This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
From an American Left History blog review of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall-
… Hey, haven’t I already reviewed this movie. No, sorry that was Manhattan another in the line of very witty Woody Allen movies. But the point is this it is the same subject that Woody addressed there even though chronologically Annie Hall came first by a couple of years and received the lion’s share of kudos and awards. As virtually always Allen is intent upon commenting on New York life and its intellectual trends and the ups and downs of relationships, mainly with women. Here he adds a flourish by contrasting old New York (in the 1970’s) to up and coming California as the cultural mecca of the American empire. And, as should be the case, New York wins.
Add to that the perennial issue of Woody’s struggle with ‘interpersonal’ relationships and his angst-driven desire to understand the modern world and you have a very fine social commentary of the times. Needless to say Woody’s love interest Annie Hall (as played by his then paramour Diane Keaton) keeps him hopping. As does an ensemble cast that works well together as foils for his ironic and savage humor. The only surprise in revisiting this film recently is how well Keaton plays her role as an up and coming torch singer. Of course, I have always been a sucker for torch singers but that is another matter. Some of the humor may seem dated and very 1970’s New Yorkish. Some of Woody’s mannerism and use of sight gags may seem like old news. But this is a film to watch or re-watch if you have seen it before.
And hence…
Bullets Over Broadway
Apparently, as long as it involves a New York City scenario Woody Allen is more than happy to take a run at a plot that involves that locale in some way. Here it is the Great White Way- Broadway during its heyday in the Prohibition Era 1920’s that gets his attention (as it has before in the classic Broadway Danny Rose). What really makes this plot line very, very funny and makes the film work however is the twist of interspersing production of a play with nefarious gangster activity.
Here a struggling (weren’t we all and still are) Greenwich Village writer has a play in search of a backer and in the process a gangster ‘ghostwriter’. Up comes one backer-with a problem- his ‘doll’ wants in on the play and he needs to stay one or two steps ahead of his rivals. These antics drive the play nicely as does a brilliant performanceby Diane Wierst doing a fantastic send up of Gloria Swanson as the has been actress searching for a comeback in Billy Wilder’s classic Hollywood Boulevard. This one is definitely the five star without the hype.
From The
Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His
First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-From Some Misbegotten Flower Child
November 14,
2018 marked the first anniversary of my officially becoming site manager at
this publication and in acknowledgement of that tight touch first year I
started going back to the archives here from the time this publication went to
totally on-line existence due to financial considerations in 2006. (Previously
from its inception in 1974 it had been hard copy for many years and then in the
early 2000s was both hard copy and on-line before turning solely to on-line
publication.) This first year has been hard starting with the residue of the
“water-cooler fist fight” started by some of the younger writers who balked at
the incessant coverage of the 1960s, highlighted in 2017 by the 50th
anniversary commemorations of the Summer of Love, 1967 ordered by previous site
manager Allan Jackson. They had not even been born, had had to consult in many
cases parents and the older writers here when Allan assigned them say a review
of the Jefferson Airplane rock band which dominated the San Francisco scene at
the height of the 1960s. That balking led to a decisive vote of “no confidence”
requested by the “youth cabal” in the Jackson regime and replacement by me. You
can read all about the various “takes” on the situation in these very archives
from the fall of 2017 on if you can stand it. If you want to know if Allan was
“purged,” “sent into exile,” variously ran a whorehouse in San Francisco with
old flame Madame LaRue or shacked up with a drag queen named Miss Judy Garland
or sold out to the Mormons to get a press agent job with the Mitt Romney for
Senate campaign after he left here it is all there. I, having been brought in
by Allan from American Film Gazette
to run the day to day operations as he concentrated on “the big picture” stayed
on the sidelines, didn’t have a vote in any case since I was only on “probation.”
A lot of the
rocky road I faced was of my own making early on since to make my mark, and to
look toward the future I came up with what even I now see as a silly idea of
trying to reach a younger demographic (than the 1960s devotees who have
sustained this publication since its founding). I went on a crash program of
having writers, young and old, do reviews of Marvel/DC cinematic comic book
characters, graphic novels, hip-hop, techno music and such. The blow-back came
fast and furious by young and old writers alike and so the Editorial Board that
had been put in place in the wake of Allan’s departure called a halt to that
direction. A lot of the reasons why I am presenting the archival material along
with this piece is both to see where we can go from here that makes sense to
the Ed Board and through that body the cohort of writers who grace this
publication and which deals with the reality of a fading demographic as the
“Generation of ’68” passes on. Additionally, like every publication hard copy
or on-line, we receive much material we can’t or won’t use although that too
falls into the archives so here is a chance to give that material a “second
life.”
Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts
A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source 2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21st century on the 200th anniversary of his birth:
http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
By Seth Garth
Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2018. And Frank at first fought me a little on this and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. Greg had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school, forever known as Scribe for obvious reasons, and so I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and later would act on them a little. (Some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he had been plenty or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)
Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in blew a gasket in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on normal American propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx.
Like I say a glimmer then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be more so later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later. I remember one night Scribe told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked not about Marxism but something else and Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.
What this confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.
To finish up on this though I should say that the way Scribe got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen and had heard that it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document not wanted to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town.
Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things he said were spot on. Worse, in a way, some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.
In Commemoration Of The Centennial Of French Composer Claude Debussy Death (1862-1918)-The End Of An Era
By Fritz Taylor
I am a child of rock and roll having come of age in the 1950s when names like Elvis, Carl Perkins, Big Joe Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis lit up the firmament, gave meaning to me and what I found out later was to a lot of my generation from places far from Fulton County down in Georgia where Taylors have lived for generations. I was and am still somewhat clueless about classical music, about highbrow music which is somewhat like the right way to put what we thought of such music. (I won’t say the real thing since I don’t want to offend any highbrow types who might peruse this publication. So I was fit to be tied ( I am being polite) when site manager Greg Green decided I would be the perfect person to have put his name, his good name I will have you know on a commemoration piece in the centennial year of the death of the composer Achille-Claude Debussy over in France in 1918.
Here is Greg’s reasoning though which told me a lot about Greg and will tell you something too. 1918 was also the year that Leonard Bernstein was born and he came up with, or somebody came up with, the bright idea that the pair should be book-ended with Debussy as the end of old time impressionist-etched classical music favored before World War I (my usual reference point for 1918) and Bernstein’s as the new age aborning take on classical music -for the masses. And with that slight observation I can say no more on this subject. Nor will I.
Sir Alfred Falls Down- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Family Plot” (1976)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon
Family Plot, starring Barbara Hershey, Bruce Dern, William Devane, Karen Black, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock before he was a Sir, 1976
[When I first decided on the title for this piece (or rather the beginning of the title) I was not trying to be ironic but merely pointing out that the film under review Family Plot had been far from one of Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s bests efforts, a crude and predictable attempt at some cranky footloose humor involving a couple of scam operations which go awry as they cross paths. Since choosing the title I have come by information via an NPR segment on another aspect of the fall of Sir Alfred, a less savory one, concerning a recent revelation (at least to me) from Tippi Hendron who starred in one of his best films, The Birds, in the 1960s that he sexually harassed her almost beyond endurance. Advances which she repeatedly rebuffed. As we are becoming almost daily aware many years later in 2017 in a slew of other cases involving powerful men in positions to do something gross and get away with it because of Hitchcock’s powerful position as famous and profitable film director he was able essentially ruined Ms. Hendron’s career by bad-mouthing her to others who might be interested in her for a role in some production.
Of course since apparently this whole subject of predatory sexual activity (epitomized by the slightly more than vaguely suggestive term ‘casting couch” the gauntlet that many young actors of both sexes on occasion were confronted with if they expected to go farther up the food chain) “was an “open secret” in Hollywood at the time perhaps she would have had no recourse at all once the big man put the whammy on her when she didn’t respond to his sexual advances. (Apparently even his every-loving wife of many years had no influence when Tippi tried to get him to back off and asked her to intercede to no avail. Jesus.)
This whole sordid episode (among an escalating number of such revelations about men in powerful positions acting boorishly and worse) brings up a problem which has until now remained unspoken when apparently a great many public men have assumed that given their positions, young women, or for that matter any women, were fair game for their sexual advances, harassment or criminal behavior. The problem exemplified in the Hitchcock case is how much film reviewers, scholars, fans should weigh that outrageous human behavior of any creative person against whatever cinematic or cultural values the works they have produced have. Not an easy question to answer but I would have to think as in the review below knowledge of that rotten behavior will seep into this piece. In any case there is no reason to change the title if anything it is more appropriate than ever. Sandy Salmon]
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Sir Alfred Hitchcock went all fall down in the late production under review Family Plot. A man whose long career gave us such black and white classics as Saboteur and The 39 Steps and all-time modern suspense classics like Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds seemed to have run out of energy when it came time to bring this one to the screen. Not a horrible film by any means but shockingly a rather lame attempt at a humorous look at star-crossed con artists working different sides of the street whose paths cross unconvincingly. The real problem was by the time this film reached its climax this reviewer didn’t care which pair of con artists won the day. Not a good sign, not at all.
Here is the subtext, what my old friend Sam Lowell who used to do this job and still is in emeritus status calls “the skinny.” A pair of low-end con artists, played by Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern, working the old Madame LaRue crystal ball fortune-telling con have landed a big fish in a wealthy old maid woman who is looking to find her wayward sister’s illegimate son and make amends for shuttling him off to another poorer family to avoid the shame of what that bastardy meant for her family’s good name in order to give him his rightful inheritance. So this pair is hired at a serious for them amount of money to find that heir, to do the leg-work to find a guy who seemingly does not want to be found for his own reasons. That is one thread. The other thread is that another pair of con artists, played by Karen Black and William Devane, are working a high-end kidnapping of wealthy private citizens for ransom racket with the payoff in serious diamonds. The twain shall meet as the storyline evolves because the subject of the first pair of cons search is that male part of the high-end kidnapping duo.
That is the so-called drama tension of the piece, the unwinding of the plot, the family plot I guess, where the work of each pair eventually cross each other and not for the benefit of what either set is trying to do. The capers each go through on the one hand for the “detective” cons and the other the pursued kidnapping cons are prankish and result in a comedy of errors which however will lead one set to prevail and the other to wind up doing Edgar Allan Poe time. Hey I won’t give away the ending any more than that but if you have a Hitchcock film you really need to watch then try Saboteur or Vertigo to see where Hitchcock was before the wheels came off, before he got cranky.
The Last Of The Classical Lyric Poets?- Bob Dylan’s 121st Dream-With Professor Richard Thomas’ “Why Bob Dylan Matters” In 2017 In Mind
[During the past several years, which has built up some extra stream the past couple of year, there has been a storm brewing among the writers who write for various departments in this space, for the American Left History blog (and the on-line Progressive American, American Film Gazette and American Folk Gazette websites with which we have fraternal relations including cross-publication of certain articles). Since a great deal of the storm has subsided after we have now reached agreement on some decisions about the road forward I feel it is appropriate as the about to retire administrator to let the reading public know what those decisions entail, what way we are heading. Over the past few years we have brought younger writers like Zack James, Bradley Fox, Jr., Alden Riley and the writer of the article below, Lance Lawrence, in to begin the transition away from writers, including myself, who were totally “washed clean” as one of the older writers Fritz Taylor is fond of saying by the turbulent 1960s, a watershed in American culture, politics and social arrangements.
While it has been entirely possible to read plenty of other material including older films, music and books over the years the strongest component, the subject that has held sway more often than not has been somehow involved with the growing up days in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s of the first wave of writers. That has tilted all have agreed, although I have dissented, vigorously dissented as to the degree and to the extent of my alleged role in the process, the axis of the American Left History experience we are trying to educate people about and preserve too one-sidedly around experience from fifty or sixty years ago when we came of age as if nothing has happened since then beyond the long haul rearguard actions against the reactionary trends of the past forty or so years when we have taken it on the chin once the “60s” ebbed.
Almost naturally the storm (what my old high school friend and low time associate here oldster Sam Lowell called a “tempest in a teapot” as he sided with the younger writers against the old guard, against my leadership casting the decisive vote against me) reflected the generational divide-the sensibilities of the old guard against the very different perspectives of the younger writers who were plainly way too young to have appreciated except second-hand all the tales and lies that we older folk have imposed on them. This whole dispute came to a head, although other similar disputes this year played a role, over the figure of Bob Dylan not what Lance will write about below but an earlier dispute over our tendency to have a music review on every one of the seemingly never-ending, seemingly never-ending to me as well, bootleg series volumes including Volume 12 which Zack had considered nothing but a commercial rip-off and composed of nothing but a million out takes and other crap and not worthy of giving review space here.
That dispute was the beginning of our awakening to the fact that not everything the man (our “the Man”) did was pure gold something which would have been blasphemy if one of older generation had uttered those words. The hard fact, as the younger writers were at pains to explain, younger writers who self-styled themselves as the “Young Turks,” Bob Dylan to the extent than any of them listened to him or saw him as anything but some old fogy who will probably die on the road doing his two hundred boring concerts a year, to draw anything from his music was something like our reaction to Frank Sinatra when we were young. Square, too square. That comment by I think Bradley Fox cut me especially to the quick. In any case other writers can give their respective takes on what has gone on of late. Since I am headed for retirement which just this minute feels like some kind of exile that seems best rather than my going on and on in defense of various objectionable actions I have taken over the past few years. Soon to be retired administrator Peter Paul Markin]
************
By Writer Lance Lawrence
I suppose if a man, if a man like Bob Dylan the subject of this short piece, has lived long enough, has been in the public eye, mostly in his case the public eye of a dwindling number of hard core folkie aficionados then somebody will write what he or she thinks is the definitive say on the subject. Especially some academic somebody like Harvard Professor Richard Thomas who has indeed written a treatise called “Why Bob Dylan Matters” where he regales the brethren, the devotees who will buy the book because they buy everything Dylan-etched including bogus Bootleg series volumes some of which are nothing but stuff better left on the cutting room floor. The good professor’s premise is that Mister Dylan is the second coming of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, who knows maybe Cato and Cicero too in the “big tent” lyrical poet pantheon.
Originally this piece was going to be written by I think Bart Webber, one of the older writers who would probably like a number of the older writers in this space, on this American Left History blog drool on and on in agreement with the good professor. (This is nothing personal against Bart which has pulled me out of more dead-ends on stories than I care to count but he unlike the more thoughtful Sam Lowell who was like a breath of fresh air in the dispute Markin mentioned above in that quasi-introduction was his most rabid supporter.) Would have make up a laudatory piece which according to my archival research on this site has had over four hundred Bob Dylan-related articles almost all of them “soft-ball puffs” like Dylan was the King of the world and not the nightshade of the old guard. Looking over the archives nobody except Leon Trotsky, who after all was a world historic revolutionary, led a real revolution, and was a key historic figure even if he seemed to have been snake-bitten in his struggle to keep the faith in the Bolshevik future when old “Uncle Joe” Stalin bared his fangs in public has more entries.
Markin, I might as well say it since we have all been given the go ahead to give our respective takes on the internal fight now that the smoke has apparently cleared, mercifully soon to be retired Markin, or is it “purged” like his buddy Trotsky, started the whole madness early in his regime on when he wrote a ton of his own stuff rather than just run the site and hand out assignments as he was supposed to do. He lashed together extensive 3000 word reviews of Dylan’s five or ten first albums and then went over the top when he decided several years ago to write a series entitled “Not Bob Dylan.” That series seemingly endless series about the ten million or so it seemed male folkies who had not been dubbed by Time magazine to be the “King” of the 1960s folk minute (and it was only a minute despite all the hoopla here making it seem like some world-historic event like Trotsky’s Russian Revolution which even I could see had some merit for that designation rather than a tepid passing fad) and who had gone on to something else or who still inhabit the nether-world of the backwaters folk venue world.
I swear Markin must have written up the employment bios, resumes, and fates of every guy who knew three chords and a Woody Guthrie song learned in seventh grade music appreciation class with the likes of Mister Larkin at my middle school who walked into a coffeehouse back then. Even guys I had never heard of in passing like Erick Saint Jean who was supposed to be big in Boston and New York and Manny Silver who was supposed to be the greatest lyric writer since Woody (and probably if Professor Thomas took a whack at it probably since Milton or somebody like that). If I hear one more word about those guys, hell now that I think about it he also added insult to injury by doing a series on the ten million folkie women who were “Not Joan Baez” Dylan’s paramour and the queen of that 1960s folk minute (according to omnipotent Time).
But enough of taking cracks at the folk aficionados wherever they are who saw Dylan as a god, a guy who wrote lyrics better than he could sing. Frankly the guy was a has-been by my time, a leader of the folk minute that had passed mercifully away. We used to laugh at the graying long-haired guys guitar in hand in the subway still singing covers of his songs while the trains roared by. Would drop a dollar in the guitar case if they DID NOT sing Blowin’ In The Wind or The Times Are A-Changin’ one more freaking time remembering Mr. Larkin that music teacher in seventh grade, another guy from the 1960s line-up, trying to get us to sing that crap since the words were so meaningful, so important to know and remember according to him.
Finally since I am supposed to be an objective reporter of sorts, supposed to give all sides a short at reasoned opinion let me take Professor Thomas’ thesis at face value. Now my take on Homer is that he wrote pretty good stories made up of whole cloth no crime and created quite an oral tradition. Same with plenty of Greeks and Romans we read about in high school and college. They survived the cut, they represented some pretty high standards for the lyric form. Got quite workout by Miss Laverty my high school English teacher who was crazy for those guys and the way she read their words out loud you could see why they lasted. Literary comparisons aside about who was the king the lyrical poetic hill who except those guys like Markin and Sam Lowell, despite his honorable part in our internal fight, and who I do not believe know one song later than maybe 1972 which everybody will admit is a long time to be stuck on an old needle even listens to Dylan anymore except for old nostalgia trips.
For those three people who may be interested in exploring Professor Thomas’s ideas, see what makes him tick, see why he seemingly a rational man is a Dylan aficionado who probably one of the two guys who bought that dastardly Volume 12 which started this “revolution” here is a link to an NPR On Point broadcast hosted by Tom Ashbrook where the good professor holds forth:
[Although Professor Thomas’ thesis about Dylan’s place in the pantheon was not central to the recent disputes among the coterie of writers who ply their trade here Dylan did figure in the mix when all hell broke loose the day Zack James refused to write a review on Volume 12 of the never-ending Bootleg series. I would still be surprised if going out the door Pete Markin will let my “venomous” words see the light of day. As is. If he does then maybe we will have new day after all.]
When The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old
Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father
Moment
By Zack James
[Zack James has been on an
assignment covering the various 50th anniversary commemorations of
the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind
something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and
therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on
those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own
generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been
present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the
demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young
too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period
which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute
breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as
well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also
too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid
rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the
legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through
his paces. Greg Green, site manager]
Alex James was the king of
rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and
no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a
“think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million
years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year
anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical
experiences which have left me as a stepchild to fiveimportant musical moments, the birth of rock
and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the
early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which
for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big
three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank
Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson,
Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as
the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls
the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring
for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a
decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child
still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.
This needs a short
explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother,
born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest
brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls,
me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in
the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of
North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and
remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor
Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked
for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American
prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept
himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player
(the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was
forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what
was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the
great jailbreak.”
A little about Alex’s
trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late
Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four
connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in
the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it
reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they
never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of
larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music
coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe
1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex
always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.)
Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until
the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who
turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in
Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled
in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made
what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in
his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west
to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned
about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one
mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he
would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid
successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time.
(The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at
the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
That’s Alex’s story-line.
My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come
back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day
at some law firmas somekind of lacky, and went to law school nights
studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole
bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing
stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and
knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his
record playerJerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out.
I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a
blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on
her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me
mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my
own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly
interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high
school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in
gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when
he had first heard such and such a song.
Although the age gap between
Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew
him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in
college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and
out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not
just a question of say, why Jailhouse
Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or
what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had
happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label
which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith,
Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going,
why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my
toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how
Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock
with his Rocket 88 and how obscure
guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop
rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine,
Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to
its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing
he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy
Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their
country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red
barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with
some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from
the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.
One night Alex startled me
while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe
Every Times You Leave, when he said
“daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in
the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I
don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I
resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look
at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is
clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Sons welded by twelve
millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal
ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn
fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune
and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would
be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the
time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were
doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like
World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl
Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot
near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed
the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time
now.
Alex had the advantage of
being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his
family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my
father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after
hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my
father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as
much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster.
All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make
you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the
recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain
or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well
have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in
a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing
Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend
and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine
civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t
know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked
under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when
he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early
one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking
hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play
some fretted guitar).
That night Alex also
mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who
tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although
apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry,
figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which
would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on
in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some
point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was
spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison
particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the
rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say
Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off
the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what
Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he
called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical
skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work
in some hardware store in some small town down South.
Here is the real shocker,
well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA
thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing
something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank
Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold
Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He
would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out
and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song
too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and
Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So,
yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over
fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.
The selection posted here
culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces
of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their
stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.
[Alex and I had our ups and
downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom
passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same
wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017
when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective
corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San
Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of
Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the
production values.]
When The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old
Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father
Moment
By Zack James
[Zack James has been on an
assignment covering the various 50th anniversary commemorations of
the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind
something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and
therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on
those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own
generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been
present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the
demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young
too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period
which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute
breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as
well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also
too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid
rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the
legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through
his paces. Greg Green, site manager]
Alex James was the king of
rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and
no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a
“think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million
years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year
anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical
experiences which have left me as a stepchild to fiveimportant musical moments, the birth of rock
and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the
early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which
for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big
three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank
Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson,
Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as
the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls
the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring
for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a
decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child
still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.
This needs a short
explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother,
born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest
brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls,
me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in
the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of
North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and
remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor
Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked
for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American
prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept
himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player
(the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was
forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what
was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the
great jailbreak.”
A little about Alex’s
trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late
Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four
connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in
the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it
reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they
never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of
larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music
coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe
1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex
always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.)
Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until
the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who
turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in
Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled
in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made
what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in
his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west
to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned
about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one
mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he
would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid
successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time.
(The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at
the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
That’s Alex’s story-line.
My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come
back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day
at some law firmas somekind of lacky, and went to law school nights
studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole
bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing
stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and
knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his
record playerJerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out.
I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a
blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on
her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me
mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my
own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly
interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high
school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in
gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when
he had first heard such and such a song.
Although the age gap between
Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew
him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in
college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and
out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not
just a question of say, why Jailhouse
Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or
what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had
happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label
which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith,
Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going,
why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my
toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how
Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock
with his Rocket 88 and how obscure
guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop
rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine,
Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to
its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing
he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy
Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their
country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red
barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with
some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from
the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.
One night Alex startled me
while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe
Every Times You Leave, when he said
“daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in
the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I
don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I
resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look
at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is
clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Sons welded by twelve
millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal
ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn
fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune
and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would
be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the
time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were
doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like
World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl
Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot
near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed
the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time
now.
Alex had the advantage of
being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his
family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my
father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after
hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my
father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as
much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster.
All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make
you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the
recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain
or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well
have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in
a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing
Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend
and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine
civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t
know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked
under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when
he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early
one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking
hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play
some fretted guitar).
That night Alex also
mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who
tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although
apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry,
figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which
would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on
in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some
point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was
spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison
particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the
rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say
Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off
the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what
Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he
called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical
skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work
in some hardware store in some small town down South.
Here is the real shocker,
well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA
thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing
something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank
Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold
Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He
would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out
and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song
too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and
Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So,
yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over
fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.
The selection posted here
culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces
of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their
stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.
[Alex and I had our ups and
downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom
passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same
wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017
when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective
corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San
Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of
Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the
production values.]
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris
DVD Review
Midnight In Paris, starring Owen Wilson, Rachael McAdams, written and directed by Woody Allen, Sony Picture Classics, 2011
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda (no last name needed for Jazz Age aficionados, right?), Cole Porter, T.S. Eliot, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, hell even Djuana Barnes are names from the Jazz Age and the American post- World War I expatriate night that get bandied about in Woody Allen’s 2011 comedic effort, Midnight In Paris. There were plenty of other names dropped as well but the above popped out in memory’s eye and serve my point. This film is a paean to that by-gone age just far enough back for Woody (and me) to not have been splashed by the Jazz Age karma but wishing, wishing like crazy, we could have lived at that time –in that city, Paris and been washed by the spectacular antics and struggles that went on there to create a modern literary and cultural world. And in the end that is Woody’s point, as he has one of his throw-back jazz Age characters pine for an even earlier time- the last quarter of the 19th century-La Belle Epogue. Nice spin, Woody.
Gil though through cinematic magical realism finds his way back to the Paris of the 1920s around midnight each night and from there is able to find his true self, or what he thinks is his true self. Naturally a women (Pablo Picasso’s, mistress, or one of them) is there to goad him along but also to pose the question about what craving for earlier unattainable times mean. In the end Gil is “liberated” from Inez (she was two-timing him anyway with some pedantic prof) and can walk the rainy 2010s streets of Paris and really make his literary breakthrough. This is one of Woody’s better recent efforts. Proof. A person whom I respect very much as a cinematic aficionado said this is the first Woody Allen film that she could sit through to the end and wish that it didn’t end. High praise indeed.
