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
The Trails and Tribulations
Of The Generation of ’68- I’m Going Away My Own True Love
By Sam Lowell
Lana Jamison had been
frustrated for most of her twenty-eight young years. Frustrated by her whole
past, her past that included a serious bout of a childhood where she was not
listened to by her parents, was treated like a dishrag, was told to be silent
and like it by her tyrannical father and her go-along-with father mother. Had
spent years in therapy after college trying to get to the bottom of what that
did to her psyche and had come up with few good clues as to how to proceed with
her life without feeling she had to look over her shoulder every time he made a
remark that expressed her true feelings. That situation had been made worse by
the seemingly inevitable run of boyfriends and lovers who had decided on the
basis of her demur presence that they could treat her like a dishrag as well.
Didn’t feel the need to expect that she might have an opinion of her own and
tried might and main to direct her life for her. That woeful series included
one husband, Jeff Mullins, who made an art form of putting her down wherever
she had an idea that did not jell with his. That marriage had fallen apart of
its own weight after a couple of years when Jeff decided one night to run off
with the next best thing that came along and left Lan
cold.
Then Fritz, Fritz Taylor
came along, came along like a fresh breeze after that disaster with Jeff. She
had met him one when she was feeling lonely at a bar in Cambridge that she
would frequent before her marriage to Jeff and where they played country music
of all things in the heart of Harvard Square. That country music thing had been
a throwback to her days on that silent father farm and he would play the stuff
on the radio every day. Fritz’s interest had been more recent, what he called
his outlaw country music minute when that genre had a run even in urban areas
of this country. The Wheatstack had been playing, a group that he followed
which played Willie Nelson covers among others and so he had shown up there one
Friday night and kissed fate. He had spied her, so he said, while he was
sitting a bit forlorn at the bar since he had recently been divorced from his
own didn’t understand him wife. Spied her sitting like heaven’s own angel
at a corner table with her girlfriend, so he said as he talked to
her as she passed by his bar stool as she was going to the Ladies’ Room. She
had been impressed by his light touch, his giving her room to speak about what
interested her, and most of all by the no pressure way that he handled the idea
of calling her up once she insisted that she really had to go home with her
girlfriend. But gave him her phone number. In response he gave her the most
gentle good night handshake she had ever received from a man. And so started
their love
affair.
Fritz proved, mostly, to be
as advertised that first night, except his own bouts of withdrawal and distance
which he told her he had inherited from his own dismal childhood down among the
working poor by parents who were way over their heads trying to raise six kids
on an unskilled worker’s pay. He called them, he and she, soulmates and that
stuck, stuck as true as anything he ever said. Lana could take those bouts of
darkness for a while as long as they were mixed in with days of happiness. But
that mix had of late fallen on hard times. Many times burned she needed some
space, needed room to think things through and so one day she mentioned to
Fritz that she wanted to head to California by herself, wanted drive across at
her own pace and see the country she had missed seeing all her sweet young
life. They battled back and forth on the matter for weeks. Fritz telling her
that he would improve his disposition and she, having heard it all before and
really wanting to get away, arguing for her space. Finally, one morning out of
the blue he gave in, wished her Godspeed and that she should keep in contact
with him in case anything happened along the way. The idea being when she left
that she would return and they would try to start over again, start their love
on a higher
plain.
So one sunny April day Lana
took off in her Chevrolet, a car filled to the brim with seemingly every
possible thing that she owed. No pioneer woman trekking across the country
intrepidly, not Lana. Told Fritz as they kissed good-bye that she would call
him when she hit Philadelphia. Would see if she couldn’t find him some nice
gift to make him feel better, make him get through their separation better.
Fritz said in reply simply that he didn’t want any material gift but that the
thought of her speedy return was enough to keep her going. That brought a tear
to her eyes but she still insisted that she would get him something. So in
Philadelphia she called him and asked him if he wanted a nice gold ring that
she had seen in a jewelry store that would be a sign of their friendship and
love. Fritz begged off again saying he only wanted her own sweet
love.
Beating Down The
Legend-Hawkers And Night-Takers-The Legend Slayer Cometh Yet Again-De-Stinging
“Spider Man-The Homecoming ” (2017)-A Very Necessary Film Review
DVD Review
By Will Bradley
I have said it more than
once and you have probably said it too that on some days you cannot win. I have
recently gotten back in harness in the legend-slayer business which is how I
originally got my by-line when I went toe to toe with, well, legendary film
reviewer Seth Garth over the fake news legend and serious criminal activity of
one Larry Lawrence, his name on the Scotland Yard and Interpol police blotter but
better known as Sherlock Holmes. From there it was almost child’s play to sift
through the evidence to see what was real and what was baloney going back to
the time of Robin Hood and his greasy like a stuck pig PR operation run be a
defrocked priest and serial child molester Friar Tuck. (Defrocked not for those
myriad later crimes but for robbing the church alms box and for selling votive
candled out of his cart stealing them from the altars so nothing really has
changed that much as far as the abuse of helpless kids is concerned,)
What I learned along the
way and this is important is that not all legends are spun from pure cloth, fake
news, press agent bull or movie studio or literary digest paid hand-outs. The
best example of that in the past was the Green Hornet, the individual and the
organization of the same name who really did save our asses when the usual greedy
humous giant decided he wanted the universe on a platter starting with poor
benighted New York which has been the target of many, too many nefarious
deadbeat deals and was not particular about who or how many he had to step over
on the way.
More recently and this is
where I have been taking some heat although I am not sure if it isn’t from Tony
Stark’s massive publicity department, a publicity department whose budget is
larger than the American military budget whereas by comparison the Stark
Industries research and development department gets something like 25 million
and has been cut repeatedly in recent years. (That drastic decrease to pay for
the huge and expanding high maintenance costs of keeping a fistful of hit men
and women at the ready in case anybody threatens his world-wide operations
headquartered in that same benighted New York. You can image the upkeep for a
guy like fake legend Hulk to keep him doped up 24/7 and then ramp him up when
duty calls.) For what purpose. To tout his so-called Avengers operation made up
of himself as a guy called Ironman and a bunch of mutants, men and women, adult
men and women. So Tony needs two things one a massive publicity campaign
spreading the word, the false word, that the world is safe as long as his operation
is around and the profits keep rolling in and another addition to his Avenger
vigilante posse. I might be wrong although I have a pretty good nose now for
this kind of stuff, but I think Stark was trying to get this Spider Man gag
spider kid really to appeal to the younger crowd since the young as usual were
getting bored with a bunch of old fogies who could hardly keep themselves safe
never mind the world.
That is background but what
has been dogging me of late is this hate campaign ever since I exposed Spider
Man as a teenage mutant, a nerd and a holy goof. A fake legend in the making no
question. Some anonymous maybe paid e-mailer took umbrage (his or her word)
when I mentioned that this so-called legend changed from his high school
teenage day clothes to his “uniform” in some wino piss dumpster back alley. So
much for legend status for this bum of the month
But enough of my sorrows
and tribulations and on to the latest efforts to turn this teenage mutant into
the stuff girls dream about at night. Spider Man (I really hate to call this
punk a man but I will play the game as long as I can destroy the bastard’s
budding legend which will be my first chance to nip this fake stuff in the bud
right at the beginning unlike say that Robin Hood generosity noise spun out
before by that ravenous beats Tuck) originally didn’t make the final cut as an
Avenger after falling down in what was called the Battle of New York. (For
those with short memories that is when some lizards tried to take over Central
Park and it took something like the combined might of NATO and American state
forces combined to subdue the damn pests after Spider Man, aka at nowhere high
school as Peter Parker, a name which was a source of many witty ditties and
some salacious remarks as well, fell down, lost the battle against a freaking
lizard and had to be evacuated by the aforementioned forces and Tony Stark’s
vagabonds and grifters)
Back in high school Pete is
the average flop that a nerd and holy goof relishes looking for some sympathy
from girls or maybe fellow nerds. I will say this for the kid he never lost the
dream of getting that suit back from Tony Stark even if he did have to put it
on in some wino piss dumpster back alley. He decided to free-lance for a while
trying desperately to get back on the team. Fortunately, New York, Jesus always
New York like Pasadena or Boise couldn’t use a little help for what menaces
their existences was being menaced by a guy who used to haul the debris from
the Battle of New York and was pissed off that he lost the contract to some low
bidder, actually some no bidder, some alphabet soup deep state operation with
high budgets and no oversight. In revenge Mack, aren’t the bad guys always
named Mack, started stealing whatever was not nailed down and having his techie
make some awesome weapons and other stuff to menace the world.
This guy’s operation was
strictly low-rent, showed that it was nothing but a start-up dream. This guy,
let’s call him Mike because I hate the name Mack, but like a lot of things down
in the mud of society don’t get hung up on names, had his techie make up some
contraption, that is the best word I can use to describe it, that would let him
fly around and steal whatever he wanted unmolested. You should have seen this
thing. It would have embarrassed the Wright Brothers, Jesus, even poor Icarus.
Strictly nuts and bolts. Even then when Spider Man went up against the guy he
took a few beatings before he was able to subdue Rust Man. Here is the howler
though, the thing that made me realize this was very much a Tony Stark hijinks,
this guy’s daughter went to school with Peter and he had a crush on her.
Naturally when Dad went to jail that romance was kaput. One budding legend
down.
The Legend Slayer Cometh
Once Again-Dismantling Or Trade Puffing The Legend Of One Jack Reacher?-Tom
Cruise’s “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” (2016)-A Film Review
By Will Bradley
I am not as a
legendary-slayer (and on occasion as here a legend promoter I guess we would
call it) impervious to the taunts and barbs of the latter-day press agents,
flak-catchers and toadies whose sole reason for existence is to grab a soft
paycheck hustling their client’s claims to legend status. In this business
those noises come with the territory and are what I would call collateral
damage incident to getting the average citizen to think through who deserves if
anybody legendary status. In my last review touting Jack Reacher’s candidacy
for that status I mentioned in passing a few legends that I have put a dent in.
That however had not stopped the press agents from howling bloody murder when I
step on their clients’ toes.
People are surprised and
maybe the reader of this piece will be too that a deadbeat like Robin Hood once
he grabbed every piece of land King Richard would grant him turned from
cheapjack highway robberies to gouging his yeomen tenants until they cried “uncle”
and was so cheap he left his bastard daughter with one of the milkmaids three
sheep and said good luck. Three fucking sheep. Yet his paid press agent Friar
Tuck filled the Domesday books with so many lies about his generosity that it
would take centuries to answer every one. Here is the surprising part this
press agency did not stop with Tuck when he passed on to hell but was taken up
by his son and the son’s boyfriend and from there passed to the Dominicans who
have perpetuated the malarkey until I put a big crimp in their operation. Same
with the slaver Captain Blood whose latest flak-catchers have proposed that
there be reparations to any descendants of slaves who passed the Middle Passage
on one of the Captain’s ship. Bullshit since there is no money attached to that
so-called plan. Worse of all and my fellow writer here Laura Perkins can
testify to this since she had to deal with this bastard while defending herself
against the crazies who wanted to trash her idea that all serious 20th
century art is twisted up with sex and erotica are the defenders of Larry
Lawrence, aka Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick who worked under various aliases
from Nigel Bruce toDoc Watson like
Doyle, Arthur Gilmore Doyle who has attempted a massive counter-attack on the
Lawrence legend ( I refuse to call him Holmes as the documented records in
Scotland Yard have Lawrence as his real name on his extensive police rap
sheet).
Needless to say, when I
went to bat for Jack Reacher all hell broke loose not only from the various
press agents whose clients I have dinged like those above who came out of their
caves with massive furor but those who question why I would proffer an “off the
grid” ex-servicemen as worthy of legendary status. A guy who claimed to have
known Jack over in Iraq when he ran a big-time MP unit after the heavy fighting
subsided claimed, erroneously when I checked the facts, that Jack was running a
numbers racket forcing his underlings to fork up dough, or else. Noise, just
noise. Moreover, anybody except some toady of some busted legend would have
noticed that I went out of my WAY in capital letters to say that I was touting
the guy not based on his military record although the skills he learned there
would have helped with his actions in the Barr case. Particularly as he went
about his “off the grid” business and was impervious to press agent build-ups.
I liked that.
The silliest e-mail I
received, and I am not sure that it might not have been a ruse put out by the
Marvel Comics cabal was challenging my subsequent debasing of the budding
legend machine around some punk high school kid name, get this Peter Parker,
aka the Spider Man. The kid a joke promoted by one Tony Stark aka Ironman to
build up his own legend by having what he called a swarm of docile avengers
ready to save the world, or given how many times the place been invaded,
marauded, twisted and plain bombed New York City. This kid, this Parker for
crying out loud puts his “uniform” on in back alleys with the cats. Give me a
break. Last I heard he had been fighting red-tail lizards the smallest variety
of the species and barely holding his own after some mad scientist who knew his
late father went too fast in his protocol and almost screwed up the world, or
least New York. Some young woman classmate had to bail him out by figuring out
a formula to stop the little bastards. I will have more to say about the Stark
“creation” shortly since the publicity department at Stark Industries had
decided to make a film about the kid’s “exploits.”
The beauty and it really is
a beauty in modern times when everybody with access to a smart phone and that
means about everybody is promoting themselves or some silly cause here is Jack
out in the wilderness what I have already called “off the grid,” a nomad. Even
I could not believe the story when I heard it being just cynical enough not to
buy into legends having spent some serious time debunking the run of the mill
bums. I initially thought Jack was an invention of some agency, some “deep
state” agency who were running him like the old time Soviet sleeper operations
(keep the agents under cover and then spring them on an unsuspecting world like
they did with Trump). On misty nights when I am in a funk I still think that
may be true. But I have taken the leap of faith on this one based on the case
he had just finished, the Barr case where he saved a guy he didn’t even like
from the big step-off. That intrigued me.
The funny thing about Jack
and in the deep recesses of my mind make me finch is how he is as isolated as his
is “connected,” knows his way around Washington, D.C. (a town that Stark and
his dumbass minions in the Marvel/DC Comic cabal giving New York City a break should
think about saving for it surely needs saving). From nowhere Jack can call up
his replacement at the old 110th MP unit, the elite unit now led by a
woman as it turned out. This woman, a major, is in trouble on two scores-one a
couple of her agents got wasted by some rogue U.S. agent in Iraq and closer to
home was relieved of her command and charged with espionage. (I might as well
forewarn the romantics out there that nothing with take place between the two
under the silky sheets, although not for her not giving him some encouragement
but Jack is built differently as they say these days. After leaving a hint in
the Barr case where Jack did not take on the drop-dead beautiful lawyer
defending the sniper that Jack was probably gay and that was okay in this day
in age when our legends can be gay or whatever. This case confirmed my
suspicions and it is clear that Jack is at least more comfortable around men
and we will leave it at that)
Jack to the rescue
following all kinds of false leads after personally springing the Major from
the stockade to find out why her people were killed and for what reason (no
mean feat and a rather high bar that those fake legends like Robin Hood, Larry
Lawrence, Casanova and the crowd would crumble under). This pair, this skilled
pair after seven kinds of hell finally figure out that the whole thing is a
scam being run at a high level involving weapons to the bad guys inAfghanistan in exchange for high grade opium
to help a faltering state-side business (which Afghans at while moment a good
question if you can figure out who is good and who is bad something the
British, Russians and American have never figured out to their respective
sorrows). A scam that big meant somebody in the American command, a General,
was running the whole operation using rogue Black Water-type ex-military to do
their bidding. Case closed Jack walked away (away from a bogus paternity suit
as well but that was only filler here since we now know Jack’s sexual
preferences). Walked away to hitch a ride to some place leaving me here to sing
his song of glory. Enough said
In The Age Of The Buddy
Film-Not-Well, Maybe-Charles Grodin and Robert DeNiro’s “Midnight Run” (1988)-A
Film Review
DVD Review
By Bart Webber
Midnight Run, starring
Charles Grodin, Robert DeNiro, 1988
Funny, lately I have
been cutting down seriously on my film reviews working at the behest of site
manager Greg Green on the fundamentals of an on-going series on the history of
folk music, not the whole history I do not believe that I would live long enough
to complete that vast task but the stuff from the 1960s folk minute that slammed
through American youth nation and then disappeared almost without a trace, music that I grew up with. I am deep
in research and in doing interviews of whoever is still left standing from the
diminishing number of active performers (a la endless tour Bob Dylan), to those
who have hung up their cleats tot the coffeehouse owners and promoters who
provided the initial infrastructure. That series is scheduled to start in the
Summer of 2019.
Then along come the same
site manager Greg who knows I am working my ass off to get the series off the
ground (and knows as well from the less than perfect start of Laura Perkin’s Traipsing Through The Arts series how
important a good start is) and asks me, pretty please, asks me to help him out
with this 30th anniversary tribute to the classic buddy film from an
age that make an art out of such films Midnight
Run. Greg told me he could not get anybody else to do the review the right
way meaning having a feel for the buddy film genre having grown up in corner
boy society in the Acre section of hometown North Adamsville where every trait
exhibited in this film got a similar work-out.And more importantly that I had had the role as Cash in the earlier
buddy work Cash and Dale, not thefilm version but the off-Broadway
production. (You will note, and Greg used it as a selling point, that this
film’s 30th anniversary was in 2018 and we are now in deep 2019 he
is desperate.)
The plotline to every
buddy film, male or female, think Thelma
and Louise is almost unimportant compared to the emerging merging and
bonding of the targeted pair. Except that whatever exploits or travails the
pair find themselves in should be long and varied enough for the audience to
cheer the budding merger on. Midnight Run
has that and more.The plotline is
simplicity itself, taking a page from other buddy films and having the pair run
through every possible mode of transportation to get to their destination.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Duke (Grodin’s role) was
the max daddy accountant for Jimmy Swags, you remember that name if you are old
enough, since after Bugsy Siegel fell down Jimmy Swags and his boys took over
Vegas without a murmur. (Funny how these mobsters like to shorten their names
to one syllable ever since Eddie Mars, Marston real name, started the trend in
the 1920s when he ran all the rackets in LA after his previous boss, Pat Scanlon,
fell down. Fell down according to rumor from a couple of well-placed slugs from
the gun of one Eddie Mars). Except the Duke though he was working an up and up
racket for real businessmen not as a launderer until he found out he was fronting
for the mob. Reaction: take Jimmy Swags down for 15 million no small amount
even back then, blow town and give most of the dough to charity. But as the
mob’s money man the Feds were looking for this brother too and somehow he got
himself in criminal trouble needing bail from his local friendly bail bondsman
in beautiful LA. Then he skipped out and is nowhere to be found with only five
days left before that crumb-bum bail bondman defaulted for something like half
a million for his error in not knowing the Duke was hotter than a pistol. Ouch.
Not to worry though, at
least for now since ex-cop crackerjack Jack Walsh (DeNiro’s role) is the max
daddy bounty hunter who will make the situation right. With a little
razzle-dazzle Walsh finds out that the Duke is hiding away with his wife in New
York, finds him and through the first of many ruses clamps Duke and is ready to
head west and the big pay-out. (That LA-NYC connection beautiful since three
thousand miles will allow for many adventures and misadventures.) A few hour’s plane
flight and done. Well of course not otherwise that would be a very short film.
The “hook” is the Duke has a well-grounded fear of flying which gets them off
that five-hour plane ride and down on the ground. A very much longer way to
head west and fraught with more troubles than one could shake a stick at. Along
the way they will use every form of private and public transportation except
maybe covered wagon heading west. From trains to cars and trucks (borrowing
that formula used in other such buddy travel-oriented films.) Naturally nothing
will stop Jack from getting his man to LA and his dough to start a new life and
in the end he does deliver his bounty to LA.
What counts though is
the changing relationship between hyper working- class shoulder to the wheel
Jack and droll and wise guy middle class Duke-they don’t like each other much. At
the start. Can’t figure out what makes the other guy tick (especially when Duke
offers Jack more dough that the bondsman to let him go-can’t figure Jack’s stay
with the girl who brung you code). Through a million ups and downs being
harassed by a second bounty-hunter courtesy of that bastard bondsman who
deserves to get shafted, the Feds once they know Jack has Duke and Jimmy Swags
who you know cannot let some holy goof underling get away with 15 mil they get
to know each other. Jack in the end gets the Duke to LA mission accomplished
but not to said bail bondsman. They part ways as minute friends. Classic.
From The Marxist Archives On The 100th Anniversary Year Of Their Deaths-For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg
Workers Vanguard No. 1147
18 January 2019
TROTSKY
LENIN
For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg
(Quote of the Week)
One hundred years ago, on 15 January 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered in Germany at the behest of the capitalist government run by the Social Democrats, which unleashed the fascistic Freikorps to crush a workers uprising. After receiving news of the assassinations, V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, heaped further scathing condemnation on the social-democratic betrayers of the proletariat, including the wing led by Karl Kautsky, in the letter excerpted below. Upholding the revolutionary tradition of the early Communist International, this month we commemorate the “Three L’s”—Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Lenin himself, who died in January 1924.
The foundation of a genuinely proletarian, genuinely internationalist, genuinely revolutionary Third International, the Communist International, became a fact when the German Spartacus League, with such world-known and world-famous leaders, with such staunch working-class champions as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, made a clean break with socialists like Scheidemann and Südekum, social-chauvinists (socialists in words, but chauvinists in deeds) who have earned eternal shame by their alliance with the predatory, imperialist German bourgeoisie and Wilhelm II. It became a fact when the Spartacus League changed its name to the Communist Party of Germany. Though it has not yet been officially inaugurated, the Third International actually exists....
Against Liebknecht are the Scheidemanns, the Südekums and the whole gang of despicable lackeys of the Kaiser and the bourgeoisie. They are just as much traitors to socialism as the Gomperses and Victor Bergers, the Hendersons and Webbs, the Renaudels and Vanderveldes. They represent that top section of workers who have been bribed by the bourgeoisie, those whom we Bolsheviks called (applying the name to the Russian Südekums, the Mensheviks) “agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement,” and to whom the best socialists in America gave the magnificently expressive and very fitting title: “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class.”...
The foregoing lines were written before the brutal and dastardly murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the Ebert and Scheidemann government. Those butchers, in their servility to the bourgeoisie, allowed the German whiteguards, the watchdogs of sacred capitalist property, to lynch Rosa Luxemburg, to murder Karl Liebknecht by shooting him in the back on the patently false plea that he “attempted to escape” (Russian tsarism often used that excuse to murder prisoners during its bloody suppression of the 1905 Revolution). At the same time those butchers protected the whiteguards with the authority of the government, which claims to be quite innocent and to stand above classes! No words can describe the foul and abominable character of the butchery perpetrated by alleged socialists. Evidently, history has chosen a path on which the role of “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class” must be played to the “last degree” of brutality, baseness and meanness. Let those simpletons, the Kautskyites, talk in their newspaper Freiheit about a “court” of representatives of “all” “socialist” parties (those servile souls insist that the Scheidemann executioners are socialists)! Those heroes of philistine stupidity and petty-bourgeois cowardice even fail to understand that the courts are organs of state power, and that the issue in the struggle and civil war now being waged in Germany is precisely one of who is to hold this power—the bourgeoisie, “served” by the Scheidemanns as executioners and instigators of pogroms, and by the Kautskys as glorifiers of “pure democracy,” or the proletariat, which will overthrow the capitalist exploiters and crush their resistance.
The blood of the best representatives of the world proletarian International, of the unforgettable leaders of the world socialist revolution, will steel ever new masses of workers for the life-and-death struggle. And this struggle will lead to victory.
—V.I. Lenin, “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America” (21 January 1919)
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Got That Right Brother-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind
A YouTube film clip of Muddy Water's performing his classic Chicago blues tune, Mannish Child.
By Allan Jackson
[It is funny about musical influences and their effect on the person and the generation. I have noted elsewhere and others in this series have as well that the recording companies have done some serious demographic research to come up with say for the baby-boomer generation endless compilations of classic rock and rock hits from Ike Turner’s 1951 Rocket 88 stuff to maudlin vanilla stuff toward the end of the classic era before the Beatles/Stones saved our asses from boredom. Doo wop, girl groups, Sun Records, one-hit wonders the whole shebang. See what they know and what we know from our intuition “you stay with the gal who brung you” in your musical tastes which allows you to titter such pearls of wisdom as “they don’t make songs like they used to in my day” and “how can these kids stand that noise” both statements stolen from driven crazy parents in their turn.
Of course later music will have some play if it is good enough and maybe in a retro fit sounded like what you loved as a kid and some music like the blues, the eternal blues which forever speaks to some hidden wound deep in the American psyche given what we owe Africa musically and in that damn slave ship crossing, will transcend time and class for that very reason. Other stuff and what we are talking about here alluded to a minute ago when I talked about the end time of the classic rock and roll era which was dying on the vine through what we did not know until much later when we researched it deeply (researched for various sketches in this series and to put the cultural currents ebbing and flowing in the modern American experience in perspective for this publication) was a conscious cabal. A cabal between our parents who saw our music as the “devil’s music” either from deep bias about the black-etched roots or could not take the swaying, swirly sexually suggestion way that we free-formed danced to our own inner wonders, the greedy and insidious record companies and through them the DJs or the local rock radio stations which controlled the music flow.
It was a tough time for a few years say from the late 1950s to the early 1960s when most of what we heard was and I have characterized it this way before and others have as well “bubble gum” music. If you are from that baby-boomer generation or you have access to YouTube you can verify this for yourselves. There was the taming of what passed for rock sex symbols from the likes of the departed Elvis, the sullen Jerry Lee, the long gone Buddy Holly, the messing with Mister’s women Chuck Berry and a host of others who we ran upstairs to listen to on our freedom transistor radios which saved many a wretched youth from silence and despair for clean dudes like Fabian, Bobby Dee, Vee and a host of Bobbies and women like Sandra Dee and Leslie Gore. Fuck.
That cabal did us wrong, wronger than they will ever know just to make us vanilla cooperate and buckle down as the endless term of the teen household would have it. The worse of it was we were sabotaged from within since the girls, the ones who had money from somewhere to buy the records thought these stuff was “cute.” Fuck, again. In the end though we sprang like the phoenix from the ashes of that horrible period, dragging some of those Bobby-smitten girls along with us for a while anyway, and really did go our own way when the 1960s heated up in so many ways. I like to think that our “training,” our being present at the creation, of rock and roll had something todo with that. Mercy, please. Allan Jackson]
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Johnny Prescott daydreamed his way through the music that he was listening to just then on the little transistor radio that Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, and Pa too, Paul to adults, but the main battles over the gift had been with Ma, had given him for Christmas. In those days we are talking about, the post-World War II red scare Cold War 1950s in America, the days of the dreamy man in the family being the sole provider fathers didn’t get embroiled in the day to day household kids wars and remained a distant and at times foreboding presence called in only when the dust-up had gotten out of hand. And then Papa pulled the hammer down via a classic united front with Ma. Johnny had taken a fit around the first week in December in 1960 when Ma quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and more practical too, for a sixteen year old boy. Reasonable since alongside Pa being that sole provider, being a distant presence, and being called in only when World War III was about to erupt in the household he also worked like a slave for low wages at the Boston Gear Works, worked for low wages since he was an unskilled laborer in a world where skills paid money (and even the skills that he did have, farm hand skills, were not very useful in the Boston labor market). So yes ties, an item that at Christmas time usually would be the product of glad-handing grandmothers or maiden aunts would in the Prescott household be relegated to the immediate family. And that holiday along with Easter was a time when the Prescott boys had in previous years had gotten their semi-annual wardrobe additions, additions provided via the Bargain Center, a low-cost, low rent forerunner of the merchandise provided at Wal-Mart.
This year, this sixteen year old year, Johnny said no to being pieced off with thick plaid ties, or worse, wide striped ties in color combinations like gold and black or some other uncool combination, uncool that year although maybe not in say 1952 when he did not know better, uncool in any case against those thin solid colored ties all the cool guys were wearing to the weekly Friday night school dances or the twice monthly Sacred Heart Parish dances the latter held in order to keep sixteen year old boys, girls too, in check against the worst excesses of what the parish priests (and thankful parents) thought was happening among the heathen young.
No, that is not quite right, that “Johnny said no” part, no, he screamed that he wanted a radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was. Could listen to what he liked against errant younger brothers who were clueless, clueless about rock and roll, clueless about what was what coming through the radio heralding a new breeze in the land, a breeze Johnny was not sure what it meant but all he knew was that he, and his buddies, knew some jail-break movement was coming to unglue all the square-ness in the over- heated night. Could listen in privacy, and didn’t have to, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe or Harry James 1940s war drum thing on the huge immobile RCA radio monster downstairs in the Prescott living room. Didn’t have to listen to, endlessly Saturday night listen, captive nation-like listen to WJDA and the smooth music, you know, Frank Sinatra, Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, and so on listen to the music of Ma and Pa Prescott’s youth, the music that got them through the Depression and the war. Strictly squaresville, cubed.
Something was out of joint though, something had changed since he had begun his campaign the year before to get that transistor radio, something or someone had played false with the music that he had heard when somebody played the jukebox at Freddy’s Hamburger House where he heard Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Wanda (who was hot, hot for a girl rocker, all flowing black hair and ruby red lips from what he had seen at Big Max’s Record Shop when her Let’s Have A Party was released), the Big Bopper, Jerry Lee, Bo, and a million others who made the whole world jump to a different tune, to something he could call his own. But as he listened to this Shangra-la by The Four Coins that had just finished up a few seconds ago and as this Banana Boat song by The Tarriers was starting its dreary trip through his brain he was not sure that those ties, thick or uncool as they would be, wouldn’t have been a better Christmas deal, and more practical too.
Yeah, this so-called rock station, WAPX, that he and his friends had been devoted to since 1957, had listened to avidly every night when Johnny Peeper, the Midnight Creeper and Leaping Lenny Penny held forth in their respective DJ slots, had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new rocker blasts, now that Elvis had gone who knows where. Killer rocker Chuck Berry had said it best, had touched a youth nation nerve, had proclaimed the new dispensation when he had proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven had better move alone, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky, that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff in town. But where was Chuck, where was that rock blaster all sexed up talk and riffs to match now that everybody was reduced to Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, and Bobby, hell, they were all Bobbys and Jimmys and Eddies and every other vanilla name under the sun now not a righteous name in the house. As Johnny turned the volume down a little lower (that tells the tale right there, friends) as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from) by Russ Hamilton he was ready to throw in the towel though. Ready to face the fact that maybe, just maybe the jail-break that he desperately had been looking forward to might have been just a blip, might have been an illusion and that the world after all belonged to Bing, Frank, Tommy and Jimmy and that he better get used to that hard reality.
Desperate, Johnny fingered the dial looking for some other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 blasted the airwaves. Ike whose Rocket 88 had been the champion choice of Jimmy Jenkins, one of his friends from after school, when they would sit endlessly in Freddy’s and seriously try to figure out whose song started the road to rock and roll. Johnny had latched onto Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll which Elvis did a smash cover of but who in Joe’s version you can definitely heart that dah-da-dah beat that was the calling card of his break-out generation, as well as the serious sexual innuendo which Frankie Riley explained to one and all one girl-less Friday night at the high school hop. Billy Bradley, a high school friend who had put an assortment of bands together and so knew more than the rest of them combined, had posited Elmore James’ Look Yonder Wall as his selection but nobody had ever heard the song then, or of James.
Johnny later did give it some consideration after he had had heard the song when Billy’s band covered it and broke the place up.
But funny as Johnny listened that night it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s voice on Rocket 88 so he listened for a little longer, and as he later found out from the DJ, it had actually been a James Cotton Blues Band cover. After that band’s performance was finished fish-tailing right after that one was a huge harmonica intro and what could only be mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through. No need to turn the dial further now because what Johnny Prescott had found in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, was direct from Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets was Be-Bop Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who everybody who read the rock and roll magazines found easier at Doc’s Drugstore over on Hancock Street knew, had started Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.
Now Johnny, like every young high-schooler, every "with it" high schooler in the USA, had heard of this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just now the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your parents would dance to, no, sit to at a dance, some kids still craved high rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny had never heard it before because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to ever have enough strength to pick Be-Bop Benny’s show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. When Johnny heard that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stomp and jumped up with his Someday added in he was hooked. You know he started to see what Billy, Billy Bradley who had championed Elmore James way before anybody knew who he was, meant when at a school dance where he had been performing with his band, Billie and the Jets, he mentioned from the stage before introducing a song that if you wanted to get rock and roll back from the vanilla guys who had hijacked it while Jerry Lee, Chuck and Elvis had turned their backs then you had better listen to the blues. And if you wanted to listen to blues, blues that rocked then you had very definitely had better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north from Mississippi and places like that.
And Johnny thought, Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville, or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had, couldn’t understand why that beat, that dah, da, dah, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the womb in his head. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew it had to be in his genes.
Here’s the funniest part of all though later, later in the 1960s after everybody had become a serious aficionado of the blues either through exposure like Johnny to the country blues that got revived during the folk minute that flashed through the urban areas of the country and got big play at places like the Newport Folk Festival or like Jimmy Jenkins through the British rock invasion the blues became the dues. It was especially ironic that a bunch of guys from England like the Stones and Beatles were grabbing every freaking 45 RPM record they could get their mitts on. So if you listened to the early work of those groups you would find thing covered like Shake, Rattle and Roll (Big Joe’s version), Arthur Alexander’s Anna, Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster and a ton of stuff by Muddy Waters. Yeah, the drought was over.
The Geometry Of Innocence -The 100th Anniversary Of The Bauhaus In Wiemar Germany After World War I
By Laura Perkins
I get to do this short commemoration of the Bauhaus in Germany from 1919 to about 1933 by default. Or because I am currently running an on-line series on art works entitled Traipsing Through The Arts. Although we have no official section titles and have not had them for a while I am the “art go-to person” (maybe an official title like art editor would be better but that is not a battle I want to fight right now when I am being besieged by half the American arts cabal from curators to gallery owners for my unorthodox views of my self-selected artists). I actually know, or I should say knew, since I have hustled myself through the small Bauhaus exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the more expansive one at the Harvard Museums next to nothing about the movement except for a few names like Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. (Who knows what other museums with even the most tenuous links to the Bauhaus will roll out their red carpets for the commemoration like happened a couple of years ago with the Summer of Love, 1967 where even the MFA had a dinky exhibit down in the dungeon of the American Arts wing closeted from view along with the Native American and Mezo-American art.)
Aside from learning about the very real connections between Harvard and the movement brought on by the exile of many of the figures associated with the school once Hitler and his wreaking crew pulled the hammer down I was surprised to see how many modernist painters like Klee and Kandinsky passed through the doors either as teachers or students. Also the link between the Bauhaus and the famous Black Mountain College down in North Carolina which produced a significant number of culturati. (Frankly the first reference I knew about Black Mountain was not the college but one of Bessie Smith’s blues, Black Mountain Blues, which is a very different take on that location.)
More than anything else though I was fascinated by how important geometric figures were to that movement not only in the obvious architectural and design areas but in the art. Especially the work of Joseph Albers who would later help found Black Mountain College. That is why I titled this sort piece “geometric of innocence” since 1919 nobody, or almost moody knew what hell was coming down when the Weimar Republic fell down.
The Woes Of Sand-Bagger Johnson….I Got Caught By The Golf Police- A Cautionary Tale
By "Sports Writer" Les Larkin
[This site very occasionally stubs its toes against the massive sport-industrial complex that has many fixated on couches from sports season to sports season with few breathers in between. The exceptions have been a few time when college football looked like it was going to be have some shoot ‘em up seasons and more recently golf, the sport of the infirm, elderly, chronically depressed and desperate after a round where those putts just would not fall in. Now that spring is here in the Northeast after a few false starts the golf season and its eternal hopes for decent rounds of golf is set to take the sting out of the winter doldrums. Les Larkin who has written various book and film reviews in this space has been dragooned into writing occasional pieces since he is the only one around who knows the different between a three wood and a three iron much less what makes these infirm, elderly, chronically depressed and desperate folk flow out onto the links only to be once again disappointed that things fell apart like the wind on them.
The other qualification that Les has for writing about golf is that he actually knows some guys who play the game seriously if not well. The person whom he knows best who he has chosen to call Sand-Bagger Johnson, not his real name in the interest of not being sued by every guy that had the silly notion that they could beat the guy once he had them over a barrel with those strokes they had to give him under the handicap rules of golf which Les will explain more fully at some point. Good luck, Les. Pete Markin]
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Sand-Bagger Johnson here (and if you don’t know what golf is or give damn about it a sand-bagger is a guy, or gal, who purposefully plays badly during the week putting in scores that are not reflective of his or her true golf handicap in order to grab prizes, money prizes, on the weekend tournaments when he or she plays like a whirling dervish. I was in a bad streak once and had put in some weekday high scores which actually did reflect how badly I was playing and then suddenly for a short period played way over my head and won everything in sight. From that small grasp of luck I got the name sand-bagger and it stuck even though I haven’t won anything, nothing, inflated handicap or not, in about six years. Such is life. I hope I don’t have continue to report this sad story about how I got my moniker so if anybody asks just tell them it is something to do with golf and they can move on with their lives.)
This is what is bothering me today.
You know the right to privacy has gone to hell in a handbasket in the age of Trump (maybe in previous administrations as well whether they were golfers or not going at least as far back as Tricky Dick Nixon, a common criminal and one time President of the United States in that order who according to reliable sources used to say he had a five on a hole when he really had a six which tells you all you need to know about the man and about the why of Watergate and who I had heard was now hanging around down in Costa Rica with some fallen woman named Corina.) On a recent Monday, a Monday after the wicked weekend of snow fast melted before our eyes opening up hope of playing I decided since Mondays are usually slow days on the golf links of the world to sneak onto the course and play in order to get a leg up on my group, my guys, my foursome come the weekend when dough will be on the line for the first time this season. I felt since I am the oldest player in the group and also the poorest player that I need every leg up I can grab. (My bad streak of not winning tournament money does not include the little side bets among my regular group of guys although even there I haven’t had a winning season in three years.)
Fair enough I thought. Then when I was finished for the day and putting my golf clubs in the car this SUV came up to me and stopped for a moment. I didn’t recognize who was in the vehicle and thought nothing of it until a couple of minutes later this guy from the vehicle wearing a three-piece came up to me and started asking me a lot of questions. Even as he was taking off his tie to act like just another golfer I thought copper, or some kind of security guy. You know old-time guys who have been around the block, guys who have shaded the edges of what is legal at times especially when younger, can almost instinctively smell copper. He asked questions like what were the condition of the greens, was there still water on the course from the weekend winter storm that melted almost as soon the storm was over, did I play with anybody else and who, how did I putt, did I take any “mulligans” (golf is pretty rigid in its formal rules you basically play the ball no matter where it lands or how you started out the hole but an informal set of rules have been worked out among friendly foursomes where in each round if you have a bad shot off the tee you can get a reprieve and take the drive over again), stuff that showed me especially that mulligan business that he knew something about golf. Still I felt a certain apprehension.
He asked me my name and silly me I told him. Then I asked him his. He said Keith Smith. Alarm bells went off. This wiry guy looked like the map of China so I knew something was up, something was wrong. Maybe he was American, maybe not although he had an accent but no Chinese guy I knew ever had a name like that which was something out of 1950s Golden Age America when everybody was dropping their ethnic identities to become vanilla American. Then I thought still thinking cop, hey, the President of China is coming to America this week and maybe that was what it was all about. Although why a Chinese security agent of some sort was vetting me at little Pine Point Golf Course far from where the action was down in Palm Beach at Trump’s winter home/resort made me even warier. He must have sensed that because immediately after he said that name he backed off and said his name was Chou-en-lai, something like that, like I didn’t know that they changed the transliteration rules of Chinese to English about thirty years ago. When he saw I was perplexed he said Zhou-en-lai, something like that, like I didn’t know that was the name of one of Mao’s old buddies from the Yenan days and a guy who was never on the losing side of a Chinese Communist Party faction fight. I let it ride even though my guard was up.
Then this Zhou or whatever his real name was asked the question of questions. What was my score for the day’s outing. At first to throw him off I invoked the old priest-penitent rule of confidentiality that that information was between the MGA and myself. (The Massachusetts Golf Association which controls the handicap system that golf works under in order to allow people of different skill levels to play on something like an even playing field and the subject of much grousing when as previously mentioned handicaps are too high or low. So a ten handicap person and an eighteen handicap person could play with the better player giving the poorer player eight stokes on the round which is determined by how hard the holes are). I suppose that I could have just said it was none of his business but something about the way he had posed the question made me think it might have something to do with Chinese-American relations so I was keeping my mouth shut.
He didn’t buy that excuse so I stepped up and pleaded the 5th Amendment, you know the rule that you don’t have to in America any way and hopefully in the future as well to confess against yourself just because some governmental agent or committee decided you should spill your guts out. Zhou laughed at me and said he was not a governmental agent, an American governmental agent anyway, so that did not apply. Then I invoked the Official Secrets Act figuring that throwing some sand in his eyes that he might buy. To that reply he asked whether I had posted my score on-line. I foolishly said yes. He then laughed as he walked away and said he would check with one of his buddies at the NSA and get the score that way.
So if you see a wiry Chinese guy hanging around your golf course this weekend asking about your score be very, very careful. And whatever you do don’t post your score on a computer. Maybe not even on a scorecard. Enough said.
Sixty years ago, in January 1959, a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement in Cuba overthrew the Batista capitalist regime and in 1960-61 expropriated the bourgeoisie, creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Revolutionaries in the U.S. have a special duty to defend the Cuban Revolution against capitalist restoration and U.S. imperialism. Integral to this defense is the Trotskyist call for proletarian political revolution to establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The excerpt below is from a 1961 internal document submitted by our forebears in the Revolutionary Tendency, a minority in the now-reformist Socialist Workers Party. The SWP majority gave political support to the Castro-led Stalinist bureaucracy, rejecting the necessity of a Leninist-Trotskyist party and the centrality of the proletariat in the fight for socialist revolution.
14. The Cuban workers and peasants are today confronted with a twofold task: to defend their revolution from the attacks of the U.S. and native counterrevolutionaries, and to defeat and reverse the tendencies toward bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. To confront this task they crucially need the establishment of workers democracy.
15. Workers democracy, for us, signifies that all state and administrative officials are elected by and responsible to the working people of city and country through representative institutions of democratic rule. The best historical models for such institutions were the Soviets of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Workers Councils of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956….
16. The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.
— “The Cuban Revolution,” December 1961, printed in Spartacist No. 2 (July-August 1964)
