Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four

Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He wrote of small-voiced people, mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder, never were heard over the rumble of the subway, working stiffs and their women, sometimes their kids, their kids growing up like weeds, who turned out to be disappointments but what could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of North Adamsville, another town filled with small-voice people). Never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people who tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors, people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall (not some edenic fall but just a worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored). Wrote of the desperately lonely, a man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to him move on, or else, a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, no more. Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did Eliot call it, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. 

Wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man, about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. Wrote of the night people, of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the  people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all shape angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well, or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal moment. The next fix, how to get it, the next drink, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment. Waiting eternally waiting to get well, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any doctor could prescript, better than any priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them. Not for him the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn, the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine or whatever the traffic would bear, or of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred who of course they would never tell do when the whole thing goes public (although one suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent)who in the pull and push of the writing profession they had (have) their muses. Nor was he inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard (although again one suspects he could have, if so inclined, shilled for that set). No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him a name took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, other to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

I remember reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the feckless “hot rod” boys, boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

He spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers, all night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

Poets’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Poets Take A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath    

By Lenny Lynch

I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20^th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios. 

I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.         

Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,  would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.

In Honor Of Those Who Cannot Boil Water-In The Midst Of The Things Culinary Craze-Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth -“Love’s Kitchen” (2011)-A Film Review

In Honor Of Those Who Cannot Boil Water-In The Midst Of The Things Culinary Craze-Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth -“Love’s Kitchen” (2011)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Love’s Kitchen, starring Claire Forlani, Dougray Scott, 2011 

Sometimes a film reviewer like me knows exactly why he or she gets an assignment. And I can tell you exactly why since under site editor Greg Green we have been encouraged to give a little “inside scoop” stuff about the workings of the on-line publishing business. My tale is simple. I happened to mention in response to I think fellow critic Sarah Lemoyne who was talking about the incredible increase in all things culinary both on-line and in the theaters that in all things culinary I could not boil water. Somehow Greg found out about my withered statement and called me in to tell me that I was the primo candidate to do the British film under review. Love’s Kitchen. Although Greg himself thought along with many of the British critics who panned the film this was a “turkey,” pun intended, he wanted to ride the culinary interest wave and have the film reviewed, reviewed by a guy who “kitchen sink” eats prepared foods a lot.  

Sarah, her mentor Seth Garth and I sat through this thing and were scratching our heads to make sense of it other than to cash in on the cheap in the culinary craze bonanza. See what this film is really about is not food, Jesus, not English food like Welsh rarebit which even I draw the line at, but the twelve millionth reincarnation of the “boy-meets-girl trope that Hollywood and now the whole cinematic world has latched onto when you have a turkey that leaves people scratching their heads. That interplay has saved more than one film although not this one.

Here is why. Rising chef in the British culinary world Rob Haley, you have probably if you have been to London lately since one of his gastropubs that are seemingly popping up in every corner of the kingdom, played by Dougray Scott, lost his wife to a fatal automobile accident. That event crushed him (and his coming of age daughter) and he wound up working in some dung heap serving kippers and other such swill to the unknowing clientele. Not in obscurity though since his efforts were panned by a well-known American food critic Kate Templeton, you have probably read her searing and truculent reviews yourself or seen her as the beautiful winsome judge on some Food Channel production, before you got snagged into this lemon. Eventually our boy Rob snapped out of his morass and began a reclamation project on an old pub that he purchased out in the English boondocks. For those who thought this would be a place to learn how to cook or get a tip on spices from a real pro forget it since fixing up the pub to be ready for the carriage trade is the high point of the culinary intrusion.

Back to the plot. At first things don’t go well since Rob refuses to let any critic within a mile of the place. Enter Kate Templeton, Rob’s arch-enemy from that thumbs down review who immediately forms a pole of attraction to the lonely Rob. Here is what I didn’t know about Kate though she was the daughter not only of an American mother but of Sir Max Templeton, yes, that Max Templeton who before knighthood, before OBE time was ransacking taking no prisoners every home in America who had any young women within. Maxie had met his soon to be wife in the American wild 1960s be-bop night of “drugs, sex and rock and roll” of which he was a master of all three. For those who don’t remember Maxie or are too young go on YouTube to see what it was like when men and women played rock roll for keeps. Google Little Red Rooster the Chicago blues tune written by Willie Dixon and charted by Howlin’ Wolf which Maxie and the boys covered and made the first of several big hits on. That was then though now Maxie, Sir Maxie, is a cranky, creepy, crusty, cruller of a man who wants nothing but calm and contentment. Certainly not the crowd that would gather at a top-notch restaurant out in the English country side. He will make trouble for Rob through a willing confederate smitten by Kate but mainly act as a side-show of remorse for abandoning Kate as a child.

Pretty far removed from recipes for crepes or casseroles, right. It only gets worse as Kate beguiles Rob’s daughter and then on cue beguiles her father. Funny, what gets her home, what gets her under her silk sheets with the man he had to show her the proper way to dice carrots that one would think even an American college professor of culinary studies would know how to do before entering the lists as a critic is her shining light review of his menu. So be it. Once the satin sheets are messed as also on cue there is a moment’s misunderstanding when Kate unbeknownst to her has to take the heart for her father’ s hatchet-handed attempts to shut the joint down. Not to worry remorseful Maxie drops the complaints, his agent is gone to ground and Rob hurries off to the arms of the gallant Kate. If you were looking to see what it was like when men and women keep kitchen for keeps look elsewhere.        

On The 60th Anniversary- When The King Was “The King”-Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” (1957)-A Film Review

On The 60^th Anniversary- When The King Was “The King”-Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” (1957)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

Jailhouse Rock, starring Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler, 1957

As I have mentioned before sometimes as an associate film critic, meaning a junior member of the staff, you receive the tail-end assignments, not the good stuff which is left to Sandy Salmon (and in the old days Sam Lowell). Sometimes you get an assignment that is something of a so-called “learning experience” like the time I mentioned to Sandy that I did not know who Janis Joplin was when he asked me what I thought of her as part of his Summer of Love, 1967 seemingly endless nostalgia trip and he assigned me to review the D.A. Pennebaker documentary on the first Monterey Pops Festival in that same year where Janis blew the house down. That was not the case with the film under review Elvis’ (do I need to print his last name for the three people in the world who do not know who I am talking about solely by using his first name) Jailhouse Rock from 1957 which played off of his huge record hit of the previous year. I practically begged Sandy for the assignment especially after Sam Lowell decided that he wanted to concentrate on finishing his also seemingly never-ending series on early 1950s B-film noirs put out by the English Hammer Production Company. Sandy demurred suggesting that like with the Janis Joplin episode I could learn something about the days when men and women (think Wanda Jackson) played rock and roll like their lives depended on it- and it and they did.               

Now everybody knows, or should know since I am an associate critic and thus much younger that those reprobate rockers Sandy and Sam who were as Sam put it one time “present at the creation,” that I am at least a decade if not more removed from having been, as Sam Lowell would also put it, washed clean by the rock and roll wave that swept American youth in the mid-1950s. But that fact does not mean that unlike the Janis Joplin episode that I am unfamiliar with the work of “the King” when he was in the king in the 1950s dawning light. The link? I grew up in a rather tepid household in New Jersey anchored by staid and respectable parents, my father a civil engineer and my mother, Mildred eternally called Milly, nothing but a great and resourceful housewife as befit a professional man’s wife in those days if not now. Except that Milly was wild for Elvis back in her teenage maiden days. The days when Elvis made all the women sweat. So against staid respectable housewifely type-cast all day long on some days especially when Pa was away she would play whatever Elvis tunes hit her fancy just then. And dance to some of them to my embarrassment when I was younger since it seemed kind of provocative to me although I didn’t know what that word meant then. The long and short of it though is that love of Elvis must have been in my DNA since I have always been a fan of his early music if not the horrible films that he got talked into after Jailhouse Rock or the muted musical life of a stuffed animal Vegas head-liner. Yeah, the classic age of Good Rockin’ Tonight, It’s Alright Mama, One Night With You (better the version that has One Night of Sin to the same melody-what he might have been if he followed down that path a bit), Heartbreak Hotel,  and of course the progenitor of the film under review Jailhouse Rock.  The songs that when you look at YouTube versions makes you understand why he made women like my mother sweat and scream their frustrations away in their teenage fantasies.       

I am sure that I had seen the film Jailhouse Rock sometime in my youth since I am sure my mother had it on some revival retro television station or we saw it at the retro-movies downtown but I was foggy about the details enough tin this watching that I soon realized that I didn’t recall much of the plotline. After viewing I had come away really wishing that Elvis had not done another movie because none compares with the snarly, sullen, youth he portrays speaking for a whole lost post-World War II generation who had been too young for that war but had immersed in the frightening Cold War night that froze the American landscape and which even I caught the tail-end of myself.

From scene one in some drunken back alley barroom when sullen, sulky construction worker Vince Everett (Elvis’ role) gets into a fight with some irate customer and winds killing him drawing two hard years in the state pen Elvis lights the screen up. Sure there were a million sullen youth out in places like La Jolla sucking up the surfboard seas, hot rodding down midnight Thunder Roads in Mill Valley, motorcycle helling with angels like Marlon Brando’s Johnny Too Bad tearing up the holy landscape with nothing going but Elvis spoke to them. Spoke to guys like Sam Lowell and Pete Markin in Podunk North Adamsville and a ton of places like that. And he would have stayed sullen and snarly forever, would have measured his sappy life by prison stretches except that jailbreak-in bought him in contact with a guy like Hunk, his bunkmate, a lifer-type jailbird who happened to have been a small something in the music industry before the inevitable woman got him thinking crazy about whiskey and blowjobs and got him a long stretch from a stinking two bit robbery.          

Yeah, old Hunk was always looking for the angle, for the next best thing, saw in the kid something, saw a meal ticket and so he made Vince sign a pact with the devil, take a chance to break out of that “from hunger” world that guys like Sam, Pete, and even Sandy talk about in their poor boy working class days when they too might have taken one wrong turn too many. I know Sam has told me a million times it was a close thing with him (a couple of his brothers didn’t make it-wound up inside the pen more than outside). So sullen, surly too after a deuce in stir Vince takes the air on the outside thinking maybe he can make it as an entertainer not small potatoes like Hunk but big, with that big red convertible of his dreams.     

But a million guys back then had that like a million other guys sound borrowed from Hank Williams or Big Joe Turner or Frank Sinatra, hell, guys were even borrowing styles and form from hokey Mickey Alba who knocked the women for a loop-for a minute and then they went back to sleep. No soap, no soap for Vince except maybe cadging drinks for a tune or coffee and. That is until he met record hustling insider Peggy who sets him up on the road to dough although never giving him a tumble. Never buying into that from hunger need Vince exuded since as bright as she was she was strictly suburban middle class and sullen and snarly in that milieu only played in sociology classes or in the magazines.   

Vince and Peggy wash out until two things happen, happen in the small company world of records in the days before big operations like RCA and Columbia sucked all the air out of Mom and Pop operations. First Vince got told via a tape-recording that he sounded like a lonesome cowboy singing to and for himself. No feeling, no jump until Peggy blasted him. Made him jump feel the song. Second Vince figured that he still had a shot at the bigs by producing and hustling his own records and it worked. Once a Peggy-friend DJ spun his platter the girls went crazy, went Milly and fantasies crazy. The rest was history.

Well almost history since our boy Vince had a thing for Peggy but couldn’t express it, couldn’t figure a way to get to her and Hunk came out of stir looking for his cut. He got it alright and in the end Vince got Peggy too but that was a close thing. Here’s the real play though since every Hollywood production, or most anyway, have some boy meets girl conflict that must be resolves by the end or else just like here. What you want to watch this movie for and if you can’t get it go to YouTube to watch is that Elvis scene when he is doing Jailhouse Rock for a television show. Watch (forget the lip synched song) Elvis go through his paces, watch him make the moves that later guys would imitate although they couldn’t surpass. Watch what made all the young things sweat, hell, all the grown women too. Watch why my mother in her sainted sanitary home kept her girlish fantasies alive listening to the king when he was the king do his stuff. Yeah, watch when men (and women too) played rock and roll for keeps.        

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Sean Connery’s 007-“Goldfinger” (1964)- A Film Review

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Sean Connery’s 007-“Goldfinger” (1964)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Guest Film Critic Si Lannon  

Goldfinger, starring Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Frobe, based on the James Bond character by British spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming, 1964

I have only myself to blame for this one, for this review of Goldfinger after having reviewed the first film in the James Bond 007 series Doctor No based on master spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming’s iconic character. I find myself, as on other recent occasions, going on what my old friend and colleague Sam Lowell called a “run.” That is grabbing everything one can in a series on some subject, here the Sean Connery James Bond films, and playing out your hand. I suppose I could shift the blame and lay my new tendency on that old curmudgeon Sam since he is notorious in film critic circles for going crazy when he goes on a “run.” I will nevertheless take full credit/blame here since what these Bond films evoke in memories of 1960s drive-in theater antics-and sexual longings of course. [For a recent example of his influence although he is no longer in charge of day to day operations but now working under the title of film critic emeritus Sam has been on something of a tear having already done five or six reviewing 1950s B-film noirs from the ten film Hammer Production series. Pete Markin]        

When I reviewed Doctor No, the first Bond film by Connery, there was a great deal of anticipation built up by the advertising campaign promoting the film. Especially of the sexy young women who would be catnip for Bond. That was one draw although not the biggest one. The biggest one was to see that film at the local drive-in theater where, well, where the real live girls were. I have already mentioned our poor boy working-class roots where we were always seeking some small time con/scam to do things for little money from guys who had no serious dough. For the drive-in experience that was in the days before the theater owners got wise and started charging by the carload when they charged single admissions to load up the car with say six guys and only have maybe three showing (with the other guys in the trunk or down on the backseat floor).

That same scam was done once again in order to see this Goldfinger film which was if anything more hyped up that the initial offering since part of the draw was showing a gold-plated young woman who got caught in the deadly Midas touch. But the “real deal” was that we were now older and less shy about “hitting” on the young women who were hanging out at the well-known area in back of the refreshment stand who also came through in the same carload manner that we did. So the innocence of the first film gave way to more foggy windshields, sighs (you know what I mean) and such.                

Thus this recent viewing of Goldfinger was the first time I actually saw the film all the way through. Needless to say I didn’t remember most of what happened, how could I, except that mesmerizing gold-painted young woman and that great lead-in title song by Shirley Bassey. Here’s the play this time around. In the day (before 1971) when the benchmark dollar and pound were pegged to the price of gold the British Treasury Board of Governors was worried about controlling the flow of that precious metal and efforts by rogue elements like the Auric Goldfinger of the title to corner the market. So 007 James Bond was on the case to figure out how this character was getting his gold around the various international restrictions. The chase was on but not before our boy James gets a very rude awakening (literally) finding a young woman he was having a quick roll in the hay with all gold-plated as a warning signal for him to back off. (Forgetting that such as desecration would only bestir our man to greater revengeful deeds especially after that gal’s vengeance seeking sister laid her head down trying to off the bastard.)        

Naturally Bond is ready for anything including that attempt by the dead woman’s sister to kill Goldfinger and gum up the works. What Goldfinger was up to in collusion with the nasty Red Chinese (in the days when the People’s Republic was called Red China in Western terminology) who provided men and technology in aid of Goldfinger’s nefarious plan was to neutralize the gold at Fort Knox and make a killing on the steeply increased value of his gold holdings not by stealing it but by making it unusable by making it radioactive-nice touch, right. James of course learns of this plan while he was a prisoner of the greedy Goldfinger. The idea was to have Goldfinger’s confederate Pussy Galore (a very suggestive name and the subject of lots of sexual jokes among the corner boys in my neighborhood hang-out spots), played by Honor Blackman, and her all-female team of pilots spray deadly gas in the area knocking out everybody. Then blowing the gate at Fort Knox unobstructed and putting a radioactive devise in the vault with all the gold bars making them useless as a currency. Goldfinger’s whole plan went asunder when handsome Johnny James Bond snagged Pussy and made her his ally faking the deadly spray and leaving the American troops to fight off the Chinese invaders (sound familiar). In the end Goldfinger lost his life as expected by trying to go mano a mano with Bond. Bond and Pussy go under the sheets once again as the film ends. You know I am glad based on this story line that I spent my first time dealing with this film fogging up car windshields-okay,       

After Charlottesville-Greensboro 1979-Never Forget- Learn The Lessons Of History-Should Fascists Be Allowed the Right of Free Speech?

After Charlottesville-Greensboro 1979-Never Forget- Learn The Lessons Of History-Should Fascists Be Allowed the Right of Free Speech?

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Greensboro 1979 events.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre

Markin comment:

The events of Greenboro, North Carolina 1979, today more than ever as we gear up our struggles in the aftermath of the spark of the Occupy movement, should be permanently etched in our minds. We had best know how to deal with the fascists and other para-military types that rear their heads when people begin to struggle against the bosses. The article below points the way historically.
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Markin comment on this article :

Every year, and rightfully so, we leftist militants, especially those of us who count ourselves among the communist militants, remember the 1979 Greensboro, North Carolina massacre of fellow communists by murderous and police-protected Nazis, fascists and Klansmen. That remembrance, as the article below details, also includes trying to draw the lessons of the experience and an explanation of political differences. For what purpose? Greensboro 1979-never again, never forget-or forgive.

Although right this minute, this 2011 minute, the Nazis/fascists are not publicly raising their hellish ideas, apparently “hiding” just now on the fringes of the tea party movement, this is an eternal question for leftists. The question, in short, of when and how to deal with this crowd of locust. Trotsky, and others, had it right back in the late 1920s and early 1930s-smash this menace in the shell. 1933, when they come to power, as Hitler did in Germany (or earlier, if you like, with Mussolini in Italy) is way too late, as immediately the German working class, including its Social-Democratic and Communist sympathizers found out, and later many parts of the rest of the world. That is the when.

For the how, the substance of this article points the way forward, and the way not forward, as represented by the American Communist Party’s (and at later times other so-called “progressives” as well, including here the Communist Workers Party) attempts to de-rail the street protests and rely, as always, on the good offices of the bourgeois state, and usually, on this issue the Democrats. Sure, grab all the allies you can, from whatever source, to confront the fascists when they raise their heads. But rely on the mobilization of the labor movement on the streets to say what’s what, not rely on the hoary halls of bourgeois government and its hangers-on, ideologues, and lackeys.
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Should Fascists Be Allowed the Right of Free Speech?

A Working Class Point of View on the Question That Was
Brought to the Fore Again by the Professional Democrats
When the Nazis Mobilized at the Garden
_
-Reprinted from the Socialist Appeal, 3 March 1939

It seems that the only point of importance that the Professional Liberals and Democrats could see in the big mobilization of the Nazis at Madison Square Garden last week, was their "right of free speech and assembly."
Mayor LaGuardia kept reiterating emphatically that his attachment to Democracy compelled him to grant the Fascists the right to hold their meeting and provide them with extraordinary police protection.
The American Civil Liberties Union rushed into print to insist that the right of free speech be extended to the Hitlerites.

One of the numerous committees of the Jewish bourgeoisie, anxious to demonstrate that it loves fairness above all else, did likewise.
Even the wretched little Jewish anarchist weekly published in New York indignantly reproached the Trotskyists for the lack of sense in "demanding the right of free speech and assembly for oneself and at the same time trying to prevent the freedom of speech of our opponents..."

Freedom for Nazis But Not for Pickets

Before going further into the consideration of the question
of "free speech for Fascists," it is interesting and important
to record the fact that all the above-mentioned who showed
such touching concern for the "democratic rights" of the Nazis,
are entirely unconcerned with the brutal police suppression
of the picketing rights of the workers who assembled outside
the Garden.

The Mayor simply refused to see a delegation which came to protest against the violence of the police who rode down and slugged the picketers.
The American Civil Liberties Union, apparently exhausted by its noble efforts in behalf of the Nazis, didn't utter a peep about the democratic rights of free speech, assembly and picketing being denied the 50,000 anti-Fascists who came to protest the Nazi rally. Ditto for the Jewish committee.
As for the anarchist Freie Arbeiter Stimme, it says not a word about the police assaults, but villainously insinuates that the Terrible Trotskyists were really at fault because, Mr. Police Commissioner, they planned a violent attack on the Nazis who were innocently celebrating Washington's Birthday. Unbelievable, but here are its exact words: "But there are times when people who endeavor to do social work, must reflect ten times, a hundred times, before they come out with an appeal for acts of violence."

What the Problem Really Involves

The question of "democratic rights for the Nazis" cannot be resolved on the basis of Liberal phrasemongers. All such a discussion can produce is a bewildering tangle of words and abstractions. At a more decisive stage, as all recent experience has proved, it produces a first class disaster not only for the working class but also for the Professional Liberals and Democrats themselves.

How many of them, indeed, are there in concentration camps, in prison and in exile who are continuing the thoroughly futile and abstract discussion over whether or not the Fascist gangsters should be granted the "democratic rights of free speech and assembly"!

And what is most decisive—this is the point which leads us directly to a solution of the problem that seems to agitate so many people—is the fact that in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Spain, the Democrats were so concerned with preserving the "rights" of the Fascists that they concentrated all their attacks and repressive measures upon those workers and those labor organization which sought to conduct a militant struggle against the Fascists and for the preservation and extension of their truly democratic rights and institutions.

It is when the bourgeois "democrats" like Giolitti in Italy and Bruening in Germany, had done all in their power to smash' the most progressive and active sections of the working class—as LaGuardia and his police tried to do on a smaller scale in New York last week—that the Fascists concluded successfully their march to totalitarian power. Whoever forgets this important lesson from abroad, is a fool. Whoever tries to keep others ignorant of this lesson, is a rogue.

A Simple Example

Let us take a simple example which every worker has ex¬perienced dozens of times.

A strike is called. The authorities promptly jump into the situation in order to protect the "democratic rights" of the scabs and the company gunmen who guard them. The "right to work" of the scab, which is guaranteed by the capitalist govern¬ment, amounts in reality to his "right" to starve out the striking workers and reduce them to helpless pawns of the employers.
Millons of workers have learned the futility and deceptiveness of the academic discussion of the scab's "democratic rights," as well as of appealing to the government and its police to "arbitrate" the dispute involved. They try to solve the question, as they must, in the course of struggle. The workers throw their picket-lines around the struck plant. The conflict between the scab's "right" to break a strike and the workers' right to live, is also settled on the course of struggle—in favor of those who plan better, organize better, and fight better.

Same Rule Applies on Broader Scene

The same rule applies in the struggle against the much bigger scab movement that Fascism represents.The workers who spend all their time and energy in the abstract discussion of the Nazis' "democratic rights"—to say nothing of working themselves into a lather in defense of these "rights"—will end their discussion under a Fascist club in a concentration camp.

The workers who delude themselves and waste their time begging the capitalist Democrats in office to "act" against the Fascists, will end up in the same place, just as the workers of Italy, Germany and Austria did.
The workers have more vital concerns. They are and should be interested in defending and expanding their democratic rights. But not in any abstract sense. These rights are the concrete rights of free speech, assembly, press, the right to organize, strike and picket, without which an independent working class simply cannot exist.

A decaying capitalism—of which Fascism is only a natural product—seeks constantly to restrict and destroy these rights, which are not truly genuine even in "normal" times. These rights can only be defended from the assaults of capitalism and its ugly offspring, Fascism, in the same way in which they were first acquired: by the tireless, aggressive, unbending, inde¬pendent struggle of the working class.

The wailing and weeping about the Nazis' "rights" can safely be left to the prissy Liberals and the phoney Democrats.

The self-preservation of the working class demands that it cut through all abstract chatter and smash the Fascist gangs by decisive and relentless action.

Once Again-For the Umpteenth Time There Really Is No Honor Among Thieves -Just Ask Robert Mitchum A Guy Who Should Know-Jane Greer And Robert Mitchum’s “The Big Steal” (1949)-A Film Review

Once Again-For the Umpteenth Time There Really Is No Honor Among Thieves -Just Ask Robert Mitchum A Guy Who Should Know-Jane Greer And Robert Mitchum’s “The Big Steal” (1949)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Big Steal, starring Jane Greer, Robetr Micthum, William Bendix, 1949

This film review of The Big Steal, an encore performance by Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum who lighted the screen on fire in their dance of death in the film adaptation of Out Of The Past (along with a young Kirk Douglas as the fall guy, or at least the guy who fell-first) was supposed to go to Seth Garth who did the original review of the latter film and was to compare the energies of the two filmed performances. After we, Seth is something like my mentor even though I have my by-line now after taking down old-time film reviewer Sam Lowell a peg or two, and site manager Greg Green watched this film one evening Seth told us that perhaps I was better able to write this one since he would be in mourning for his lost youth when this pair were as likely to kill each other as to go under what he called “the silky sheets” and what I called having sex. Seth said he knew that Jane and Robert had gone soft after their last set-to and while he liked this film, he had some psychological energy committed to their being star-crossed lovers for eternity.     

I could see what he meant if I didn’t fully understand why since he has written tons of reviews of films where things got switched up in the sequels or another film. But I liked the film, liked the fast-paced energy that seems to be missing in many of today’s action-adventure pseudo-noir productions. Before I go on though Seth insists that I explain quickly what he couldn’t face doing the review. Simply put in that Old Of The Past  which also passed through sunny Mexico as here Jane and Robert became lovers, lovers who should have gotten the hell out of Dodge when old Kirk came looking for them, came wondering a little why he was the fall guy, why he big-time mobster was made to look like a chump when they fled without him getting what he wanted from Robert whom he hired to track Jane down and bring her back to Reno. But the biggest problem was that Seth couldn’t get over Jane’s outstanding performance there as a gun-simple femme fatale who shot first and asked questions later.

The reader does not have worry about Jane here as sedate and street smart Joan shooting every guy in sight since while she starts out not trusting Duke, yeah, Duke Halliday, you may have seen the headline where he got robbed of an Army payroll and looked to be the patsy to take the fall. He will get well by recovering the dough and meting out a little rough plebian justice while doing so. See the Army, the Army in the person of an officer named Bill Bendix who had spent a career cleaning up the Army’s messes, thought that Duke, beautiful broad-shouldered and barren-chested Duke with the jutted jaw that drove my mother crazy when she used to go to the Saturday matinees to see Robert Mitchum what she called strut his stuff, had been part of the scam, had been involved in the payroll robbery.  

That premise sets everything else in motion down sunny Mexico way where Duke to save his hide has gone looking for the bad guys who did him wrong. Mainly a guy named Jim Fiske who from one report was from one of the branches of the 19^th century robber baron Fiske family and so an armed robbery or two didn’t seem that out of the ordinary. This Fiske though was a slippery character and led Duke a merry chase. Had led dear Joan up a tree as well with some scam he ran on her to get some dough for whatever reason con artists use to grab dough. So that sets up the paring of Duke and Joan looking to get a little rough justice in the world on their own. Set them off across Mexico in pursuit of Fiske in the meantime and dodging and being followed by Bill Bendix. See Fiske is looking to get well by unloading his cash on a fence out in some isolated desert who will give him a percentage of the value no questions asked and that would be that.

Here is where the “no honor among thieves comes in.” Duke was slated to be the fall guy, the guy to take the big step-off if necessary, since Bill Bendix was in cahoots with Fiske. Nice right. Nicer still is that the two confederates didn’t trust each other and rightfully so since hard-pressed Bill facing some cheapjack pension and nothing more wanted the whole bundle for himself. As if Brother Fiske. No go, Joe. After he blasted Fiske Duke and he tussled, and he lost. And Duke and milady Joan walk off into the sunset holding hands. That has to be better than Robert taking two or three quick gun-simple slugs from an irate Jane when she realized that Robert has called copper on her in Out Of The Past. Still a good film although looking at a photograph from that film Seth showed me after I took this assignment when he wanted to show why he didn’t want of Ms. Greer looking very sexily provocative makes me see his point a little better.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

Poets’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Poets Take A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath    

By Lenny Lynch

I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20^th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios. 

I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.         

Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,  would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.