On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"(2017)-Poets’ Corner- The Zen Of The “Beats”- The Poetry Of Gary Snyder

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"(2017)-Poets’ Corner- The Zen Of The “Beats”- The Poetry Of Gary Snyder

http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/s_z/snyder/life.htm

Click on the title to link to an "American Modern Poetry" entry for the "beat" poet, Gary Snyder.

Book Review

Riprap And Cold Mountain Poems, Gary Snyder, Counterpoint, 2009

As circumstances would have it I recently have been going through a reading, or in most cases a re-reading, of many of the classics of the 1950's "beat" literary scene as a result of getting caught up in marking the 40th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac. Thus, I have re-read Kerouac's classic "On The Road", Allen Ginsberg's great modernist poem, "Howl", and the madman of them all, William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch". And along the way, after a 40 year hiatus, Kerouac's "Dharma Bums".

That is where the connection to this recent release of poetry by one of the key West Coast figures in the "beat' movement, Gary Snyder, an early American devotee to Zen Buddhism comes in full force. "Dharma Bums" is a novelistic treatment of Jack Kerouac's bout with Zen enlightenment, with Buddha and with his own inner demons. And central to guiding old Jack through the Zen experience was the aficionado, Gary Snyder, posing under the name Japhy Ryder. I noted in a review of that novel that while I could appreciate the struggle to find one's inner self that dominated that novel I was more in tune with Dean Moriarty's more adrenaline- formed material world adventure quest than Ryder's.

This characterization, however, never encapsulated Gary Snyder's poetry that, while not as to my liking as Allen Ginsberg's rants against the post-industrial world , nevertheless was superior to his when comparisons between their poetic understanding of Buddhism were in play. Snyder was, and I presume off of the reading here still is, serious about the Zen of existence. Ginsberg was all over the place, and I think what really influenced him came from the cabalistic tradition in Jewish life, despite his very OM-saturated period in the 1960s. Read the "Han Shan" poems in this collection first, and then Snyder's and you will see what I mean.

Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.

A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.

December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

Hay for the Horses
by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Passing-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall-Hard Times Please Come Again No More-With Kudos To Allan Ginsberg

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

English Pyscho-Ingrid Bergman’s “Gaslight” (1944)-A Film Review

English Pyscho-Ingrid Bergman’s “Gaslight” (1944)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotte n, 1944

Lowering gaslights (indicating pre-electric light times, 19^th century times), strange noises from the attic and deep London fog which aids in nefarious work. All the ingredients for a full-blown old-time example of a suspense film without any gore or pyrotechnics. Oh yes, and a mad man obsessed by something which is driving him beyond the edges of rationality. This is what drives this first-rate classic Gaslight which garnered the beautiful and talented Ingrid Bergman last seen in this space playing the loyal wife, well kind of loyal wife, of Nazi-resister Victor Lazlo in the film Casablanca her first Oscar.          

Here’s why beyond her beauty and the depth of her performance in the part. Paula, Ms. Bergman’s role, is a sensitive and reserved young woman having had her famous opera singer aunt whom she lived with as a young girl murdered for unknown reasons. Paula follows in her footsteps or tries to. Then love enters the scene. The love of a pianist, Gregory, or whatever his real name was as we shall find out, played by Charles Boyer (whom I do not recall having mentioned in this space previously) who sweeps her off her feet. They marry and return (at his request) to the London house where Paula came of age.

Then the craziness begins. Craziness egged on by our boy Gregory who has an ulterior motive for attempting to undermine Paula’s sanity. A goodly portion of the film is spent on detailing the many vulgar and nefarious ways Gregory plays out his hand. He almost had her over the edge (with help from that noise in the attic, the London fog and those damn flickering gaslights-and a little help by the snooty housemaid played by a very young Angela Lansbury).     

Naturally this torture can’t, or won’t, go on forever, because of a chance encounter with one Inspector Cameron, played by Joseph Cotton, last seen in this space hunting down like a dog his old friend Harry Lyme in Vienna who had gone over his own deep end. The Inspector had been an admirer of Paula’s aunt as a child and wondered about the craziness going on between Paula and Gregory. Once he stepped in you knew it was curtains for the dastardly Gregory. Yeah, the mad monk Gregory had in his younger “wanting” habits days killed the aunt with the idea of grabbing her precious jewels and living the high life instead of being a stumblebum pianist for budding students. The whole ruse was to get control of that London house so he could grab the jewels hidden somewhere up in the attic in peace. All he will get in the end will be the hangman’s noose. A little loose in places and some of Ms. Bergman’s emoting seemed overdrawn but a very good suspense film without like I said gore or bells and whistles.          

Kitty’s Tale-‘s With Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster’s Film Adaptation Of Hemingway’s “The Killers” In Mind

Kitty’s Tale-‘s With Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster’s Film Adaptation Of Hemingway’s “The Killers” In Mind  

By Si Landon

[Kitty Collins was a knock-out, was a gal who guys would jump through hoops for and not think twice about it, who would lie, steal and double-cross for just to get a whiff of that jasmine, or whatever the hell that scent was that drove guys dizzy when they were in the same room with her. This the way that Jim Reardon, the high-priced investigator for Acme Insurance described her in a note that he left in his records of the Ole Andreson case, the case that would make him that high-priced investigator back in 1946. John Colfax was looking through Reardon’s files one day trying to figure out how his mother Kitty had wound up doing a long stretch in for her part in a murder and robbery scheme, the famous Tip Top Hat Company payroll job. They had grabbed $250,000 cash, not a lot now maybe just walking around money in but a big number then-a number worth cutting guys up for and cutting guys out of. When the cops picked up Kitty at her palatial home outside of Philadelphia after his father, Jim Colfax, had been killed by one of his confederates, a guy named Dum Dum who was looking for the dough that went missing she was frantic that the dying Jim (everybody had called him “Big Jim” then) exonerate her, get her off the hook for the murder of the hat company guard and the dough. No dice. Big Jim passed before he could say word one, one way or the other.

After Kitty had been convicted of the felony murder and sentenced to that twenty to thirty year stretch her parents had decided that it was better to raise John without him, only two at the time, knowing too much about what had happened to his mother and father. Had told him early on that they had died in some car crash. Later when he was an adult somebody recognizing the name “Big Jim” Colfax when John was “in his cups” at Jimmy’s Grille in Pottstown where he had been raised and had mentioned that his parents had died in a car crash a guy put him wise, told him that was all hogwash and filled him in on the real reason that Big Jim had died-and his mother had spent her life in stir (she died there in some kind of poetic justice just before she was to be released some twenty years later). That night he confronted his grandparents about the matter. They confessed to what they had done without giving many details since they had forgotten many of them in their dotage.

They did tell him that if he was interested in finding out more details about what really happened that he should check and see if Jim Reardon was still at Acme Insurance in Philadelphia. As it turned out Reardon had retired some years before after a successful career and was living in Tom’s River over in New Jersey. A couple of weeks later he went to Tom’s River and met up with Reardon. Reardon had told him that he had too forgotten many of the details of the case, although he remembered without guidance or guile that John’s mother was a beautiful woman, a woman to twist a guy up. He offered to let John look at the files, his personal files of the important cases he had worked on which he kept in his basement. John eagerly agreed that he wanted to see the files. The next day he came back to Reardon’s house and spent the entire afternoon going through the papers at a table Reardon had set up down in the musty basement.

The key document that John found was a diary, no more of a journal that Kitty apparently kept during her younger days, had kept for several years before the robbery, and during the time of the robbery ending just before his father was killed when Kitty had placed a notation in the book that she was off to meet Reardon and was fearful that he was getting too close to the truth of what happened back then to Ole Andreson, to the Swede as everybody called him. The most startling news he received from his perusal of the journal was that despite her protestations of innocence she, not his father Big Jim, had been the driving force behind the robbery. Had spent the better part of her young womanhood plotting to “hit the motherlode,” her expression and take a ride on easy street (John’s term for what she had been looking for). He confronted Reardon with that journal and asked what he knew about it. Reardon confessed that he had picked up the journal from Kitty’s bureau drawer after she had been marched off to the police station but that he had never bothered to look at it since the case was now closed and he had about ten other cases that his boss was driving him crazy to finish up. The journal made for chilling reading, made John unsure about whether he would have wanted to meet his mother if he knew where she was and knew what was in the journal. Reardon let him keep the journal and a few weeks later he gave it to his newspaper friend, Larry Larson, to make sense of what had really happened in the famous, maybe infamous, Tip Top Hat company case. Here’s what Larry was able to do with the material. Si Landon]                            

Kitty Colfax, nee Collins, had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, Irishtown, in Pottsville, Pa and from as young age she could remember she had dreamed about escaping lie among the coal slags, among the dirty, drunken shanty Irish too. She was aided considerably in her dreams by her startling good looks, her long black at those coal slags hair, a tidy body and big ruby red lips. Early on she figured that she could use that beauty to her advantage. That and a cold, calculated sense that every man was nothing but putty in her hands once they got a whiff of that scent she was wearing that said femme fatale (the jasmine she wore from early on only added to the effect). Almost naturally she used sex, the sex act, acts to get something from a man (boys at first, that was how she got her first bottle of jasmine perfume, her “trademark”) losing her virginity one night when she was fourteen. Everything later flowed from that understanding of the world, the man’s world that she was going to trample on.

Kitty also knew she had to get out of Pottsville, get out fast so at sixteen she told her parents she was going to Philly to make her life (she told them she wanted to get married but not to anybody in Pottsville as a pretext). In Philly she went through a bewildering series of men [to John] who picked the up tab, kept her, paid her rent although nobody who had hit the big time, who had serious don’t worry about the future money. Then one night at a party where she was slumming (and kind of singing for her supper since they guy who was hosting the party was also paying her rent, paying for her voice lessons as well) she met Ole Andreson, the “Swede,” who had come in with a date but blew her off once he got a look at Kitty. Once he told his story-that he had been a boxer, had broken his hand doing so and so was moving on, moving into some connections he had with guys in the rackets, probably act as muscle she sensed that he might come in handy. He certainly had the built for some tough action (although she also noted that his “member,” his cock wasn’t that big and he wasn’t much of a lover, couldn’t give her an orgasm). She had him all tied up though and she knew it, he knew it too. One night she had been in Joey’s, a restaurant when pugs and other bad boys hung out, mostly cons and clip artists wearing a stolen brooch, a very expensive stolen brooch when a copper, a friend of the Swede’s came in to pinch somebody, to pinch her. The Swede walked in, glammed to the situation and claimed he had stolen the brooch to the copper after she begged him to do something. Yeah, he took a fall for her, did three hard ones. She had him down forever if she needed anything.             

Of course a guy doing three hard ones, even if for her, wasn’t getting her ahead in the world and so she started stepping out again (she had made it a policy from early on, except for an off-hand blow job if a guy was giving her something, to only deal with one guy at a time-unless she needed to use another guy for some caper and that was his price). That was when she met and shacked up with “Big Jim” Colfax, a guy moving up in the rackets and a guy who seemed to have a “front” unlike the Swede who was just a pug, somebody to be used. Funny this Big Jim was seriously into sex, seriously into kinky action and so Kitty let him have his way-for a while. A guy like Big Jim though was a guy who liked to lay back and take it easy-have his boys take up the “collections” on the numbers rackets his was running on the North side. 

That is what Big Jim thought was the big time but Kitty knew that serious money was not through some middle-level push in the cheapjack numbers racket. She would keep hammering away at him to listen to her plans about making a big score and then ducking out and become “legit,” make some real easy street money from a business start-up. She would go after him particularly when she had him tied up on the bedposts and she was ready to down on him. He kept putting her off though.

Kept putting her off until she heard that the Swede was getting out of prison and then she went full- bore, wouldn’t do the kinky stuff that consumed Big Jim unless he listened to her plan. The plan was simplicity itself and she had been working on a variation of the scheme for some time. Where was there serious money almost laying on the ground. Banks-or the payroll at some big factory. Banks were too risky but a payroll with little security and no vaults was a cinch. In Philly then right after the war when hats for men and women were a big deal the factory had to the Tip Top Hat Company with a big payroll and nothing more than a door to go through. They, Kitty figured they needed three other guys besides them for muscle and firepower if necessary, would be dressed as workers going through the single guard gate when the shifts changed. Then to the payroll office and the dough on a Friday morning. Big Jim started to show some interest once Kitty laid out the scenario and before the day was out they were casing the place (and it didn’t hurt when she let him do his thing with whips with her). Big Jim was in.

Of course the Swede would be in once he saw that she was lined up with Big Jim just so he could get his hands on the dough to take her away from him (little did the Swede know then that Big Jim whom she would use to front the whole operation was claiming half of the take for figuring out the plan). Yeah, Swede was in when he heard the plan with Kitty sitting provocatively on the bed with that come hither look that meant she was “available.” The other two guys were more trouble. There had been a dearth of firepower talent in the town since the war with first-rate guys heading to Chi town and the Motor City where there was more action. So Big Jim contacted the best available, the second best, a guy named Dum Dum and a guy named Blinky. Then Kitty went to work. Took Dum Dum up to her room and let him have his way with her. Blinky, an old time junkie but a great wheel man when he was sober, could have cared less about sex but a few bindles of smack, of boy, of heroin brought him on board (and the promise of enough dough to stay junked up for a year or two). So that had the five ready to go.

In the event the robbery went as planned except at the end some guard thinking the money being robbed from the company was his personal stash or something had started shooting and Dum Dum had wasted him. An overhead cost. The plan was to meet at a cabin that night after they had split up in different direction when the robbery was completed and they headed for the cars they had parked across the street from the plant. This is where things got dicey-or seemed to. They were all to meet and divide the dough the next morning at another cabin when the coast was clear. What had happened was that, by design, Kitty had gone to Dum Dum and Blinky and told them the meeting cabin had burned down and the new meet place was at a farm a few miles away.

She told the Swede that he was being cut out, that the others wanted him out but that she loved him, had always loved him so why didn’t he foul the boys up by showing up at the farm and grabbing all the dough and head to Atlantic City. She would meet him there. She left her calling card to make sure he was in-she let him have his way with her (although she made another note that prison had done a job on his sex drive and she had to pretend to have an orgasm). The next morning the Swede came through, grabbed all the dough and hightailed it to Atlantic City with a sack full of dough. Kitty showed up later in the day. A couple of days later she blew town-with the dough-leaving the Swede holding the bag. Classic fall guy.

Here’s the deal. The Swede was set up not only by Kitty but through her by Big Jim. Kitty had bet the farm that Big Jim had enough smarts to put together a legit business-with her guiding him. But she wanted all the dough to get the thing rolling. That was why the Swede was left with egg all over his face. So everybody, everybody being Dum Dum and Blinky, thought that Swede had crossed them up.

Big Jim, with Kitty in tow, did wind up setting up a big time construction company and Kitty finally had all the dough that even her black heart could use. The Swede, well the Swede figuring the others had him down as the villain disappeared, went underground in some small town in Ohio working as a gas jockey, all a washed up pug and robber was good for. Then one day while driving through Ohio on company business Kitty stopped at a gas station for gas and water. There was the Swede with a stupid sheepish grin on his face. Kitty was able to hold him off with a promise to show up at his room after she convinced him that Big Jim had forced her to betray her man-him. Yeah, this Swede had it bad. Once Kitty got back to Philly though she implored Big Jim to hire a couple of gunsels and get rid of the Swede for good.

Big Jim, for once, didn’t argue the matter. He hired a couple of boys to do the job, and they did it as neat as any hit job had ever been done. They killed him right in his crummy boarding house room while he was sleeping, an easy hit. That is where Reardon came in. Seems that the gasoline company that employed the Swede had life insurance on its employees, Not much but enough to have Reardon smell a rat. So Kitty and Big Jim would go down for a$2500 life insurance policy. Jesus. Reardon was a bulldog on the case once he saw that the Swede,  mere gas jockey, had been waylaid for no apparent reason. By dogging it out, by retracing some footsteps he found that the Swede was no mere gas jockey but a pretty good boxer whose hands went south on him. He had gotten mixed up with the local branch of the Philly mob, met the mysterious to Reardon Kitty, taken the fall for her, and then had taken part in the Tip Top Hat robbery.

The important thing though was that Reardon figured out that the Swede had been the fall guy-the guy who was supposed to have skipped with all the dough. That got the pissed off Dum Dum and Blinky thinking once they read that the Swede had been wasted under suspicious circumstances. Then the trail led back to Big Jim and Kitty who were now married and had a son. Dum Dum finally not so dumb wasted Blinky figuring he was the bad guy. When that proved not to be true he then went after Big Jim. In the meantime Reardon had figured out that Kitty had betrayed everybody. He had it almost right except that she one last plea-and that was where the journal ended. Everybody knows though that Big Jim and Dum Dum had a shoot-out and had killed each other with Kitty begging Big Jim to get her off the hook as he lay dying in a pool of blood. We already know Kitty’s end.

Larry thought after finishing up his piece figured that Kitty’s parents had been right to keep John in the dark. And after reading this article he was also sure that John would be glad that he had not met his mother later.                                        

The Lake Of Fires-When The Whore Of Babylon Strutted Her Stuff-A Cautionary Tale Of One Sarah Roe Sanders

The Lake Of Fires-When The Whore Of Babylon Strutted Her Stuff-A Cautionary Tale Of One Sarah Roe Sanders

By Leslie Dumont

[Thank the Gods I don’t have to be a free-lance writer these days because I am not sure I wouldn’t going into something safer and less anxiety-driven like being a safari guide or trapeze artist. Everybody who has read any of my columns in Women Today where I had a by-line for many years before knows even on the toughest assignment days, days when the irate editor screamed into respectively the telephone or cellphone wondering where my copy was and threatening bloody murder if it didn’t appear ASAP if not faster I would take my beating, grouse in public and secretly pray to some ancient press god for that steady job. The reason that I mention the whole question of free-lance is not only because I started out as such, including a short stint here when this was a strictly hard copy publication and only got out when it looked like I was going nowhere and Josh Breslin coaxed me into seeking more steady work but because my long-time companion and fellow writer Sam Lowell here happened to mention the trials and tribulations of one Hunter Thompson, the late Doctor Gonzo who for whatever reason committed suicide about a decade ago.

Sam had claimed that he was in need of a “hit” of Doctor Gonzo to try to figure out what the hell has happened to this country socially and politically and whether this Ice Age doomed denizens American world we live in had any previous such human sink periods. And of course all Sam had to do was grab Thompson’s General of Swine about the low-bar life of the Republic in the 1980s Reagan-Bush years when the country was first put up for sale to the low-bid junkies, the fixer men, the con artists and the voodoo economics boys who made it their business to sink the ebb tide. Junk bond artists, cowboys in the basement of the White House running foreign policy, political whores of all genders displaying their wares without embarrassment in the public square. All Sam had to say was that re-reading the columns from Hunter’s days as the gadfly outlier at the formerly staid San Francisco Examiner  was that seemed a “golden age” compared to now. Jesus.

All this prep though to wonder aloud about what made Thompson tick, why did he always seem to be on the edge of controlled panic when his assignments were due. Frankly unlike Sam (and Josh and Frank Jackman) who all worshipped at the Gonzo shrine I never paid attention to this Gonzo journalism then and the whole junkie, druggie, male dominant, weirdly out of step with the times and self-indulgent (a trait of all writers but Hunter had them on steroids) word games reminiscent of the Beats. What has recently perked my interest was that slavish devotion to “just in time” copy and his love of the Whore of Babylon.     

                 

I don’t think I need to go into the theory of Gonzo journalism except to say that its positive effect has been to break the silly journalism school nonsense about objective journalism, nothing but the facts Jack. In an age of “fake news” blather and alternate facts bullshit facts are under attack and need serious defense although that is not enough. Hunter Thompson got right down into the mud with his stories including his indulgences and his down to the wire way of operating in the publishing world. In an age of citizen journalism and expert channeling frenzies this is probably quaint now.   

  

What separated out Thompson and what has given me a bit more respect for what he tried to do was he fearlessness of going after the big guys and gals (Richard Nixon a specialty) and the foibles and follies of lots of people who back themselves or get backed into some crazy situations. With eyes wide open. That is where the imaginary of the Whole of Babylon is appropriate. My good friend and fellow writer here Laura Perkins has actually done some research on the subject via her series of articles about art that interests her. Without going into detail she has staked out a claim for the centrality of sex in 20^th art. I don’t know. What I do know is that she received all kinds of blow-back from evangelical types who have attempted to scourge her in defense of their children who might happen upon Laura’s articles. Yes, weird. What set her research up though was that they would call her either the Whore of Babylon or the devil’s servant for her activities. Laura was not familiar with that Whole of Babylon expression so when she looked it up she was surprised that all the blather was about some beautiful courtesan who used a wolf’s head and fur to advertise her profession. No big deal whatever the evangelicals thought.    

Where Hunter Thompson fits in, probably more accurately than the religious folk, is that he ripped apart the pretensions and predilections of the hustlers, con artists, fixers, junkies of all sorts, apologists for every angry yahoo and their enablers, objective journalists, White House cowboys, bottom dwellers, magpies, holy rollers and whatever other flotsam and jetsam crossed his path. He saved a special place though for what in his mind was the Whore of Babylon via the Book of Revelations and those dame lakes of fire and eternal burning of all the cretins mentioned above.]

***********

It is an awesome awful  fistful of horrible dreams to force a tiny six year old girl to read the Book of Revelation, yes, that hard-ass no holds barred barren section of the Old Testament, in front of adults just because she pissed her pants and lied about it to dear father, Preacher Roe. That stuff about the lake of fires and the devil’s 666 handiwork is tough enough for lonesome adults in some dry gulch Beat Western during a snowstorm with the electricity out and no other reading matter around except the leavings of the goodly Gideons who long ago left Gilead to spread what they called the good news once the Second Great Awakening burned over the rural upstate parts of the American Republic. But to under some wicked spell, and a sack full of dope and a keg of raw whiskey, do what Preacher Roe did , everybody called him that although who the fuck knew his real name except his benumbed daughter was beyond the pale even if it would explain why that vagabond frightened urine smelling rag doll turned herself into the Whole of Babylon’s unholy daughter when she came of age, and beyond. A lot of strange and awful things have been played out but Preacher Roe’s bloody sins will never be washed away even though he claimed he did those terrible things in the name of the Lord Zoroaster or whoever he was shilling for in his long hustle of a career.

See the Preacher, Preacher Roe had been “ordained” in the hard church of life which included a few necessary courses in not only scaring the Bejesus out of innocent daughters but how to keep the revenue stream flowing through good times and bad, jail time and freedom time, and how to scare the Bejesus out of the brethren, now the Brethren of the Fire in the Lake into that big new church edifice and television studio adjacent (along with other more personal items like those previously mentioned bags of dope and whiskey). Money no question. So six-year old let’s call her Sarah since that was her God-given name paid with her soul in the end for her father’s greed, avarice and incestuous desires.

That piss-induced stand-up for your sins had not been the first of the tortures Sarah went through but she always claimed that was where it started, where the lying started and the modern- day public stool-dunking as well. She told a fellow classmate once in third grade that she had seen the fires in the lake and that she had been beaten for lying about that by the old man in one of his righteous whiskey rages. The classmate had dismissed her thought except it proved true since Preacher Roe was “travelling the circuit” out toward Lake Erie way and the lake had actually been on fire for containing so many flammable chemicals. A few more incidents like that and it was no wonder that poor Sarah never could go forward either way, telling the truth or telling lies got so mixed up together she just gave up and decided Keil (the old name for the Whore of Babylon in Aramaic I think) was right to do her dirty work in public. Working behind her father’s rackets came easier than trying to figure out why her head ached so when she thought about the fires.

Almost the minute Sarah came of age, meaning turned from stick-like girl to shaped young woman she was a lure to all the boys in whatever neighborhood Preacher Roe happened to be working in (and not just boys either as she got just a little toward sixteen older and not without something from Preacher Roe along the way although she never would talk about it, never utter the word incest when questioned). We don’t have to spend much time on the details of where our Sarah fell down early on because where and how she wound up there is the real subject of our cautionary tale. Beside it has all the earmarks of story we have heard of and seen too many times beginning with that first dire understanding that what Sarah Roe had to give she would not give freely but make a profession out of in the time-honored way many young women with little or no resources except hunger for something different sought. Sought her version of the courtesan’s trade, the modern sordid way. Nickel and dime stuff until she got one of Jimmy Swag’s boys to pimp for her taking his cut and a cut of her. But Jimmy Swag and I think it was Balls Margene took their cut, took Sarah Roe down in sister cocaine land turning all her nightmares into dreams-they said. Courtesan pretentions or no she took the fall, took the path downward once Jimmy Swag’s had no more use for her wasted body at Madame Sonia’s high-end bordello in Santa Monica. Wound up doing the streets after some bum married her and took all her last dough, had a few kids by accident, had a few abortions by plan and was headed to be one more unwashed, unmoored, un-mourned potter’s field denizen like I said a not unfamiliar story.

Then like manna from heaven, a God send I guess somebody like Preacher Roe would call it in his sober moment fell down on Sarah Roe, now Sarah Roe Sanders she was calling herself after that deadbeat father and ex-husband combination exhausted other possibilities.  A self-satisfied businessman turned politician of a new sort from New York City, a guy named Donald J. Trump pulled lots of gags and gaffs and became POSTUS (you figure it out). His problem was that he needed to dump his current weak-kneed press secretary who would not absolutely toe the boss’ line, or rather lines, as fast as necessary and had turned into a donkey, an ass really. Trump, beautiful Trump called in his HR guy, a guy who used to be governor of New Jersey or some place like that and commissioned him to scour the earth, the American earth I guess I should say looking for somebody who could “take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black” without blinking. Everybody associated with the operation thought it was bizarre since the boss, unlike ghostly ex POSTUS Jimmy Carter was not known to throw out lines from king of the folk Bob Dylan’s playbook.       

                          

The connections are somewhat murky but somehow one of the that Jersey governor’s operatives had contacts with Preacher Roe who was working some “mission” scam in Arkansas and had asked him for references for that press job. Thinking of milk and honey he automatically thought of his daughter Sarah if only she could be found. One virtue of unlimited Executive office dough and connections is that almost anybody but a pure hidebound hobo can be found. And so Sarah was found working some dive whorehouse up in Half Bay south of Frisco where wasted whores have their last round-up.      

The rest of the story you know since Sarah Roe Sanders took the job (her father would ask her after a while to stop using the Roe maiden name since it was hurting his revenue flow at the Church of the Seventh Redeemer where he had been raking it in before all the media started calling his daughter Pinocchio). She lasted for a while, longer than most thought given her background but eventually the boss told some underling to give her the boot when even she couldn’t keep up with the bullshit. That’s the cautionary tale such as it is, even a bend whore has a hard time keeping up with “fake news” and alternate facts these days. As Hunter would say Selah.    

A Ghost Of A Chance-Gene Tierney And Rex Harrison’s “The Ghost And Mrs. Muir” (1947)-A Film Review

A Ghost Of A Chance-Gene Tierney And Rex Harrison’s “The Ghost And Mrs. Muir” (1947)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, starring Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, 1947

Excuse the jokey headline for this review but it rather concisely makes the point about what will happen in this film under review director Joseph Mankiewicz’s film adaptation of R.A Dick’s novel The Ghost And Mrs. Muir. After all if you want to have film about the relationship, a quasi-romantic relationship between a young widow and a long gone sea captain then you have to draw the conclusion that such a relationship cannot be consummated this side of the grave.    

Despite the obvious problems that one must overcome to suspend disbelieve in order cheer on a happy ending this is a quality film from the time when the lead actors Gene Tierney who plays Mrs. Muir (last seen in this space being hunted by a smitten detective played by Dana Andrews and a compulsive/obsessive older man played by Clifton Webb with murder and lust in his heart in the classic film Laura) and Rex Harrison who played the deceased Captain Gregg (last seen here chasing evil-doing Nazis for His Majesty in The Last Train To Munich) were emerging as major stars.     

As to the problems well Captain Gregg ran afoul of the pitfalls of being on land and not at the friendly sea and died in an accident. Mrs. Muir after years of being under the thumb of her late husband’s family decided to make a jailbreak from that scene. She wound up at the ocean-side town where the good Captain was killed and where he was currently in ghostly residence at his “haunted” house trying to keep the flux of turnover tenants from staying. He was rather easily able to scare the wits out of all previous dwellers but Mrs. Muir, along with her daughter, was made of sterner stuff. Therefore there will be a test of wills, an unequal test as it turned out, after they declared a truce (and after they were half in love with each other which you could see would be a problem given their respective conditions). And after the good Captain seeing that Mrs. Muir needed real life love lets her go and pursue love left the house for parts unknown.     

Obviously the lonely Mrs. Muir wanted and needed love, or thought she did but she ran in the wrong direction out once she had a real live gentleman caller, one Uncle Neddy. She was ready to go to the altar with him except for one little problem. She found out that this cad, played by George Sanders, was already married. Once burned she decided to leave the romance business alone. After that rude awakening the rest of the film details her growing older and more pensive alone. Growing older until her own end when the Captain returned and they were reunited that side of the grave. The woman friend I saw this one with called it a “chick flick” although I don’t think that term was used back in the 1940s. But it fits.       

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 3-1936-37)

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 3-1936-37) 

CD Review

By Music Critic Seth Garth

The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 3, 1936-37

Everybody, at least the everybodies who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day (I believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young, who backed her on many recordings and in many a venue gave her that name and it fit her as did that eternal flower in her hair) had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin.      

Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if you listen to this CD under review, the third volume in the series you will also know why in the first part of the 21^st century guys like me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place, kept your own blues at bay. That last statement is really what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than a single selection. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right. Here is the not nice part. Once a few years ago I was talking to some young people about Billie and they, maybe under the influence of the film or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own blues   away. That is why we still listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today. 

Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the 1930s, the time of her time, covering Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. Check out Pennies From Heaven and I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm and you will get an idea of what I am talking about.     

When Rock And Roll Rocked The Known World-John Lennon’s Rock And Roll-A CD Review

When Rock And Roll Rocked The Known World-John Lennon’s Rock And 

Roll-A CD Review

CD Review 

By Josh Breslin

Rock And Roll, John Lennon, 1974-5

I really wish my long departed old friend, Peter Paul Markin, met in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 could have reviewed this CD. He was just enough older than me at the time to have been able to appreciate the influence that the classic age of rock and roll, what he calculated as between 1955 and 1965, had on a poor street tough (just look at the cover and you will see what I mean) from the depths of Liverpool had on John Lennon. Made me appreciate this stuff that growing up in Podunk Maine I was not really that familiar with at the time. See Markin (everybody called him the Scribe when he was growing up poor on the tough streets of America but I knew him first under the moniker the Be-Bop Kid on that first long ago meeting) came to his blessed rock and roll music the same way. Let the beat seep into his brain just like Lennon.

While Markin had no particular musical skills he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what rocked his kindred on those mean streets (and not just the denizens of the mean streets either). What Markin also knew was that along with the quintessential American black-centered blues that rock and roll was being revered and played in the back alleys of England long after those genre were being by-passed by what Markin called the musical counter-revolution that got sprung on the teenage world in the late 1960s and would not be broken through until guys like John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards crossed the Atlantic in the British invasion of the mid-1960s.       

So what you have with this production is John Lennon, post-Beatle John Lennon, going back to the roots. Going back to what kick started his young street tough brain. Are the individual songs performed here the best covers ever done on the classics from the 1950s. No. Does this production even in remastered form give uniformly quality values. No. Does this thing make you want to get up and dance even in your shadowed AARP-worthy life. You bet. Yeah, Markin would have given you why and what for on individual covers like Be-Bop-A-Lula, Stand Be Me, and Sweet Little Sixteen and told you to grab this thing with all your hands as a prime example of what it was like when people played rock and roll for keeps. I agree. 

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- *Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Peggy Seeger's "Sing About These Hard Times"

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Peggy Seeger's "Sing About These Hard Times"

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.



SING ABOUT THESE HARD TIMES
words and music and © 2003 Peggy Seeger
administered by harmony music, ltd.

Chorus: Sing about these hard times,
Sing all about these hard old times,
Sing about these hard times
When will the good times roll?

I worked hard, I played my part
That's what I did right from the start
But these hard times are gonna break my heart
When will the good times roll? (chorus)

Life gets harder every year
Those with the least have the most to fear
Those with the most just don't care
When will the good times roll? (chorus)

The big corporations got no home
And the men on the Hill got hearts of stone
They worry my life like a dog with a bone
When will the good times roll? (chorus)

They moved my job to Mexico
Where the children slave and the pay is low
How I'm gonna live I just don't know
When will the good times roll? (chorus)

O, the world is ill divided
Those who work most are the least provided
& When they got a war they want US to fight it
When will the good times roll? (chorus)

Created for an event at the Asheville Arts Museum on March 23, 2003, this song was originally entitled 'Sing about Those Hard Times'. That version dealt with the late 1920s and the Depression because the occasion was a celebration of the work of the great North American artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969). There were rooms and rooms of his paintings, drawing and photographs. I updated the song to the hard times we are going through now and changed Those to These. If you are interested in using folksong tunes as a resource for writing new songs you might take a peek at the song "Down to the River to Pray", popularised in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? There are most definitely resonances between that tune and mine.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s- In The Heart Of The Late Dance Night- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Platters performing their classic, Only You.

CD Review

The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Slow Dancing Classics, Time-Life Music, 1997

Scene: (Prompted by the cover photograph, the memory cover photograph, which graces each CD in this Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll series. The photo on this CD, as might be expected, shows a he, Jimmy Callahan, and a she, Kathy Kelly, in formal attire dancing, dancing that last sweet teenage high school, maybe the senior prom, dance. Or it had better be else this scene will turn to ashes)

“I don’t understand why it took you so long to ask me out, Mr. James Callahan,” murmured Kathy Kelly as they clasped hands in anticipation of the last dance. Jimmy mumbled, or it seemed like mumbling to Kathy, that he was shy, that he was busy, that he wasn’t sure that she even noticed him, or if she did notice him, liked him. Kids’ stuff, typical guy kids’ stuff, thought Kathy. But just now, unbelievably, the last dance, the last sweet time high school dance before facing the Cold War world and whatever it held out in that 1957 night, was to begin. But that world stuff was for tomorrow tonight Kathy has finally, finally, snagged the boy she has been mooning over for, well, let’s leave it as a long time, long before rock ‘n’ roll made it easier for a guy like Jimmy Callahan to ask a girl like Kathy Kelly out on to the dance floor without having to get all balled up in following the leader close dancing, sweaty palms and all. Now though was the time for slow dancing, slow last dance dancing and two-left feet, two left-shoeless feet, heck, two left-snow-shoed feet or not, Jimmy, as Kathy beamed to herself, was snagged.

Kathy looking resplendent in her Filene’s finest formal dress, complete with lacy see-though shawl, and topped off with a Jimmy corsage, a corsage that spoke more powerfully to her victory than ten million dances, and that finally felt that it all worth it feeling another ten million. Worth the every trick in the book that she had to pull out of the hat in order that he would “ask” her to their senior prom, the last chance Kathy would get to claim her Jimmy before he left for State later in the summer. Just that hand-clasped moment she hoped, hoped to the stars above, that they played her “they” song, a song that she had been listening to with Jimmy last dance dancing in mind since, well, you already know, a long time.

That right choice might also be the last chance to put her mark on him, although earlier in the evening she sensed something, something unsaid, when they played 16 Candles by the Crests and Jimmy mumbled something about how he was sorry that he couldn’t make it to her 16th birthday party, although Kathy had gone through six levels of hell to try and get him there. Then he kind of backed off when they played Patsy Cline’s cover of Crazy and right after that he said he didn’t understand how someone could keep on “carrying the torch” when the love affair was over. And he was definitely moody when they played I’m Sorry by Brenda Lee, calling it drippy. He lightened up a little when they played in In The Still Of The Night by the Five Satins and said he loved doo wop, proving it by knowing all the words and doing some fine harmony in his deep bass voice.

Suddenly some awfully familiar music started up and the last dance began, the last dance ending with Only You by The Platters. And just as the Platters got into the heart of the song, the heart-felt only you part, Jimmy, red-faced, shy, two left-feet Jimmy, asked Miss Kathy Kelly if she would come up and visit him at State in the fall. Ah, very heaven.