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
Artists’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Dada Takes A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath Which Mowed Down The Flower Of The European Youth
By Lenny Lynch
I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios.
I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.
Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Those former were forever your brethren and breathe. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding, would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.
Step up Max Ernst and show us your stuff, show us what four fucking years of war did to the brain. Ernst was drafted and served both on the Western and the Eastern front. Such was the devastating effect of the war on the artist that in his autobiography he referred to his time in the army thus: "On the first of August 1914 M[ax].E[rnst]. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." How could one any longer draw bowls of fruits or natty portraits of high society fashion or even peaceful fishing villages like their forbears. The times were out of joint, connected only by the most tenuous thin reed bonds.
Shorty Blast (not his real name , his stage moniker that was all, the reason for the ruse will be mentioned below but since he was working the New York café society crowd and needed to have a cabaret license a necessary moniker ) dreamed his eternal great big fat immense high white note dream, dreamed it incessantly, dreamed it right then while he was playing, hornsplish-splash playing, just kicks riffs and raffs, little be-bop, be-bop nothings that got the customers attention and a certain nod, maybe a sent-over scotch, like the brethren knew, hell, knew anything about high white notes or anything. Just then he was dribbling for the early arrivers (and early leavers, the six in the morning wakers, hah, his bedtime, jesus what do they do all day but wait upon the night, their own version of the high white note night), the quick scotch and soda crowd before the night bleeds, bleeds all Mayfair white around eleven (and the real stuff, after hours after two, when the clubs let out and the boys play for each other, and to beat each other, to tag off some phantom riffs ) at this Red Fez gig that he had been working, working for a couple of months now to keep body and soul together and to keep Mister Landlord, a not very understanding fellow, from his door, and to keep the former Mrs. Blast far, far away from his door (and his latest paramour, Miss Lucille Pratt). Yes, he dreamed of that high white note, dreamed when or where or how it would come but never, never that it would not come because , he, frankly, frankly you hear, brothers and sisters, had the sheer lung power and muse-magic to turn that big fat note on a dime.
And so this night, this could be night, Shorty did, as he always work did, once he had a few house scotches in him, or maybe some godsend reefer to change the pace if one of the boys scored (he, having been burnt once with a small container and done a couple up at state prison was not the scorer any more, no way, not with that dream note still out there. He knew that the note could come out at the Red Fez, the Hi Hat Club, maybe at some wicked jam at LoJo’s, or even while he was up in his tenement room, practicing ,when Miss Lucille was not around since when Miss Lucille was around, around with her wanting habits on, even Gabriel did not want to blow some funky horn but no way, no way in hell was that note coming out in Ossining town, no way), was to go into a certain state, a certain state where he was not really in the Red Fez , he was not playing for crowds, early or late, was not even in the present time but back to Mother Africa times, to Pharaoh times if anybody was asking, okay.
That Pharaoh time kick had stayed with him since about the sixth grade, yes, it was the sixth grade when he and his older brother (now resting in some European graveyard after having spilled his black brother blood against that damn Hitler) and he, they , were mesmerized by the Egyptian exhibit at the Museum Of Fine Arts in Boston where they grew up complete with pharoanic statues and wondered , wondered out loud about those slave days, about the winds rushing across the Nile, about the rapid river run ofthe Nile, and about some ancient sound, a sound that sounded very much like the sound that would be produced by that high white note, the note that would bring down pharaoh, bring down Mister’s thousand acre cotton fields, bring down Mister James Crow, bring down that silky smooth Mayfair swell crowd that was starting to fill up the place just then. And so Shorty played, played like Pharaoh was coming to get him, coming to take his deep breath away…
*******
Trumpet Player
The Negro With the trumpet at his lips Has dark moons of weariness Beneath his eyes where the smoldering memory of slave ships Blazed to the crack of whips about thighs
The negro with the trumpet at his lips has a head of vibrant hair tamed down, patent-leathered now until it gleams like jet- were jet a crown
the music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire the rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire-
Desire that is longing for the moon where the moonlight's but a spotlight in his eyes, desire that is longing for the sea where the sea's a bar-glass sucker size
The Negro with the trumpet at his lips whose jacket Has a fine one-button roll, does not know upon what riff the music slips
It's hypodermic needle to his soul but softly as the tune comes from his throat trouble mellows to a golden note
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Real Scoop Behind “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”-Martha and the Vandellas- Dancing In The Streets
This sketch takes place in the 1970s but is driven, and driven hard, by the music of the early 1960s when the grifter described here first came of age and hence its inclusion. Frank Jackman
“Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?,” (or sister now something unheard of back in the day, back in the early 1960s, when some cop might pinch you at her request for disturbing the fair sex for being unseemly in public asking a proper lady for anything. Now here in the go-go 70s any human form is qualified for the hustle where every low-rent guy takes a shot figuring maybe to get something so the other party, particularly women, can get you out of their faces and move on) followed by “Got an extra cigarette, pal (or gal, ditto the sister thing except unlike back in the day, pal or gal, in the new age, as likely as not, probably has no butts, has no “cigs,” doesn’t touch the stuff ever since the Surgeon-General’s report put the fear of God in lots of people)?”
Yeah, Billy Bailey, William James Bailey, used-to-be brash corner boy, a contender for the title of king hell king of the corner boy night around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, “up the downs” back in North Adamsville in the old days, the old days these days being the early 1960s before smart and brash corner boy Frankie Riley put an end to that dream by trumping all upstarts since he was “in” with the shop owner, certainly had the panhandler lingo down, down pat, after only a few days on the bum. Funny during these few days on the bum this time he would almost blush when he thought back to the days when he used to laugh in the faces of swollen-faced raggedy-assed guys trying to pan-handle him for dough, trying to bum a smoke, and here he was with the brethren. Hustling maybe a little cleaner in attire that the brethren since he had not gotten down to second-hand Sally goods yet although a few more weeks with constant use of the few clothes that he did have might have him howling. Hustling too with cleaner breathe since he did not drink (that jones long over and done with substituted by several subsequent joneses including his current burden. He still felt that contempt for the buggers since he “knew” that a few days of this street work and he would be off the skids, on his feet again and then able to go back to laughing at the brethren, a good laugh too, while they pipe-dreamed their lives away.
Yeah, this was strictly temporary because his ship would come in before he wound up on cheap street like the boyos hanging around the Common swilling rotgut wine (or maybe low-rent whiskey if the day’s take was good) smoking tobacco “roaches,” butt end really off the ground and pissing all over themselves. However every once in a while he would get a funny feeling, kind of turn up his collar a little more, push his baseball cap lower on his head, put on sunglasses ( a real no-no in the pan-handler racket since you want the “marks” to see your desperate eyes, your pleading desperate eyes, to close the deal. Besides sunglasses might make them feel you just blew in from the coast.) when he realized that he was on the bum in his own home town, his ever-loving’ roots, Boston. (His hometown of North Adamsville close enough so that he did not have to tell people who asked the name of the town and could get by with Boston unlike if he was from Lowell or Lawrence or places like that. Sure he had been on the bum a few times, nothing big, once on the Mission in Frisco (where in the same day he walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and that night slept, slept newspaper for a pillow sleep, under that edifice), a couple of times on Larimer Street in Denver before they gentrified the damn place and along the arroyos down in Los Angeles with a bunch of Vietnam veterans like himself who unlike him couldn’t adjust to the “real” world.
Yeah, those were a few day bums, maybe a week, couple of weeks, no more than a month and then back to the world. Short falls, maybe drunk too much and jobless, later maybe too much gambling on run-out horses and dogs (and no money coming in to feed the habits once he got behind), maybe some twist threw him over for a steady guy after he wore out his welcome (and her pocketbook). On the bum this time, this time though a real fall, in hock and up to his ass in debt, mostly big score no-go dope on credit deal debts, when he had tired of drunk risks, gambling risks, frail risks, guys looking for him, not Boston guys thankfully, well, looking for him to pay up. During the long days of pan-handling this time though he would think back to the old days, the days before the “falls” when hustling dough was just for some short money, pick up some spare change, to wander into free campsite, Volkswagen bus pick-up sharing stews, brews and dope hitchhike roads looking for the great blue-pink American West night with some honey, some Angelica honey, bum like a few years back. Angelica, the proto-type of his sexual desire in those days, all Midwest blonde, slender, frisky, proud and sensible, traipsing after him across half the continent before going home to Indiana and then later joining him in southern California before she decided on white picket fences and kids. Sweet kiss, baby, you were probably right when that last night you said your gallant knight was made of sawdust. Yeah, that was a while back, late 1960s back when even he sensed the world might be turned upside down. Hoped maybe he and his would get a fair shake in the world even though more pressing personal issues drove his days and nights.
Those days, those days after the hellish army routine, the “Nam bummer, the Nam bummer before he hightailed it with the arroyos brothers who couldn’t face the “real” world down in L.A. he practically made a religion, yah a religion out of living “free,” living out of the knapsack(oddly an old World War II surplus job found at Snyder’s Army and Navy which he father had told him he carried all thorough Europe when it was to kick ass with the Nazi), living under bridge (not arroyos brother bridges but nice, meaning girl company nice, sleeping bag also Army surplus and light campfires and fine stews), no sweat, if need be. But those “golden days” dried up a few years back and now here in 1976 he was facing a real skid row choice. How it happened he will get to along the way but first let’s set the parameters of what 1976 panhandling, to put an eloquent name on it for “bumming”, shiftless bumming , looked like and how to survive in the new age of everybody me-ing themselves, even with people who were not on the bum. Christ, lord the times were hard, hard times in old Babylon, no question.
See, a guy, a guy who called himself “Shorty” McGee for obviously physical reasons but who knows what his real name was, maybe he didn’t remember either after all the rum-dum sterno heat years and the endless backsides of skid row haunts, that he had hitched up with for a minute, an overnight minute at the Salvation Army Harbor Lights Center over in the South End kind of hipped him to the obvious tricks of the new down-at the-heels road. Like putting the two requests, change and “cigs,” together when you were panhandling. See, Shorty said it was all a matter of psychology, of working the crowd, the downtown crowd, the bustling workaday Park Street Station crowd hurrying to and fro looking for quick lunches, maybe a minute shopping spree in Jordan Marsh’s or Filene’s, and the Copley Square sunning themselves crowd on the benches across from the library maybe reading a book or feeding the pigeons, right to get you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were doing. So you endlessly put the two requests together, time after time after time, and always. And what happened was that when they turned you down for the dough ( as happened a lot), or maybe took you literally and pieced you off with just a dime, Christ a dime that wouldn’t even buy a cup of joe, could feel good about themselves, if they smoked, smoked cigarettes anyway, by passing you a butt. Billy thought, nice, this Shorty really does have it worked out just about right. Of course dimes and drags were not going to get him out from under, not this time.
Well, rather than leaving the reader out in the dark, Billy Bailey this fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum, but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down just in case there were some guys who were looking for him, or worst, the cops, in case some irate victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” Of course he was counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends and acquaintances, of not putting “the heat” on him since he had already promised through the grapevine that he would make restitution. But we are getting a little ahead of the story, let’s step back.
The early 1970s were not kind to “free spirits” the previous name for what on this day were “free-loaders” and Billy, well, got behind in his expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding bills. But see the transition from free “s” to free “l” caught him off-guard, moreover he was just then in the throes of a fit of “the world owes me a living,” a serious fit. Why? Well see, he as a pauper son of the desperate working poor, “felt” that since he missed out on the golden age benefits of his youth that he was to make up the difference by putting the “touch” on the richer friends that he had acquired through his doing this and that, mainly high-end drug connections (not really rich but richer since the really rich were hunkered down behind about fifteen layers of fortresses, physical and legal, and as some writer who knew what he was talking about really were different that you and me, no question).
The long and short it was that he work the deal this way, this way once he got his hard wanting habits on first he would “borrow” money off Friend A under some scam pretext of putting it to good use, usually using some exotic drug story as the front (yes, his good use, including several long airplane fight trips to California and other points west-no more hitchhike roads for this moving up the food chain lad) and then borrow dough off Friend B to cover some of his debt to Friend A. Something like an unconscious classic Ponzi scheme, as it turned out. And then when he got to Friend X or somewhere around there things got way too complicated and he started “kiting” checks, and on and on as far deep into his white- collar crime mind as he could think. That could only go on a for a short while and he calculated that "short while" almost to the day when he would have to go “underground” and that day had sprung up a couple of weeks before.
So it took no accountant or smart-ass attorney to know that dimes and drags were not going to get him back on his feet. Nor were many of the schemes that Shorty had outlined over at Harbor Lights as ways to grab quick cash. (Hitting the poor boy charity circuit, good mainly one time, grabbing stuff on credit using somebody’s credit card gained through guys who sold fake credit cards and then selling the stuff quick and deeply discounted. Some check finagling. All things that really took sunnier times to work and squeak maximum benefit from. These were chicken feed for his needs, even his immediate needs, although some of the scams would fill the bill for a rum-dum or life-long skid row bum. But here is the secret, the deep secret that Billy Bailey held in his heart, after a few nights on bus station benches, cold spring night park benches, a night bout under the Andersen Bridge over by old haunt Harvard Square (girl-less and with no cozy sleeping and stew campfires), and a few nights that he would rather not discuss just in case, he finally figured out, figured out kicking and screaming, that the world did not owe him a living and that if he wanted to survive past thirty he had better get the stardust and grit out of his eyes. But just this minute, just this undercover spring 1976 minute, he needed to work the Commons. “Hey, brother, hey sister, can you spare a dime?” “Pal, have you got an extra cigarette?”
Postscript: Not all wisdom ends happily, and not all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes, Billy paid off his debts to his friends, mostly. However, Billy Bailey was killed while “muling” in a drug war shoot-out in Juarez, Mexico in late 1979 trying to do an independent score when the bad boy Mexican and South American cartels were bundling things up. Found face down with two in the back of the head. Yeah, Billy Bailey had moved down the chain a lot since the days when he was a contender for the king hell king of the corner boy night.
History In The Making-In The Unmaking Too-Audrey Tautou’s “Coco before Chanel” (2009)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
Coco Before Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou, 2009
Apparently Greg Green who hands out the assignment here, all the assignments here unlike before he came over to manage this sit and headed the film department at American Film Gazette where I was a stinger for a while early in his tenure has decided that I am to be the “women’s film” reviewer in residence since with the film under review Coco before Chanel marks the fourth straight women-oriented film I have reviewed. I don’t like, don’t like that implication at all, since if I had wanted to shell myself into a cozy non-threatening spot I could have kept my by-line at Women Today where I reviewed many things including films which were only marginally about women, one about a couple of gay men where there were no women at all.
The real thing that bothers me about this assignment from Greg who although he had posted in public that he reviews every film before assignment seemingly could not have done so here though is the subject matter on two counts. First dealing with famed Parisian haute couture fashion designer Coco Chanel when I do not give a damn about high fashion or low and resent that I have to blather on about fashionable hats and dresses like that meant anything in the real world. Fellow writer here Josh Breslin who was my companion for some years before I went to my by-line at Women Today can testify that I threw the bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume he gave me one Christmas across the room one time later when we having a drawn out, drag down fight about something. So much for fashion, high or low. The more egregious point though is that this is basically a dishonest film, a film which very conveniently cuts away before the German occupation of Paris when Ms. Chanel according to now disclosed documents worked hand and hand with the occupiers of what could have been burning Paris if Hitler had had his way and never was held truly accountable for her collaboration and her convenient grabbing fortunes when the Jews were rounded up. Thus this vehicle portrays yet another rags to riches by the bootstraps by a poor trodden down orphan who falls in love and is disappointed. Damn another two-bit love story.
Holding my nose, officially holding my nose if anybody including Greg Green is asking, I will do what is expected ever since Sam Lowell’s days as film editor and tell a few details about the plot-line. Coco and her sister were treated as wayward orphans at the hellish Catholic orphanage they grew up in after their mother died. When they came of age (after learning how to sew at the orphanage) they hit the road as a sister singing act and drew the attentions of some high society patrons of the saloon where they worked (and where Coco got her moniker). These upscale relationships gained them, and eventually Coco alone, some important connections with high society, with the world of money where women as “pet poodles” were as conscious about fashion as they were about having their sullen little side affairs.
Coco’s relationship with one such high society male got her entrée into the provincial country elite and then off to gay Paree where her hats first and later high end dresses gave her a certain cache. The film’s tension is between her overweening ambition, not a bad thing in and of itself especially for a single woman of limited means, and a love affair with a British businessman that cannot go anywhere since he, seeking his main chance, is engaged to be married to some daughter of the England nobility. Before that happens though the beast died in a car accident and that was that. Although Coco never married she was at least a mistress to some high ranking German when the Nazis tried to devour Europe, including Paris. I am still holding my nose. No mas.
Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program Three- A Shop Of One’s Own
“Doc” Jackson(first name William but nobody, including his wife, Lucille, evercalled him anything but Doc, so Doc) had been dispensing pills and sundries and notions (not one knew what that mean, including Doc, but it sounded good, good to the tongue, when one said it reading it off the front door sign) at his corner drugstore for over thirty years in that spot at the intersection ofFirst Avenue and Grand Boulevardand Third Street in the high Detroit Southwardneighborhood, what some called the “colored section” when he first started out back just a few years after World War II, others, black and white, called “niggertown” showing some contempt or self-contempt in the snarly way that they pronounced it, still others, reflecting the new sociology of the 1960s called it by some seemingly pathological name, “ghetto,” and he called just plain ordinary vanilla home. See Doc had lived over that drugstore of his for all the time that he had been dispensing those pills, those sundries, and those notions. That apartment’s value and an adjacent rented one had helped when money was tight, when things were slow, or when the neighborhood and the times changed. He was proud that he had held on, held on tight.
He had seen some changes, from the high side money coming in during the “golden age of the automobile” when everybody was looking, looking hard to upgrade to a new car every few years (he had even caught the bug going from an old Packard, to a Chevy, to a high-end Buick, the one sitting out in the back of the store just then) to the hard time’60s when they, those bastard black brothers, burned everything they could get their hands on after Doctor King was assassinated, and almost got the drug store and its environs but the neighbors, his black and brown neighbors, had drawn a line in the sand and said, no, no more. And now, he was seeing some very disturbing signs that the town was going to be further devastated because they, as a result of some world oil situation which even he didn’t understand, were going to close Dodge Main, a place where in good times and bad, a lot of the neighborhood worked, or had somebody working.
Worst though, much worst, was that his old clientele was pulling up stakes, or was dying off he hated to admit and so his old seven in the morning to ten at night speedy service of those in need of their medicines (or their liquor, which he carried for those with prescriptions, and those without, but the less said about that the better) and he was being squeezed out, squeezed out by the new chain drugstores, the new one they want to build right on his corner spot. And there was nothing that he could do about it. See, despite what everyone believed, even Lucille, he didn’t actually own the building, the apartments or anything but had leased them from Mister Reed, a good white man who had run the drugstore before him and seen the neighborhood change and seen that Doc was someone who could be trusted to keep the place going, long ago. Mister Reed, who had recently died, had a son who, as sons will do, wanted to convert his legacy to cash and was willing to sell out to that Osco Drug chain. So here he was now with nothing much to show for a lifetime of work, of sweat, of service except to rekindle his dream of a shop of his own somewhere, anywhere to close out his days…
The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[39][40]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
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
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.
Traipsing Through The Arts -In Lieu Of Discussing Artist And Known
Voyeur Edward Hopper’s “Summertime”-Down In The Mud With The Holy Roller End
Times Sex Patrol-A Thankless Task-But Necessary
The much maligned Mary Magdeline before that saint business-Tintoretto's view
By Laura Perkins
(If you are only interested in reading about the import of Edward
Hopper’s works written through the prism of an art lover although not a member
of the curator, gallery owner, high-end museum patron-donor, art collector
cabal you will have to wait for my next piece to be published. For now I have
to get some seriously disturbed people off my case so I can breathe enough to
talk of guys like Edward Hopper and the whole sex mad modern art scene. L.P.).
[Once again I have to start imprisoned within brackets to avoid
having to ruin a perfectly good piece about one of Edward Hopper’s collection
of paintings, about his salacious take on painting young nubile women without
them looking while he looked on quite leeringly. (Check, for example, his 1943 Summertime with the diaphanously summer dressed
urban dwelling femme waiting, waiting for something to happen to while away the
heat. The model although clothed certainly was not his wife who forbade him to
paint women other than her in the nude but Hopper must have snuck out the back
door or gave her some lame excuse about needing cigarettes to go do his lust-driven
task) But that discussion for later. Cutting right to the chase I have been
dogged in this series of pieces on my take on various paintings, American
paintings that have attracted my attention as I have dug into this assignment,
by a clot, no, a cohort of what I call evangelicals who have been trashing me
endlessly about my discussing sex and sensuality, eroticism, in art. They don’t
give a rat’s ass about the art (both the “rat’s ass” expression and idea about
the place of art for these holy goofs courtesy of long-time companion Sam
Lowell who has had forty years of experience dealing with what these days he
calls the trolls or one sort or another but which took me a little while to
figure out) or even my opinion about any particular piece.
What has them hot under the collar and me on the hellish hot seat,
me, as a conscious agent of the devil, you know the devil that Johnny Milton
talked about endlessly back the 1600s with such best-selling potboilers as Paradise
Lost and Paradise Found. Me as Keil, that I am still
baffled by since this character was a disciple, man-servant as far as I could
tell of the Zoroastrian devil figure Loh, not the Christian one who goes by the
name Satan, Lucifer, Bad Boy, Billy Bob Thornton etc. What has them exercised
is that somehow their junior or missy will Google something for a school assignment
and see me in my vivid splendor talking about the sex life of John Singer
Sargent’s Madame X who essentially acted the role of
courtesan, of professional beauty in the wild and wily days of the Third
Republic in France, the strange opium dream drug-induced kinky sex cult worship
of Alexander’s Isabella, or the Whole of Babylon advertisement
announcing she is open for business explicit in Whistler’s The White
Girl via the telltale wolf’s head and fur beneath her feet. What planet
are they on since no self-respecting teenager is going to do anything but laugh
at the idea of reading some supposedly sexually suggestive stuff in early
modern art in some funky review when they can get whatever they want of real
visual sex on the various sexploitation sites that dot the Internet. And with
hormones going crazy who could blame
them.
Frankly, although my long-time partner and fellow writer Sam
Lowell mentioned above swears by the use of bracketed introductions to not
spoil the good stuff I don’t like the idea, am not going to do this after I
have my say here. What has me up in arms, although silently since I do not
answer any comments by the trolls who have descended on me since I started my
little project, is that somehow I don’t know “jack” (that from Walter, from,
oh, I forget now where he is from, Kansas I think) about religion, about
religious sensibilities. They didn’t frame it that way- it came out more as the
well-trodden-liberal multiculturalist secularist, comsymp (communist
sympathizer from the younger set who otherwise have no clue what that meant and
which in passing also tells me I am dealing with some on the older side parents
making me wonder about that so-called concern for their collective off-springs’
moral welfare certainly not of the folk or anything like that, stuff along that
line. What they don’t know, and I would not ordinarily feel I had to discuss the
issue in a series on art is that I grew up in upstate New York, grew up in the
country that was “burned over” in the Second Great Awakening in this country in
the early 19th century.
There are still small standing churches with attendees who can
date their church structures to those times, plenty still left practicing the
respective faiths of forbears even if the number of congregants is falling off.
Not far from where the farm that I grew up on stands a church-Lord’s
Host-Disciples of Christ which was built by the farmers in the valley back in
1820 in about three days as a sign of their devotion and of their desire to
have a fitting place to worship according to their lights. The few remaining
ancient descendants still practice their religion there. You can go across
upstate, across the “burned-over” areas traversed by preachers like Grandison,
Miller, and the lecherous Hansbury who like today’s Preacher Roe, and allegedly
Reverend Larson who just got exposed for playing around with his congregants,
male and female, had a field day with the women and girls they conned into
believing they were the Son of God and find if not congregations then churches
and markers reflecting those events. Find places that farmers and small
townspeople built, and built quickly, to temper their faiths. Fourth Awakening
folk be advised.
I grew up in a household, a farm as I said where my father was
Mountain Methodist, meaning a split from the Wesley boys’ operation over
theological differences around whether everybody will be saved or not (Mountain
Meths calling out in glee that there will salvation for all-even sinners no
questions asked if you can believe that-especially if you had known my father
and his penchant for casting me to the hell-fires when I lived at home) and my
mother was purebred Brethren of the Common Life, a grouping which broke from
the Monrovian Tabernacle over adult baptism, or maybe the need for baptism. (This
was not a marriage made in heaven, far from it, since from the get-go my
mother’s people “scorned” her for marrying outside the covenant, for marrying a
“heathen,” apparently to them no better than an Indian, now Native American, in
going for an MM). Those are my bloodlines, that’s my DNA so don’t tell me I
can’t go hand to hand with any of the trolls over what they think is happening
to their world-which is basically that it has gone to hell in a handbasket. And
as a corollary to their well-worked out if sour worldview we need End Times to
come quickly to wash away the sins of this earth and return to the Garden.
(That latter part not a bad sentiment if they would not be so nasty about
explicitly by name excluding Keil’s
servant-me.)
It probably will not do any good since speaking of religious
controversy usually gets you nowhere fast and I am not directly responding to
any particular thread (although Sarah from Duluth with her numbered list of
sins for which I have to atone is in my mind as I write this) from these holy
goofs but there have been three main objections to what I have had to say about
why people, trolls and non-trolls alike, should back off and just let me go
about my business of writing little scrawny pieces about art, about what one
troll actually identified, correctly identified, as high culture except used
that notion to cast the whole cabal of curators, collectors and gallery owners
and their hangers-on to the lake of fires. Exception has been taken to my
aspersion that Mary Magdalene, the street whore, lets’ call her what she was,
what she had called herself after she changed careers, who converted to
Christianity around the time Jesus was murdered had been his lover, and if not
him if he was not into sex with women then one, or more of the apostles.
Exception has been taken to my assertion that Jesus may have been gay, may have
been sleeping with one, or more, of his boys. And exception has been taken to
my characterization of the various differences between religious sects over
various ceremonial and theological doctrines as “tempests in
teapots.”
Maybe it was all the clamor over my attempt to place Singer
Sargent’s Madame X (finally I get to say a word about art if only for a minute)
in the long line of professional beauties who used that beauty to get ahead in
the world. This may not accord with any religious scruples or anything like
that but ever since Eve, ever since Adam poisoned Eve with his jealous ways
there have been women who have had to do the “best they could” to fend for
themselves. I just mentioned Eve but at least in the Christian saga I trace the
genesis to Mary Magdalene, who was nothing but a street-walker despite all the
bullshit halos some scholars have tried to throw around her name. Have tried to
pawn her off as some bored little rich girl who “got religion” when Jesus
showed up at a revival in her town and went meekly, and chastely along for the
ride.
Yeah, right. The hard evidence was she was any man’s woman, had a
specialty of washing feet for a fee at the time which I guess was an erotic
foreplay when sandals were in or something now looked at when we have well shod
feet as a fetish, and rightly so. A simple whore doing the best she could who
would up being at “the right place at the right time.” There is substantial
evidence, despite the conflicting and frankly bizarre renderings on the subject
by the four guys who told the Jesus story from their own crooked little
subjective angles, that Jesus has spotted Mary Mags in the crowd when he was
working the town, working Jerusalem when that was a Roman enclave and he was
desperate for converts. Needed some good-looking women to draw the guys in
(some things unfortunately never change). Meeting her he saw that maybe it
wouldn’t be bad to have a little company on those long lonely nights out on the
circuit. On good authority Jesus was not alone when he took a vacation for
forty days to refuel himself-and you know who was with him.
Eyewitness reports, those of a couple of apostles if anybody is
asking and if they are to be believed, state that after they met Mary started
working the crowd as Jesus started working his grift. Look here you have if you
can believe any of the various ancient drawings of the guy a good- looking guy
and a good-looking gal, you had to be to work the streets in those days all the
older used up women were working the wineries, who were smitten. Now there is
no proof that they went under the sheets together, but it is a pretty safe bet
that a guy like Jesus, unless he was gay which will be dealt with in a minute
had no trouble coaxing her in his bed. Alternatively, if he didn’t, was gay and
that is okay if he was although then I believe he would have been stoned or
something like that, then at least John and James are known to have had carnal
knowledge of her once Jesus left for heaven and his father’s place. For all her
troubles and this is kind of the clincher as to what really went on-our Mary
Mags got a sainthood, got to get a trip to Paradise. Not bad for washing some
guy’s feet gratis when he went down for the
count.
Okay, it is definitely possible that Jesus was the “B” of LGBTQ,
“bi” but that makes it harder to make my case about the torrid affair between
him and Mary Mags. If Mary Mags and he were not getting under the sheets after
a tough day of preaching, which is my preferred and more historically correct
view, then Jesus hanging around with twelve guys and no gals is very, very
strange, especially for those times when twelve guys or so doing anything amounted
to an act of insurrection against the Roman state. And not just twelve guys but
a bunch of guys who were fishermen, a profession known to be nothing but a gay
preserve back then -at least at sea. The whole thing would have escaped my
attention except that, and this information gathered via Sam Lowell, W. H.
Auden, the English poet make a habit of “outing” various guys whom he called in
the parlance of the 1930s part of the “Homintern,” which Sam says is just a
take-off on the Comintern, the Communist International, another international
organization of the time.
This “outing” given the nature of the times and the criminal
implications when the “love that dare not speak its name” was a serious crime
just ask Oscar Wilde, was privately held by him and his circle but did not
include Jesus. It did however include Matthew and the villainous Judas Iscariot
of unblessed memory. Since then Edward and Timothy have been added to the list.
Of course the trolls will go crazy on this one since to them “gay” means devil,
maybe not as bad as Keil, the devil’s servant, me but bad and beyond the pale.
That Jesus was letting gay guys into his operation if he was straight would be
beyond the pale. The idea that Jesus was gay would destroy their whole
theological construct, blow the Catholic Church a fatal knock-down as well and
wreak havoc with their opposition to gay
marriage.
Although I have laughingly noted that my troll cohort has created
a veritable “united front” around my acting as an active agent for the devil,
as the truly sinister Keil who in Zoroastrian lore really was a bad- ass from
what I have read up on the character I have noted that they are not above a few
internal skirmishes around their various religious differences. What I have
called to their furor “tempests in teapots” have appeared from time to time. To
add fuel to the fire I have consciously tried to be provocative about those
differences. I mentioned in my own family my father’s Mountain Methodist roots
which derived from the differences around who could be saved and under what
conditions. Like I said strangely my father’s MMs strongly believe everybody will
be saved come judgement day as against the traditional view that only the
repentant will avoid the lakes of fire. In my mother’s case the main split
point back in the 1700s in Monrovia was how long it took God to create the
earth-the Tabernacle’s traditional six days and a day of rest or the Brethren’s
view of twelve days and two days of rest. Those are at least understandable
doctrinal differences and while maybe there should not have been a century of
religious civil wars over the damn issues and nobody should have faced the
stake, or worse been shunned, there you have
it.
What makes no sense to me and this came up an exchange between
Wanda from Wabash, a leading and prolific troll, and Jeffrey Jay, no hometown
given, was over the question of when and in what condition baptism would be
appropriate. Wanda, strait-laced Wanda, has argued for adult baptism, only done
after appropriate repentance and while fully clothed in some mud-raked river or
pond. Jeff, and a few others who have become his acolytes, has argued that
those who have attained the age of reason, have repented of their sinful ways
before the gathered church, should be stripped naked to receive the Lord and
can do it anywhere from a mud-calked river to the family swimming pool. Such
distinctions floor me but that is what keeps guys, endlessly repentant guys
like Preacher Roe and Preacher Baxter in clover. Reverend Larson even as I
write is probably writing up his repentance statement, getting some cheapjack
loin cloth at the Salvation Army store and getting ready to get back on the
gravy train and into those dark
bedrooms.
All this religious talk though really is just that compared to the
firestorm I set off among a small subset, a mini-cohort when I made a statement
that none of these holy goofs cared about art. Were happy to see the whole art
world and the culturati blown to bits, won’t let their kids within five miles
of an art museum. As long as they have their Velvet Elvis memorabilia to grace
their trailer living rooms. Then the guns came out, the heavy guns. Needless to
say all the tripe of the cultural wars came out, the class issue with the
trailer, gun, Walmart, Bud-lite crap.
You would not believe the stuff thrown at me, would have been
surprised at the lack of elementary solidarity with a fellow human sufferer who
maybe had lost her way. A lack of Christian charity even to a vowed opponent.
None of that for I was to be immediately cast in the lake of fires (one guy Jed
I think must have been playing Johnny Cash when he wrote because that came out
“ring of fire” in his submission). Of course I got the now obligatory Keil,
devil’s servant business, although Betty from Toledo at least called me the
devil’s handmaiden. There is more but I can’t go on without commenting on this
rush to have me put down as Keil, a male figure, a male bad guy in the ancient
Zoroastrian religion who when I looked it up, and I had to look it up, was
struck down by Lan, by the force of some primeval moan, some artful prayer
which saved humankind. Is that the fate that awaits me among some of the
brethren?
Speaking of brethren, we could not have a bout of revelation
without the obligatory stand-off between those who will be saved and those who
won’t. My father’s now seemingly gentile religious beliefs that all would be
saved-sinner and saint alike-is like some beautiful dream compared to the hoops
some of the cohort want the “saved,” meaning sinners are in that lake with me,
to jump through. Funny how much it all comes down to ceremony-to the outward
show. Those who want adult baptism via that muddy river fully-clothed and after
public repentance and those who want their saved naked as jaybirds in some
backyard swimming pool with all eyes averted while the swimmers read off their
lists of transgressions. But enough. Back to strictly traipsing through the art
museums.
Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass-
A New Biography
Click on link to hear a
serious biographer of Frederick Douglass the revolutionary abolitionist who broke
with the William Lloyd Garrison-wing of the movement when the times called for remorseless
military fighting against the entrenched slave-holders and their allies. This from
Christopher Lydon’s Open Source program
on NPR.
This is what you need to
know about Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery, the revolutionary abolitionist
fight. He was the man, the shining q star black man who led the fight for black
men to join the Union Army and not just either be treated as freaking contraband
or worse, as projected in early in the war by the Lincoln administration the return
of fugitive slaves to “loyal” slave-owners. Led the fight to not only seek an
emancipation proclamation as part of the struggle but a remorseless and probably
long struggle to crush slavery and slaver-owners and their hanger-on militarily.
Had been ticketed at a desperate moment in 1864 to recreate a John Brown scenario
if they logjam between North and South in Virginia had not been broken. Yes, a
bright shining northern star black man.
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.
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