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
When It Rains Pennies From Heaven-Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly’s “Singing In The Rain” (1954)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
Singing in the Rain, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly, 1954
An old associate of mine in this wacky journalism business once told me that when writers, meaning in that case reporters but here commentators and reviewers, start airing “their dirty linen in public” that usually means some problems are congealing up the ladder, up in the administrative offices, when decisions such as assignments and plum pieces get decided. That old associate also pointed out that when things get dicey it is much easier to put one administrator under the bus than fire a whole raft of writers who make the whole thing hum. We shall see, we shall see. Here is my gripe. I seem to be getting a whole raft of these silly feel good musicals, song and dance ones a specialty. I just got this one, this silly Singing In The Rain, which is so corny it could not possibly be made today and not just because song and dance films are passe, quite passe, but because would try the patience of an eight year old if an eight year could be wrestled into the theater something in my day which could be done since there was nowhere else to put us if Grandma had other business to attend to and we were force fed this stuff which we couldn’t understand then, or now. These musicals other than endless songs and dances at the drop of a hat, and maybe you didn’t even need to do that with a song bursting at the seams or some guy dancing up the walls to show his prowess. With that in mind this thing is a loser despite its future post-release iconic status which must have been led by those poor wrestled kids brainwashed into sitting through this turkey. One of these days I will kindly refuse to swallow yet more pride and say no.
For now though as Laura Perkins, who got the saying from Sam Lowell who used to be the head honcho in the film room here, and who said it was okay for me to use when I mentioned that I would not because she had it “patented” “here is the skinny.” Don, Gene Kelly’s role, is former vaudeville duo with Cosmo, played by Donald O’Connor, who have played every venue without coming up roses. Hard times indeed in the 1920s when vaudeville was losing it grip to surging Hollywood. They, mainly Don, once they hit Tinsel Town tried everything to get into the movie business from go-for to stuntman. Finally he got and finally he got his
Big chance with a big star, Lina, who made all the men weep for her hand-in the “silent film” era. Don made it big on Lina’s say so and both rode the stardom trail until the advent of “talkies.”
That is where Lina had a little problem. Her low-rent Brooklyn-Bronx-Yonkers someplace in urban New York anyway accent and manner were zero when The Jazz Singer ruined many a lucrative career by making actors more than mimes and forced then to talk the King’s English. Don and Lina had been touted by the studios and egged on by Lina as a Hollywood star pair but that was strictly for show. Strictly PR stuff but Don had Lina tagged as from nowhere in his dream girl nights. What did get Don in a dither was meeting Kathy, played by all-American “girl next door” Debbie Reynolds who was star-struck and stage-struck but before some big break was getting by as a chorus girl showing her gams for the nightclub set. Strictly second-rate stuff but better than being beaten back to Boise or Omaha on some one-way Greyhound bus. For a while as is almost standard in these older films she gives Don the big chill but only for a while, made him burn like a firecracker but eventually she defrosted after he rushed her.
Meanwhile what to do about Lina and that horrible voice which will turn audiences off in about two minutes. This is the lamo gag that was supposed to get audiences worked up-rise up. Star power Lina would do the on stage acting in the latest Don-Lina vehicle which conveniently was turned from a loser period piece romantic drama into, guess what, a musical so Kathy can do the talking and singing and old battle axe Lina could lip-synch. Beautiful and the screenwriters should have gotten millions of that little sleight of hand. But what about tons of talent Kathy. Will she ever get her big break. Come on now you know she will once by another screenwriter sleight of hand Lina is exposed as nothing but a manqué for Kathy’s real talent. What still makes me grind my teeth days later is how such a thin story line can promote about eight million songs which have nothing to do with the plotline or the title of the film and about seven million dances one in that very rain out of nowhere. Beware, beware too the critics who claim this musical is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Gene and Donald can dance no question but to what purpose.
The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life
Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.
Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.
The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.
La misión del Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) es ser un lugar de encuentro de las culturas del mundo. En reconocimiento a la herencia cultural del artista, los textos de la galería para esta exposición se ofrecen en inglés y español.
By Laura Perkins
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1990-91, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Culture, Class and Censorship-Forbidden Art
By Helen Cantor
"Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies." —Rep. George A. Dondero
Back in the McCarthy witch hunt days, abstract art was supposed to be a Commie plot, subverting and/or making fools of the American people, as the above 1949 quote from Michigan Representative George A. Dondero indicates. Today, when you can tell exactly, precisely, down to the last hair follicle, what's happening in certain works of art, the same generic yahoo Congressmen still don't like the stuff. Today it's North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms ranting against the late Robert Mapplethorpe's classic, precise photographs because they have sexual themes he doesn't happen to like. Back then it was Dondero and his ilk howling against works they charged were deliberate gibberish done by "germ-carrying vermin," "international art thugs" and "human termites" they darkly claimed were Communist agents boring from within.
Then and now, such hysterical assaults serve the same purpose, which isn't art appreciation but an attempt to ensure the government's social control over the population through intimidation and witch-hunting. In the first Cold War, the focus was on "the Commie menace" and fluoridation; in the past decade it's been sex (it was a/so sex then, of course, and some anti-homosexual campaigns rivaled the anti-Communist hunts in their hysteria). Having pretty successfully expunged the "Reds under the beds," during the Reagan/Bush years the government has turned directly to the beds, unleashing an army of sex police to try to overturn the '60s "sexual revolution" and return Americans "to their places," passive and socially obedient. They even tried to shut down the art museums this past summer. But the American public is pretty fed up with this reactionary assault, as the recent stunning jury decisions in favor of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center's Robert Mapplethorpe show and for the black rap group 2 Live Crew demonstrate.
Artists need support, and should try to get all they can ' out of this government, which is supposedly a democracy. The government has no business telling us what we can look at—or telling artists what they should paint. As New York artists rudely and aptly put it in protests at the Metropolitan Museum last year, "Jesse Helms, You Old Fart! Keep Your Hands Off Our Art!"
Congress' current deal is that the National Endowment for the Arts will give you grant money, and you don't have to sign the "no dirty sex" Jesse Helms pledge. But if a local sheriff finds your work "obscene," you have to pay it all back (not to mention possibly going to jail). Joseph Papp, impresario of New York's renowned Public Theater complex, turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEA grants as a protest against this policy, which continues government censorship in only slightly disguised fashion. This is a courageous act, even if he can afford it. For poorer struggling souls, however, it may come down to a Woody Allen "Take the Money and Run" guerrilla approach. But don't kid yourself—they are not nice guys handing out free money up there. As Lenin used to say, "If you're going to sup with the Devil, you'd better bring a long spoon."
Of course performance artists like Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, with their feminist and lesbian themes, have just as much right to NEA grants as anybody else. But it is hard to imagine government policy, wedded to the concept of the monogamous family as the cornerstone of society, really going for "gay and lesbian art." It's unlikely there will be enthusiasm in Congress for some of the works, for example, in a recent Soho exhibition titled "Queers"—for good or ill, the gigantic lavender plastic male with the big purple penis is never going to grace the Senate lobby. Judy Chicago's equally massive Dinner Party, with its plates representing the vaginas of historical women, lost its home at the University of the District of Columbia. Congress, which still rules over D.C. like a feudal plantation, vindictively cut $1.6 million from the University's appropriation as punishment for accepting what one Congressman called "ceramic 3-D pornography" (meanwhile, students' protest over their rotten education and lack of funding led the artist to withdraw her work in sympathy with their demands).
As the sordid history of official support to the arts shows, the' politicians, even when they appear to be totally disinterested and liberal, dole out their crumbs with careful control. From the Depression era WPA (Works Progress Administration) up through the Rockefellers' sponsorship of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s, official interest in art has been reluctant or self-interested. This history hasn't been raised much in the current fights over the NEA, but then, neither the "progressive" artists nor the government bureaucrats come off too well in what's been a tentative, awkward relationship rich with embarrassment, farce and sheer McCarthyite terror.
The WPA: "A sound, fresh ear of corn"
What I want, said Edward Bruce, one of the early advocates of massive public arts projects during the Roosevelt administration, is work that has "the same feeling I get when I smell a sound, fresh ear of corn," things that "make me feel comfortable about America." Well, he got the corn anyhow. If American "progressive art" of the 1930s tended toward self-righteous preaching, and state-sponsored "official art" tended toward the horribly dull and morally uplifting, the combination was practically fatal, at least aesthetically. The American Stalinists of the Communist Party, solemnly proclaiming "Communism is 20th Century Americanism" during the heyday of the "Popular Front," contributed their share of turgid murals, all of which seem to be variations on Davy Crockett and Babe the Blue Ox leading oppressed Indians, Negroes picking cotton and starving coal miners reading volumes of Marx by flickering coal lamps as huge tornadoes rage in the dust bowl and floods carry scrawny chickens downstream. As we noted in "Women, Culture and Class Society," an earlier article on feminist art, "The caricatures of 'womanhood' (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda" (W&R No. 6, Summer 1974).
Some people claim there's such a thing as "totalitarian art," massive, relentlessly upward stuff churned out in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. But examination of the work of Roosevelt's WPA reveals the same styles and themes—the aluminum horses, monster eagles, heroic workers rebuilding society, simple-minded peasant families. Bruce's "fresh ear of corn" line isn't so different from the Nazi historian who said, "Pictures have to have a certain smell of the soil." The heated rhetoric of the self-styled "American regionalists" like Thomas Hart Ben-ton and Grant Wood versus Communist Party sympathizers is hard to grasp 50 years later, as they all dug into that same soil stylistically.
"Any artist who paints a nude for the Public Works of Art Project should have his head examined," another Roosevelt honcho proclaimed. One of the few artists whose works were openly, even grotesquely, sensual was one of the first to be censored and, ironically, at the very same Corcoran Gallery in D.C. that canned the Mapplethorpe show. Paul Cadmus today enjoys a renewed reputation as a kind of pioneer of "lesbian and gay art." His work, The Fleet's In, was initially chosen as one of the 500 paintings for a 1934 show of state-sponsored art. While the bulging, randy sailors, arms around one another, and the equally bulging females, were enjoyed in the Navy Department's salons without incident, one high-ranking narrow-minded admiral spotted the picture and had a fit. After much protest, the offending picture was removed, and Eleanor Roosevelt opened the affair to music by the Navy Band Orchestra. The president praised show as "robust and American."
It was hardly "the greatest art event in this country since the Armory," as one of the organizers had hoped. The faithful members of Roosevelt's court had comfortably forgotten that the 1913 art show in New York's Armory, which introduced the American public to modern European art, had horrified another Roosevelt. The show, including Marcel Duchamp's infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, set off the former president, according to exhibitor William Zorach, who recalled Teddy "waved his arms and stomped through the Galleries pointing at pictures and saying 'That's not art!'"
Other artists had better luck at subverting the nitpicking rules and pompous censors of the WPA agencies. Among the first big projects of Edward Bruce's Treasury "Section of Fine Arts" were murals for the Justice and Post Office buildings. The jury looked at 91 designs —mainly of chain gangs, evictions, third degrees, electrocutions, battling juvenile delinquents and gangsters—and promptly rejected them all. Rockwell Kent, however, got a commission for a Post Office mural. He painted a mailman delivering a letter to delighted Puerto Ricans with the words (in Eskimo language): "To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free." When no one noticed he finally called up a newspaper columnist and broke the story. Delighted by the resulting tempest, he cheerfully told reporters, "I think it's a swell thing when people want independence and I think it's the most American thing one can do to wish them luck." The seething bureaucrats demanded he change it, but rejected his suggestion for a quotation from Lincoln's first inaugural address on the right of oppressed minorities to revolution. The unamused Treasury officials insisted the only motto he could paint was "To commemorate the far-flung front of the United States Postal Service." Kent properly refused to paint this bombast, and so the letter is blank to this day (see The New Deal for Artists, by Richard D. McKinzie, Princeton University Press, 1973).
The Communist Party "Popular Front" and Artists
The WPA did give work to thousands of artists on relief. In its first year alone (1935), over 5,300 artists joined the WPA's Federal Art Project (FAR). About half the artists in the FAR were in New York City, home of the large and influential Communist Party-inspired American Artists' Congress, also formed in 1935. Earlier New York State and federal art relief efforts had sought to exclude known Communists, by not inviting the "Unemployed Artists Group," connected to the CP's John Reed Clubs, to participate.
The noblesse oblige of Roosevelt's cultural overseers was often severely strained, especially in New York, where militant artists' actions sought to extend the benefits of the WPA. In December 1936 (after the national elections), Roosevelt tried to cut the relief programs, but artists packed the Art Project offices in a sit-down strike. Police waded in and arrested 219 of them. In May of 1937, another protest and sit-in was called. Though it didn't win its demands, this protest finally pushed FAR director Holger Cahill, a former bohemian fellow traveler, over the edge: "These people are psychopaths, they are basically unemployable, and you can't do anything with them," he fumed, stating later that "these people were pretty wild...they were left-wingers who thought that if they could get a portrait of Marx or Lenin into a meeting, this somehow would bring about the revolution."
In fact, the American Artists' Congress was not for "red revolution," but was formed precisely because the Communist Party's previous artistic groups, the John Reed Clubs, were too radical for the "Popular Front," proclaimed in August 1935 at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. This "front" was supposed to enlist the "Western democracies" (formerly known as capitalist swine) in the fight to defend the Soviet Union against fascism—which for the CP meant in practice calling off the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. The John Reed Clubs were summarily disbanded during the winter of 1935-36, while their emphasis on class struggle and "proletcult" (proletarian culture) was abandoned.
"By building an alliance among Communists, Socialists, independent leftists, and Democrats, artists could feel as if they were part of American society," noted the editors of Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress (Rutgers University Press, 1986). This novel feeling^—both for artists and Communists—was not to survive the war. The organization reached over 900 members by 1939, with exhibits like "To Aid Democracy in Spain." Though the group took no official position on what style of art it preferred, a paper by Max Weber on "The Artist, His Audience and Outlook" outlined a view close to the party line:
"We must cast away therefore chameleon cleverness, and discard mental and optical illusions born of bourgeois decadence and ennui of a fast expiring civilization.... Let us, instead, turn to the gladiatorial heroism, ambition, and tempo of modern beneficent and yielding industry, science and technology, to scenes of joy and verve of happy toilers in their own made environments, to the new home-life, nursery and school, to the new comradeship and brotherhood hitherto unknown."
Yech. Following the twists and turns of Stalinist politics, artists in the group put out a letter defending the Moscow Trials, signed by president Stuart Davis as well as Raphael Soyer, William Cropper, Max Weber, Harry Gottlieb and other well-known artists of the period. But the increasing strain of following the Moscow line, especially when in 1938 "modernist" influences in art were officially banned in the Soviet Union, took its toll, as did the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in August 1939. As well, artists and writers around Partisan Review and others were coming to the defense of Leon Trotsky, Stalin's Bolshevik opponent; the 1937-38 John Dewey Commission exonerating Trotsky of Stalin's slanders had an important impact.
The bureaucratic perversion of "socialist realism" imposed by Stalin in the USSR was an especially bitter blow to artists, because the triumphant Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 had been associated with the great cultural upheavals that gave birth to modernism and abstract art. Recalling the heady atmosphere of those days of artistic experimentation and enthusiasm in the midst of poverty and civil war, Trotsky sought to re-establish what had been the Marxist norm when he and Lenin were leading the young workers state. As he wrote in a 1938 letter to Partisan Review:
"...a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. Such a pretension could only enter the head of a bureaucracy—ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power—which has become the antithesis of the proletarian revolution. Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity."
Essentially it was World War II that swept away the CP's art groups and the WPA. The war finally got American capitalism out of the Depression, ending all the Rooseveltian experiments in subsidizing artists. Its conclusion, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushered in a new era of American world imperialism.
"Advancing American Art": Censorship and McCarthyism
In 1947 the State Department organized a big art show, "Advancing American Art," to prove to the not yet totally grateful Europeans and South Americans that the American conquerors were not really the new barbarians. Instead the State Department ended up with egg on its face when it was forced to cancel the successful show in mid-tour by an outbreak of nativist yahooism and anti-Communism in Congress and the Hearst press.
The paintings themselves, bought in 1946 for the show by the State Department, represented a fairly broad range of American painting at that time (a 1989 paperback, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, published by the University of Alabama Press, includes 36 of the paintings). This was before the smashing success of Abstract Expressionism, so most works had recognizable subject matter, some mildly surrealistic, some still carrying on the '30s and early '40s themes of social injustice, like Ben Shahn's painting of a gaunt boy titled Hunger. There was a Georgia O'Keeffe landscape, a seascape by John Marin, a Marsden Hartley, a painting by the black artist Romare Beardon—all artists accepted today as standard figures of American modern painting.
William Randolph Hearst's papers went wild during a preview of the show in New York City. His New York journal American carried a series on the "Red Art Show," attacking "left-wing painters" like Stuart Davis, William Cropper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others as "a lunatic fringe." With slashing sarcasm, the Hearst writers denounced works like Karl Zerbe's Around the Lighthouse: "SHEER LOVELINESS...Is there anything more beautiful than a dead fish? Of course there is: Two dead fish, for example, or three or five. That's what makes this painting...so wonderful. You get five dead fish. And so did the State Department!"
Look magazine ran seven of the paintings under the provocative title "Your Money Bought These Pictures," while Newsweek ran a spread originally widely distributed by the Republican National Committee, which claimed that five of the seven works were by artists with Communist connections. The Republican majority in Congress, along with some nativist Democrats, seized on the show to settle scores with old New Deal enemies. Congressmen passed reproductions around the floor to raucous laughter, amidst charges it was a Communist plot because the faces of people in the paintings "are always depressed and melancholy. That is what the communists and other extremists want to portray. They want to tell the foreigners that the American people are despondent, broken down or of hideous shape—thoroughly dissatisfied with their lot and eager for a change of government. The Communists and their New Deal fellow travelers have selected art as one of their avenues of propaganda."
Finally President Truman was moved to denounce the show as "so-called modern art" and "merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people." He said of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Circus Girl Resting, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." On 4 April 1947 the Hearst papers triumphantly screamed "Marshall Halts World Tour of Red-Linked U.S. Art." Secretary of State George C. Marshall had the 79 art works brought back and sold as government "surplus property" at a gigantic loss—a Romare Beardon painting went for as little as $5.00!
Enter the evil age of Richard Milhouse Nixon, of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, "the Great Fear" era dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department," he charged in his famous scare speech of 1950. He never had such a list, but the "Red Scare" rolled on to full, raging hysteria, as loyalty oaths, flag salutes, enforced finking, "confessions" and witch hunts sought to drive CPers and other leftists out of the trade unions, the schools and every other field of American life, while crushing any sympathy for them. A 1949 Life magazine photo spread of "Dupes and Fellow Travelers" of the "Red Peril" was practically a who's who of famous people, including Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.
This was the heyday of Republican Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan, who served an incredible 25 years in Congress. He was honored by Vice President Nixon at a 1957 dinner saluting Dondero's many contributions to alerting the public to "the Communists' evil designs for pollution of American art." This McCarthy of the art world had a genuine obsession with modern art: "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.... Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason," he explained.
The CIA, the Rockefellers and Abstract Expressionism
This uncontrolled ranting was viewed with dismay by more rational bourgeois ideologues, who knew perfectly well it was making American society look like the revolting combination of terror and idiotic cultural boorishness it in fact was, a dippy "hula hoops from hell" suburban nightmare where a Picasso print on the wall was proof you'd made a pact with the Commie devil. (The FBI, in fact, kept a huge file on Picasso, extending on for years even after his death!) The United States Information Agency, perhaps hoping the worst storms had subsided, tried later in the '50s to present some international shows of American artists, but with similar disastrous results, as William Hauptman detailed in "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade" (Artforum, October 1973).
The USIA supported a show on "Sport in Art" (partially funded by Sports Illustrated), scheduled for the 1956 Olympic Games. A preview in Dallas, Texas was vehemently protested by Colonel Owsley, the Dallas County Patriotic Council and other art-loving ladies of Dallas, because it contained paintings by supposed Communist or Commie dupe painters like Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Max Weber, Diego Rivera and the seemingly ubiquitous Ben Shahn. The USIA canceled that one. They tried again with "100 American Artists of the Twentieth Century." Again, it was claimed that ten of the artists were politically "unacceptable" and "pro-Communist." The USIA had to cancel that one too. Shortly afterward, the USIA announced in exasperation that it would ban from any of its traveling exhibitions any "American oil paintings dated after 191 7"—that is, after the Russian Revolution—to avoid any possible Communist taint!
Somebody had to rescue America's international reputation on the cultural scene, to win over European intellectuals in the Cold War—and it turned out to be the Rockefellers, the Museum of Modern Art and the CIA. A fascinating article by Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," in Artforum (June 1974) lays out the connections. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was founded in 1929 by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. In 1939 Nelson Rockefeller became its president, going on to become Roosevelt's coordinator for South and Latin American affairs, and returning to MOMA in 1946. A 1941 wire story called the museum the "latest and strangest recruit in Uncle Sam's defense line-up," quoting the museum's chairman John Hay Whitney on MOMA's mission to "strengthen the hearts and wills of free men in defense of their own freedom." Whitney (a veteran of the OSS, predecessor of the CIA) himself set up a trust exposed as a CIA conduit in 1967. Cockcroft details:
"Primarily, MOMA became a minor war contractor, fulfilling 38 contracts for cultural materials totalling $1,590,234 for the Library of Congress, the Office of War Information, and especially Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. For Nelson's Inter-American Affairs Office, 'mother's museum' put together 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting which were shipped around Latin America, an area in which Nelson Rockefeller had developed his most lucrative investments—e.g., Creole Petroleum, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the single most important economic interest in oil-rich Venezuela."
Rockefeller's Latin American experts were bodily transferred over to MOMA after the war, including Rene d'Harnoncourt, who had helped cultivate the Mexican muralists at the time Mexico's oil nationalism threatened Rockefeller oil interests. Head of the art section of Nelson’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in 1943, he was brought to MOMA as vice president in charge of foreign activities, and in 1949 d'Harnoncourt became MOMA's director. In 1952 MOMA launched its international program with a $625,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Under the direction of Porter A. McCray, another Office of Inter-American Affairs veteran, MOMA added its International Council. Reassuringly "modern" exhibitions of contemporary American art were sent to Europe, South America and Japan, as MOMA "assumed a quasi-official character, providing the 'U.S. representation' in shows where most nations were represented by government-sponsored exhibits," Cockcroft points out. At the Venice Biennale, the most important European international art show, MOMA took over the U.S. pavilion, the only privately owned booth, from 1954 to 1962.
Abstract Expressionism, the slashing, dripping, floating huge canvases whose primary subject is the world of paint and canvas itself, became MOMA's favorite art. Not only was it new and artistically avant-garde, in refreshing contrast to the stale old "smell of the soil" Thomas Hart Benton "regionalism" pushed by more primitive anti-Communists, but it was really "American." Many of the leaders of the movement had past left-wing connections: Jackson Pollock was influenced by left-wing Mexican mural painting, Mark Rothko had done paintings of the city poor, Willem de Kooning did work for Artist Union protests, while Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell had "dabbled in Marxism," according to art critic and "Action Painting" advocate Harold Rosenberg. While this may have kept them from getting Congressional approval, it wasn't entirely bad from the more sophisticated Cold Warriors' viewpoint. It heightened the propaganda value of these artists in demonstrating the supposed "freedom of expression" of America, since they ostentatiously avoided "politics" in their new work. Though as Rosenberg noted in The Anxious Object, the old impulse wasn't entirely gone: "It is hard to imagine a Johnson campaign billboard in the manner of the late Franz Kline, though in 1952 the Action Painters of the Artists Club in Greenwich Village turned out placards for [Adlai] Stevenson (how much these contributed to his defeat is not known)."
Of course, totally abstract art was safer for the Rockefellers too. Those earlier attempts to woo the Mexican muralists were not a total triumph. In 1933 the Rockefeller family ordered Diego Rivera off the scaffolding at Rockefeller Center, because the artist refused to remove a head of Lenin from his mural Mankind at the Crossroads. Later the entire mural was pulverized. At least with a Pollock drip painting or an Ad Reinhardt black-on-black, there was no obviously subversive, rude content. In any case, MOMA began showing the Abstract Expressionists early and often, in 1956 touring a "Modern Art in the U.S." show with works by de Kooning, Franz Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko and others through eight European cities, including Vienna and Belgrade.
MOMA also sought to influence intellectuals behind the so-called "Iron Curtain." In 1961the museum gave the Polish painter Tadeusz Kantor and other "nonobjective" Polish painters an exhibition at MOMA. The CIA funded cultural institutions like the National Student Association, Encounter magazine and even a 1952 Paris tour by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of the bourgeois feminist Ms. magazine, knowingly took CIA money as director of the "Independent Research Service," which sponsored young Americans going to youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1962. "I found them liberal and farsighted and open," she said of the CIA agents with whom she collaborated, according to the Washington Post (18 February 1967).
MOMA's executive secretary from April 1948 to November 1949, Thomas W. Braden, joined the CIA in 1950, supervising its cultural activities from 1951 to 1954. In "I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral'," in the 20 May 1967 Saturday Evening Post, Braden said that "dissenting opinions within the framework of agreement on cold-war fundamentals" made effective propaganda abroad, and in any case "the idea that Congress would have approved of many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch society's approving medicare." This initial suave CIA impression was later buried in the swamps of Vietnam, as they were revealed as the bloody killers they were and are. And Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York in 1971, will go down in history as the "Butcher of Attica."
One of the few bright lights in this sick period between McCarthyism and the explosion of the New Left was the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. "The most beautiful body I've ever seen was at a party in 1954," Lenny would occasionally muse on stage, "I was in the bedroom getting the coats...and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt. 'You like what you see? They are nice, aren't they?' she said, caressing the area near her medallion. 'Yes, they are very nice.' 'Would you like to touch them?' 'I'm—I'm—' 'You're shocked,' she said, 'aren't you?' Indeed I was. Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen." For this gentle satire, Lenny was arrested at Greenwich Village's Cafe Au Co Co for giving an "indecent performance." The legal complaint was headed "Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits"! Lenny Bruce died on 3 August 1966, after having been unable to get work for months, harassed and hounded by the state's vicious censors.
No to Censorship!
The current debate over whether the National Endowment for the Arts, itself a creation of the Kennedy-Johnson "Great Society" days, should place conditions on its grants seems like a somewhat paler repeat of this turbulent past. The total amount of money being debated isn't much—military bands get more money than the entire arts budget—but the point, as we've said, is attempted political repression. Jesse Helms is every bit as reactionary a piece of work as the Donderos and McCarthys of the 1950s, and the spectacle last summer of Senator Alfonse D'Amato ripping up an Andres Serrano art catalogue on the Senate floor was a chilling replay of earlier witch hunts.
There are encouraging signs that the "heartland of America" is finally getting fed up with the lying cant and censorship shoveled down its throat for the past decade. The six-year-long ghastly expensive trial against teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Southern California finally ended early this year as a jury acquitted the defendants of some 52 counts of child abuse, renouncing the prosecutors' witches brew of hysteria over the devil, drugs and day care. The jury in the Washington, D.C. Marion Barry trial refused to be suckers for the feds' attempted frame-up of the black mayor in a drug/sex sting.
And in early October an eight-person jury in Cincinnati, Ohio, acquitted the city's Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie of obscenity charges for its retrospective exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos. "High art" devotees had plenty to cheer about, since this was the first-ever obscenity case against an art museum. The prosecution strategy of picking people they thought were hicks from the sticks backfired, as one juror said afterward: "We thought the pictures were lewd, grotesque, disgusting. But like the defense said, art doesn't have to be beautiful or pretty."
Then "low art" got its licks in, as a jury in Broward completed the one-two punch, acquitting the rap group 2 Live Crew of obscenity charges on October 20. "You take away one freedom, and pretty soon they're all gone," said one juror in that case, while others noted they thought the black group's raunchy lyrics were really a gas. This tendency toward common sense, decency and tolerance on the part of ordinary citizens is deeply disturbing to our rulers.
Government censorship is going to continue as long as this capitalist government goes on. The heart of it is that this system of government is not neutral. It was created to uphold capitalism, the system of private ownership of the means of production. Pared down to its essentials, the state is an executive committee of the capitalists as a whole, for keeping the ruling class on top through state coercion of those at the bottom, mainly through the selective use of cops and prisons and murder. State subsidies for health care, education and the like are given reluctantly, as part of the necessary overhead to keep the population minimally content and at least a section of it competent to work. Subsidies for artists are extra frills, given or taken away depending on how the political winds are blowing. It's especially so in this country, where the Puritan legacy still hangs heavy with its dour suspicion of the arts, especially live theater, as agencies of sin and the devil.
Meanwhile, as the hogs at the public trough complain they don't want to spend our "taxpayers' money" on sexy art, but would really rather use it for strange new weapons and to bail out their buddies in the savings and loan scandals, there is some poetic justice around to relish. While the Mapplethorpe show's director was acquitted, the man who gave "Censornati" its nickname, the founder of various Cincinnati Legions of Decency, is himself under indictment today, the Lincoln Savings & Loan's own Charles H. Keating Jr. And another figure in this latest farcical episode in American cultural life has met her appropriate end as well: Christina Orr-Cahall was the curator who canceled the Mapplethorpe show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to avoid Congressional ire, in the Vietnam-era spirit of "bombing the village in order to save it." She was last heard from in a New York Times Travel Section, down in the Nancy Reaganland of West Palm Beach, curating the no doubt culturally deep show "Pools," a survey of swimming pools in recent American art.
************
I Paint What I See
It's no good taste in a man like me,
Said John D's grandson, Nelson.
To question an artist's integrity Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
But I know what I like to a large degree,
Tho art I hate to hamper.
For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks You painted a radical.
I say, shucks,
I never could rent the offices—
The capitalistic offices.
For this, as you know, is a public hall And people want doves, or a tree in fall,
And tho your art I dislike to hamper,
I owe a little to Cod and Cramper,
And after all,
It's my wall ....
We'll see if it is, said Rivera.
— E.B.W.
Excerpt of poem printed in The New Yorker, 20 May 1933
Click on title to link to Karl Marx's 1850, yes that is not a misprint the question has been with us for a long time, 1850 "Address Of The Central Committee Of The Communist League" which deals with the popular fronts of his day in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848.
COMMENTARY
DOWN WITH THE WAR! DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET!
Radicals and revolutionaries, including Marxist revolutionaries, have been struggling with the implications of popular front politics at least since the European Revolutions of 1848. At that time, due more to the question of political immaturity and inexperience, left-wing working class militants and their allies tried to line up with, and in most cases in subordination to, their national bourgeoisies in the fights for the demands of the classic bourgeois revolutions. And for their troubles these same ‘allies’ suppressed these militants and their demands once the situation became too ‘hot’ and the various capitalist parties made their peace with the old regimes. One of the great lessons that Karl Marx (and his co-thinker Frederich Engels) derived from that turn of events was an understanding that an essential ingredient to successful socialist revolution was the need for independent working class organization and action and a political break with the capitalist parties.
Of course, as latter working class history has made painfully clear that seemingly elemental task has been easier said than done. Since Marx's time time endless numbers of ‘socialist’ politicians and ‘vanguard’ political organizations have broken their teeth on denying the truth of his assertions. One need only think of the classic Popular Fronts in Spain and France the 1930’s and Chile in the 1970’s created explicitly by leftwing forces to act as brakes on developing revolutionary situations to know that such a strategy means political death for the revolution and the physical destruction of revolutionary cadre for decades.
What gives? What do those historic events have to do with today’s opposition to the war in Iraq? Simple, while not all popular fronts are created equal they all serve the same ends. As a primer one should know that the popular front is a left-wing political strategy where its advocates call on all ‘progressive’ forces and people of ‘good will’ including capitalist parties and politicians to unite around some ‘good old cause’. Well, what is wrong with that? On democratic issues such as the right to vote or opposition to government snooping and in political defense cases not a thing. Except we call that a united front. Why? Because depending on the case the fight is a limited one, the time is short and there is no political reason not to gain the support of as many people as possible. No, the popular front is a very different animal. It is a conscious strategy on the part of some left-wing forces to limit the aims of any particular fight to those acceptable to the capitalist parties.
For those who do not believe the import of such distinctions let me give one example. Take a simple slogan like –STOP THE WAR. In the build-up to the Iraq War that did not have a bad sound, if not particularly poliitcally sophisticated. Big burly former football linebackers and pacifist little old ladies in tennis shoes could agree to that. However, until early 2006 this was still the central slogan of the anti-war movement. The more appropriate IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES AND ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ did not get official sanction until that time. Why? Because those big burly football players and gentile old ladies did not want to go that far? Hell, no. The real reason was no ‘respectable’ capitalist politician, except maybe Congressman Kucinich on a good day, was making that call. And that is the rub. The case of the various umbrella anti-war coalitions such as the ANSWER Coalition and United For Peace and Justice here in America (and elsewhere as this is decidedly an international phenomena) are classic examples of a non-parliamentary popular front. Any thoughtful militant who wonders why the anti-war movement here is spinning its wheels can look to that conscious strategy on the part of the current anti-war leaderships as the root cause of the dilemma.
I have noted above, at least twice, the fact that the popular front strategy is a conscious one on the part of those ‘progressives’ who pursue it. And for those who do not want to make a revolution or are just serious about 'pressure' politics on the face of it that policy makes sense. The capitalist parties and their politicians have no need, except as electoral cannon fodder, to seek an on-going bloc with non-parliamentary leftwing forces. One should note that it has only been this year (2007) that even minor league Democratic politicians have gotten on the platforms at anti-war events. No, this is strictly a strategy pursued by 'get rich quick' artists of the left who pursue this course in order to be at one with the ‘masses’ or not get ‘isolated’ from the political consciousness of the masses. That at the end of the day the wily (and in some case not so wily, take John Kerry in 2004, for example) capitalist politicians reap the rewards of this political treachery seems not to have occurred to these same artists. The next battleground on the fight against the popular front will be on the upcoming war budget. It will not be pretty. However, those are the central slogans for the immediate future. You will definitely see the limits of popular front politics on that one. DOWN WITH THE WAR, DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET, BREAK WITH THE CAPITALIST PARTIES.
50th Years Gone Jack Gone And What Might Have Been- The Lonesome Hobo-In Honor Of Ti Jean Kerouac’s “Lonesome Traveler”
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Million-word pre-word processor so golf score pencil and Woolworth’s 5&10 cent store notebook fitted for flannel shirt pockets Jack (nee Jeanbon, nee Ti Jean, nee everyman, every man, and every woman with the fire in the belly to write) bellowed out in the good earth night, bellowed out in the night from the womb, bellowed about loneness, loneness in crowds, and sign of the age loneness. Not loneliness, not on the surface, not with Acre kidding corner boys crowding around (mostly French-Canadian boys who set the tone of the town, adieu this and that, but some Irish and Greek boys too, especially mad monk poet Sammy, hanging around Leclerc’s Variety Store), Jack-crowding, small-breasted F-C loves (oohing ,aah-ing in the dark- haired angel man thought ) swaying to Benny on the be-bop 1930s night and tossing and turning over Ti Jean words and clowning arounds (and secret Irishtown girl love spoken of before and now done), Jack-crowding, Adonis full field, full football field heroics, crowds cheering against bread and roses fed arch –rivals, Jack-crowding, Village cafes, full, chock full of the hip, the want-to-be hip, the faux hip, waiting, waiting on some dark-haired golden boy to rescue them from the little box night, Jacking-crowding, ditto Frisco, ditto New Jack City redux, ditto Jack-crowding.
So not loneliness he but lonesome cosmic wanderer from youth as partner to the crowds, up in small, immensely small twelve- year old bedrooms playing full- fledged leagues of solo jack baseball, sitting solo in fugitive Lowell libraries reading up a storm from Plato to kinsman Voltaire (via Acadian Gaspe dreams), sitting solo in some sigma phi dorm room munching chocolate bars, vanilla puddings, great greasy sugared crullers after hearty beef meals, as companion pouring over tales of greek gods and Homer, sitting solo (hard to do, believe me ) astern ships on big wave oceans ready to devour man, beasts and ship whole, sitting solo in midnight slum New Haven rooms, small hot stove, coffee pot percolating, ditto later in Frisco town, ditto in big sur town, ditto in Tangiers town, ditto down in mere Florida town, ditto solo.
Ditto too solo adventures on west coast work ship piers, solo sweaty dusty south of the border Mexican nights adventures, solo brakeman of the world trackless night adventures, solo sea- sick sailor going to fugitive night adventures, solo weird New Jack City 1950s beat scene adventures, solo big rock candy mountain and the void adventures, solo stumble around Europe on a dollar a day adventures, and solo mad cap late night chronicler of the hobo jungle world vanishing adventures. And hence crowded solo lonesome karmic writings and big word blasts, and smiling, smiling, maybe Buddha-like, at the connected-ness of it, of the one-ness of it, of the god-like symmetry of it. And a Ti Jean kindred tip of the hat.
APRIL 15—Last Thursday, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was dragged out of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London by British cops and arrested. He is now being held in the maximum security Belmarsh prison on an extradition request from Washington. Assange, an Australian citizen, has been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism for years. Both Democrats and Republicans have been howling for his head ever since 2010 when WikiLeaks released a trove of documents provided by Chelsea Manning, then an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. No extradition! Free Julian Assange now! For unobstructed passage to any country that grants him asylum!
Assange resided in the embassy for seven years, having been granted political asylum by Ecuador’s then president Rafael Correa. At the time, he was facing deportation to Sweden on bogus allegations of “sexual molestation” and “rape,” which was simply a step toward handing him over to U.S. authorities. Correa’s successor, the U.S. imperialist lackey Lenín Moreno, revoked Assange’s asylum (as well as the Ecuadorean citizenship he had acquired). Trampling on the sovereignty of his country, Moreno threw open the embassy doors to the British cops.
Workers in the U.S. and Britain must fight to keep Assange from falling into the clutches of the U.S. imperialist butchers. The Partisan Defence Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/Britain, wrote to the British Home Secretary to denounce the vendetta against Assange and demand “the immediate and unconditional release of Julian Assange and an end to all extradition proceedings. This includes the possibility of extradition to Sweden on cooked-up ‘rape’ charges, which were never anything more than a flimsy cover for handing Assange over to the vengeful US rulers.”
Washington’s extradition request is based on the accusation that Assange conspired with Manning to crack a Department of Defense computer password. An extradition hearing is scheduled for May 2. If sent to the U.S., Assange will likely find himself facing far more serious charges, and could disappear into one of the bourgeoisie’s dungeons.
A taste of what is in store for Assange is shown by the Obama administration’s treatment of Manning, who was convicted for violating the Espionage Act and held in torturous prison conditions for seven years. Since last month, she has been back behind bars for courageously refusing to testify before the grand jury that indicted Assange. The U.S. imperialists and their British junior partners want to send a message that anyone who tries to reveal imperialist atrocities will be severely punished. Free Chelsea Manning!
Democrats hold particular animus toward Assange because in 2016 WikiLeaks released a cache of Hillary Clinton emails, including some pointing to her role in the 2011 invasion of Libya, as well as the machinations of her presidential campaign (see “WikiLeaks Reveals Truths,” WV No. 1099, 4 November 2016). Democratic Party pols and the liberal press claim, without any evidence, that Assange is a Russian agent and blame him for the election of Trump. As part of the smear campaign, the Guardian last November ran a now-debunked story that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in advance of the 2016 elections.
A number of leading bourgeois newspapers, including the New York Times and the Guardian, published (and profited from) material made available by WikiLeaks, only to turn on Assange and help lead the witchhunt against him. Their editorial boards heaved a collective sigh of relief that the indictment did not include any charges related to publishing leaked material, which could set a precedent for going after these news outlets. Even so, by treating news gathering processes—communicating via encrypted messages, cultivating sources and encouraging them to provide more information—as parts of a criminal conspiracy, the indictment is an attack on freedom of the press.
The New York Times, the U.S. bourgeoisie’s paper of record, praised Assange’s arrest. An 11 April editorial declared: “The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime.” The Times editors, who are crusaders for the anti-Trump “resistance,” then wring their hands that “there is always a risk with this administration” that his prosecution “could become an assault on the First Amendment and whistle-blowers.” In fact, an all-out war on whistle-blowers, not least WikiLeaks, predates the Trump administration. Obama used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more people for leaking secrets than all of his predecessors combined, and his Justice Department laid the groundwork for Assange’s indictment.
Even before Obama was in the White House, the Pentagon aimed to destroy WikiLeaks and Assange. In a CounterPunch article (18 June 2018), award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger reported on a secret Pentagon document from 2008 that outlined a plan replete “with threats of ‘exposure [and] criminal prosecution’ and a unrelenting assault on reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher.”
Central to the assault on Assange’s reputation were the manufactured Swedish rape allegations. The two women involved, by their own accounts, had consensual sex with him. Neither claimed at the time that she had been the victim of rape or sexual assault. Never formally charged, Assange repeatedly offered to be interviewed by Swedish authorities in London or by video link, but the Swedes refused. They also refused to rule out his extradition to the U.S. if he went to Sweden for questioning. In May 2017, Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation. However, now that he is in British custody, authorities are reviewing one of the cases and might reopen it.
In Britain, a whole raft of liberals, Labour Party Members of Parliament and reformists like the Socialist Workers Party are calling for Assange to be dispatched to Sweden to answer the allegations, if demanded by Stockholm. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn claims to oppose Assange’s extradition to the U.S. However, in response to a reporter’s question as to whether he would support extradition to Sweden, Corbyn stated: “I do think he should answer those questions, so yes.” For Assange, Sweden would be nothing more than a layover on a journey to U.S. prison hell.
It is in the interests of the working class and all the oppressed to oppose the witchhunt of Julian Assange. We Marxists seek to imbue the working class with the understanding that imperialist war, with all its savagery, is inherent to capitalist class rule. The brave acts of truth-tellers like Assange and Manning have lifted the lid, even if slightly, on imperialist barbarities. Ridding the world of imperialist war and pillage requires a series of socialist revolutions internationally to shatter the capitalist order.
Lost In The Rain In Tombstone
On The Road To Desolation Row -With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In
Mind
By Jack Callahan
“I’ve met Einstein
disguised as Robin Hood complete with his greedy band of lumpen brethren, wine
swill drinkers, upper-class whores down on the low while the court was in exile,
tavern wenches who are always with us, Tokay tokens breathers smelling of rat’s
assess, gumweed, advance men setting up the next armed robbery of some dolt who
dared against all reason to traverse Sherwood Forests when the boyos where in high dudgeon, unpaid advertisers (this before printing
presses so unpaid), free-lance press agents ready like all of their kind to lay
a ton of bullshit on a candid world, gabacho defrocked friars listening to
penny-whistles and sordid confessions, deflowered our lady of the flowers nun
escapees, rough trade cock and bull wharf rats (loved to pieces later by one
Jean Genet after he got out of the high sheriff’s Nottingham prisons or what
passed from such), all banished when the Lion-hearted hit town and laid so much
land on Robin for keeping some simple faith, not even Christian faith that most
of the brethren serfed the lord’s manor or blew smoke rings of desire in some clammy
Robin bed.” “I’ve been in the tower of
pizza, excuse me, Pisa with Ezra Pound pounding out tunes for Benny and the
Jetspretending against all Harvard
Square reason that he beat some joker’s ass and with T.S. Eliot in an adjoining
cell looking for straw men, absolution, that self-same Pound, Ezra first name,
some modern coffee cup dreams with ancient junkie hooded eyes blinking the tunes
that dear Ezra played out in three-forth time to while away the captivity,” declared
dizzy in the night Robert South to no one in particular although Jake Devine
was the only one in the room at the time. Jake a blind lady from the circus
which left town some hours ago with some jealous monk, maybe that fucking defrocked
friar who passed paper about one Robin Hood who took his manhood and rolled it
in a copper-etched cup (nice that manhood bit after that defrocked friar played
freely with the carriage trade after Cinderella balled the jack with old Robin
and his crowd.)
With those words Jake, Jake
known as Jake since childhood to distinguish him or her who knows once the
circus leaves town with some extra baggage from John Devine, Senior although that
father a genial Irishman addicted to sports betting and drinking whiskey not
always in that order was more the slap on the back Jake type while Jake in the
throes of his high hippie moments was trying to shed that moniker for Be-Bop
Benny but old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake
and when he went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name
stuck whether he liked it or not, knew that Robert was two things-one, high as
a kite on either speed or LSD just then the drug of choice among the “hip” (not
always the same as Hippie but Jake did not want to argue the fine points on
that one since he himself had been on a two-day speed high-low) on the mind-expanding
conscious West Coast cohort of the brethren and two, Robert had been listening
to the whole of Bob Dylan’s Desolation
Row at least once, probably more than once if he was high since he would
not have had the stamina to switch the sound system off that Captain Crunch had
installed in their “digs” now that they were off the road for the winter and
settled into Diego’s high on the hill mansion.
By the way in
compensation for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of
which more in a minute, he had gathered some sense of respect because his
latest flame, a serious “hippie chick” met on the road at Big Sur as they were
heading south, Frilly Jilly, called him Be-Bop Benny, called him a
few other things once they high on grass, you know marijuana, got
down to the “do the do,” a term the guys still carried with them from the corner
days in Riverdale after they had heard the Chicago bluesman Howlin’ Wolf do a
song with those words in it, those words meaning hitting the sheets, having
sex, what she called him in her high hormonal moments was left to
them.
Yeah, Robert, Jimmy Jenkins,
Frank Riley, and a guy named Josh Breslin they met from a mill town in Maine,
from French-Canadian come down from Quebec farms to work the fetid textile
mills along the Saco River a couple of generations before on Russian Hill in
San Francisco where they were camped out in a small park when he stopped by the
bus and asked for a joint had been on quite a ride since coming West to see
what it was all about and were learning quickly it was all about “drugs, sex
and rock and roll” at its core but also about getting out from under the old
ways of thinking and living. So when they hit Frisco they headed like lemmings
to the sea to Golden Gate Park where all the hell was breaking loose met a few
guys who “turned them on,” got them invited to a few parties, including one
Captain Crunch was throwing around the new yellow brick road bus that he had
just purchased (allegedly in a trade for a big sack of dope but all the time
they were on the bus they never had that rumor confirmed by the Captain or
anybody else and mainly it didn’t matter by then). This bus was nothing but an
old school bus that had been turned into a moving commune after the seats had
been torn out, mattresses thrown down, a storage area for family living
material like utensils, dishes, and pots and pans, the thing had been repainted
in every day-glo psychedelic color under the sun and best of all
hooked up with a great sound system Dippy Mike, the guy who did the sound
system for Fillmore West and the Dead, put together for any trips they would
take. (Another rumor had it that Dippy did that set-up for a sack of dope from
the Captain, later confirmed by his companion Mustang Sally, which got its way
into a Dead concert and caused the freaking place to smell like Saint James’
Infirmary except everybody was getting well, was getting fixed up under the new
dispensation rules.)
And almost from the start
at Golden Gate Park the trips began once Captain had selected the Riverdale
boys as part of his crew to head south with him. The reason for that heading
south, the reason Robert was holding forth those lines from Desolation
Row was to “house-sit” here in La Jolla at this mansion that belonged
to Pablo Rios, who everybody called Diego since that was his alleged place of birth
but who knew where anybody came from really or who was using, or not using their
birth names, a friend of the Captain’s and a serious south of the border drug
dealer who was in Mexico for the winter and the Captain had agreed to doing the
sitting as we got into “winter quarters.” Now that the bus was not being used,
was being refitted with a new engine and so not useable, the sound system had
been transferred to the house for the weekly parties the Captain threw for his
friends (and whoever happened to hear about the event and knew where to find
the place, not as easy as it sounds when stoned in hideaway between the cliffs away
from prying highways in La Jolla.
Robert, once settled in,
once he got his own room with his lady-friend, Lavender Minnie, got heavily
into the dope, got heavily into listening to the amped up music and Jake
thought he had begun, like they had all heard about with kids who did too much
dope, to go over the edge. To head to edge city where the flowers do not bloom
and madness stands tall at the doorstep.
Just as Jake thought that
thought Robert rag out again with “they’re selling postcards of the hanging,
they’re painting the passports brown,” and Jake knew that Robert had gone for
the next something like eleven plus minutes to his own world. Eleven plus
minutes if he was lucky, since more than once Robert had decided that he needed
to give his own take on what the whole thing meant, what the various references
meant to him. For example, that business with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the
two exile poets who almost single-handedly broke from the old forms and created
modern poetry and were treated like gods among the hip at one point was Dylan
throwing down the gauntlet, was sending these festering bum to the glue factory,
telling those guys a new sheriff was in town. Well, maybe, if you think Dylan
was a lyric poet rather than a song-writer, or maybe put the two together. For
example that “postcards of the hanging” stuff was his political moment like
Billie Holiday had with Strange Fruit
about the scandalous open lynching of mostly black men in the South put
together with a new sense of masculinity turned in on itself with sailor boys
caught out on the seven seas who transformed themselves in boy-girls with those
all male crews. For example, that stuff about Ophelia, you know Hamlet’s chick
and how she was giving up the ghost (committing suicide) not because of some
lost love but because she was pregnant and was not sure who the father was. Maybe
Robin Hood for all Robert knew. I left the comfort of the old home yellow bus before
long knowing that I already knew a million Robert “takes” on the deep meaning
of the lyrics and even if he gave a few new twists who could reasonably sit by
and take it all in.
Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.
Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
