5/14 "Repeal Taft-Hartley!" (Tuesday)

Bill Bumpus<wbumpus62@comcast.net>

12:03 PM

To  Bill Bumpus  

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*Repeal Taft-Hartley!*


*Forum: Tuesday, May 14 – 6:00 p.m.*

*Somerville Library - 79 Highland Avenue, Somerville*

The *Taft-Hartley Act* is a United States federal law that restricts the
activities and power of labor unions. It became law despite U.S.
President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947. Labor leaders called
it the "slave-labor bill” while President Truman argued that it was a
"dangerous intrusion on free speech". Nevertheless, after it passed
Truman relied upon it in twelve instances during his presidency.

We'll discuss the history behind the Act and the prospects for its repeal.

*Standout: Sunday, June 23 – 2:00 p.m.*

*Central Square, Cambridge*

*#RepealTaftHartley
<https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23repealtafthartley>
*

Sponsored by Boston Labor Solidarity Committee – bostonlsc.wordpress.com
<https://bostonlsc.wordpress.com>

Free and open to the public

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Protest Raytheon's Hypocrisy at the Walk for Hunger Massachusetts Peace Action

Protest Raytheon's Hypocrisy at the Walk for Hunger

Massachusetts Peace Action Brian Garvey<info@masspeaceaction.org>

12:49 PM

To  Al Johnson  

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Dear Al,

Expose Raytheon's Hypocrisy at the Walk for Hunger

Boston Common (Beacon and Charles Street)

Sunday, May 5th 7:30 AM - 11:30 AM 

Fill out our Google Form and let us know how you’d like to participate:
bit.ly/yemenwalkforhunger

Raytheon, headquartered right here in Massachusetts, is one of the largest arms manufacturers in the world and a leading sponsor of the Walk for Hunger in Boston. While using charitable causes like the Walk for Hunger to whitewash their image, Raytheon continues to be a major supplier of bombs to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been dropping those bombs on the people of Yemen for over four years. With the help of corporations like Raytheon they have created the worst famine in the world today.

Thousands of well meaning fundraisers will be on Boston Common Sunday morning, walking to end hunger. We need to make them aware of this blatant hypocrisy and demand that Raytheon cease all weapons sales to Saudi war criminals.

As many of you know, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the United States, has been bombing the country of Yemen for four years. They routinely strike hospitals, schools, food storage facilities, and water treatment plants. The Saudis are using man-made famine and disease as weapons of war. 14 million people, half the population of Yemen, now lives on the brink of starvation. (Source: New York Times “As Famine Looms in Yemen, Saudi-Led Coalition Redoubles Attacks” 11/6/2018). This has created what the UN describes as, "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," resulting in the death of at least 85,000 children under the age of 5 from starvation.

Yemen may seem far away but so long as Raytheon, the military-industrial complex in our own backyard, is supplying the weaponry then this is Massachusett's war and it is our responsibility to stop it. Citizens and residents of Massachusetts can no longer remain silent. Join us in this creative form of protest. Stand in solidarity with the people of Yemen, and stand up to the war profiteer Raytheon!

Sign up now to support the Walk for Hunger and to stand against Raytheon-supported starvation in Yemen! Some of us will walk the 5K route, but it is not necessary to do so. Some will hold signs and banners. Some with spread the word by passing leaflets. Some will register to become official Walk for Hunger team members. All levels of participation are encouraged and welcomed! We will also be selling T-shirts to increase our visibility!

Fill out our Google Form and let us know how you’d like to participate:
bit.ly/yemenwalkforhunger

To officially join the Yemen Anti-Famine Team and donate to the Walk for Hunger go to:

bit.ly/yemenantifamineteam

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Yours for Peace, Brian Garvey Organizer

---

Visit our website to learn more about joining the organization or donating to Massachusetts Peace Action!

We thank you for the financial support that makes this work possible. 

Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169  • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter

Massachusetts Peace Action Email  

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T For Texas, Texas Blues-Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues (2000)-A CD Review

T For Texas, Texas Blues-Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues (2000)-A CD Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Milk Cow Blues, Willie Nelson and others, 2000

My old high school friend Seth Garth whom I am still in close touch with reminded me the other day when he was over at my house and I had the CD under review playing in the background, Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues, that back in the early 1980s he recalled that I had had what he called my “outlaw country cowboy moment.” I didn’t recall that I uttered that particular expression although I did recall that I had for a brief period been drawn to the likes of Willie, Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt and a number of other singer-songwriters who broke out of the traditional stylized Nashville formula mold epitomized then by guys like George Jones and gals like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Just then rock and roll was taking one of its various detours which I could not follow, folk music, the social protest kind anyway that had attracted me in my youth was fading fast even among aficionados and the blues was losing its star performers by the day and the younger crowd was heading to what would become hip-hop tradition so I was up for listening to something different. Willie, not clean-shaven, pony-tailed, not shining sparkly suit Willie filled the bill.            

Yeah, Willie filled the bill with songs about two-timing men, women too, lost love, the heartache of love relationships, getting out from under some rock that was weighting him down but down in soulful, thoughtful way with a bit of a gravelly voice, a kind of voice that always had the ability to draw me in, to make me stop what I was doing and listen up. Of course I had remembered back then that Willie had written a song that Patsy Cline whom I had always liked had made famous in the late 1950s, Crazy, which I had learned about when I was at Cheapo Records over in Cambridge looking for some bluesy stuff back in the 1960s. 

Fast forward to 2000 and this CD. I had expected that Willie, now ancient Willie if he had written Crazy back in the 1950s, would still be grinding out in his twangy way the old classics which fill out this album. Would put his Texas touch on these standards. Guess what-he switched up on me, made an album of well-known covers made hits by some very famous like Cline, Bessie Smith, B.B. King (who is featured on a couple of songs here), Jerry Lee but changed the tempo. Put everything in a bluesy frame, and let the beat go on. Let the music carry the day with whoever was singing along with him on each cut. Not a recognizable cowboy sound in the house. Now part of that switch-up represented the hard fact that age had like with Bob Dylan rusted up his voice and so he no longer tried, or was capable of hitting the high white notes. Part of it was to let the other singers or the musicians carry the force of the songs. But guess what if you, and Seth agreed with me on this, need some nice jazzy, bluesy background music this one fills the bill. Yeah, we all have come a long way from that old “outlaw country cowboy moment” Seth claimed I was in thrall to. Enough said.     

When Hazel Dickens Made The Hills And Hollows Of Appalachia Ring Out To The High Heavens And Made A Believer Of A Yankee Boy

When Hazel Dickens Made The Hills And Hollows Of Appalachia Ring Out To The High Heavens And Made A Believer Of A Yankee Boy   

By Sarah Lemoyne

Jack Callahan caught the folk minute bug when he was in high school in his hometown of Carver after having heard some songs that held him in thrall over a fugitive radio station from Rhode Island, a college station, that every Sunday night would have a two hour show called Bill Marlowe’s Hootenanny where he, Bill Marlowe, would play all kinds of songs from the latest protest songs of the likes of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs to old country blues to Western Swing and everything in between, a fast- paced glance at a very different part of the American songbook. What got to Jack, what caused him to pay attention though was the mountain music that he heard, things like East Virginia, Pretty Polly and his favorite the mournful Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies sung by Linda Lane, a forgotten treasure of a singer from deep in the Tennessee hills now.

Now this adhesion to folk minute was quite by accident since most Sunday nights if Jack was listening to anything it was Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of WNAC in Chicago. Usually in those days something had gone awry or some ghost was in the air in radio wave land and he had caught that station and then the Rhode Island Station, WAFJ. Although he was becoming something of an aficionado of blues just then and would become something of a folk one as well his real love then was the be-bop classic rock and roll music that was a signature genre for his generation. He never lost the love of rock or the blues but he never went all out to discover material he had never heard before like he did with mountain music. 

One summer while he was in college he had decided rather than a summer job he would head south down to mountain country, you know West Virginia, Kentucky maybe rural Virginia and see if he could find some tunes that he had not heard before. (That “no job” decision did not set well with his parents, his poor parents who both worked in the local industry, the cranberry bogs, when that staple was the town’s claim to fame so he could go to college but that is a story for another day). Now it was not strange in those days for all kinds of people, mostly college students with time on their hands, archivists, or musicians to travel down to the southern mountains and elsewhere in search of authentic American music by the “folk.” Not professional archivists like Pete Seeger’s father, Charles, or the Lomaxes, father and son, or inspired amateurs like Harry Smith but young people looking for roots which was a great occupation of the generation that came of age in the 1960s in reaction to their parents’ generation trying might and main to favor vanilla Americanization.      

A lot of the young, and that included Jack who read the book in high school, had first been tuned into Appalachia through Michael Harrington’s The Other America which prompted them to volunteer to help their poor brethren. Jack was somewhat animated by that desire to help but his real purpose was to be a gadfly who found some hidden trove of music that others had not found. In this he was following the trail started by the Lally Brothers, a local Boston folk group who were dedicated to the preservation of mountain music and having headed south had “discovered” Buell Hobart, the lonesome fiddler and had brought him north to do shows and be acclaimed as the “max daddy” of the mountain world.     

Jack had spent a couple of weeks down in Kentucky after having spent a couple of weeks striking out West Virginia where, for a fact, most of the rural folk were either rude or suspicious of his motives when he inquired about the whereabouts of some old-time red barn musicians he had read about from outside Wheeling. Then one night, one Saturday night he found himself in Prestonsburg, down in southeast Kentucky, down in coal country where the hills and hollows extent for miles around. He had been brought to that town by a girl, a cousin of Sam Lowell’s on his father’s side from back home in Carver. Sam had told Jack to look her up if he ever got to Hazard where his father had hailed from and had lived before World War had driven him to the Marines and later to love of his mother from Carver.   

This girl, a pretty girl to boot, Nadine, had told Jack that mountain music had been played out in Hazard, that whatever legends about the coal wars and about the music had long gone from that town. She suggested that he accompany her to an old-fashioned red barn dance that was being held weekly at Fred Brown’s place on Saturday nights on the outskirts of Prestonsburg if he wanted to hear the “real deal” (Jack’s term). That night when they arrived and paid their dollar apiece jack saw a motley crew of fiddlers, guitar player, and a few what Nadine called mountain harps.

The first half of the dance went uneventfully enough but the second half, after he had been fortified with what the locals called white lightning, illegal whiskey, this woman came up to the stage after being introduced although he did not for some reason, maybe the sting of the booze and began to play the mountain harp and sing a song, The Hills of Home, that had everybody mesmerized. She sang a few other songs that night and Jack marveled at her style. When Jack asked Nadine who that woman singer was she told him a gal from “around these parts” (her expression) Hazel Dickens and wasn’t she good. When Jack got back to Boston a few weeks later (after spending more time with friendly Nadine) that searching for mountain music he contacted the Lally Brothers to see if they could coax Ms. Dickens north for college audiences to hear. And that was Jack Callahan’s small contribution to keeping the mountain music tradition alive. For her part Hazel Dickens did before she died several years ago much, much more to keep the flame burning.           

When Bluesman Taj Majal Ready Tried To Drink All The Liquor In Costa Rica- Or Maybe Newark In New Jersey

When Bluesman Taj Majal Ready Tried To Drink All The Liquor In Costa Rica- Or Maybe Newark In New Jersey

By Sarah Lemoyne

[Seth Garth who had acted as my main mentor as a new hire before I got my own by-line has with the exception of my old nemesis Sam Lowell with whom I locked horns over the place of film noir in cinematic history more stories about happenings, his term, in the old days than you could shake a stick at, also him term. Those stories told around the office water cooler or at Jimmy Jack’s Tavern across from the Adams Building where we work can be about anything since he, along with the aforementioned Lowell worked the hard alternative newspaper drag when in order to survive you had to have a different slant on the news or cultural twirl, Seth’s term, against the mainstream noise or go under. Most of those operations did but that had more to do with the times changing in an ugly direction than the quirky looks guys like Seth (and Sam) threw at the established presses when that meant something.]        

***********

Seth Garth the old time music critic for the now long gone alternative newspaper The Eye who had followed all the trends in the folk world in the old days once his friend from high school, Jack Callahan, had turned him on to the genre after having heard some mountain music coming from a fugitive radio station one summer Sunday night still was interested in what was left of that world. More importantly who was still left still standing from that rough-hewn folk minute of the early 1960s. An important part of that interest centered on who still had “it” from among those who were still standing. Whose voice still could call out a song and who had enough presence to grace a smaller stage if they couldn’t.

That was no mere academic question but had risen quite sharply in the early part of 2002 when Seth, Jack and their respective wives had attended a Bob Dylan concert up in Augusta Maine and had come away disappointed, no, more than disappointed, shocked that Dylan had lost whatever voice he had had and depended increasingly on his backup singers and musicians. Dylan no longer had it, both agreed that they would have to be satisfied with listening to the old records, tapes, CDs, and YouTube. That single shocking event led subsequently to an earnest attempt to attend concerts and performances of as many of the old-time folkies as they could before they passed on. They have documented elsewhere some of those others some who have like Utah Phillips and Dave Van Ronk subsequently passed on but one night recently, a few months ago now, they were discussing one Taj Majal (stage name of a Springfield, Massachusetts-bred folk-singer, bluesman and all around talent not the famous wonder of the world in India) and how they had first heard him back in the day since in anticipation of seeing him in person up at the great concert hall overlooking the harbor at Rockport.      

Naturally enough if you knew Seth and Jack they disagreed on exactly where they had first seen him after Jack had hear him do a cover of the old country blues classic Corrina, Corrina on that fugitive folk program out of Rhode Island, WAFJ. Seth said the Club 47 over in Harvard Square in Cambridge and Jack said they had gone underground to the Unicorn over on Boylston Street in Boston. Of course those disputes never got resolved, never got final resolution. What was not disputed was that they had both been blown away by the performance of Taj and his small backup band that night. His blues mastery proved to them that someone from the younger generation was ready to keep the old-time blues tradition alive, including playing the old National Steel guitar that the likes of Son House and Bukka White created such great blues classic on. The highlight that night had been The Sky Is Crying which has been covered by many others since but not equaled.     

The track record of old-time folkies had been mixed as one would expect as the shocking Dylan experiences pointed out. Utah Phillips by the time they got to see him had lost it, David Bromberg still had it for two examples. The night they were discussing and disputing the merit of Taj’s case both agreed that he probably had lost it since that rough-hewn gravelly voice of his had like Dylan’s and Willie Nelson’s taken a beating with time and many performances. Needless to say, they should not have worried (although they did when old be-hatted Taj came out and immediately sat down not a good sign for prior experiences with other old-time performers) since Taj was smokin’ that night. Played the old Elmore James Television Blues on the National Steel like he was about twenty years old. Did his old version of Corrina proud and his version of CC Rider as well. Yeah, Taj still had it. But if you don’t believe a couple of old folkies and don’t get a chance to see him in person out your way then grab the album Shoutin’ In Key from the old days and see what they meant. See what they meant when women and men played folk and blues tunes for keeps. Got it.

The Case That Will Never Die- Old-Time California Private Eye Lew Archer Vs. Time And Memory

The Case That Will Never Die- Old-Time California Private Eye Lew Archer Vs. Time And Memory

Sam Lowell

Maybe it is the crazy times we live what with being bombarded by madness in places high and low these days. I fully expected that a recent piece I did trying to revive the sagging (very sagging at this point) fortunes of almost famous 1950s California private detective Lew Archer would go nowhere, would as I stated in the headline to the piece finally go to ground. What I was, and I guess I still am, trying to do was finally get Lew into the Private Investigators Hall of Fame (a place where guys from his era like Sam Spade, Marlowe, Phil Larkin, Mark Lynch and Mack Devane dwell and have for a long time down in Santa  Marcos where the Hall is located). After many years I through a guy named Ted Nolan who claimed to be, and in fact after investigation turned out to be, a grandson of Lew’s first and only wife Susan who divorced him after a couple of very lonely years while he was making a name for himself with the famous Galton, Hartman and what is commonly called the grim Ivory Grin case. Despite that failed marriage she and Lew communicated for a while after she remarried and had kids and then grandkids whom she would regale stories about her famous ex-husband private detective. Ted got the bug from her and pushed forward with attempting recently to get enough information together to see if he couldn’t get Lew into the Hall.

Ted’s spirits soared when he saw my article asking that very same question. Ted contacted me and astonished me as well with information about Lew having by the Hall nominating committee rules a third chance to make the Hall after the previous two ignominious rejections years ago. Moreover, Ted had a story built up about Lew’s personal life that might sway a nominating committee today to put his name forward. Then his spirits took a nosedive when I told him I would not sign on to what was essentially a bullshit story that would have had a hard time making the cut on the Hallmark Channel cutting room floor. You know the sexually abused childhood, the sullen teen years when he started the armed robbery spree that would almost catch him a nickel in some state prison, his drinking and drug problems which lasted almost a lifetime and had him end up face down in a tidal pool along the rugged California coast. Other stuff too to add ballast to this story line that even in the age of identity politics and crazes would have a hard time flying. All that noise against the hard fact that Lew really was born at the wrong time, became a detective when things were different. When male P.I.s and it was almost all male in those days were expected to solve the average cold case the public coppers gave up on to go have their coffee and crullers while bedding every women, young old, married or single in sight. My own investigations showed that Lew had a sexual impotency problem and with few early case exceptions, passed on the silky sheets. That would seem to have sunk Lew’s chances except both Ted (sometimes he signed himself Tim and Tom but we will use Ted here) and I decided that we would patch work his “fake bio” and see what flew. 

That join effort was placed in this publication (and in a few on-line private detection and mystery publications) and that was that. This is where things got squirrely. Leslie Dumont, an ardent feminist, and Will Bradley an ardent something both had read my article and wanted to at least figure out-in print-in cyber ink- where Lew fell down and maybe this would give him a boost in today’s more sympathetic milieu. The key was which case caused Lew to flounder, to lose his nerve and to wind his way down to Bunker Hill street wino bum pulled out of a pissant dumpster by the legendary Shelly Devine (the first women inducted into the Hall) for repo and keyhole work and then when he fell down again to “go-fer” work and then that anonymous tidal pool face down grave.  

      

Leslie started the whole thing by saying that from her take on the cases he solved early and wound up twisted with some twist (her word learned from reading too many period private detective novels). Then he ran aground it seems with the Dreen case, a case that got solved but not to his or anybody else’s satisfaction. This Dreen woman, a looker, and a jealous bitch to be honest (“bitch” my term) snared Lew into looking for her missing daughter, Una, although she used a stage name of Bella something (that something because Leslie could not remember her stage name and it doesn’t matter since in Hollywood and its environs monikers are a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper). This Dreen dame figured the daughter had gone down in the deep briny since she was last seen on a raft with another Hollywood star, male. Which might have been alright in Tinseltown but in the squares circle a no-no since she was married, very married to a Navy flier who had seen serious action in the Pacific War wars and had sent her a note that he was flying home from Pearl (Pearl Harbor an attack by the Japanese forever etched in infamy by one FDR-POTUS at the time) to be with her. Somehow the message got the time screwed up and he, the flyer boy, showed up just as this Una and that unidentified male star were going at it, were having sex in what they thought was the QT.

The long and short of it was that this missing Una became the subject of that flier boy’s desperate searches and as expected he did find her washed up in some tidal basin (ironically Lew would wind up in that same condition further up the California coastline some twenty years later). Then Lew started to put two and two together, sensing something was wrong, totally wrong with the whole scene. What had happened was that fly boy sent the message, but somebody changed the time frame and so Una and that playboy toy were caught by him while naked as jaybirds. The irate fly-boy, Johnny something, but again let’s not get caught up on names since they changed as frequently as shirts and dresses in La La land dive-bombed the scene sending that brave movie star scurrying like a rat for shore and this Una the subject of such horrible torture by airplane she went down to the sea three times and only came up twice. (Think about some crazed husband with a F-something aircraft under him dive-bombing her causing her air passages to seize up according to the coroner and you can understand the case for torture, torture most foul) The mystery, and according to the notes Leslie said she saw from the police investigation at the time, was who had purposefully changed that message so Jack fly-boy would see his wife with another man-and savagely act on it. That gets us back to the Dreen woman. Seems her and this Johnny boy were lovers before Una got her claws into him so in a jealous rage she saw her chance, changed the telegram and sent her own daughter to the deep so she could have her Johnny Cakes. Here is the real deal though Lew never turned this Dreen dame in mainly to let Johnny warrior brother off the hook, and never took her under the silky sheets either even though she was nothing but a man-trap and she owed Lew big time. Leslie’s idea, she no prude but also aware that a third wave feminist frame would not fit back in 1946 was that he was thereafter guilt-ridden by what he had let go by acting as a stooge for both Dreen and Johnny boy and was never the same again either as a private detective or as a “lady’s man” (her term, not a compliment).    

A good case for the beginning of Lew’s downfall and I was ready to concede the point and move on until young Will Bradley who has made something of a reputation around here as a legend-slayer meaning bustling up guys like cheapjack Robin Hood when he started rolling in coin after committing wanton highway robbery on whoever had jack and dared to travel the roads around God forsaken Sherwood Forest, the strictly press agent, a guy named Don Marco who got it from his ravaged daughter who was attending boarding school at some nunnery made-up Casanova lover boy story and above all and germane to this discussion busting a big crack in the fake news legend of so-called private detective Larry Lawrence (aka Sherlock Holmes) who turned out to just another junkie bong pipe cretin and never ever had a change of making the Hall under any conditions. More likely to be in Dartmoor Prison if he didn’t have half of Scotland Yard on “the take” and the other half looking the other way.

Young Will was fascinated by the possibility even at this far remove and with some of his later cases in deep cold file, so deep event he public coppers had given up, that he could dig up enough material to buttress the current argument that Lew should have a ticket to the Hall based on the few cases where Lew banged it out of the ball park. Then Will ran into the hard reality of Lew’s post- cold case solved crimes, the “something happened” and the booze, drugs and mental breakdowns with which we are all too familiar. Will thereafter went from seriously trying to rehabilitate for P.I. history like the guys in Russia tried with some of the guys Uncle Joe Stalin hung out to dry to finding out why he fell down so fast and easily. Will rejected Leslie’s Dreen case out of hand since except maybe for his press agent’s publicity  machine toying with this Dreen flame was off limits, was not a good choice, and my sexual impotency theory as not complete and has posited Lew’s bungling of the femme chances in what he, Will, has called the Bohemian case since it involved artists. To give a short preview of Will’s take Lew let four very big chances get by him on the femme front and then didn’t even solve the case before half of San Marcos, the Bohemia of the tale got shot up.

Let’s face it the Dreen case may have led to Lew’s eventual downfall,  I will admit that much, but Lew crumbled, went to dust on this case, and worse than not solving the case (the public coppers had to carry off some virginal Abigail who went over the edge thinking her boyfriend, fiancé I guess was going under the sheets with some ex-lover) but somewhere in the heat of battle lost his ticket to ride, big time. Funny, from the inevitable police report statement he gave the San Marcos coppers who wouldn’t let him go without a statement he was just getting ready to drop in on an old war (World War II remember) war buddy who had been attached to his unit as a combat artist. A good one making the young heroes even more heroic than they actually were which was scared out of their pajamas. That wartime attachment is important because that became the reason that this buddy, Waldo Samson, yes, the great colorist whose work you can see in half the museums in America these days, was in San Marcos back then, back right after the war (WWII in case you forgot), before all the disaffected rebels, the hipsters, the junkies, the fast car addicts, the be-bop jazz guys, the be-bop poets talking about those angel hipsters endlessly, craven homosexuals (then, now gay and not craven), drag queens and Cinderella’s court headed to North Beach and new times. Was the West Coast version of the Village in New York, the Left Bank in Paris, Dink’s Point in Wells, Maine.                      

The town as expected had its fair share of drunks, artistic failures on the low, junkies of six drug combinations, max daddy fixer men, whores beating down artists’ door to get that Henri Matisse voluptuous bed weary stark naked, nude okay. And that is where our tale begins really because Lew never found his war buddy Waldo (don’t ask about how many times Lew when he was in his prime in the Pacific had to carry the drunken sot Waldo from half the whorehouses on Okinawa). What he did find was that Waldo was up to his old tricks grabbing whatever dame came his way and after having his way with her, after she played the flute anyway dumped her for the next best thing. The problem this time, the problem with Mara, was that she didn’t know how to quit, fatally kept after Waldo even when he moved on to the next best thing which turned out to be a big Western money dough deal with that virginal Abigail previously mentioned who would in the end be carted off by the San Marcos coppers. This loose Abigail whose father along with a guy named General Sternwood who had already gone to his big sleep invented the La Brea tar pits, no the oil and Waldo no slouch could smell big money. Another little problem was this Mara was married, not very married but married to that La Brea tar pits money despite their age differences. So like in the Dreen case this sets up as variant of the mother-daughter sexual rivalry business that has driven half the cases in the files.  

The real problem was that Waldo left that stark naked nude painting on a very visible easel (this at a time when he was doing color up the ass and so kind of forgetful about art school class nudes in charcoal which were then, as now, a drug on the market except maybe by some Leonardo). Lew saw it and both leered at it hopelessly (that Will guess based on finding out later at one point Lew had an extensive hard-core pornographic library in the office desk drawer just above the Johnny Walker Red whiskey kept for all occasions) and figured it was some old-time thing Waldo had painted. Worse, worst of all was that, Lydia, this clueless Waldo’s sister saw Lew let’s call in polite society looking at the nude and got the idea he was a trespassing pervert and not an old brother friend. Lew didn’t even try to get to first base with this very available Lydia even though after she found out who he was she gave him those meaningful looks that, well, meant something, Strike number one. Of course, nobody can find, or in the end will find Waldo except dead, very dead up in some off-the-cuff mountain retreat. Reason: that new girlfriend Abigail had a hate relationship with her dear step-mother over, yes, over Waldo since she was age-appropriate Waldo’s ex-lover. Abigail was so pissed off at Waldo she took a run at Lew, figured an old war buddy would put paid to that affair between “Mom” and her boy Waldo. Lew passed, passed out of some “code” that not even Philo Vance would have been able to figure out when it came to hard-boiled detectives and femmes. Strike two.

Might as well get strike three over with since you know as well as I do that for her own reasons, mostly sexual and frisky, but also to keep Lew the hound off her scent this Mara went after Lew. Here is the decisive strike four thought, I assume they have four strikes in cricket, this Waldo, short of cash, always short of cash decided that he would broker a sale of a famous painting by Corot which some broken down art gallery owner had clipped from Abigail’s old La Brea tar pits father and a West Coast mobster before Bugsy Seigel sucked up all the air who was desperate for the damn thing even if he was clueless about art. That artwork would cost Waldo and the art dealer their lives which may have not been much but when Lew in a high investigation mood checked out various mobster alibis he turned down the sparkling Spanish loving tongue eyes of the mobster’s maid when she practically tripped him into her bed. Leslie, Will, Ted, and I know we have a very steep hill to climb for Lew when we have Phil Larkin on another case for General Sternwood another La Brea tar pits tycoon over some two-bit hustler’s blackmail scheme over his two daughters bedded each one separately on the same afternoon and had time for a late lunch and a nap. Ouch! 

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-*Poet's Corner- The Work Of Paul Verlaine

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine.


Markin comment:

One cannot have paid serious attention to American storyteller/songwriter/poet Bob Dylan's early work, especially "Desolation Row" and "Like Tom Thumbs Blues" without have coming into contact with, and note the influence of, the two 19th century French poets honored today, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. And the selections below certainly make the case for that statement.



Nevermore

Allons, mon pauvre coeur, allons, mon vieux complice,
Redresse et peins à neuf tous tes arcs triomphaux;
Brûle un encens ranci sur tes autels d'or faux;
Sème de fleurs les bords béants du précipice;
Allons, mon pauvre coeur, allons, mon vieux complice!

Pousse à Dieu ton cantique, ô chantre rajeuni;
Entonne, orgue enroué, des Te Deum splendides;
Vieillard prématuré, mets du fard sur tes rides;
Couvre-toi de tapis mordorés, mur jauni;
Pousse à Dieu ton cantique, ô chantre rajeuni.

Sonnez, grelots; sonnez, clochettes; sonnez, cloches!
Car mon rêve impossible a pris corps, et je l'ai
Entre mes bras pressé: le Bonheur, cet ailé
Voyageur qui de l'Homme évite les approches,
--Sonnez, grelots; sonnez, clochettes; sonnez, cloches!

Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi;
Mais la FATALITÉ ne connaît point de trêve:
Le ver est dans le fruit, le réveil dans le rêve,
Et le remords est dans l'amour: telle est la loi.
--Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi.

From Poèmes saturniens (1866)
Nevermore

Come, my poor heart, come, old friend true and tried,
Repaint your triumph's arches, raised anew;
Smoke tinsel altars with stale incense; strew
Flowers before the chasm, gaping wide;
Come, my poor heart, come, old friend true and tried.


Cantor revivified, sing God your hymn;
Hoarse organ-pipes, intone Te Deums proud;
Make up your aging face, youth wrinkle-browed;
Bedeck yourself in gold, wall yellow-dim;
Cantor revivified, sing God your hymn.


Ring, bells; peal, chimes; peal, ring, bells large and small!
My hopeless dream takes shape: for Happiness--
Here, now--lies clutched, embraced in my caress;
Winged Voyager, who shuns Man's every call;
--Ring, bells; peal, chimes; peal, ring, bells large and small!


Happiness once walked side by side with me;
But DOOM knows no reprieve, there's no mistaking:
The worm is in the fruit; in dreaming, waking;
In loving, mourning. And so must it be.
--Happiness once walked side by side with me.


Clair de lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

From Fêtes galantes (1869)
Moonlight

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Singing in minor mode of life's largesse
And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite
Reluctant to believe their happiness,
And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,

The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming--
Slender jet-fountains--sob their ecstasies.




"Il pleure dans mon coeur . . . "
II pleut doucement sur la ville.
Arthur Rimbaud

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville;
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon coeur?


Ô bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits!
Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie
Ô le chant de la pluie!


Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure.
Quoi! nulle trahison? . . .
Ce deuil est sans raison.


C'est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi
Sans amour et sans haine
Mon coeur a tant de peine!


From Romances sans paroles (1874)
"Like city's rain, my heart . . ."

The rain falls gently on the town.
Arthur Rimbaud

Like city's rain, my heart
Rains teardrops too. What now,
This languorous ache, this smart
That pierces, wounds my heart?


Gentle, the sound of rain
Pattering roof and ground!
Ah, for the heart in pain,
Sweet is the sound of rain!


Tears rain-but who knows why?-
And fill my heartsick heart.
No faithless lover's lie? . . .
It mourns, and who knows why?


And nothing pains me so--
With neither love nor hate--
A simply not to know
Why my heart suffers so.


À Charles Baudelaire

Je ne t'ai pas connu, je ne t'ai pas aimé,
Je ne te connais point et je t'aime encor moins:
Je me chargerais mal de ton nom diffamé,
Et si j'ai quelque droit d'être entre tes témoins,

C'est que, d'abord, et c'est qu'ailleurs, vers les Pieds joints
D'abord par les clous froids, puis par l'élan pâmé
Des femmes de péché--desquelles ô tant oints,
Tant baisés, chrême fol et baiser affamé!--

Tu tombas, tu prias, comme moi, comme toutes
Les âmes que la faim et la soif sur les routes
Poussaient belles d'espoir au Calvaire touché!

--Calvaire juste et vrai, Calvaire où, donc, ces doutes,
Ci, çà, grimaces, art, pleurent de leurs déroutes.
Hein? mourir simplement, nous, hommes de péché.


From Liturgies intimes (1892)
For Charles Baudelaire

I do not know you now, or like you, nor
Did I first know or like you, I admit.
It's not for me to furbish and restore
Your name: if I take up the cause for it,


It's that we both have known the exquisite
Joys of two feet together pressed: His, or
Our whores'! He, nailed; they, swooning in love's fit,
Madly anointed, kissed, bowed down before!


You fell, you prayed. And so did I, like all
Those souls whom thirst and hunger, yearningly,
Shining with hope, urged on to Calvary!


--Calvary, righteous, where--here, there--our fall,
In art-contorted doubts, weeps its chagrin.
A simple death, eh? we, brothers in sin.





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Copyright notice: Excerpted from One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine translated by Norman R. Shapiro, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1999 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of both the author and the University of Chicago Press.

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It Do Not Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing-With Swing-master Benny Goodman In Mind

It Do Not Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing-With Swing-master Benny Goodman In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James

“Jesus, now that you mentioned Mr. Lawrence, our seventh grade music teacher, I am starting to remember some other stuff about the guy, about what a creep he was trying to break us from our unbreakable bond with rock and roll,” Seth Garth said to Jack Callahan as they both hoisted their three, or was it fourth, double scotch with water chaser, an old habit for both of them since the chaser made the drink last longer in the old days when they were short of dough and were sipping their drinks to stretch out the evening. The gist of what Seth had told Jack was in response to Jack’s remembering the very first time that they had heard Woody Guthrie and what song they had learned first. That gist of talk was based on Seth, an old time folk music critic, mainly for The Eyeout on the West Coast having recently seen in a folk magazine the announcement that the Smitstonian/Folkway operation was finally putting out a treasure trove in four CDs of some Woody Guthrie songs recorded by Moses Asch during World War II. Seth for the life of him could not remember what song he had heard and when of Guthrie’s and so he had called upon Jack to meet him at their favorite watering hole the Erie Grille in Riverdale where they both were now residing (and after varying absences had grown up in the town). Jack had answered that it had been in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class and the song had been the alternative national anthem-This Land Is Your Land. 

The method to Mr. Lawrence’s madness, to ween the kids off of rock and roll, had gone beyond trying to foist silly folk music off on them but to drown them in any other kind of music he could think to distract, or attempt to distract them with, especially during lunch when they played their transistor radios and drove him crazy with their rock and roll. A few times, if you could believe this he tried to get them interested in jazz, in swing music, what each and every one of them considered the music that their parents listen to and which had driven them to the transistors in the first place. Worse, worse of all he had tried to get his charges interested in the music of Benny Goodman, the so-called “king of swing.” That was all Seth needed to hear as he blurted out in front of the class “My mother and father dance to that pokey stuff on Saturday nights and they are barely moving when they dance. I am not going to listen to that here.” Needless to say Seth stayed after school a number of afternoons for his transgression. But he felt vindicated in what he had uttered and took the punishment like a soldier.

Still it did no good as Mr. Lawrence played something called Blue Skies which was his parents’ “their song.” Something else by a guy named Cole Porter that Benny Goodman made famous. It got no better when Mr. Lawrence played stuff with Peggy Lee because to his mother’s chagrin his father had “crush” on old Peggy and Seth had to secretly admit that she was kind of sexy looking at that.  

But that was then. A few nights after Seth and Jack were cutting up old touches, after drinking themselves to melancholia, Seth went to the library and picked up an old Benny Goodman CD with plenty of American Songbook stuff on it. Guess what old Seth, old rock and roll devotee Seth with an overhang of folk, blues, and a little mountain music started to pop his fingers to the beat, started laughing to himself that he know knew what they meant when they said “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.” And they were right. Just ask Benny,       

From The Archives Of "Workers Hammer"-Revolutionary Socialist And Easter 1916 Uprising Leader James Connolly on royalty

Workers Hammer No. 215
Summer 2011

Quote of the issue

James Connolly on royalty

As an antidote to the barrage of obsequious drivel we were subjected to by the bourgeois media during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland in May, we reprint below an article by Irish socialist James Connolly on the occasion of the visit to Ireland by King George V in 1911. For his part in leading the 1916 Easter uprising against British rule in Ireland, Connolly was executed by his British captors.

Fellow-Workers,

As you are aware from reading the daily and weekly newspapers, we are about to be blessed with a visit from King George V.

Knowing from previous experience of Royal Visits, as well as from the Coronation orgies of the past few weeks, that the occasion will be utilised to make propaganda on behalf of royalty and aristocracy against the oncoming forces of democracy and National freedom, we desire to place before you some few reasons why you should unanimously refuse to countenance this visit, or to recognise it by your presence at its attendant processions or demonstrations. We appeal to you as workers, speaking to workers, whether your work be that of the brain or of the hand — manual or mental toil — it is of you and your children we are thinking; it is your cause we wish to safeguard and foster.

The future of the working class requires that all political and social positions should be open to all men and women; that all privileges of birth or wealth be abolished, and that every man or woman born into this land should have an equal opportunity to attain to the proudest position in the land. The Socialist demands that the only birthright necessary to qualify for public office should be the birthright of our common humanity.

Believing as we do that there is nothing on earth more sacred than humanity, we deny all allegiance to this institution of royalty, and hence we can only regard the visit of the King as adding fresh fuel to the fire of hatred with which we regard the plundering institutions of which he is the representative. Let the capitalist and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his importance that they might familiarise the public mind with the conception of political inequality, knowing well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings — capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks. Thus coronation and king’s visits are by our astute never-sleeping masters made into huge Imperialist propagandist campaigns in favour of political and social schemes against democracy. But if our masters and rulers are sleepless in their schemes against us, so we, rebels against their rule, must never sleep in our appeal to our fellows to maintain as publicly our belief in the dignity of our class — in the ultimate sovereignty of those who labour.

What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.

Every class in society save royalty, and especially British royalty, has through some of its members contributed something to the elevation of the race. But neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity has a representative of British royalty helped forward the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind. But that royal family has opposed every forward move, fought every reform, persecuted every patriot, and intrigued against every good cause. Slandering every friend of the people, it has befriended every oppressor. Eulogised to-day by misguided clerics, it has been notorious in history for the revolting nature of its crimes.

— James Connolly, “Visit of King George V, 1911”, printed in James Connolly, Collected Works, Volume One (New Books Publications, 1987)