From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-For International Solidarity with South African Miners!

Click on the headline to link to the <em>International Communist League </em> website.</strong>
<b>Markin comment:
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I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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<b>Workers Vanguard No. 1008
 14 September 2012

  For International Solidarity with South African Miners!
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On August 30, some 100 protesters marched outside the South African Consulate in New York City to denounce the August 16 police massacre of 34 striking mineworkers and the arrest of some 270 workers at Lonmin Platinum’s Marikana mine in South Africa. This united-front protest, initiated by the Partisan Defense Committee, demanded: “Free Jailed Miners—Drop All Charges! Victory to the Striking Miners!” In an effort to generate support for the embattled miners, the PDC—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—appealed to trade unions and leftists as well as black and immigrant organizations with diverse political viewpoints for unity in action.

Some of those who endorsed the demonstration represent unions that have been under attack in the U.S., like Dan Coffman, president of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 in Longview, Washington, which fought against the multinational EGT’s union-busting drive, and Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor in Wisconsin, which has been under state government attacks.

Other endorsers included Steve Hedley of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union in Britain; Kenneth Riley, president of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 in Charleston; the New York City chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Kareem Lover of Harlem’s Circle of Brothers; the International Haiti Support Network; the Occupy Wall Street Labor Outreach Committee; and black academic Cornel West. Among those attending the protest were the Internationalist Group, which endorsed and spoke, and the League for the Revolutionary Party. One of the speakers was Matthew Swaye, a young activist of Stop Stop and Frisk who has been targeted by the NYPD for filming cops going after black and Latino youth.

Kevin Harrington, vice-president of Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York, brought solidarity greetings, and a number of transit workers were present. He remarked that the attack on South African mineworkers is against “the right of workers to organize and is an attempt to smash trade-unionism,” adding that such attempts are also “alive and well in the U.S.”

An SL spokesman noted: “This massacre exposes the truth that the blood of black workers is just as cheap today under the neo-apartheid capitalism of the ‘new South Africa’ as it was under apartheid.” He commented that the Tripartite Alliance government “only offers a continuation of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Similarly, in the U.S. the bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens —represent the interests of the capitalist exploiters. We say: Break with the parties of capital! What’s necessary is an internationalist multiracial workers party!”

A PDC speaker remarked: “August 16, 2012, will go down in history for one of the bloodiest crimes ever committed against the workers movement in South Africa.... The pain and suffering of this gruesome mass murder must be burnt into the memory of the working class—here and internationally—and all other opponents of capitalist oppression, as a reminder of the lengths to which the bourgeoisie and its repressive state machine will go to protect their class rule and profits.”
The Marikana slaughter recalls the most infamous apartheid-era slaughters—Sharpeville 1960 and Soweto 1976—which caused massive international outrage.

However, in response to this latest massacre the AFL-CIO tops and much of the left have alibied the perpetrator—the Tripartite Alliance government of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party and the COSATU union federation—which sent its police to protect the mine owners’ profits. A statement by the AFL-CIO called “for calm to return to the platinum mine...so that miners can return to work.” We say: Victory to the miners’ strike, which has continued and grown after the vicious attacks by the police!

Other demonstrations and acts of protest took place internationally. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers sent a letter to South African president Jacob Zuma recalling its support to the anti-apartheid struggle and commenting: “We did not organize against such tyranny only to see such blatant attacks on workers unfold under the government of the ANC.” During a protest organized by labor and community activists on August 25 at the South African Consulate in Toronto, a comrade of the Trotskyist League of Canada called for cops out of the unions and for a black-centered workers government in South Africa. In London on August 31, the Spartacist League/Britain protested outside the England-South Africa cricket match along with representatives of the Foil Vedanta Campaign, an organization fighting against destruction brought about by the British-Indian mining giant Vedanta. In highlighting the criminal history in Africa of the London-based Lonmin company, an SL/B speaker stressed the significance of “solidarity from workers in Britain, not least the black and Asian population from former British colonies.”

In leaflets and chants, our comrades have raised the call: An injury to one is an injury to all! For international labor solidarity with the striking miners! 

 

For The Fifty- Steve McQueen’s “The Great Escape” (1963)-A Film Review

For The Fifty- Steve McQueen’s “The Great Escape” (1963)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and a fistful of male stars to round out the cast, 1963

One of the great things about my long stay at this site (and at the now on-line American Film Gazette) is that Pete Markin, my editor (and Ben Gold at the Gazette) almost without exception let me review almost anything cinematic from virtually any genre and not grumble about my choices. That is true of this encore presentation the classic iconic (the big motorcycle chase for one thing) 1960s World War II movie The Great Escape as well. The encore part needs a little explanation since my first review of the film was written for my high school newspaper the North Adamsville High Magnet back when I was a sophomore. Of course that review of the film seen at the now long gone Strand Theater in Adamsville Center one Saturday afternoon was all about detailing the action, detailing how the good guy Allied officers outwitted the nasty Nazi night-takers who were trying (and almost succeeding) in over-running all of Europe and who knows where else, and concentrating on the long drama (with intermission) as it unfolded. What it did not entail, what got missed, was the little point about the murder of the fifty officers who were captured after the great escape and executed against even the barest minimum of Geneva Convention standards. What got missed then but not now as well is the dedication in the film (and in this headline) of those fifty murdered men who after all were only doing what the fog rules of war were expecting of them-escape and/or create as much havoc for the enemy as possible if you cannot.             

The storyline is actually pretty simple for an almost three hour movie. A group of hard ass Allied officers who have already off-camera created problems for the German High Command by a collective untold number of escapes from other POW camps are transferred to a state-of-the-art facility. Needless to say from about minute one they individually attempt to escape. No go. Then a senior British officer just recaptured and transferred comes up with the big plan –a massive escape of 250 men to tie down as many German troops as possible. The bulk of the film then concentrates of the logistics, the temporary set-backs, and the division of labor among the officers who brought different skill sets to the table. Then the big day came but due to some problems only about seventy men escaped. As I have already telegraphed of that lot fifty were captured and executed, a few escaped, and a few were captured and returned to the camp.

The central figure in all of this, the one highlighted throughout the film is Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, who between bouts of solitary (with American as apple pie glove and ball in hand to while away the time) and that aforementioned great motorcycle chase gave the Germans all they could handle. Alas he was one of the captured and returned ones. Yeah, this one, this based on a true story about the camp and the Nazi night-takers actions is for the fifty. Enough said.                

Veterans for Peace: Ring Church Bells on Armistice Day

Veterans for Peace: Ring Church Bells on Armistice Day

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8/9/2018

Veterans for Peace is calling on churches to ring their bells at 11 AM on Sunday, November 11 - Armistice Day - in recognition of the futility of war and to show our commitment to world peace.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day, a day of celebration marking the end of fighting during World War I (the Great War). Today, Armistice Day is a call to Americans, in recognition of the horrors and futility of that war, to rededicate themselves to world peace.

While November 11 was declared Veteran's Day in 1954, Armistice Day legislation (1919; 1926 and 1938) remains in place to this day. Read excerpts from that legislation here.
                     
Veterans For Peace (VFP)  is an international organization made up of military veterans, military family members, and allies dedicated to building a culture of peace, exposing the true costs of war, and healing the wounds of war. Their goal is to change public opinion in the U.S. from an unsustainable culture of militarism and commercialism to one of peace, democracy, and sustainability. They do this primarily, although not exclusively, through grassroots organizing and education at the local level.  

Learn more about the organization  Veterans for Peace, or the local chapter, Smedley Butler Brigade. Contact Doug Stewart, VFP Chapter Leader in Boston and member of the Eliot Church of Newton, a Mass. Conference church,  here.

Ring your Bells on November 11!

How The West Was Won?-Kirk Douglas’ “Last Train From Gun Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

How The West Was Won?-Kirk Douglas’ “Last Train From Gun Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

Nice double feature Saturday matinee poster, right?

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Last Train from Gun Hill, starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, 1959 

I have often had occasion to mention that when I was growing up in the Acre section of North Adamsville in the 1950s the “golden age” of the Western, on the screen and on television that my fellow corner boys and I were sucked in by the myths surrounding the Old West like the good guy wore white and the bad guys black, the only good injun was a dead one, that rough justice came out of the barrel of a gun and lots of other stuff copied from the old dime store novels on which the shows were created from. Moreover many a Saturday afternoon double feature matinee at the old long gone Strand Theater were spent watching mostly in Technicolor those myths getting a workout on the screen (this before finding the virtues of film noir when the theater owner to save cash would do 1940s retrospectives and later when the theater was a “screen” for taking some sweet girl to the balcony for a little, well, you know a little. The film under review, Last Train From Gun Hill, gives plenty of ammunition to bolster those old blasé myths about the West, the taming of the West but with a little twist.      

The twist here is that unlike most early Westerns where the “only good injun is a dead injun” a Native American woman (we are after all in the 2000s and to use the film’s “squaw” is nothing if not demeaning) taking her son home from visit with her father has been raped and murdered by a couple of young drunk Anglo cowboys who did not have an ounce of political correctness or morality for that matter in their entire bodies. What they did have, or at least one of them had, was a rich cattle baron father, one tough hombre named Craig Belsen played by Anthony Quinn, to squelch any backlash against his errant son Rick who can do no wrong, no legal wrong anyway, in the old man’s eyes. Keeping son Rick from a well-deserved hangman’s noose is what drives this plotline. Why Craig gives a rat’s ass about this ne’er-do-well son is beyond reason, except he is the heir to that big spread and to the “ownership” of the town, the town of Gun Hill.        

Problem, big problem in the end. That Native American woman, that “squaw,” was wife of tough as nails lawman Matt Morgan, played by cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas, who did his taming of the West a few towns over. Craig and Matt are old compadres but that won’t keep Sonny Boy from a big step off, from a date with the hangman and a burial in some Boot Hill, if Matt has anything to do with the matter once he knows from a saddle initials hint who he was dealing with. If it was just a matter of grabbing the kid and heading back on the next train (the last train, a late one, and hence the title) to sweet justice (or a fatal “attempted” escape on the way back) our Matt is up against it. No help from the bought-off townspeople not even the law. Well almost no help except Belsen’s much abused and put upon mistress who helps even up the odds for the ever inventive Morgan.

That no help and that long wait for the train while the forces of evil are arrayed against him that round out the film. As to be expected the two protagonists have to go mano a mano with each other.  That is when 1950s Hollywood Western script return to form as the good guys beat the bad guys without a whimper. Still it was nice to see somebody stick up for the let’s face it historically much abused Native Americans who were there long before the wild and tamed West ever got their names.      

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "You’re On The Bus, Or Off The Bus"- An Ode To Aging Hippies- Ken Kesey’s “The Further Inquiry”

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "You’re On The Bus, Or Off The Bus"- An Ode To Aging Hippies- Ken Kesey’s “The Further Inquiry”

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

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

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

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

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

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

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

Book Review

Visions Of Cody, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1973

The first three paragraphs are taken from a previous review about Jack Kerouac and his leading role in establishing the literary ethos of the "beat" generation. Those comments aptly apply in reviewing "Visions Of Cody" as well:

"As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s seminal ‘travelogue’, “On The Road”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space.

Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. They all show up, one way or another (under fictional names of course), in this book. So that is why we today are under the sign of “On The Road”.

To appreciate Kerouac and understand his mad drive for adventure and to write about it, speedily but precisely, you have to start with “On The Road”. There have been a fair number of ‘searches' for the meaning of the American experience starting, I believe, with Whitman. However, each generation that takes on that task needs a spokesperson and Jack Kerouac, in the literary realm at least, filled that bill not only for his own generation that came of age in the immediate post World War II era, but mine as well that came of age in the 1960s (and, perhaps, later generations but I can only speculate on that idea here)."

That said, “Visions Of Cody” is an extension of that “On The Road” story line that made Kerouac famous, although "Visions" is more diffuse and much more concerned with literary imager than with the storyline developed in the earlier Kerouac/Paradise narrative. Here Jack as Dulouz and Neal Cassady as Cody Pomeray do more running around on the road, partying, reflecting on the nature of the universe, partying, speculating on the nature of the American experience, partying and… well, you get the drift. In some places the descriptive language is stronger than “On The Road”, reflecting Kerouac’s greater ease with his spontaneous writing style in the early 1950s when this was written (although not widely published until after his death.).

Additionally, included here is a long series of taped interviews between Jack and Neal over several days and, presumably, while both were on a running drug “high”. These tapes reflect very nicely the very existential nature of 1950s “beat”, or at least one interpretation of that term. They produce all the madness, genius, gaffs, gaps, whimsy and pure foolishness that come from an extended drug experience. Despite all reports to the contrary not everything observed until the “influence” comes out pure literary gold, and that is true here as well. But there is a lot of good stuff nevertheless, although here it could have been cut in half and we still would have gotten that “beat” beat.




Book Review

The Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey, Viking Press, New York, 1990

In a recent DVD review of the late Dennis Hopper’s role as a fugitive radical in the 1990 comedy on the subject of the 1960s counter-culture, Flashback, I noted, no I exclaimed, no I shouted out that I was not to blame for this reach back but that the reader should blame it on Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (including “beatnik” holdover/ bus driver Neal Cassady). Or blame it on a recent re-read of Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that pays “homage” to Kesey, his Pranksters, their psychedelically-painted bus "Further", and their various adventures and misadventures. Or, better, blame it on Jack Kerouac and that self-same central character Cassady (as Dean Moriarty) for his On The Road. The same sentiment can serve here in reviewing Ken Kesey’s concept book on the occasion of the 25th anniversary (1989) of the famous coast to coast (West to East, if you can believe that) bus ride/drug trip/self-awareness adventure/madcap escape that Tom Wolfe chronicled in the above-mentioned novel.

I used the words "concept book" here in exactly the right sense. Kesey, although having apparently exhausted himself in the literary field after his early successes with One Flew Over The Cukoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion still had enough savvy in him to come up with an appropriate way to celebrate his most well-known adventure. The book is set up in the form of a trial transcript. Wait a minute who is on trial at this late date? Ken Kesey, for cooking up the perhaps ill-advised adventure, or on some belatedly-revealed drug charge? No. The WASP West Coast college students out on a romp who formed the core of the Merry Pranksters finally get their comeuppance from the neo-con counter-revolutionaries ? No. Here is the funny part. It’s the bus driver, stupid-Neal Cassady-the refugee from the “beat" generation, and one of the "fathers" of the 1960s cultural uprising. And what is the charge (or charges)? Well, the modern day version of “corrupting the youth.” That makes sense, right? He should have pleaded guilty, very guilty, and be done with it.

Along the way on this "bus ride" we get plenty of "contrite" testimony about the evil genie out of the bottle Cassady, heart-rending tales about the spell he put on those “innocent” young people, about his non-stop spiel, and about his fantastic, if just slightly unorthodox, driving habits. We also get plenty of testimony in his defense, as well. And all of this is accompanied by over one hundred photographs from the old “family” album, including many, many photos of the arch-villain Cassady himself. Just a point here though. You should read Wolfe’s book before you try to read this one-this is strictly for aficionados of the “beat” and “hippie” cultural movements.

Note: The volatile figure of Neal Cassady was central to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (as Dean Moriarty, and as Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, a similar exposition). Although Neal is central to this book, a reading of Wolfe’s book places his role in a much more secondary position- something of a highly energetic, fast-talking grand old man of the “beat” generation teaching the youth “the ropes” and passing the “break the mold” bug to a new generation. That seems about right. Kerouac will be remembered as long as youth yearn for the open road, literally or spiritually. Kesey, to a lesser extent, will hold that same position. Neal Cassady will be remembered mainly for being the guy, an important guy, who glued everything together.

Finally, off of a reading of Cassady’s “testimony” here, which is somewhat painful to read at this far remove, is more incoherent drug-induced ranting than “hipness”, or wisdom for the ages. A reading of any single page of Kerouac (or Kesey, for that matter) will provide much more insight into that period. Some of the other “testimony” of the other “witnesses” reads rather obtusely as well. But hell, these guys (Kerouac, Kesey, Ginsberg, et al.) went looking for, and got, their authentic "All-American" drugstore cowboy/untutored plebeian philosopher king/jack-of-all trades/ manly sex symbol for the post-World War II world, warts and all. Neal Cassady was his name.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Eighty Years Ago By Pierre Frank

In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The  Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Eighty Years Ago By Pierre Frank

Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.

Markin comment:

Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!

Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Markin comment:

Of course the writer of the memorial, Pierre Frank, did no small amount throughout his political career as a "leading" member of the post-Trotsky, post-World War II, confused, sometimes massively confused, international leadership to bring down the Fourth International. At least one that Trotsky might have recognized as his own.
*******
Pierre Frank
Eighty Years Ago

Published: Fourth International, Autumn 1959

Next November 7th will complete eighty years since Leon Trotsky was born. By his theoretical contribution and his militant life, he takes his place in the class of the most eminent proletarian revolutionaries, that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. But if these others are accepted as such in the workers' movement (which does not mean that their teachings are not trodden underfoot), the place of Trotsky, even at the present beginnings of "destalinization," has not yet been recognized. True, the crudest Stalinist lies are no longer repeated, for they would no longer find any listeners; but a number of lies and false ideas continue to drag on, including among those who think that they have been delivered from Stalinism. How many try to get out of it by saying: The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin is ancient history, outlived, a personal rivalry about more or less abstract theories, and Trotskyism -- apart from a few faithful followers -- no longer exists. This was not at all the opinion of Stalin who, after claiming that Trotskyism was dead, went on setting up -- in vain -- the most monstrous judicial machinations to kill it. Nor is it the opinion of Stalin's present successors, either. If they have not rehabilitated Trotsky and the Left Opposition, it is because they realize that it is not outlived ancient history, but one of the burning problems of the present day.

The figure and the teachings of Trotsky will inevitably find the place they deserve in the course of the anti-bureaucratic movement of the masses, and not in the bureaucracy's measures of self-defense to protect its political power and privileges.

Among some who perhaps do not lack sympathy but do lack a sense of history, what contributes to their failure to appreciate Leon Trotsky is the contrast between the last part of his life (from 1928 on) and his period of glory and power in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Max Eastman wrote in a recent article that Trotsky was a man of indecision who did not know how to fight against Stalin -- all this based on a "psychoanalysis" for the American petty bourgeois. Without expressing themselves so stupidly, there are not lacking people who think that if after all Trotsky was defeated by Stalin, it was because he pierced himself with his own sword at a given moment by his vision of the glorious period of the Russian Revolution, without understanding the new situation that was then opening up. It is, however, easy to verify the fact that it was Trotsky who really understood the new situation, whereas Stalin did not have the faintest idea of where he would be led by the struggle he started after Lenin's death. Power not only contributes to corrupt those who wield it; it also sets them on a pedestal which deforms their real stature. If someone like Trotsky lost the power, that must be his fault, and he was not so great a man as all that -- such is the reasoning of petty-bourgeois thinkers. We are convinced that the future will say that the whole greatness of Trotsky was shown most clearly in that last and so dramatic period of his existence -- such a period as none of the other great revolutionaries had to go through. Marx and Engels at the end of their days saw the workers' movement accept the doctrines that they -- for a long time almost alone -- had developed and advocated. Rosa was assassinated in a revolutionary period. Lenin died respected, just It the turning in the Russian Revolution, before he could join battle against the rising bureaucracy. It was to Trotsky, who, together with Lenin, had had the glory of leading the proletariat to power, that it fell to carry on that struggle. In it, the state that emerged from the first victorious proletarian revolution became the instrument of a narrow-minded and reactionary social layer of the new society, who systematically resorted to methods of violence within the workers' movement against the revolutionaries, cite a degree that even the reformists had not reached. In the Soviet Union alone, the number of members of the Bolshevik Party liquidated by Stalin -- according to the statement of Khrushchev at the session of the Central Committee in which he defeated Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich -- reached 1,600,000. This figure alone indicates what was then the power of the bureaucratic reaction. Its hatred was aimed with its full force against Trotsky.

Trotsky's third exile never had an equal not so much because of the agents of Stalin who never ceased to exist around Trotsky and Leon Sedov; but this exile was in practice doubled by a cloistering imposed by various capitalist governments and by the interventions of the Soviet government. True, Trotsky could leave his home, engage in physical exercise (walking, fishing, hunting, etc), but it was in fact forbidden to him to take a direct part himself in the workers' movement. It is necessary to recall the rage poured out by the Soviet press when it was learned that Trotsky had left Istanbul to give a lecture in Copenhagen. The lion had escaped from his cage; few interventions were necessary to make the Social-Democratic Danish government understand what attitude it must take. Trotsky, a man of the masses to the highest degree, a militant the essential part of whose life had been passed in workers' organizations, in fact during this last exile found himself in a sort of prison with invisible bars, for he could communicate with the world and especially with the workers' movement only through visitors under the more or less discreet control of the police of the country he was in.

What is more, he had no exchange of thoughts, no relations, with the workers' leaders of his generation: the Social-Democracy and Stalinism had divided up between them the old leaders of the workers' movement. The more recent strata -- those of the First World War and its postwar period -- provided the elements for the bureaucratic apparatuses. Those who gathered around him were quite young militants, without a past, without training. It is easy to understand that this great difference in age and experience added to his isolation from the big labor formations kept up by apparatuses.

On the occasion of the publication this year of his Diary for the years 1934-35, some persons have discovered a "human" side to Trotsky. That is because they never knew how to read Trotsky. It is not at all hard to see in all his works how much he understands -- because he shares -- the feelings of the masses risen up against all oppression. And with him, as with Marxism's other great ones, these feelings take on all the more force in that they find their source in the understanding of causes and in the conviction that mankind now possesses the means to put an end to those inhuman conditions in which the great majority of them live. Nobody was more sorely tried than he and Natalia by the most hideous manifestations of Stalinism; those who were at their side saw how they suffered each time that their children were struck down by Stalinism. But they also saw the firmness with which they faced it, and how Trotsky in his grief redoubled his strength to carry on the struggle to which he had devoted his existence.

It is not simple to summarize Trotsky's theoretical contribution to Marxism, so considerable is it.

Above all, there is the theory of the permanent revolution, formulated when he was 26, in connection with Czarist Russia, but which, because of the trend taken by the world revolution from the U S S R toward the East, in colonial and semi-colonial countries -- contains its strategic basis for nearly two thirds of humanity in our times. While the Stalinist conceptions about "socialism in a single country" and "revolution by stages" have been swept away by such gigantic facts as the Chinese Revolution, the theory of the permanent revolution is still officially ignored by some, reviled by others, who remain in tow to native bourgeoisies without strength and without future.

The fundamental strategy for the struggle for power in the advanced capitalist countries (united front and transitional programme) had been formulated by the Communist International at its IIIrd and IVth Congresses, in fact by Lenin and Trotsky. It was defended and systematically elaborated by Trotsky against Stalinist revisions (sometimes sectarian, sometimes opportunist, conceptions of the united front -- renunciation of the struggle for power and a transitional programme, and a policy of alliances with wings of the bourgeoisie, such as the Popular Front etc). Trotsky further proceeded to study in a practically exhaustive way declining capitalism's forms of defense (fascism, Bonapartism).

The creation of a first workers' state in an economically backward country and its isolation in the world raised the most complex problems on every plane. The victory of the bureaucracy and its absolute power under the tyrannical leadership of Stalin helped to aggravate all these problems. It is to Trotsky that we are indebted for the greatest clarity about these questions. On the problems of industrialization, planning, the proportions of the various branches of the economy, relations with the peasantry, relations of economic questions with soviet democracy, on political problems in the workers' state (separation of state and party, plurality of parties, etc), on cultural problems, on all problems posed today with a force rendered doubly explosive, both because of the level attained by the Soviet Union and because of the Stalinist methods of repressing independent initiative in any field whatever -- on all these problems Trotsky provided the correct method of approach, and often indeed solutions that are still valid today. That the bureaucracy, forced to take action along lines indicated by him so many years ago, should continue to manifest hostility toward Trotsky, without however resorting to the worst calumnies of the Stalin era, is easy to understand: at the basis of all Trotsky's answers there is to be found as the essential element the intervention of the masses by the reestablishment of soviet democracy.

We are leaving aside very many manifestations of Trotsky's thought in the most varied fields, in which most often he no more than sketched out the way of treating them, but which will unquestionably constitute for future Marxists -- as is the case for very many passages in the work of Marx -- a guide for tackling new problems.


There is in Trotsky's work one point on which many an admirer of today is skeptical: that is his creation of the Fourth International and his conviction that it was, as early as before the Second World War, indispensable for ensuring the future of revolutionary Marxism and of the workers' movement. We shall not take up this whole question again here, where the militants of the Fourth International have so often had occasion to deal with it. We wish only to insist on the continuity of the international and internationalist activity of Trotsky. He had been one of the representatives of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party to the Second International, and had seen its weaknesses; he had been at the foundation of the Third International, had there, together with Lenin, played the leading role, and had tried to make' it into a genuine international leadership of the revolutionary workers' movement; and had seen that one of the essential factors in its disintegration had consisted of abandoning an internationalist conception in favor of "socialism in a single country." To that it must be added that Trotsky had taken not at all lightly the error he had committed, compared to Lenin, on the question of the party. It was necessary to keep revolutionary Marxist principles intact, including that of the party -- and, after 1914, there could be no question of anything except an international party. It is there that is to be found the explanation of the immense efforts expended by Trotsky in his last years on the turbulent problems of an organization so numerically weak as the Fourth International, efforts which remain incomprehensible to those who do not understand that in so doing Trotsky was showing that he had adopted the Leninist conception of the party. On this question too, we are sure that the future will show that Trotsky was right. No one can yet foresee the forms of organization by which we shall pass from today's Fourth International of cadres to tomorrow's Fourth International of mass parties, but for us there is no doubt that the mass revolutionary Marxist movement of tomorrow will connect up with the Third International of the time of Lenin and Trotsky through the Fourth International founded in 1938 under Trotsky's leadership.


The error that Trotsky most often committed in more than one circumstance was to be ahead, and even very much ahead, of events. In that also, it may be said in passing, Trotsky found himself in the company of Marx and Engels. Although the brakes of reformism and the Soviet bureaucracy continue to have a strong effect on the mass movement throughout the world, they have lost much of their power. There is very little left of the Stalin cult five years after his death. And so we can, on this eightieth anniversary of Trotsky's birth, affirm with the greatest confidence that on his ninetieth anniversary his memory and his work will be honored by the great masses of the entire world.

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "Visions Of Cody" -On The Road-Redux

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "Visions Of Cody" -On The Road-Redux

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

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

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

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

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

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

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

Book Review

Visions Of Cody, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1973

The first three paragraphs are taken from a previous review about Jack Kerouac and his leading role in establishing the literary ethos of the "beat" generation. Those comments aptly apply in reviewing "Visions Of Cody" as well:

"As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s seminal ‘travelogue’, “On The Road”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space.

Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. They all show up, one way or another (under fictional names of course), in this book. So that is why we today are under the sign of “On The Road”.

To appreciate Kerouac and understand his mad drive for adventure and to write about it, speedily but precisely, you have to start with “On The Road”. There have been a fair number of ‘searches' for the meaning of the American experience starting, I believe, with Whitman. However, each generation that takes on that task needs a spokesperson and Jack Kerouac, in the literary realm at least, filled that bill not only for his own generation that came of age in the immediate post World War II era, but mine as well that came of age in the 1960s (and, perhaps, later generations but I can only speculate on that idea here)."

That said, “Visions Of Cody” is an extension of that “On The Road” story line that made Kerouac famous, although "Visions" is more diffuse and much more concerned with literary imager than with the storyline developed in the earlier Kerouac/Paradise narrative. Here Jack as Dulouz and Neal Cassady as Cody Pomeray do more running around on the road, partying, reflecting on the nature of the universe, partying, speculating on the nature of the American experience, partying and… well, you get the drift. In some places the descriptive language is stronger than “On The Road”, reflecting Kerouac’s greater ease with his spontaneous writing style in the early 1950s when this was written (although not widely published until after his death.).

Additionally, included here is a long series of taped interviews between Jack and Neal over several days and, presumably, while both were on a running drug “high”. These tapes reflect very nicely the very existential nature of 1950s “beat”, or at least one interpretation of that term. They produce all the madness, genius, gaffs, gaps, whimsy and pure foolishness that come from an extended drug experience. Despite all reports to the contrary not everything observed until the “influence” comes out pure literary gold, and that is true here as well. But there is a lot of good stuff nevertheless, although here it could have been cut in half and we still would have gotten that “beat” beat.

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

By Jeffrey Thorne

The times were out of sort, the times were frankly a mess and in that little window of time, the time of Josh Breslin’s Summer of Love, 1967 he saw a little chance to jailbreak out of his humdrum existence, to skip the nine to five world that his parents thrived in and expected him to follow like a lemming to the sea for a while anyhow. We will skip all his thinking that got him there, got him to act on his jailbreak impulses, he had done enough thinking on lonely desolate roads heading west in placed like Neola, Iowa, Grand Island, Nebraska, Winnemucca, Nevada and a whole slew of nameless Main Street pass-through towns to last a lifetime. Let’s get him to Summer of Love epicenter Frisco and into the whole thing, the passion thing, with Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love.

For those who are already confused by the today strange monikers  that latter one was Josh Breslin’s self-anointed moniker once he hit Russian Hill in that Bagdad of a city. In those days, in that little window of time when the world was turned upside down, or a small segment of society, mainly young, when you looked back from a fifty year view, everybody was try to “reinvent” themselves, making a new washed clean beginning and so an epidemic of name-changing rushed the land. Josh a very good looking guy with some ego, a lot of ego for a working class kid from up in ocean-side Maine, Olde Saco to be exact, decided that he was royalty or something and so tagged himself with that moniker. (The Scribe, whom we will get to in a moment, used to kid him that he was really the Prince of Lvov, a Podunk town in Poland just to tweak his ego a bit.)        

So Josh Breslin just out of high school hit Frisco town, hit first stop Russian Hill after being told by some holy goof, that term no put down but a real live Yippie freak who called attention to himself using that idea, in Golden Gate Park, the epicenter of the epicenter at a certain point, that righteous dope could be had up that hill. As he walked up the long drawn out hill in a city with a fistful of hills he stopped near a park when he saw this amazing sight, amazing to him then but common to the emerging scene as he would find out later, a converted yellow school bus. The bus transformed on the outside into some fantastic psychedelic moving art show and inside a cheap travelling home after the seats had been ripped out and mattresses completely covered the floor and in the back boxes filled with spare clothes, food, and utensils. Topped off by a big sound speaker system just then blaring out some unheard of by him music from he thought maybe India or something (music which turned out to the Jefferson Airplane as they moved into the acid rock music world which took a spin as the rock genre of choice among the dope aficionados of the time like cool jazz had sustained the tea head beats a half generation before.

More importantly for our tale as he approached the bus he noticed a young guy, a guy who looked a few years older than him but still young with a long beard and long hair (Josh was beardless and had only let his hair start to grow after he fled staid bi-weekly barber shop Olde Saco and got on the road) sitting on the sidewalk beside this monster of a bus. Without hesitating Josh walked up to the guy and asked if he had a joint. The guy, the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin, also without hesitation, reached into his denim jacket pocket and passed Josh a big old joint, a blunt in the dope world language of the day, and that began the friendship, a little rocky at times, but a lasting time until the Scribe’s untimely and mysterious early death several years later.       

What that converted yellow school bus was about to give an idea of the times was that the owner, although don’t make a today’s assumption about the owner part, Captain Crunch (real name Jack Shepard, Yale, Class of 1958) had bought it or traded for it that never was clear to Josh as he heard different stories from different sources for a bag of dope in order to roam up and down the West Coast ocean-side highways picking up and letting people off along the way. The Scribe, who had quit college in Boston to head west once he heard about the Summer of Love stuff happening. Stuff which had confirmed for him his long time prediction that a new breeze was about to hit the land, to hit youth nation in particular had met Captain Crunch in Golden Gate Park and had already taken one trip up and down the coast to San Diego and back. It was on that trip back up the coast in Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego that Kathy Callahan, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968, the Butterfly Swirl of this scenario comes into the picture.     

Kathy, let’s call her Butterfly Swirl to keep with the times and her time, had been nothing but a Southern California surfer girl meaning in those days that she looked beautiful, tanned and curvaceous on the beach while her golden-haired surfer boyfriend went hunting for the perfect wave. It was along the Pacific Coast Highway one late afternoon as it passed through Carlsbad where the yellow brick road bus had stopped to see the breath-taking ocean view that the Scribe spied Butterfly Swirl sunning herself waiting for her by then pruned surfer boy to come ashore for the day. The Scribe went up to her and started asking questions about surfers, surfing, a subject he knew nothing about having come from the East where such a sport did not have any cache then. They talked for a while and during that time the Scribe found out that Butterfly was kind of restless going into her senior year of high school, was intrigued by what she heard was happening up in youth nation San Francisco. 

Yeah, the times were like that. You would expect a guy like the Scribe to head west once he got the message. Maybe even expect a guy like Josh before heading on to other things to head west and see what was what. What was extraordinary was the jail breakout of a gal like Butterfly Swirl who if she was a few years older would have been totally immersed in the surfer culture and could have given a damn about some weirdos up north where the weirdos congregated and had done so for a couple of generations. The long and short of it was that a couple of days later Butterfly Swirl after the Scribe’s coaxing was “on the bus” heading north.

One of the things that guys like the Scribe was trying to break out of was the old girl-guy one and only thing although breaking through that barrier had been easier said than done. For a few weeks though as the bus headed to Xanadu, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterrey and up through Pacifica before landing once again in Golden Gate Park the Scribe and Butterfly Swirl were lovers. The Scribe gave Butterfly Swirl her first experiences with dope mostly marijuana, peyote buttons and mescaline, the LSD, the Kool-aid acid test would come later with Josh. And Butterfly being an easy-going young woman began to fit in with the travelling band of gyspys who populated the bus.        

Then the same day Josh met the Scribe on Russian Hill after he had brought Josh on board the bus Butterfly Swirl who had been out pan-handling to get some provisions for the bus saw him and that was that. Something happened between them from minute one but it was not until later that night that the big switch happened after they were all stoned. The Scribe who had taken a half-lover, half-fatherly interest in Butterfly Swirl once he saw that she was not very intellectually curious (although very sexually curious and inventive) saw the writing on the wall and “blessed” the union, became head of that little trio family. A couple of weeks later at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love had their first Kool-aid acid test and the Scribe, satanic love preacher “married” them. Yeah, like I said the times were like that, exactly like that.      

[As mentioned above the Scribe and Josh would be friends until the Scribe’s untimely death in the mid-1970s. As for Butterfly Swirl by summer’s end she had had enough of roaming and cavorting and returned to her golden-haired surfer boy still looking for that perfect wave. Not everybody was built to go the distance even in the Summer of Love. J.T. ]