The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Rolling Stones In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Rolling Stones In Mind

A YouTube film clip of the Dixie Cups performing their 1960s classic (who brought the house down with this number about 15 or 20 years ago at the Newport Folk festival of all places to show an example of a song with staying power Chapel Of Love

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

[In a recent introduction part of this series, see archives dated February 28, 2017 on the subject of 1960s icon writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters who set a certain tone for part of what that whirlwind decade meant to those in the Generation of “68, I noted that after some exhaustive investigation I had found out where the previous site manager of this publication, Allan Jackson, my old high school friend and a founder of the hard copy edition of this space as I was, was hiding out. The reason that was important was that we had lost contact with him in the aftermath of the vicious internal struggle where he was essentially “purged” after he was given a vote of no confidence mainly by the younger writers who though he had gone off the deep end last year in demanding wall to wall coverage of the 50^th anniversary commemoration of the famous Summer of Love in 1967 centered in San Francisco and environs.

When Allan went “underground” to use a term of art used in the 1960s for a lot of situations when people dropped off the face of the earth it seemed the rumors flew high and wide since he cut communications with all his old high school and 1960s friends who whose writing and adventures had formed one of the bases for this publication. Some rumors mentioned that he had been done away with in some nefarious way by the incoming new site manager Greg Green and his hand-picked Editorial Board. As I have mentioned before that seemed ludicrous on its face like this was some kind of replay (as farce as Karl Marx once said about second time around events) of the infamous Stalin-Trotsky war to the death which all the older guys were always knee-deep talking about in their radical 1960s pasts. (That  Board by the way mandated by the younger writers to avoid some of the problems caused by Allan’s increasingly single-minded devotion to “re-living” the 1960s especially in the decisive 50^th anniversary of the myriad events that dotted the landscape of 1968.)

A persistent rumor had him turning tail and placing himself in self-imposed exile out in the American Siberia Utah sucking up to the Mormons in order to get a by-line in one of their dink publications. Things got so out of hand that he had been alleged to have written reams of trash about the virtues of their wearing white underwear and the hardships of having five wives at one time. Worse, worse of all sucking up to a lizard, a chameleon like Mitt Romney who is running for U.S. Senate out there in order to be his press secretary. It got worse in the rumor mill as he was alleged to be living with, living off of some twenty-something part-time waitress surfer girl out in La Jolla who had a father fixation and who was “doing the do” an expression from the old days every chance she got with him and was teaching his to surf to boot. In a more sinister vein which could bring him big legal and maybe bang-bang troubles he was alleged to be putting together a big drug deal on credit with some guys down in Mexico who were looking to make a name in the States. Along the same lines was the rumor that he was running a high-class international whorehouse in Argentina with his old lover Madame La Rue catering to the strange whims of Asian businessmen. There were others, mostly along the same lines, but one last one will suffice to give an idea of what was essentially a smear campaign against the man. Supposedly he was in Frisco dating a transvestite who was connected with the opium trade and he was living high off the hog on Russian Hill stoned to the gills all the time.    

The way we, Sam Lowell and I, as I said among his oldest friends from back in the old Acre working class neighborhood in North Adamsville where we all grew up and came of age was simplicity itself. We checked with his third ex-wife Mimi Murphy to see if he had sent her an alimony check. He had and since he was still sweet on her (she had left him for a younger guy when he got too wrapped up in the 1960s for her taste) he told he not only about the purge which she actually already knew about from Josh Breslin but where he was to see if she wanted to “come up to see him” in his hours of despair. That “come up to see him” a telltale sign that he was not on the West Coast but up in Maine, up in Bar Harbor where he always went when things were tough. Had owned a house there until his parcel of kids from those three wives started college and he almost went bankrupt before he bailed out of that place to pay the freaking tuitions. So Sam and I headed up to see him, see what the real story was. More later except some of those rumors were actually at least partially true. That should keep things interesting.       

**********

Meanwhile story time

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities that he would rather not forget. That is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from Wattsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. It was not like he was some kind of soothsayer, could read tea leaves or anything like that but in his senses which were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll kind of drove his aspirations and that music had the cutting edge of what followed later, followed by about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.

That fascination had occupied Eddie’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haines and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night when he was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care where she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Eddie Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Eddie became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound. Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Eddie was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in Wattsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Eddie would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Eddie had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they severely disapproved on the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Eddie played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother). Then came 1964 and  Eddie was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Eddie had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Eddie knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                    

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his conference trip, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in Wattsville households (and not just Wattsville households either but in places like North Adamsville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where guys were wating for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy).

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about trips to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on television was yesterdays’ news). Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Eddie  be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her…

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up it anyway, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And Eddie and that damn Peter Dawson, who used to be so nice when they all hung around together at Jimmy Jacks’ Diner (corner boys, Ma, that is what we were) and you at least knew they were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If Eddie’s father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as Eddie is. Worst though, worst that worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving Wattsville, defenseless against the communists with his talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t he have just left well enough alone and stick with his idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors and mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Eddie’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what is going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Eddie was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just North Adamsville mothers either) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. "And that Eddie (“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie), and his new found friends like Peter Paul Markin taking her to those strange coffeehouses instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. 

And endless talk about the n-----s down South and other trash talk. Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Paul Markin sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when head South this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. They have already purchased their tickets as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet other heading south. Pete Paul turns to Edward and says, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Yes, we are still just before the sea change. Good luck, young travelers.

Happy Birthday Townes Van Zandt-Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle – “Crazy Hearts” – A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Crazy Hearts".

DVD Review

Crazy Hearts, starring Jeff Bridges, Fox Searchlight, 2009

This one is easy. See it. Why? Well, if for no other reason that Jeff Bridges finally won an Academy Award for his lead role as Bad Blake in it, a role that he has been waiting for about forty years to cash in on. Every since I first saw Bridges as Duane in the screen version of Larry MacMurtry’s great novel of the New West, “The Last Picture Show”, I have known that he had the righteous, good-hearted, hard-drinking, devil-take-the-hinter post, sexually energetic and troubled “old geezer” that he personifies in the Blake role in him. He has done other fine performances but there is something just a little extra that he brings to that good-ole-boy role, young or old.

And here is the kicker. As most of those in America who have being paying attention in the lead-up to the Oscars know this film is about an alcoholic, back roads traveling, down on his luck, hard living country singer, an “outlaw” singer for sure. But also a man in desperate need of either a good woman or a good twelve step program, or both. That premise drives the action and the music. The Blake character could be based on about twelve guys from the 1970s with that fistful of “outlaw cred” from Waylon Jennings to Townes Van Zandt (whose “If I Needed You” is part of the soundtrack here). And that is my final point. Back in those days I had what I call my “country moment”. I gravitated toward the “outlaw country” sound, especially that of Townes Van Zandt, from my permanent berth deep in the blues, city and country, and to a lesser extent, folk. The Jeff Bridges/Bad Blake character is just the cinematic expression of that moment for me. Kudos.

The Max Daddy Of Great Films-Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane”(1941)-A Film Review

The Max Daddy Of Great Films-Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane”(1941)-A Film  Review      

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Citizen Kane, starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton and the merry cast of the Mercury Theater, directed by Orson Welles, 1941  

William Randolph Hearst (oops!) Charles Foster Kane was one of those larger than life personalities who in the end, hell, who knows maybe from the very beginning was brought down the slippery slope by his own hubris. Charles Foster Kane (oops!) Orson Welles was one of those larger than life personalities who in the end, hell, maybe in the beginning was brought down the slippery slope by his own hubris and so the material for this film, this great all-time classic film, Citizen Kane, was just waiting to be exploited on the screen. And after re-watching the thing for about the fifth time my first impression way back when is still valid. This is still a great cinematic effort from the material to the cinematography to theme of the mighty fallen yet human enough to remember some childhood memories untainted by success-or failure.  

“Rosebud,” the last word the dying Kane uttered triggered the whole story line. (I was told by someone back in the 1970s when I first saw the film in a revival at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square not to miss the beginning where Kane utters the word on his death bed, or the end when we are graphically informed what it was all about, because the story line depended so much on knowing that was the key-that informative person was right.) The world- famous Kane of mighty fortunes and of late Xanadu-his ungodly palace down in Florida had by that one word sent reporters, especially one intrepid reporter searching for what that meant.

In a series of flash-backs we find that whatever virtue he had as Midwestern farm boy he had lost by the time he was a young man under the tutelage of his benefactor. We find that he was driven to distraction by placing his brand on the world. From the newspaper he turned around to make a name to be reckoned with in the industry to his ill-fated run for governor to his troubled marital life to his doddering old age as a virtual recluse in his mansion we see a man who was maybe respected, was maybe loved in a funny way but was such a control freak that he let that get the best of him. The rise and fall of Kane, part story, part newsreel, part made-up Hollywood press agent’s clippings and paid graft said something about a not very different from today America-where jockeying for cash and power, in either order rules the planet.          

When Superman Cashed His Check- Ben Affleck’s “Hollywoodland” (2006)-A Film Review

When Superman Cashed His Check- Ben Affleck’s “Hollywoodland” (2006)-A Film Review 

DVD Review          

By Sarah Lemoyne

Hollywoodland, starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins, 2006    

[Sometimes this film reviewing business which is really all the cutthroat, take no prisoners, you are only as good as your last review, the last word in your last review really, that everybody who has kept their ears and eyes on the industry has exposed although lot of good it did them. Which is surprising since the film industry, Hollywood in the old exclusive days and now Bollywood and beyond as well, had paid generations of flak-catchers, press agents, strong arm men if need be, hit men if that doesn’t work to make itself and its adjunct film critic cohort look like bosom buddies. That of course is hooey.

The cutthroat and other stuff mentioned above about the profession such as it is got a good workout a while back when one Sam Lowell, a name well-known in the industry if not well liked since he has in the course of a forty plus year career pushed some pretty wrong buttons, has panned more movies that maybe God, and I ran what he called a cold civil war between us over our “different” interpretations of films we were jointly reviewing to give the readership our “takes” on the series of films we were given to toil over. No question despite my youth, my having only a couple of years before I started working here just finished graduate school at NYU, that I whipped Sam’s butt and really did leave no prisoners. I will grant he did beat meet on a retro-review of American Graffiti but that one was strictly from his own youth and he could have been in the cast of the film and not embarrassed himself. Moreover I was pretty clueless about Valley boys out in California and their wet dreams about what Sam called “boss” cars back then and about hanging out in some drive-in restaurant which today as a gag only exist in places like San Francisco where there is a chain of Mel’s Diners.       

I might have whipped Sam’s butt as most of the younger writers here (some like Will Bradley who had his own “competition” with Seth Garth over the fake legend built-up by the publishing and film industries of punk private eye, gumshoe really, Sherlock Holmes from over in England, who helped me slay the nasty old tiger Lowell) and a sample polling of the readership attested to but I forgot the first rule of the profession really of the whole publishing industry. That cutthroat part which came home very soon and very clearly. As a result of my good work I was given a cherished by-line by the site manager and for a while I was writing material weekly if not more, especially helping Will Bradley get his own byline (which he did get over that debunking Sherlock Holmes and about ten other overblown legends not all of them that I was personally aware of).   

Then the roof fell in. Many very good films came out in 2018 and I was “overlooked” on all of them. Same thing with the treasure trove of older films which are the staple of this publication as far as paying attention to the history of film and what the old-time films bequeathed to the industry today. Finally, I was “pieced off” with a long series I was, am scheduled to present on B-films from the 1940s and 1950s. But no present or current work to keep my name before the public, and before the other rats in this business looking to cut any, my throat to get ahead. I went to the site manager, Greg Green, the one who hands out the assignment including what should be a very good one on those B-films if it ever gets published. That is when I learned that “cutthroat” had a name.  

That name one Sam Lowell. See Sam for having betrayed his old-time growing up friend and at that time site manager Allan Jackson with the decisive vote for his ouster got to be the chair of the new Editorial Board set up in the wake of the vote to insure “one-man” rule never sees the light of day again in this publication house. Sam had put the hex on me with the site manager strictly due to his defeat in our duel. Nothing else can explain my wash-out. I threatened to quite (taking maybe one thousand pages on that B-film project with me and let them sue me if they liked) and to keep the peace I am now back in the public prints. Here is the real beauty of the story though I grabbed the review below from egg-on-his-face Sam Lowell who practically begged Greg for the assignment. See, cutthroat business, right.   

(Allan, now returned as what they call a contributing editor after a hoary story of exile and banishment working for newly elected Utah United States Senator Mitt Romney’s election campaign in 2018, partnering in a high-end whorehouse with an old flame Madame La Rue out in San Francisco and M-Cing the famous drag queen show at the KitKat Club with his old friend Timmy Riley aka Miss Judy Garland in that same city if any of the rumors are to be believed. This all before current site manager Greg Green hired me when he took Allan’s place.) Sarah Lemoyne]    

*********

No question Hollywood knows how to make good noir films ever since they put classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Out Of The Past among others together back in the 1930s and 1940s. And that genre gets a modern workout here in the film under review, Hollywoodland, centered on the death of actor George Reeves who won a certain amount of fame as Superman in the hit television series in the 1950s (a series that I watched faithfully early in the morning on rerun television when I was a kid although I don’t think I took the news of his death all that personally unlike the boy in the film but that death had occurred later when I had stopped watching the series). The noir part is the intrigue that builds up over the possible ways he might have died although for the record everybody wanted the thing put down as suicide-just another guy who couldn’t hack the fact that his show had been cancelled and that he had been type-cast as a guy in tights and a muscle shirt with funny lettering, maybe gay but nobody publicly said anything about that until Rock Hudson’s AIDS time blew the lid off the whole thing. Yeah a has-been guy who had only the acting range for such kid-appropriate roles.     

Let’s see where the trail leads here. George Reeve, played by Ben Affleck, committed suicide in 1959 by shooting himself in his bedroom while his fiancé (as you know that status did not preclude a little gayness in those uptight times when guys would seek marriage for cover against the “light on your feet” charges) and others were downstairs. That hard fact is part of the historical record, the police record. But there were enough contrary statements and allegations to, well, fill a book which in fact happened and allowed a fictionalized film to try to fill in the blanks-or create a nice noir story about the prizes and pitfalls of Hollywood in the 1950s.    

Naturally, although a noir can survive without one, murder always spices one up. As does having a fictionalized shoulder to the wheel private detective look for leads on a dead-end trail after the “too busy” cops have thrown the case into the cold files. Enter one Louis Simo, P.I., nicely understated played by Adrien Brody, a been around the block once too many times down at the heels divorced father of a young son who was  a Superman series devotee (and a kid who took the death of the super hero pretty hard including almost burning the house down trying to get rid of his Superman costume since suicide was not a manly way to solve any problems among the young). He takes the case when Reeves’ mother is unhappy with the Los Angeles Police Department’s work on what happened to her son.  

Brother Simo might have been a two-bit, second-rate private detective but he was tenacious, was committed to seeing what was to be seen to the end which placed him in the company of guys like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. Ready to take a fist or too, a slug in his body if need be, to see if there was a way to grab some rough justice in the world. See if the rumors of a planned “hit” by some high movie executive doing the deed to poor George for some unknown agent or if that lovely fiancée accidently pulled the trigger. The three theories mix and match in flashbacks throughout the film, although in the end that suicide seems the most likely answer.   

But along the way there was enough confusion about motives, enough questions about who in Reeves’ life might want him out of the way to keep things moving. The prime “evidence” for the hit-man theory was the woman scorned always a good choice when murder, murder most foul is in the air. The woman scorned, an older woman scorned, Toni Mannix, played by Diane Lane, the paramour of Eddie Mannix, played by Bob Hoskins, had plenty of reason to have done the deed, or had it hired out. She had picked Reeves up one night at a party and they quickly became lovers (it was okay old Eddie had a mistress so “no foul” as they say). Including her setting up house with Reeves (she paid, or rather Eddie paid). They went along for a few years, years when Reeves became a big television hero among the younger set (and later me).     

After the Superman show was cancelled though our George was at wits end, needed a project (interesting he accused Toni of not lifting a finger to help his career even though she was well-connected through Eddie). He headed to New York where he met his fatal mistake-his- Lenore who wound up as his fiancée as they headed back to the cesspools of Hollywood. Needless to say, Toni was beside herself when Superman fel down and it is that fact that drives the hitman theory full force. And our man Simo is living proof since as he digs deeper into the cold, cold case he is warned off about seven different ways by various private dicks and security guys who work for guess who-Eddie Mannix who whatever else he might be does not want to see Toni bothered.

In the end we are left with nothing but pure speculation just where we started about what happened the night of Reeves’ death. But you know with the gritty feel of this one, the familiar menacing background music and period piece cars and costumes made me think that Hollywood still knows how to put a noir together when it wants to. Thanks Adrien, Ben, Diane and company. 

  

A Simple Twist Of Fate-Anne Baxter’s “Bedeviled” (1955)- A Film Review

A Simple Twist Of Fate-Anne Baxter’s “Bedeviled” (1955)- A Film Review With The Late Steve Forrest In Mind      

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Bedeviled, starring Anne Baxter, Steve Forrest, 1955

When murder, murder one if you thought about it, is involved you never know exactly who is, and who is not, capable of that heinous crime. Or who will step in to muddy the waters. That is the gist of the murder mystery under review, Bedeviled, that simple twist of fate which separates out the good from the bad. A very catholic idea.

And that small letter catholic idea gets a work-out in this vehicle. A young man of the cloth, a seminarian, Gregory, played by Steve Forrest is off to Europe, to France, to Paris to go through the last steps before ordination attempting to cancel any doubts about his choice. On the flight over he meets a fashion designer, Francesca, who “comes on” to him since he was wearing civilian clothing. After landing he and one of his fellow seminarians with whom he was travelling meet their priest host who invites them that evening, that fateful evening to dinner. The fateful part being that unaware of how to get around Paris he hails a cab, a cab in which Monica, a chanteuse from America, played by Anne Baxter, erratically and with some suspicion about her, enters the same cab.              

From that point the chase is on. Monica is a woman with a secret, a secret that she will only divulge to Gregory by the coffee-spoon full. He is both good looking and sympathetic by inclination so goes through a few rings of hell with her, including an attempted seduction, before she confides that she had by turns witnessed a murder, and eventually that she had murdered her fiancé who turned out to be married which had unhinged her. Not unhinged was that fiancé’s brother who was out for revenge and would not take no for an answer Somehow after finding out that Gregory was a priest she “got religion” and decided to tempt the fates. For that wrong move she paid with her life. Before she expired she sought forgiveness for her sins to Gregory. Not a great film but an interesting twist with a priest as a knight-errant. A change from their usual portrayal in the 1950s when they were as likely to run from the danger as to it and would fill the world with ideas about forgiveness, forgetfulness and worrying more about making a good act of contrition that getting a break in this life, the life they know that they have to survive.               

The Cold Civil Heats Up-In Fear For The Republic-Dump The Trump-No More Years-Channeling Robert F. Kennedy, 1968- Winnowing Out The Challengers-Who Has The Stomach To Go Down In The Mud To Take Back This Country-Kamala (Finally Got It Right) Harris In Portsmouth, NH February 19th

The Cold Civil Heats Up-In Fear For The Republic-Dump The Trump-No More Years-Channeling Robert F. Kennedy, 1968- Winnowing Out The Challengers-Who Has The Stomach To Go Down In The Mud To Take Back This Country-Kamala (Finally Got It Right) Harris In Portsmouth, NH February 19^th   

An on-going series until January 20, 2021 by Frank Jackman

These days, these anguished fearful days I find myself increasingly channeling beloved Robert F. Kennedy, laid low by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 just when his high tide was coming in. In those days among other things which I will get around to later in this series when I have little off-hand time for sweet schoolboy reminiscences I was fearful for the Republic, was worried that things were getting so out of hand what with the no end in sight Vietnam War blazing and dividing the country in almost civil war terms then as well, viciously suppressed inner city black community uprisings and the political low road ascendant with one Richard Milhous Nixon and one George Wallace scorching the earth all forms of political death were in the air including assassinations of political leaders.

At that time, that 1968 what knows what will happen time, being a good old Massachusetts boy who at fourteen years of age had knocked on doors and distributed leaflets for one of our own, our Irish boy made good, Jack Kennedy in the fall of 1960 (while also having in that period attended a nuclear disarmament rally on Boston Common sponsored by what would later be called “peaceniks” but were mainly Quakers and pacifists to show the contradictions  of the times, and the contradictions of one Frank Jackman) I could name the villain of the piece. One Richard Milhous Nixon, petty criminal, low-blow artist and bum of the month who would go to be President of the United States (POTUS henceforth in today’s Twitter-speak) before the wheels went off his train and he sulked his way to eternal infamy out in the Pacific Japan currents.     

I would not have put the matter of my concerns in those days as being fearful for the Republic but in retrospect that is what got me off my dime to go and work like seven whirling dervishes for beloved Robert Kennedy all along the East Coast, working with everybody from idealistic “seek a newer world” college students like myself (not then knowing that RFK had “cribbed” that expression from Alfred Lord Tennyson on the fly but that was okay then, and now) to the old-time still standing ward healer bosses like Meade Esposito and Carmen De Sapio in hothouse New York. Though nothing of earnestly committing to what was a united front of all those against the devil, unblessed RMN. These days when I have been able to articulate better my fears I have the same sinking feelings that we are in for continued hard times if we don’t take this country back from the night-takers and new league of bums of the month headed by one Donald Trump, POTUS, petty thief, Putin’s poodle and every evil associated with RMN writ large. One wag said memorially “Nixon on steroids.”       

I headlined this piece which will be a continuing watch word in this series from now until the next presidential inauguration in 2021 with the dire warning that the cold civil war that has gripped this country for the last couple of decades has over the past few years and particularly the past couple heated up. Heated up enough to get me off my own dime-again. Made me realize that whatever else I might think about the virtues and vices of a Republic (especially against the long discredited “divine right of kings” which seems to be the operating principle if that is the right term to be used in anything talk related to this current administration that is in play now) it is easier, much easier to work my left-wing politics under the norms of a Republic than having to look over my shoulder and worry about being sent to the bastinado every time I get my dander up to go out on the streets and get “uppity” around some cause.     

That feeling has not been one that I have personally operated on for a long time, mainly going about my left-wing business out in the streets without feeling I was headed to some dire blackhole fate. Let me be clear although my experiences in the American Army during Vietnam War times (at a time when Richard Milhous Nixon was ironically my “commander-in-chief”) pushed me in a very different direction from those heady Spring of 1968 days when I was planning to be a consummate bourgeois politician (mucking around with Esposito and DeSapio serving as an apprenticeship) I had not felt a need to worry about the fate of the Republic, one way or the other. Now all bets are off. Now I am ready to make a pact with the devil, make a united front with all who wish to oppose this drift away from even basic democratic republican values. 

So right now, I and a few others, unfortunately not any of my old-time neighborhood corner boys from the Acre in North Adamsville who continue to declare a “pox on both houses,” Democratic and Republican, are working through how to most effectively work to get the country back. Right now, that means, and this is hard for me to say after fifty years of purposefully working against or avoiding the Democratic Party and its various candidates and working instead on the issues, mostly around war and peace, I, we are doing our own personal winnowing out of the candidates, announced and unannounced, who look to challenge the Donald come 2020. Right now, as well we are policy wonks looking to see who has the best projected program if they actually defeat Trump and want to implement things to turn this place around.    

Today, today in February 2019, a long year away from the main actions for nominations I have already staked some ground out in what I am looking for in winnowing out candidates. This is where beloved Robert Kennedy rears his head again. Bobby, yeah, let me call him Bobby, could spin pure gold with his visions and his quasi-Irish poet understandings and cut your balls off the next minute if you opposed Jack or wanted to take the low road on some issue important to him-you would wind up in political Siberia and even your family would not weep for your exile. Then, and now too, just my kind of candidate. (In that poetic sweepstakes his then Democratic Party opponent after Lyndon Johnson fell into a crying fit and quit Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy was the real poet without Bobby’s ruthless streak though)

Today as the field expands to some exponentially impossible number what I am looking for since there are plenty of candidates with at least minimally supportable programs is what I would call the character issue for short. All the great programs in the world will, as is graphically clear these days when things are actually being driven the other way, are so much dust, so much hot air if a candidate does not understand from the past three years at least, that 2020 will be a “street fight,” a nasty affair no question. The question I and my co-thinkers these days will be posing point-blank and in person if candidates show up in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, maybe Maine is do they have the stomach to go down the low road to get elected, to go “down in the mud” with Trump to become POTUS. More, much more later.     

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A first wetting of the feet as communicated to those who are part of a an expanding cohort who are looking for and ready to back one candidate who we feel can win first the Democratic Party nomination and then whip the tyrant’s ass:    

Report Back From Kamala Harris 2020 Presidential Campaign Event-Portsmouth, NH -February 18, 2019-

Forward this e-mail to interested parties in your social network who are looking at 2020 in early 2019 so therefore untamed political animals like us. 

This report was written before I received news that Senator Bernie Sanders had entered the race for the White House. I am wondering whether the very positive turn out for Kamala Harris in Portsmouth forced his hand a bit or whether this was his game plan all along.

[This a contribution to our on-going conversation about who to support in the 2020 Presidential election cycle in an attempt to gather a cohort of like-mined organizers around one candidate, if possible, to have a greater impact on the selected campaign and candidate.

We have generally agreed that right now we are “window shopping” as the various campaigns roll out and splash in New Hampshire and that is probably best until the Spring anyway if not until June when the first debates take place. We have also generally agreed and if I am wrong chime in that “winnability” is a key factor up to a point (the Biden point). I would only add here the other factor I am looking at since I think we also generally agree that 2020 will be a down and dirty “street fight.” All the candidates have “the fire in the belly” or else they would have backed off like Deval Patrick and others, but do they have “the stomach to go down in the mud” against Trump, not in kind for that is worthless but to show some serious grit. Fight the low blows from the start when they will, hell, have already come. This time out it is sadly the low road or no road. I’d like other opinions on what amounts to this “character” issue. Frank Jackman] 

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Pat Riley, Connie Kelly and Frank Jackman attended this event

Pat, Connie and I arrived about 3 PM for the event scheduled from 4-6 PM at the U/U Church in downtown Portsmouth and found we were “late.”  (Yawn, what place would you expect Sen. Harris to speak at but a U/U venue, right U/U partisan Bob Williams). What we found was that there was a line that extended around a few blocks and we were pissed off that we had not come earlier as originally planned since we did not expect to get in and did not want to watch the event out in the street in the snow and cold on the screen the campaign had set up.

We did get in although up in the balcony which precluded our being able to ask the Senator any questions. The crowd was estimated by the fire department I believe to be over one thousand. I am not sure whether that included the hundred to one hundred and fifty who watched on the hallowed basement of the church where an additional screen was positioned. The size of the crowd surprised me as I figured that based on the snow, the distance from the February 2020 primary, and the lesser name recognition of the candidate, that maybe a couple of hundred diehards would show. (Connie was the only one who thought she would draw a big crowd.) The crowd, a mix of young and old, the vast majority white, the state by the 2010 census was 2% black and 93% white which must make it one of the whitest states in the country, was patient maybe reflecting the old New England character with our freaking weather.          

The event pretty much ran on time and ended on time with not much pre-speech build-up except an introduction by a NH state senator whose name I didn’t get and who is chairing the Harris campaign in NH. In her fairly short speech Senator Harris, as all serious politicians do, honed-in on her stump issues. Her overall theme was that while acknowledging the deep divides in America that we as a nation have more in common that what separates us. For now, she is going the high road as she works out the kinks in her message. Senator Harris seems to be staking out a position on the left-supporting the litmus test issues-Medicare for All, Green New Deal Plan, No Wall, a more humane immigration policy, serious attention to the impending disasters with climate change, fighting the opioid addiction problem (acute in NH). She addressed other issues in the question and answer period generally on a left-liberal, progressive agenda line. What was not addressed in either segment were any issues around the huge military budget or foreign policy which I am not sure was by design or because she was playing to her audience.

Speaking of audience when it came time for question and answers, I am not sure whether campaigns “plan” this stuff, but all the questions she receives were “soft ball” hit out of the ball park things. This is where in response to questions she answered that she favored a comprehensive prescription drug policy, more help for the elderly and chronically ill, support to the union and union organizing movement in answer to a question from a former Portsmouth Naval base worker (although nothing about the fight for $15), support for an NH bill fighting against voter suppression and making it easier to register and vote (which drew one of the big applauses of the day), increased gun ownership requirement invoking Parkland and other horrors, and support for stripping the bastard Columbus of his designated day and making the day Indigenous Peoples Day.    

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I made a special effort to talk to people to see why they had come because frankly I was impressed not only by the turnout but how they found out about the event and why they were there as I grabbed as much on the ground political intelligence as I could. Granted it has been a long time since I have been involved in presidential politics but I wondered how much of the crowd turnout for Senator Harris reflected her very public role grilling Brent Kavanaugh at the Judiciary Committee hearings (a lot), being a woman (a fair amount), being an interracial woman (hard to tell but important in the long run), and having a much better organization on the ground than I would has suspected in NH this early (by comparison somebody I talked who had been at a Sen. Booker event in Portsmouth on Saturday and said it was very much smaller).

Of course, the elephant in the room, especially for the young (many of whom I saw busily texting during the event) is the role of social media in the organizing efforts. In other conversations after the event I talked to longtime NH residents who told me that every four years this stuff is a rite of passage and there is a certain “competition” to see who goes to the most events, etc. So that is an element as well as is the fact greater Portsmouth unlike say North Conway or places like that is a Democratic Party stronghold, especially with the conversion of Pease AF base to civilian uses and increased working class jobs and more affordable housing in the area in places like Exeter (even fairly rural Newfield about twenty miles away and the home of the governor Hilary polled 68%)           

Evaluation based solely on this event: Senator Harris as an experienced politician is good on her feet in answering questions. Her style also reflected her obvious personal concern for the downtrodden, the hurt and the underappreciated in this society and her own life story which she alluded to at several points. While I am far from being ready to dismiss her candidacy like I have done on others I left the event not feeling strongly that she has “the stomach to go down in the mud” with Trump and his crazed supporters. It will take a less friendly environment to see how she reacts.      

Final notes: Pat and I were interviewed by NBC News (not bad for day one of our campaign) and Friendly Toast has good food for those of us who will be seeing more of the Seacoast area in the next year that we thought possible. (That Friendly visit via some gift certificates I won in our last VFP live fund-raiser so all the sweeter.)   

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VI-“Bumbling Up The Fight Against The Fascists”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon” (1942)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VI-“Bumbling Up The Fight Against The Fascists”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon” (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

[Readers who are familiar with this series of short film reviews in the struggle to debunk the legend of the wiseass, sullen fake amateur private detective who went by the name of Sherlock Holmes but who used the moniker Basil Rathbone and whose real name was Lanny Lamont which will be explained below need go no further and can skip to the skimpy review below the end bracket. For those others who are clueless about the hopped up public relations created bumbling Holmes-Watson legend please read on to get caught up on one of the biggest scams in the history of private detection.   

Let’s get a couple of items straight from the get-go which will make what appears to be an exercise in futility on my part trying to overturn a massive fraud on the cinematic and literary public seem more necessary and vital to clear the air.

First if you look at my moniker in the byline above you will notice that I have used the name Bruce Conan. That alias of course, actually of necessity, had been forced on me by the notorious and nefarious group of blood-thirsty cultists who go by the name of the Baker Street Irregulars who seek my demise, my death according to some reports, for exposing their bloated homosexual hero (and his partner Doc, Doc Watson, the M.D. not the famous legendary blind bluegrass performer) for the bumbling fool that he is.

On the first five of these so-called film reviews (out of what I thought would be  twelve but have recently found out are fourteen films thus cutting my chances at completion down severely if I am not done in by some night-taker from that Irregular clot of inhumanity well before that) I was forced to use another moniker, Danny Moriarty. Yes that was in honor of the unjustly maligned heroic foe of Sherlock’s Professor Moriarty who it turned out was nothing but a fall guy for a dope and burglary ring that Holmes was running to keep up his opium-addled lifestyle. Unfortunately in the debunking business, in the whistle-blowing business you have to take some risks if the truth will out and somehow these determined holy goof cultists were able to figure out where I was and more ominously where I had sent my family for safe-keeping. Hence the new moniker and maybe another one or two before I am through to throw this menace off the scent while I get my family to other quarters and do my expose business.  

The second point. Readers, some irate although I think that they are just fronting, trolling would be the word in cyberspace times, for the notorious, nefarious Irregular cultists, have lambasted me for putting so much material in brackets throughout the review. Points about Holmes’ place in the private detection pantheon and that charged accusation of being back then when the times took a very different social-and legal- view on the subject of having a homosexual affair with Doc which explained some of the bumbling, the piling up of bodies, and the contempt for his fellow humans   before somebody else laid the bad guys low. Somebody else covered up his mistakes. To the extent that I think those anonymous readers have a point, whoever they are, I have decided to put the whole analysis here in one place. And as I have mentioned at the beginning the reader can move down past the end bracket to the obligatory although hardly pressing review or push on to find out the truth about a guy they might have thought that they admired at one time when they were kids.      

Genesis first. I had originally been assigned this series of film reviews by the previous site manager, Allan Jackson, who knew that I had done a series of reviews of films and books about two really legendary private detectives, the gold standard of the profession, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe whom I had spent many a youthful Saturday afternoon watching on the screen and many a youthful night reading and re-reading up in my bedroom. I had noted, and Allan seemed to agree, that these professional private detectives were the epitome of what was what among such career detectives. Without going into great detail here I noted that what made them special was their grit, their lack of fear, their ability to take a punch or a slug for the cause and keep their heads when the obligatory femme fatale came knocking on their doors. Went under the silky sheets with female danger while tilting some windmills to grab a little rough justice in the world be it for a partner like Miles Archer or a broken down old man like General Sternwood with a couple of wild daughters who were ready for anything from those silky sheets to murder, murder one when you think about it.          

When Allan gave me the original assignment I was actually doing a series of film reviews for another Hammett detective Nick Charles, and the indispensable Nora of course, so I begged off for a while. Then came a big internal shake-up at this publication which I will not bore the reader with the details of and the emergence of Greg Green as the new site manager. Greg noting that old Allan assignment schedule was very interested in doing the Holmes series as well and so here it was all set up.

I originally went about my business of the first Holmes review  with no particular animus toward the man although I cringed a bit at his condescension toward other mere mortals based on the flimsiest motive that he was some kind of king hell deductive reasoning guru. He seemed at the time to have the truly bumbling Doc, Doc Watson, under his spell and moreover to have his number as a punching bag incompetent to make his own mistakes seems trivial in comparison. Then I started to analyze what his modus operandi really was. To see the holes in his deductive reasoning methods against real pros like Spade and Marlowe, hell, even lady’s man Miles Archer and half-drunk Nick Charles looked good in comparison. What I noticed from the very first film was that once he was on the case he let the bodies pile up before the villains were caught. Caught not by him but by third parties. Cops and an occasional civilian.            

That wasn’t so bad, even bad boys Sam and Phil were not virgin pure when murder was in the air although they always brought the bad guys to justice on their own hook. Then I noticed that Holmes, I will call him Holmes since that is what he conned the world into believing was his name and maybe he was right to do so with a Christian name of Lanny Lamont to live down, that he was totally incompetent with a gun, could not “fucking shoot the side of a barn” as my sainted mother used to say. Then Holmes started to take his act to foreign countries and that was the limit.

That is when I had to put my foot down and expose this nasty little bugger. Here is where the fake legend really got its start. Where whatever public relations guys Lanny, I mean Holmes, hired to build up his reputation in the prints went over the top. It was one thing for Holmes to get outsourced for jobs over the incompetent, venal, and corrupt coppers at Scotland Yard. Everybody knows the coppers there were on “the take” and I have since come to understand they have been paid off by the Baker Street Irregulars to see no evil when those cretins go about their blood rituals. And look the other way when they threaten me with murder and mayhem for tarnishing the image of their Nancy boy Holmes. I got that information by the way from a few ex-Irregulars who left the organization repelled by the blood rites and by the extortionate crimes committed to keep them in dough. It is another, however, to think that His Majesty’s MI6, its foreign spies, its James Bonds, was going to let Holmes within five hundred miles of any espionage case against the Hitlerite plague that was darkening the doors of Europe. The most bitter taste in my mouth was when he let an innocent fourteen year old serving girl get murdered while he on some landudum high.   

Everybody knows that real professional private detectives back in the day not only knew how to shoot, knew enough to keep innocent young girls from harm’s way, kept their own counsel in attempting to bring a little rough justice in the world but were committed skirt-chasers. Expected a little something more than another boy-scout merit badge in the fight for that rough justice. Nobody ever heard of a private detective who was not a womanizer. After the first film review I noticed that Holmes never looked at a woman, that he only seemed to be intimate with his teddy bear Doc, his roommate as it turned out and bedmate when they were on foreign cases. Once when he was captured by some bad guy and being held with a great looking young woman I noticed he never even looked at her. Sam or Phil would have looked her upside down and been grinning thinking about those silky satin sheets.

That slap against his manhood, his manliness, on top of all his other failures of nerve is what committed me to his exposure. I have taken more than my share of abuse from those criminals in the Irregulars who have started a smear campaign against me as being anti-gay, you know homophobic, against same-sex marriage and every other libel and slander they could produce in their insidious attempts to discredit me as I de-fang Holmes. Apparently, according to those ex-Irregulars who have come forward with information, there is a big internal battle between those who want to proudly “out” Holmes as a member of the Homintern pantheon and those who want to keep things hush-hush and go about their high-end criminal enterprises without the glare of such publicity. The latter clot seem to have become ascendant.    

Today there are probably a million gay private detectives and nobody thinks anything of the matter least of all me. Probably there are half a million gay partners and gay married private detectives although I don’t know if anybody bothers to keep such figures. But back in the day there were different social-and as I said before legal strictures against the “love that dare not speak its name,” against private detectives who were “light on their feet,” were “fags” and were keeping house with another man. So no way could Holmes, or Holmes and his paramour, qualify as real private detectives. That is the icing on the cake that is the way things were. And that explains why Holmes didn’t take look one at that good-looking young women he shared temporary prison with. As I keep saying a fake, yesterday’s news. Enough said.]

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Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again I think through another cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1942

It almost seems criminal after crucifying Lanny Lamont aka aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes above to bother running yet another bummer summary of one of these fake news cinematic storylines, here Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, which probably were made up on Fleet Street anyway at the behest of those nefarious Irregulars who through their media connections in the notorious Kit Kat Club, the haunt of the wild boys since about King George III, can get any libel published without recourse but I will simply use this as case number six in the struggle to topple Holmes and his ill-gotten fame.

      

Although Bond, James Bond, would sneer and M, the head of MI6, of British Intelligence would have heads rolling at 10 Downing Street somehow in the middle of World War II there was nobody available but a rank amateur key-hole peeper and known pervert Holmes to carry back some information and a key scientist who had developed a secret weapon that would change the war, would put Hitler to ground once the thing got into production. Assuming it worked, which it did.   

Of course the bloody British are all over the discovery and probably expected to use it on their colonials after a shortened war bout with the Germans on the plains of Europe. Fortunately heroic Professor Moriarty was onto the scheme, on to it as long he lived anyway before falling afoul of Holmes and a martyr’s death. The scientist who created the invention, the bombsight which would help decimate cities, towns, villages was a control freak (as I found that decimation did happen in Africa after the war when “the natives got uppity” and the “bloody wogs in India too when the British were still trying to hold onto the edges of empire). He divided up his secret into four parts to be worked on by four different unscrupulous Nazi-like scientists who did not know each other and did not know all the moving parts.

Fortunately despite Holmes’ best efforts the good Professor was able to thwart him in his efforts to piece together the four separate parts which Holmes had been given an inkling about since that mad scientist had given a code to his girlfriend in case anything happened to him or in the more likely case that he forgot the separate parts by being too clever by half when he divided everything up. Moriarty had the dastardly scientist in his clutches away from the nefarious British agents who were after the secret formula. Needless to say when Holmes went to that girlfriend’s “flat” (apartment) to grab the illicit code he did not take peek number one at her and she was if anything lovelier than the good-looking young woman he had scorned in Washington on another caper. Yet another example as if any more were needed about where the man’s proclivities were directed. Needless to say as well that Holmes would stop at nothing to do in poor Professor Moriarty and he laid a very devious trap for our good fellow which he fell into and went to his death. RIP, Professor, RIP.  

Asgard Is In The Ninth House-Once Again Down Valhalla Lane-Chris Hemsworth’s “Thor: The Dark World ” (2013)-A Film Review

Asgard Is In The Ninth House-Once Again Down Valhalla Lane-Chris Hemsworth’s “Thor: The Dark World ” (2013)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Thor: The Dark World, starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tim Hiddleton, Marvel Comics, 2013

No, I will not as I did in the first review of the seemingly going on forever Marvel Comic Viking saga Thor moan and groan in public about having to dirty my hands with this kids’ stuff boys’ comic book super-hero fantasy adventures. Not because as a result of that very public wailing I got to get my feet wet in film noir even if on the edges and not the heart of the Bogie, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Lauren Bacall, Glenn Ford, Queen Gloria Grahame Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Jim Turner, Jim West treasure trove which my longtime companion Sam Lowell, a fellow writer here, mined for years and kind of was smarty pants about the matter. Now after reviewing Beat The Devil I can have my little bragging rights, can hold my head high.   No, the hook here is what was left undone, was not finished in that first film review. The inevitable boy meets girl aspect which Hollywood, Bollywood, Indies, have also mined since moving pictures started well over a century ago now taking the lead from the novel and before that probably unto the Greek calends.        

That unresolved “boy” hunk (still sorry Sam) Thor, played by hunk Chris Hemsworth (once again giving a beefcake shot for all the women, young and old, to feast on if so desired) “girl” Earthling Jane, although not Plain Jane by any means, played by Natalie Portman last seen by me playing in The Black Swan who have been separated, planetary separated when Thor in defense of the realm of hometown Asgard tore up the bridge to Earth to thwart brother, adopted brother as it turned out, Loki from invading other worlds in his quest to be king of the hill on the cheap. That left the two inter-planetary sweethearts in a bind and it did not take a rocket scientist or even a third rate screenwriter to know that another film would issue to resolve that little dilemma.

So the Jane-Thor search for eternal blest will drive this one even more so than the first Thor-ian (sic, maybe) vehicle. Naturally this interplanetary romance will have to play out to a fight against the dark forces that guys like Thor and his small band of trusty devotees are always having to thwart. (Just as an aside I find it very interesting that ancient Thor from way back when doesn’t give a damn about taking an Asgard girlfriend like Lady Sif the one woman warrior in his cohort and who would certainly have liked to have gone under the silky sheets with him or say a female Frost Giant or any other dame from the nine realms but that is just an aside. I won’t even comment on how easily Thor from “primitive” Asgard has no problem with traversing say modern New York City or London and conversely Jane when she finally gets to meet Thor’s parents on backwater Asgard)        

Here’s the “skinny” (I have already given the origin of that expression from Sam so that is that). Thor is sulking for his Janie, Loki is back in chains from his craziness on plundering Earth and Jane is looking, desperately looking for a way to get back to Thor. Simple. The trick will be done through the revival of an ethereal substance Aether produced by the Dark Elves which will sent the nine realms into darkness, into the abyss if it once again gets in wrong hands. The vehicle to do this, that Aether, is, oh well, Jane who is infected with it. Thor finds about it and gets down to Earth Asap on that bridge that links all the realms which has finally been repaired. Finding radioactive Jane they are transported to Asgard (to meet his folks I think but supposedly to fight the menacing Dark Elves and their malignant leader who will stop at nothing now that his magic elixir is back on the radar).

All of this preliminary madness starts a series of battles between Thor and his trusty band and the Dark Elves and leader over various planetary and spacial locations including a minute alliance with Loki to get rid of the really bad guys. Loki “dies” honorably in battle and that is that but you know that cuckoo would do anything to get that coveted Asgardian throne. Eventually the Dark Elves are defeated, their leader wasted and the Aether out of bad guy hands. For now. Thor declines the throne offered by his “father” who turns out to be Loki and so it goes. Thor and Jane, well, they are back together on Earth but they still haven’t gotten under the silky sheets which makes me think that there will be yet another sequel. (Which turned out to be true as the third installment which I will not review, will not in a thousand years came out in 2017). I think I have had enough of this crowd, even hunk Thor.                     

Happy Birthday Townes -*In The Time Of My "Country Music Moment"- The Work Of Singer/Songwriter Townes Van Zandt-Townes In His Prime

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Townes Van Zandt Doing "Dollar Bill Blues".

CD Review

Flyin’ Shoes, Townes Van Zandt, Tomato Records, 1972

The main points of this review have been used to review other Townes Van Zandt CDs.

Readers of this space are by now very aware that I am in search of and working my way through various types of American roots music. In shorthand, running through what others have termed "The American Songbook". Thus I have spent no little time going through the work of seemingly every musician who rates space in the august place. From blues giants, folk legends, classic rock `n' roll artists down through the second and third layers of those milieus out in the backwoods and small, hideaway music spots that dot the American musical landscape. I have also given a nod to more R&B, rockabilly and popular song artists then one reasonably need to know about. I have, however, other than the absolutely obligatory passing nods to the likes of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline spent very ink on more traditional Country music, what used to be called the Nashville sound. What gives?

Whatever my personal musical preferences there is no question that the country music work of, for example, the likes of George Jones, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette in earlier times or Garth Brooks and Faith Hill a little later or today Keith Urban and Taylor Swift (I am cheating on these last two since I do not know their work and had to ask someone about them) "speak" to vast audiences out in the heartland. They just, for a number of reasons that need not be gone into here, do not "speak" to me. However, in the interest of "full disclosure" I must admit today that I had a "country music moment" about thirty years ago. That was the time of the "outlaws" of the country music scene. You know, Waylon (Jennings) and Willie (Nelson). Also Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and Jerry Jeff Walker. Country Outlaws, get it? Guys and gals ( think of Jesse Colter)who broke from the Nashville/ Grand Old Opry mold by drinking hard, smoking plenty of dope and generally raising the kind of hell that the pious guardians of the Country Music Hall Of Fame would have had heart attacks over (at least in public). Oh, and did I say they wrote lyrics that spoke of love and longing, trouble with their "old ladies" (or "old men"), and struggling to get through the day. Just an ordinary day's work in the music world but with their own outlandish twists on it.

All of the above is an extremely round about way to introduce the "max daddy" of my 'country music moment', Townes Van Zandt. For those who the name does not ring a bell perhaps his most famous work does, the much-covered "Pancho And Lefty". In some ways his personal biography exemplified the then "new outlaw" (assuming that Hank Williams and his gang were the original ones). Chronic childhood problems, including a stint in a mental hospital, drugs, drink, and some rather "politically incorrect" sexual attitudes. Nothing really new here, except out of this mix came some of the most haunting lyrics of longing, loneliness, depression, sadness and despair. And that is the "milder" stuff. Not exactly the stuff of Nashville. That is the point. The late Townes Van Zandt "spoke" to me (he died in 1997) in a way that Nashville never could. And, in the end, the other outlaws couldn't either. That, my friends, is the saga of my country moment. Listen up to any of the CDs listed below for the reason why Townes did.

Townes Van Zandt was, due to personal circumstances and the nature of the music industry, honored more highly among his fellow musicians than as an outright star of "outlaw" country music back in the day. That influence was felt through the sincerest form of flattery in the music industry- someone well known covering your song. Many of Townes' pieces, especially since his untimely death in 1997, have been covered by others, most famously Willie Nelson's cover of "Pancho and Lefty". However, Townes, whom I had seen a number of times in person in the late 1970's, was no mean performer of his own darkly compelling songs.

Here the ones to give a close listen to are the haunting "Loretta" about a common Van Zandt topic of "fallen women"; the prophetic and self-explanatory "No Place to Fall", the title track "Flyin' Shoes"; a righteous cover of the old Bo Didderly classic "Who Do You Love"; the mournful "When She Don't Need Me"; and, the ambiguous (about whether he misses the horse or the woman more that may give a newcomer a small inkling to the Van Zandt personality) "Buckskin Stallion Blues".

Honor The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)

Honor The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The Anniversary Of The Historic First World Congress Of The CI 
Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.



First Congress of the Communist International

Declaration of the Participants in the Zimmerwald Conference, made at the Congress of the Communist International in Moscow
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Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.


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4 March 1919
The Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences were of importance at a time when it was essential to unify all those proletarian elements ready to protest in any way against the imperialist slaughter. But the Zimmerwald Association, besides including men and women of a clearly defined Communist orientation, attracted other wavering, pacifist and ‘centrist’ socialists, who are now – as the Berne conference has shown – forging an alliance with the social-patriots to wage a struggle against the revolutionary proletariat. Thus, Zimmerwald is being exploited in the interests of reaction.

At the same time, the Communist current in a number of countries is gaining in strength. The struggle against the ‘centrist’ elements, which are obstructing the social revolution, is now a priority task for the revolutionary proletariat.

The Zimmerwald Association has outlived its usefulness. Everything in it that was truly revolutionary is passing over to the Communist International.

The undersigned members of the Zimmerwald movement declare that they regard its organisation to be dissolved and propose that all the documents of the Bureau of the Zimmerwald Conference be transferred to the Executive Committee of the Third International.