston also held on August 19^th also at the Parkman Bandstand. As Allan will report that was not the case, not by a long shot although this resurgent fascist (and their sundry allies) menace needs to be combatted and combatted with massive counter-demonstrations to make them go back into their rat holes or wherever they hang out. To “crush them in the egg” as an old-time militant antifascist once told me who had been close to the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s when James Cannon had told an audience in New York City that he had heard their chief, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, use that expression for the tasks ahead against the Nazi-night-takers. (That militant had at that time been instrumental through his union in bringing out a mass of working people to surround Madison Square Garden in that city when the fascist thugs tried to get a toehold there so I am sure he had the Trotsky remark on good authority.)

Allan, and I had agreed, had expected to take his notes and make a “think piece” story to be published here and at Progressive America. Subsequently we have decided to merely publish his somewhat edited notes which gives as much flavor to the event as it deserved.

Frank Jackman]              

[In the event the November 18^th “rally” drew about fifty to one hundred demonstrators and a counter-rally of about one thousand to fifteen hundred mainly Anti-fa, Black Lives Matter and Veterans for Peace militants. Curiously except for a couple of people that Allan had recognized from the November 4^th rally selling newspapers and passing out leaflets there was no identifiable presence by this ResistFascism operation on the Common at least. From their literature they had planned a rally at Copley Square about one half mile away from the Common although it might as well have been ten thousand miles away as far as visibly confronting the fascist menace that day. Frank Jackman]    

*****

Frank- Here are my observations about the ResistFascism rally that took place at the Parkman Bandstand on November 4, 2017 which we, you and I, have had many e-mail and phone conversations about with the organizers who wanted us to publicize the thing and cover it extensively. Also between us about our approach to a group we knew very little about except their literature and their persistent at the time and that unlike the paltry sums most leftist operations can gather these days they must have had an “angel” to be able to put a full page ad in the New York Times.

I showed up at the advertised spot, the Parkman Bandstand, about 3:30 for the 4:00 event at which time there were maybe twenty people gathered while the organizers were putting up signs and stocking a table with literature. (At first I thought I had the wrong spot not having been on the Common in years and figuring that maybe it was to be at the Park Street MBTA station entrance one of the historic protest spots on the Common that I knew from previous events but after asking if this was the right place of a person milling around I found I was indeed at the right spot.) After finding I was in the right place I knew almost immediately that this event was going to be far smaller than it was hyped up to be and which the organizers hounded us to publicize extensively beforehand and provide plenty of coverage for on the day of the event.

I did meet Steve, whom you told me you had plenty of contact via e-mail and cellphone with when he noticed my press tag and we talked for a bit. He continued to badger me about covering the November 18^th event they were planning at Copley Square. I told him frankly I did not see how a rally in Copley when the fascists were going to be on the Common a half mile away made sense, made a statement to the scumbags, made a statement about effectively resisting fascism as advertised. He demurred at that point and told me he had to help set up. This Steve seemed like a nice guy of the old school 1960s organizer sort that I have run into a lot in New York and out in San Francisco lately who under current adverse conditions are keeping up the good fight as best they can in an age when the social media technology and the subsequent generations’ organizing style have down-graded the old time ways of putting together protest rallies out in the real mean streets.

I sensed and somebody I talked to later knowledgeable about the leftist remnant still around the Cambridge/Boston milieu that this operation was an off-shoot of the old “Not In My Name” grouping from Iraq War 2003 days which was organized by an old-time cultist Maoist who didn’t hear he, Mao, died or something. It definitely had that liberal democratic feel especially around the main villains of the piece in their literature Trump/Pence and the urgent need to impeach them as if that would create the “newer world” you and the older guys I know are always harping back to when stuff like this comes up and you get all misty-eyed about the huge X number of people who came to some event against war, racism, capitalism, whatever about fifty years ago.     

  

The rally itself when I left about 5:30 never had more than one hundred people and that is perhaps generous considering the number of student journalists and other such curious student types who apparently were assigned by their professors to do coverage as a class assignment. The usual run of  general curiosity seekers who peek around the edges of such events getting confirmation for their distant hometown fears that Boston is some Red Moscow of the East Coast and making note never to send their kids to school in the town listening to the usual speakers preaching to the choir about that war, racism, sexism you and your crowd are always talking about how you almost had turned the corner on that stuff but you underestimated the forces of counter-attack arraigned against you and have been on the run ever since. Of course this included the usual Kumbaya folk music that is supposed to stir the crowd to a revolutionary pitch by evoking Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and who knows who else singing about the magic wand of getting rid of oppression. All in a regular left event day’s schedule.

I did notice that on a hand-out leaflet ResistFascism was advertising marching in a veteran’s peace parade on the 11^th, on Veterans Day and giving our starting time and place. I urged all the people I met to join that march that day since we are very familiar with and support the efforts of the main sponsor Veterans for Peace although I think you told me they were trying to reclaim the original purpose of the day by calling it Armistice Day since Sam Lowell, Fritz Taylor and I think Allan Jackson are Vietnam-era veterans, right.          

There were a few minor heavy verbal confrontations between protesters and a few Alt-right people who showed up obviously to do “recon” and size up what was what knowing they could get a row going by spitting out their garbage in a small environment. One from Salisbury, a young Iraq War veteran who portrayed himself as only interested in a dialogue with the left, told me he was an organizer for the so-called Alt-right rally on the 18^th. When I asked him about the rally “call” which we had culled from Facebook being inflammatory, calling for a street fight like you said after you read the Facebook announcement, he said just like the far left they had their crazy far right who wanted to stir things up. Take that for what it is worth, although one thing I have noticed about this newer breed of whatever you want to call these modern fascists is that that they are a bit slicker than the old guys who used to breath fire and damnation against the generic left, n----rs, gays, women and “commies” without blinking at eye. They are more media savvy and couch things in terms like “free speech,” “oppression,” “railing against the elites” and the like. Off the top of my head I think we have to treat them at least in the post-Charlottesville era where they showed some unsavory savvy and skills as being as smart as us in this war of words and images.    

Not much heated argument although a woman started yelling about those NFL players who went down on their knees during the national anthem before their football games and got into an argument with an Anti-fa who seemed very much the angry young man masked and dressed in Johnny Cash black of course.  A Veteran for Peace guy whom I think you know, at least he said he knew you, was able to calm her down a bit and she left. (I told him that I had been urging people I talked to during this time to join the Veterans Day peace march which would be starting near this section of the Common and he corrected me by calling it Armistice Day so I guess they are serious about reclaiming the day, or at least the name.      

All and all a waste of time and I told Jeff whom you had also assigned to this story to do interviews and take some photos and who was heading down to meet me to go home. Stuff might have happened after I left but I don’t think so. I am glad we had a hands-off with this R-F group although if they show up with any forces on the 11^th for that Veterans for Peace march let’s see what they have to offer. 

I felt sorry for you and Allan since you were inundated by phone calls and e-mails for stuff that seemed like a big deal and was all smoke and dreams. We have to help save your time and energy for the big stuff not this Mickey Mouse stuff so we better screen this stuff better.

Speak To Me Of Mendocino-With The McGarrigle Sisters Song On The Same Theme In Mind

Speak To Me Of Mendocino-With The McGarrigle Sisters Song On The Same Theme In Mind

By Zack James

Sid Lester had often wondered whether Lena, Lena of the Caffe Lena, the small coffeehouse that weaned many folksingers in the days when such activity was on deck, in the time of the now fabled early 1960s folk minute, now too but she the grey eminence had long gone to the shades and so that is not her bother had ever gotten to the Mendocino of her dreams and the song that the McGarrigle Sisters had reportedly written for her when she dreamed the dream of West Coast dreams. This was no mere academic question since Sid was asking it not only to himself but to his lovely companion, Mona Lord, who was accompanying him just that moment on the Pacific Coast Highway about fifty miles from that very spot, from the Mendocino of his dreams if not hers (but probably about three hours away given the hairpin turns that he increasingly hated to take along some very treacherous stretches of that beautiful view highway having almost gone down an un-guard-railed embankment to the ocean around Big Sur a few years back).

It was not like Sid had not been to the dreamland before, having made the trip up from the fetid seas of Frisco town (fetid in comparison to the Mendocino white-washed breakers eroding the sheer rock at a greater rate than he would have expected) a number of times mostly with his old time now long gone to “find herself” Laura, Laura Perkins whom he had talked into going up those several times based on nothing more than that he liked the song. Liked too that she, Laura liked it as well and would cover the song anytime she could find somebody to do a duo with her at “open mics” and features depending on how she was feeling. Mona having heard the song exactly once (she didn’t like the fact that Laura had liked the song and had been to Mendocino before she had and so would not listen when Sid tried to play it on his car CD player as they got closer to the place). Moreover she was reserving judgment on the relationship between the song and the place.

And that last point, the point for Sid anyway, was exactly how the song and the place connected. Was the real source of his wonder about old Lena back in the tired old East. Did she long like he had to be done with Eastern pressures and pitfalls. To stop worrying about where the money would come from for rent, to pay the utilities, hell to pay the performers and stop them from having to play for the foolish “basket” like when they  had just started out on some forlorn street in Cambridge , Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Old Town or the Village. Stop all of that and head West, head to South Bend for a minute, head over the Rockies and suck in the breezes of the new land, of the new dispensation. Yeah, he bet though that she never got to the West, never could leave her cats, never could get that café out of her system, would probably fret even if she only went out for a week or so.

As they, Sid and his new Mona, approached the outskirts of Mendocino he wondered, seriously wondered whether Mona would ask him someday to speak of Mendocino, to let the place get under her skin. Yeah, speak of Mendocino.                  

Artists’ Corner-Frank Stella And The Abstract Expressionist Movement

Artists’ Corner-Frank Stella And The Abstract Expressionist Movement

Thad Lyons comment: I was crazy for abstract art when I was a kid and that genre was fresh with guys like Jackson Pollack breaking through the last vestiges of representational art which dominated Western art for a few precious centuries. Then that movement kind of turned on itself, or maybe better, ran out of steam once one could not tell a piece of art work from the walls which surrounded the picture. Frank Stella put himself front and center of some new energies when he took that basically sound abstract art push away from representational art and brought back form, forms geometric and curvilinear to tell his stories in paint. Not all of it worked, some of it left the viewer bewildered but some of it pushed art forward when things looked tough.