Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)-Poet's Corner-Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- 

“Advertisements for Myself”-Introduction by Allan Jackson, a founding member of the American Left History publication back in 1974 when it was a hard copy journal and until 2017 site manager of the on-line edition.      

[He’s back. Jack Kerouac, as described in the headline, “the king of the beats” and maybe the last true beat standing. That is the basis of this introduction by me as we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his untimely death at 47. But before we go down and dirty with the legendary writer I stand before you, the regular reader, and those who have not been around for a while to know that I was relieved of my site manage duties in 2017 in what amounted to a coup by the younger writers who resented the direction I was taking the publication in and replaced me with Greg Green who I had brought on board from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while I oversaw the whole operation and planned my retirement. Over the past year or so a million rumors have, had mostly now, swirled around this publication and the industry in general about what had happened and I will get to that in a minute before dealing with Jack Kerouac’s role in the whole mess.

What you need to know first, if you don’t know already is that Greg Green took me back to do the introductions to an encore presentation of a long-term history of rock and roll series that I edited and essentially created after an unnamed older writer who had not been part of the project balled it all up, got catch flat-footed talking bullshit and other assorted nonsense since he knew nada, nada nunca and, about the subject having been apparently asleep when the late Peter Markin “took us to school” that history. Since then Greg and I have had an “armed truce,” meaning I could contribute as here to introductions of some encore and some origin material as long as I didn’t go crazy, his term, for what he called so-called nostalgia stuff from the 1950s and 1960s and meaning as well that Greg will not go crazy, my term, and will refrain from his ill-advised attempt to reach a younger audience by “dumbing down” the publication with odd-ball comic book character reviews of films, graphic novels and strange musical interludes. Fair is fair.

What I need to mention, alluded to above, is those rumors that ran amok while I was on the ropes, when I had lost that decisive vote of no confidence by one sullen vote. People here, and my enemies in the industry as well, seeing a wounded Allan Jackson went for the kill, went for the jugular that the seedy always thrive on and began a raggedy-ass trail on noise you would not believe. In the interest of elementary hygiene, and to frankly clear the air, a little, since there will always be those who have evil, and worse in their hearts when “the mighty have fallen.”  Kick when somebody is down their main interest in life.

I won’t go through the horrible rumors like I was panhandling down in Washington, D.C., I was homeless in Olde Saco, Maine (how could that be when old friend and writer here Josh Breslin lives there and would have provided alms to me so at least get an approximation of the facts before spinning the wild woolly tale), I had become a male prostitute in New York City (presumably after forces here and in that city hostile to me put in the fatal “hard to work with” tag on me ruining any chances on the East Coast of getting work, getting enough dough to keep the wolves from my door, my three ex-wives and that bevy of kids, nice kids, who nevertheless were sucking me dry with alimony and college tuitions), writing press releases under the name Leonard Bloom for a Madison Avenue ad agency. On a lesser scale of disbelief I had taken a job as a ticket-taker in a multi-plex in Nashua, New Hampshire, had been a line dishwasher at the Ritz in Philadelphia when they needed day labor for parties and convention banquets, had been kicking kids out of their newspaper routes and taking that task on myself, and to finish off although I have not given a complete rundown rummaging through trash barrels looking for bottles with deposits. Christ.

Needless to say, how does one actually answer such idiocies, and why. A couple of others stick out about me and some surfer girl out in Carlsbad in California who I was pimping while getting my sack time with her and  this one hurt because it hurt a dear friend and former “hippie girl” lover of mine, Madame La Rue, back in the day that I was running a whorehouse with her in Luna Bay for rich Asian businessmen with a taste for kinky stuff. I did stop off there and Madame does run a high-end brothel in Luna Bay but I had nothing to do with it. The reason Madame was hurt was because I had lent her the money to buy the place when it was a rundown hotel and built it up from there with periodic additional funds from me so she could not understand why my act of kindness would create such degenerate noise from my enemies who were clueless about the relationship between us.

I will, must deal with two big lies which also center of my reluctant journey west (caused remember by that smear campaign which ruined by job opportunities in the East, particularly New York City. The first which is really unbelievable on its face is that I hightailed it directly to Utah, to Salt Lake City, when I busted out in NYC looking for one Mitt Romney, “Mr. Flip-Flop,” former Governor of Massachusetts, Presidential candidate against Barack Obama then planning on running for U.S. Senator from Utah (now successful ready to take office in January) to “get well.” The premise for this big lie was supposedly that since I have skewered the guy while he was governor and running for president with stuff like the Mormon fetish for white underwear and the old time polygamy of his great-grand-father who had five wives (and who showed great executive skill I think in keeping the peace in that extended family situation. The unbelievable part is that those Mormon folk, who have long memories and have pitchforks at the ready to rumble with the damned, would let a sinner like me, a non-Mormon for one thing anywhere the Romney press operation. Christ, I must be some part latter day saint since I barely got out of that damn state alive if the real truth were known after I applied for a job with the Salt Lake Sentinel not knowing the rag was totally linked to the Mormons. Pitchforks, indeed.    

The biggest lie though is the one that had me as the M.C. in complete “drag” as Elsa Maxwell at the “notorious” KitKat Club in San Francisco which has been run for about the past thirty years or so by Miss Judy Garland, at one time and maybe still is in some quarters the “drag queen” Queen of that city. This will show you how ignorant, or blinded by hate, some people are. Miss Judy Garland is none other that one of our old corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville, Timmy Riley. Timmy who like the rest of us on the corner used to “fag bait” and beat up anybody, any guy who seemed effeminate, at what cost to Timmy’s real feelings we will never really know although he was always the leader in the gay-bashing orgy. Finally between his own feeling and Stonewall in New York in 1969 which did a great deal to make gays, with or with the drag queen orientation, a little less timid Timmy fled the Acre (and his hateful family and friends) to go to friendlier Frisco. He was in deep personal financial trouble before I was able to arrange some loans from myself and some of his other old corner boys (a few still hate Timmy for what he has become, his true self) to buy the El Lobo Club, his first drag queen club, and when that went under, the now thriving tourist trap KitKat Club. So yes, yes, indeed, I stayed with my old friend at his place and that was that. Nothing more than I had done many times before while I ran the publication.                   

But enough of this tiresome business because I want to introduce this series dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac who had a lot of influence on me for a long time, mostly after he died in 1969 

******

All roads about Jack Kerouac, about who was the king of the beats, about what were the “beats” lead back to the late Pete Markin who, one way or another, taught the working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville corner boys what was up with that movement. Funny, because we young guys were a serious generation removed from that scene, really our fathers’ contemporaries and you know how far removed fathers were from kids in those days especially among the working poor trying to avoid going  “under water” and not just about mortgages but food on tables and clothing on backs, were children of rock and roll, not jazz, the beat musical medium, and later the core of the “Generation of ‘68” which took off, at least partially, with the “hippie” scene, where the dying embers of the beat scene left off. Those dying embers exactly the way to put it since most of our knowledge or interest came from the stereotypes-beards before beards were cool and before grandfather times -for guys, okay, berets, black and beaten down looks. Ditto on black for the gals, including black nylons which no Acre girl would have dreamed of wearing, not in the early 1960s anyway. Our “model” beatnik really came, as we were also children of television, from sitcom stories like Dobie Gillis with stick character Maynard G. Krebs standing in for all be-bop-dom.        

So it is easy to see where except to ostracize, meaning harass, maybe beat up if that was our wont that day, we would have passed by the “beat” scene, passed by Jack Kerouac too without the good offices, not a term we would have used then, if not for nerdish, goof, wild and woolly in the idea world Markin (always called Scribe for obvious reasons but we will keep with Markin here). He was the guy who always looked for some secret meaning to the universe, that certain breezes, winds, metaphorical breezes and winds, were going to turn things around, were going to make the world a place where Markin could thrive. Markin was the one who first read Kerouac’s breakthrough travelogue of a different sort novel On The Road.

Now Markin was the kind of guy, and sometimes we let him go on and sometimes stopped him in his tracks, who when he was on to something would bear down on us to pay attention. Christ some weekend nights he would read passages from the book like it was the Bible (which it turned out to be in a way later) when all we basically cared about is which girls were going to show up at our hang-out spot, the well-known Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and play the jukebox and we would go from there. Most of us, including me, kind of yawned at the whole thing even when Markin made a big deal that Kerouac was a working-class guy like us from up in Lowell cut right along the Merrimac River. The whole thing seemed way too exotic and moreover there was too much homosexual stuff implied which in our strict Irish-Italian Catholic neighborhood did not go down well at all -made us dismiss the whole thing and want to if I recall correctly “beat up” that Allan Ginsberg character. Even Dean Moriarty, the Neal Cassidy character, didn’t move us since although we were as larcenous and “clip” crazy as any character in that book we kind of took Dean as a tough car crazy guide like Sonny Jones from our neighborhood who was nothing but a hood in Red Riley’s bad ass motorcycle gang which hung out at Harry’s Variety Store. We avoided him and more so Red like the plague. Both wound up dead, very dead, in separate attempted armed robberies in broad daylight if you can believe that.    

Our first run through of our experiences with Kerouac and through him the beat movement was therefore kind of marginal-even as Markin touted for a while that whole scene he agreed with us that jazz-be-bop jazz always associated with the beat-ness was not our music, was grating to our rock and roll-refined and defined ears. Here is where Markin was always on to something though, always had some idea percolating in his head. There was a point where he, we as well I think, got tired of rock and roll, a time when it had run out of steam for a while and along with his crazy home life which really was bad drove him to go to Harvard Square and check out what he had heard was a lot of stuff going on. Harvard Square was, is still to the extent that any have survived like Club Passim, the home of the coffeehouse. A place that kind of went with the times first as the extension of the beat generation hang-out where poetry and jazz would be read and played. But in Markin’s time, our time there was the beginnings of a switch because when he went to the old long gone Café Nana he heard folk music and not jazz, although some poetry was still being read. I remember Markin telling me how he figured the change when I think it was the late Dave Von Ronk performed at some club and mentioned that when he started out in the mid-1950s in the heat of beat time folk singers were hired at the coffeehouses in Greenwich Village to “clear the house” for the next set of poetry performers but that now folk-singing eclipsed poetry in the clubs. Markin loved it, loved the whole scene of which he was an early devotee. Me, well, strangely considering where I wound up and what I did as a career, I always, still do, hated the music. Thought it was too whinny and boring. Enough said though.                   

Let’s fast forward to see where Kerouac really affected us in a way that when Markin was spouting forth early on we could not appreciate. As Markin sensed in his own otherworldly way a new breeze was coming down the cultural highway, a breeze push forward by the beats I will confess, by the folk music scene, by the search for roots which the previous generation, our parents’ generation, spent their adulthoods attempting to banish and become part of the great American vanilla melt, and by a struggling desire to question everything that had come before, had been part of what we had had no say in creating, weren’t even asked about. Heady stuff and Markin before he made a very bad decision to quit college in his sophomore years and “find himself,” my expression not his, spent many of his waking hours figuring out how to make his world a place where he could thrive.

That is when one night, this is when we were well out of high school, some of us corner boys had gone our separate ways and those who remained in contact with the brethren spent less time hanging out at Tonio’s, Markin once again pulled out On The Road, pulled out Jack’s exotic travelogue. The difference is we were all ears then and some of us after that night brought our own copies or went to the Thomas Murphy Public Library and took out the book. This was the spring of the historic year 1967 when the first buds of the Summer of Love which wracked San Francisco and the Bay Area to its core and once Markin started working on us, started to make us see his vision of what he would later called, culling from Tennyson if I am not mistaken a “newer world.” Pulling us all in his train, even as with Bart Webber and if I recall Si Lannon a little, he had to pull out all the stops to have them, us, join him in the Summer of Love experience. Maybe the whole thing with Jack Kerouac was a pipe dream I remember reading about him in the Literary Gazette when he was down in Florida living with his ancient mother and he was seriously critical of the “hippies,” kind of banged on his own beat roots explaining that he was talking about something almost Catholic beatitude spiritual and not personal freedom, of the road or anything else. A lot of guys and not just writing junkies looking for some way to alleviate their inner pains have repudiated their pasts but all I know is that when Jack was king of the hill, when he spoke to us those were the days all roads to Kerouac were led by Markin. Got it. Allan Jackson    

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)-Poet's Corner-Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"

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

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaddish, Part I
by Allen Ginsberg

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--
And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--
Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-
lypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--
like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-
ping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it
lasts, a Vision--anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-
dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and
the sky above--an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side
--where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the
first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward
Newark--
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice
cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards--
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light
on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved
thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on
the street, fire escapes old as you
--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me--
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with
us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
every time--
That's good! That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,
torture even toothache in the end--
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,
in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair
and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death let you out,
Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with
God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure
--Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the
world--
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more
fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,
loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--
No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you
killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart
--But Death's killed you both--No matter--
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-
ity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar
--by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital
ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts
pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to
have husbands later--
You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and
will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill
--later perhaps--soon he will think--)
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now
--tho not you
I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came
first--to you--and were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the
Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with
you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull
in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deaths-
head with Halo? can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,
than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet Tri-
umph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the
ground--but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
wrapped, sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the
knife--lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost
thought some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old
roses--a dog for his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric
irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies, consciousness,
shoes, breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into
hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of
stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is
Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over
midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes--as he sees--and
what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might
have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-
mortality, Naomi?
I'll see him soon. Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't
when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses
--headed to the End.
They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our own
life they cross--and take with them.

Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-
ried dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity--
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-
derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping
--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's perfect
Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!

II
Over and over--refrain--of the Hospitals--still haven't written your
history--leave it abstract--a few images
run thru the mind--like the saxophone chorus of houses and years--
remembrance of electrical shocks.
By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your
nervousness--you were fat--your next move--
By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you--
once and for all--when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my
opinion of the cosmos, I was lost--
By my later burden--vow to illuminate mankind--this is release of
particulars--(mad as you)--(sanity a trick of agreement)--
But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and
spied a mystical assassin from Newark,
So phoned the Doctor--'OK go way for a rest'--so I put on my coat
and walked you downstreet--On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,
unaccountably--'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered--
and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask
against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma--
And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of
the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on--to New
York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound--

*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-For the Communism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht!

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:

As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor Italian Communist Leader Antonio Gramsci -Newspapers and the Workers (1916)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
Antonio Gramsci 1916

Newspapers and the Workers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Avanti! (Piedmont Edition) December 22, 1916;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.
Proofread: by Andy Carloff 2010.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These are the days of subscription campaigns. The editors and administrators of bourgeois newspapers tidy up their display windows, paint some varnish on their shop signs and appeal for the attention of the passer-by (that is, the readers) to their wares. Their wares are newspapers of four or six pages that go out every day or evening in order to inject in the mind of the reader ways of feeling and judging the facts of current politics appropriate for the producers and sellers of the press.

We would like to discuss, with the workers especially, the importance and seriousness of this apparently innocent act, which consists in choosing the newspaper you subscribe to. It is a choice full of snares and dangers which must be made consciously, applying criteria and after mature reflection.

Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper. And he must always, always, always remember that the bourgeois newspaper (whatever its hue) is an instrument of struggle motivated by ideas and interests that are contrary to his. Everything that is published is influenced by one idea: that of serving the dominant class, and which is ineluctably translated into a fact: that of combating the laboring class. And in fact, from the first to the last line the bourgeois newspaper smells of and reveals this preoccupation.

But the beautiful – that is the ugly – thing is this: that instead of asking for money from the bourgeois class to support it in its pitiless work in its favor, the bourgeois newspapers manage to be paid by...the same laboring classes that they always combat. And the laboring class pays; punctually, generously.

Hundreds of thousands of workers regularly and daily give their pennies to the bourgeois newspapers, thus assisting in creating their power. Why? If you were to ask this of the first worker you were to see on the tram or the street with a bourgeois paper spread before him you would hear: “Because I need to hear about what happening.” And it would never enter his head that the news and the ingredients with which it is cooked are exposed with an art that guides his ideas and influences his spirit in a given direction. And yet he knows that this newspaper is opportunist, and that one is for the rich, that the third, the fourth, the fifth is tied to political groups with interests diametrically opposed to his.

And so every day this same worker is able to personally see that the bourgeois newspapers tell even the simplest of facts in a way that favors the bourgeois class and damns the working class and its politics. Has a strike broken out? The workers are always wrong as far as the bourgeois newspapers are concerned. Is there a demonstration? The demonstrators are always wrong, solely because they are workers they are always hotheads, rioters, hoodlums. The government passes a law? It’s always good, useful and just, even if it’s...not. And if there’s an electoral, political or administrative struggle? The best programs and candidates are always those of the bourgeois parties.

And we’re aren’t even talking about all the facts that the bourgeois newspapers either keep quiet about, or travesty, or falsify in order to mislead, delude or maintain in ignorance the laboring public. Despite this, the culpable acquiescence of the worker to the bourgeois newspapers is limitless. We have to react against this and recall the worker to the correct evaluation of reality. We have to say and repeat that the pennies tossed there distractedly into the hands of the newsboy are projectiles granted to a bourgeois newspaper, which will hurl it, at the opportune moment, against the working masses.

If the workers were to be persuaded of this most elementary of truths they would learn to boycott the bourgeois press with the same unity and discipline that the bourgeoisie boycott the newspapers of the workers, that is, the Socialist press. Don’t give financial assistance to the bourgeois press, which is your adversary. This is what should be our battle cry in this moment that is characterized by the subscription campaigns of all the bourgeois newspapers. Boycott them, boycott them, boycott them!

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Third Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life

Year 3-The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life     

By Frank Jackman

Over the first year of the Trump regime as this massive control freak regime has plundered right after right, made old Hobbes’ “life is short, brutish and nasty” idea seem all too true for a vast swath  of people residing in America (and not just America either) I have startled many of my friends, radical and liberal alike. Reason? For almost all of my long adult life I have been as likely to call, one way or another, for the overthrow of the government as not. This Republic if you like for a much more equitable society than provided under it aegis. This year I have been as they say in media-speak “walking that notion back a bit.” Obviously even if you only get your news from social media or twitter feeds there have been gigantic attempts by Trump, his cronies and his allies in Congress to radically limit and cut back many of the things we have come to see as our rights in ordinary course of the business of daily life. This year I have expressed deep concerns about the fate of the Republic and what those in charge these days are hell-bend of trying to put over our eyes.

Hey, I like the idea, an idea that was not really challenged even by the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in their respective times that I did not have to watch my back every time I made a political move. Now maybe just every move. This assault, this conscious assault on the lives and prospects of immigrants, DACAs, TPSers. Trans-genders, blacks, anti-fascists, Medicaid recipients, the poor, the outspoken media, uppity liberals, rash leftist radicals and many others has me wondering what protections we can count on, use to try to protect ourselves from the onslaught.

I, unlike some others, have not Cassandra-cried about the incipient fascist regime in Washington. If we were at that jackboot stage I would not be writing, and the reader would not be reading, this screed. Make no mistake about that. However there is no longer a question in my mind that the “cold” civil war that has been brewing beneath the surface of American society for the past decade or more has been ratchetted up many notches. Aside from preparing politically for that clash we should also be aware, much more aware than in the past, about our rights as we are confronted more and more by a hostile government, its hangers-on and the agents who carry out its mandates.

I have been brushing up on my own rights and had come across a small pamphlet put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a good source for such information in these times. I have placed that information below.

As the ACLU disclaimer states this information is basic, should be checked periodically for updating especially the way the federal courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme  Court have staked the deck against us of late. In any case these days if you are in legal difficulties you best have a good lawyer. The other side, the government has infinite resources, so you better get your best legal help available even if it cost some serious dough which tends to be the case these days with the way the judicial system works.

Most importantly when confronted by any governmental agents from the locals to the F.B.I. be cool, be very cool.  

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor Italian Communist Leader Antonio Gramsci -Split or Disorder?(1920)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
Antonio Gramsci 1920

Split or Disorder?


Source: L’Ordine Nuovo, December 11-18, 1920;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

The Unitary Social-Communists don’t want a split in the party because they don’t want to ruin the Italian proletarian revolution. We recognize that the Unitary Social Communists represent and embody all the most “glorious” traditions of the great and glorious Italian Socialist Party (which will turn into the Unitary Social-Communist Party): glorious ignorance, glorious and broadminded absence of any scruple in polemic and of any sense of responsibility in national politics; glorious low demagogy, glorious vanity, greatly glorious charlatanry. This is the corpus of glorious and so Italian traditions that are embodied and represented by the Unitary Social Communists.

The Congress of the Communist International has posed the problem to the Italian Socialist Party of organizing itself on the basis of the acceptance of the deliberations approved by its assembly. It is a matter of breaking with the reformists, of breaking, that is, with a small part of its own body, with a part that has no vital function in the organism, that is distant from the proletarian masses, that can say it represents the masses only when they have been demoralized by the errors, the uncertainty, the absenteeism of the revolutionary leaders.

The Unitary Social-Communists haven’t wanted to accept the deliberations of the II Congress so as not to split the reformists from the party, and they affirm that they don’t want to split the reformists from the party so as not to split the masses. They have sunk the masses, both in the party and in the factories, into the darkest chaos; they have put in doubt the correctness of the International Congress, they have repudiated the party’s adherence to the congress (Serrati has returned to Italy from Moscow the same way that Orlando one day returned from Versailles, to protest, to split up the responsibility, to save the Italians’ honor and glory); they have discredited (or sought to discredit) the highest authority of the working class International, have spread, in an ambience as propitious for it as ours, a putrid tide of rumor and insinuations; of cowardice, of skepticism.

And what have they obtained? They have split the party in three, four, five tendencies; they have, in the big cities, split the working masses, which were united against reformism and the reformists; they have spread far afield the seed of disorder and decomposition in the ranks of the party.

What then is Unitarism? What occult evil is hidden by this word, which causes greater and more widespread discord and splits, while affirming that it wants to avoid a limited and precise split? That which is had to occur. If Unitarism provoked the current disorder the truth is to be found in the fact that disorder already existed; Unitarism has no other fault than to have violently opened the dams to a cloacal mass. The truth is that the Socialist Party wasn’t an “urbe,” it was an “orda.” It wasn’t an organism it was an agglomeration of individuals who had the amount of class-consciousness necessary for organizing itself in a professional union, but didn’t have the capacity and the political preparation necessary to organize itself into a revolutionary party such as is demanded in the current historical period.

Italian vanity always led us to see that we had a unique Socialist Party, that couldn’t and wouldn’t suffer the same crises as the other Socialist Parties. What has happened is that in Italy the crisis was artificially delayed and that it broke out at precisely the moment when it would have been better to avoid it, and it broke out in a way all the more violent and devastatingly by the will and the stubbornness of those who always denied it and who today deny it still (we are Unitarists! Unitarist damn it!)

It would be ridiculous to whimper over what has occurred and what is irremediable. Communists must reason coldly and collectedly: if everything is in a state of disorder we have to remake the party. Starting today it is necessary to consider and to love the Communist fraction as a true and actual party, as the solid framework of the Italian Communist Party, which is acquiring proselytes, solidly organizes them, educates, forms active cells of the new organization that is developing and will develop until it becomes the entire working class, until it becomes the soul and the will of all the working people.

The crisis we are today undergoing is perhaps the greatest revolutionary crisis of the Italian people. To understand this truth the comrades should put forth this hypothesis: what would have happened if the Socialist Party had suffered this crisis in the middle of the revolution, having all the responsibility for a state? What would have happened if the government of a revolutionary state had found itself having in hand men who fought for their tendencies and who in the passion of this struggle placed in doubt the most sacred patrimony of a worker: faith in the International and in the capacities and loyalty of the men who occupied its highest offices? What would have happened is what happened in Hungary: the abandonment by the masses, the relaxing of revolutionary energy, the rapid victory of the counter-revolution.

The Unitarists charlatan mania has today only caused disorder in a party. Tomorrow they would have caused the fall of the revolution. For this reason they have damaged the working class and reinforced reaction. The evil is not decisive; men of good will yet have a boundless field to harvest and render fruitful.

Traipsing Through The Ghost Of Tin Pan Alley Looking For The Muse Of Music-Looking For A Melody Too-With Drew Barrymore And Hugh Grant’s “Music And Lyrics” (2007)-A Film Review And More

Traipsing Through The Ghost Of Tin Pan Alley Looking For The Muse Of Music-Looking For A Melody Too-With Drew Barrymore And Hugh Grant’s “Music And Lyrics” (2007)-A Film Review And More

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Music and Lyrics, starring Drew Barrymore, Hugh Grant, 2007

Very seldom has a movie theme and moment in my life come together but that is the case with the theme of the film under review Music and Lyrics. In the film Alex, who I give more detail on in a moment, played by boyish Hugh Grant, is struggling to keep his head above water in the music business and needs to find a lyricist badly and Sophie, ditto on the details, is just struggling to be a writer but who is a natural born lyricist who is not looking at the start to do lyrics.

How does that dilemma apply to me. Well let me tell you in a few thousand words, just kidding. As the reader may know and if not, I will mention that I have relatively recently retired from the day to day grind of writing a by-line for Women Today a publication I was associated with for some thirty plus years. I am sure that the average reader does not know that I started out as a free-lance stringer at this publication as did many others. After a couple of years though my fellow writer and then companion (and we are friendly again now too and let’s leave it at that) advised me that I needed to move on, get myself a by-line at a publication which would value my skills more than as a long-term free-lancer here. Good advice. When a change of leadership came through a couple of years ago and to keep my hand in the business the current site manager Greg Green on Josh’s recommendation hired me to do a general assignment by-line. Meaning I could write on any subject that might interest me.               

That information gives you an idea about my career but does not give an understanding on what my youthful dreams had been. That is where the theme of this movie comes in and why I strongly related to it beyond the charming acting of the two principals. I grew up in New Jersey close to New York City, close enough to imbibe in the folk music revival on the weekends that swept the bohemian clots and campuses around the country in the early 1960s. I had a good voice and a fair knowledge of that folk part of the American Songbook. Moreover I could write songs, lyrics anyway and had something of an amateur’s success in the coffeehouses around the Village on “open mic” nights and when I went to college up in Saratoga Springs I grabbed some gigs at the famous and still going Caffe Lena’s. Here’s the rub though I like many other “folkies” had to make some kind of decision when that folk minute faded, or at least became something for aficionados meaning only a few could make a living out of their art. My big problem then, and now, which is the opposition problem Alex had was that I never was good at putting a fine finish on my lyrics, needed a never found melody maker to go up the next step.     

I always, as Josh could testify back when we were an item, kept that musical interest up, kept writing lyrics even while working as a stringer and with my by-line when I had spare time. I was always dissatisfied with the melodies, with meshing the two together as Josh could tell you then, and now too that I have time to work some on those lyrics that had piled up in drawers. I need a melody maker, a person who could hone my lyrics into something good. Josh, did I say we are now friends again and let’s leave it at that, offered to help me. Problem, big problem is that Josh doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. No, that is not true, he knows more of the American Songbook than I do, has written more about music than any other subject in his own long career as a free-lancer and then here. But that take is more about the place of different kinds of music in the American experience or about the stuff that he and his corner boys up in Olde Saco, Maine listened to growing up, stuff like that. What I need is a melody maker, end of story.

Well not quite end of story since I have been very frustrated not being able to find somebody to work with, someone like in the old days of the mythical Tin Pan Alley when one person wrote lyrics and the other did the melody, common practice and for the times a good one before the superstar kids who could write and make music all in one fell swoop, in one person like say Bob Dylan, guys like that came on the scene. I brought the issue of my frustrations to my chiropractor who has helped me with stress management and other troubles who recommended this film which I was totally unaware of. So, I, well, Josh and I watched, and while it didn’t solve my own musical problems it was as Josh said, “just what the doctor ordered.”

Of course from minute one when Sophie comes to water “has been” rock star Alex’s plants as a substitute for a friend you know that this is going to be the inevitable “boy meets girl” or vici versa story that has saved many a lame Hollywood plot (this one in the “so-so” category saved by the main characters’ performances more than anything else). And they will get under the inevitable silky sheets.  With a twist-“has been” Alex is looking via the next generation superstar Cora (although how and why was beyond me except I plead guilty to not understanding what thirteen-year olds, my grandkids, listen to currently) to “get well” to make something of a comeback, since this Cora is the conduit to that return. Problem, big problem again, Alex hasn’t written anything but trash for a long time, since he was king of the hill in the famous 1980s rock group Pops-you may remember them if you are from Generation X. He needs, maybe not as desperately as I need a melody maker, a lyricist.                         

Turns out that Sophie is not just a spaceshot plant-tender but a spaceshot writer with a few credentials who beyond that seems to have a grasp for writing appropriately endearing lyrics.

Naturally there have to be some ups and downs like Alex even getting spaceshot serious writer Sophie to write bubble gum lyrics for this teen idol Cora. They do, do a good job too as the romantic attraction builds. Then it all comes crashing down-almost. Seems Cora has a very different take on how to present this well-crafted song to her audience. Alex desperate to move back up the music food chain (Seth Garth’s forever term) is willing to let Cora do whatever butchery she wants to the song as long he gets back into the limelight or at least moves up from playing for his once youthful now aging audiences at state fairs and conventions. Split issue. Well almost since they are smitten, and all is well once Alex realizes he can’t sellout and keep his dear Sophie. And they compose and write happily ever after. Well I have had my say-except if any melody maker is out there you know where to find me.

[I was not sure where to put this but Josh and I had a conversation recently, really going back to the 1970s and just revisited by this film about “has-beens” like Alex, like me at a more amateur level and what you do when the flame burns out, when the music that made you goes out of fashion and you wind up playing conventions and coffeehouses. I decided, a right decision to move on to a professional career. Alex decided to stick it out no matter how far down in the mud he went. Josh reminded of a series he did covering two folk icons-Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the media-anointed king and queen of the folk minute. His take was what happened to those who had maybe not as much fame as that pair but who were famous for the moment but who decided to move on when it looked like they were not going to be able to make a career out of their youthful dreams. Or did not want to trek the awful miles in some rundown car staying on the road at some broken down motel in order to play to twenty people in Kingstown, Pennsylvania or someplace like that. Josh is thinking of asking Greg to okay an encore performance of that series in light of this film-L.D.]   

      

A Tale Of Two…Sisters- Down And Dirty Among The Mayfair Swells-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s “Holiday” (1938)-A Film Review

A Tale Of Two…Sisters- Down And Dirty Among The Mayfair Swells-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s “Holiday” (1938)-A Film Review

DVD Review

     

By Leslie Dumont

Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by George Cukor so you know it will be some kind of romantic comedy, 1938

Sam Lowell, the former Senior Film Editor in this space under the old regime where the situation had evolved that every writer had some kind of title now discarded, told me to start this little film review, Holiday, with an idea attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald who did know a thing or two about the species that the rich, no, the very rich, the don’t ask the price rich, are different from you and me. I was not familiar with that particular quote but after viewing this film there is a certain truth to that old saw. So thanks Sam for giving me a lead-in since this is really my first review of old time black and white movies of which I was never really a big fan. Never like it when college guys with no money would ask me if I wanted to see some feature in the latest campus film festival retrospective although I went if I liked the guy. Moreover I was, and the jury is still out for me on this earlier effort, not a big fan of Katharine Hepburn in her later 1960s and 1970s films. I was however quite enamored of Cary Grant in his later pictures although that may have taken a little beating in this film where he is not quite so dashingand decisive.

Sam, who was crazy for, was spoon-fed on these 1930s screwball romantic comedies, also told me to mention at least in passing that those were the golden days of the genre with the likes of the director here George Cukor, Preston Sturgis and Howard Hawks blazing the trail.  That while this film was in the genre it was not the best by either main star. But onward to the “why” of the difference between the very rich, those who owned “museum” mansions on exclusive streets in New York City then, or now. Seems poor little rich girl, silver spoon fed and bred, Julia, was on the prowl for a husband while she was slumming on the post-1932 Olympic ski slopes of Lake Placid in upstate New York. Bingo she finds up and coming up by the bootstraps Johnny, Johnny Case, played by Cary (who looks good in any kind of tie by the way if you wind up seeing this film you will get the reference)  and after a short whirlwind romance on the slopes they get engaged.

Of course whirlwind or not, among the upper set, maybe lower down the class ladder too, in those days at least a proper young man and woman would seek the blessing of the family. That is where the action starts for real when our boy Johnny shows up at that swanky museum mansion to face the inspection of Julia’s rich as Midas banker father. That is where things begin to unravel as well. The old man is dubious about young man Johnny’s wherewithal, clearly not sure of the boy’s bloodlines and so there is a round and round between father and daughter until she gets her way. As usual.       

Enter older sister Linda, played by Ms. Hepburn, who is something like the antithesis of Julia but who can see from minute one that Johnny is the real thing. Real whether he will fit the expectations of Julia and the old man or not. That is a dicey thing and Johnny’s determination/hesitancies somewhat out of character for dashing Cary is what makes me feel a little less kindly toward Cary’s abilities after viewing this one. So the whole circus of a family and Johnny go round and round until the decisive New Year’s Eve night when proud Papa gets to announce the engagement publicly to New York society, to the swells at a big bash at his house. That is kind of the tipping point for Johnny, for Linda who is madly in love with her free spirit side Johnny, and even Julia who begins to have doubts about whether her Johnny can toe the mark, can fit in high society. The answer, after going the extra mile to bring Julia to his side, no on the latter question. And Linda is there to help Johnny put up the Julia rejection pieces. Maybe Linda is just a little too dizzy, too ephemeral and other-worldly but she is ready to break out of the high society rat race which is a good sign. Not a great film but one which I could see myself cheering for Linda and Johnny if I had been in a 1938 movie seat.