From The Archives Of The Struggle Against Climate Change And Animal Preservation-West Coast Version

From The Archives Of The Struggle Against Climate Change And Animal Preservation-West Coast Version

By Bart Webber

Yeah, today I am again on the soapbox (in the old days, the very old days the ordinary old days being my youthful times in the 1960s orators of all kinds would go to a place like Central Park or Boston Common and harangue the crowds on anything from the virtues of socialism to the value of some homemade remedy sold cheaply). As we swelter in the excessive summer heat I want to once again climb on the climate change issue and particularly as it relates to the effect on animal habitats and routines. Today, maybe literarily today, we are so wedded to the very real idea that climate change is knocking us for a loop that we forget that such efforts to fight the worst effects of the crisis have been going on for a long time. As I have mentioned previously one of the key leaders who noticed something was dramatically wrong was Johnny Allan, a figure out of the mold of John Muir, guys like that. Johnny was one of the early advocates of the very sound idea that we do something about the matter before it got too late, too expensive or we didn’t have the technological resources to combat whatever affront we had made to Mother Nature.

Johnny Allan, he was from the South so Johnny named not John, had a fistful of degrees and a few awards although not the big one which would have helped his “street cred” as he started sounding the warnings back in the early 1970s. Of course Johnny’s name will always be associated with the now overdone use of animals to get donations to help save them. Johnny was worried about what all the changes would do to the animals in the wilderness when their sources of food got mixed up. Johnny had the very bright idea of going to the people who ran the San Diego Zoo and asked them to install many canisters around the park asking kids, really parents but pitched to kids to throw their surplus coins from their purchases into the kiddy.

There is more to the Johnny Allan story though and it also relates to the San Diego Zoo with which he was associated with for many years. Johnny put in many years of thoughtful study (see photograph below) thinking through the idea of making animals in captivity more comfortable, more in tune with their natural habitats. One of the first things he protested about was the idea of bringing polar bears and penguins to the zoo which would have entailed a vast array of structures and conditions that did not make sense in a semi-tropical climate. I believe he got an award for that long effort. That struggle against changing habitats became the central thrust of his later work when he got, finally got the zoo (and others followed suit) to make the spaces the animals were caged in more like home. I remember one demonstration inspired by his work by a bunch of UCal/San Diego students protesting that the giraffe should have much more room and larger trees to feed from. Yeah, they don’t make them like Johnny Allan anymore. He did his stuff for free, for love unlike the paid guys these days.          

When The Bad Guys Danced (And The Dance Was No Foxtrot, Brother) -James Cagney’s “Lady Killer” (1933)-A Film Review

When The Bad Guys Danced (And The Dance Was No Foxtrot, Brother) -James Cagney’s “Lady Killer” (1933)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Alex Radley

Lady Killer, starring James Cagney, 1933 

Everybody in the old neighborhood, the Atlantic section of Carville, the used to be “capital” of the cranberry world now pushed west to Wisconsin and places like that, knew a guy like Dan Quigley, the role that legendary actor James Cagney plays in the film under review Lady Killer. Well, maybe not everyone, but close, a guy who knows, or thinks he knows all the angles, has the angels on his side too no matter what. A Teflon-type guy who might be put in a spot but comes up smelling like roses.

I’ll get to Dana’s moves, good and bad, in a moment but the character of Dana Quigley, including the lady’s man, aspect reminded very much of Lenny Logan from down in that Atlantic section of Carville where I grew up and who was if not my closest friend, or me his, then we never crossed each other, and I was never directly the butt of one of his scams, cons, brainstorms. Lenny, good-looking Lenny, also a lady’s man was as much from what other older guys who write for this site have called “from hunger” in declining market seasonal cranberry country. But he always had dough from early on when he would con guys out of their milk money by flipping “fixed” baseball cards against the schoolyard wall (until some parents complained to the teachers and it stopped-or rather he stopped on those particular kids). That deeply larcenous scheming heart would parlay that kind of scam all through school including plenty of serious housebreaks which he would plan-and others would carry out. He would, for lack of a better word, be the “finger” man with plausible deniability in case things did not work out. Sent more than one young woman off to “Aunt Emma” as writer Sam Lowell would have called it in any earlier time and we said rolling our eyes “in the family way.” Lenny, wouldn’t you know, eventually broke that bad streak by becoming a very successful local lawyer (including being mine on a couple of occasions) but it was, as always with guys like Lenny, a close thing.

With that kind of character in mind let’s see what made Dana Quigley tick, how he passed his time. Part of the problem with this particular film is that the producers or somebody wasn’t sure which James Cagney they wanted to use. The notorious 1930s headliner gangster from films like White Heat in the classic age of that genre of which audiences in Great Depression ate up like crazy or the dandy song and dance Yankee Doodle Dandy man. As usual they went for the great test audience muddle. So they kind of put them together and added in that street wise kick. Yeah Dana was always hustling, nickel and dime stuff mostly until he almost drew a sucker punch when he got conned by a dame, by a moll, twist, frail whatever you want to call a girl ringer playing the old lost pocketbook gag luring guys in and set them up for a beating of their worldly goods at the poker table.

But our boy Dana got wised up quick, and despite a roomful of thugs against his small stature he made those low-rung gangsters cry uncle-and make them plenty of dough. Of course guys like Dana are always thinking about the next best thing which is to make a big score-here doing cagey burglaries in Mayfair swell houses. Made a nice racket as the pretty boy finger-man until the beef went too far and conked too many heads, too many deaths and the future looking like the big step for everybody unless they blow town.

That blowing town begins the shift to the pretty boy part, to Dana’s rise as an actor out in Tinseltown, out in Ed Rushca’s big Hollywood sign hills. While there he takes up with a different kind of frill, a big- time movie actress. Wouldn’t you know it though that old gang of his from back east wound up in LA, including that former love interest moll he had been running around with and who left him high and dry when the deal went down. The old gang figured to work that high- end burglary scam of old with Dana in the lead. Problem: the gang, now the gang that couldn’t shoot straight if you ask me robbed his movie star honey. Bad move. Maybe bad move both ways. The gang sensing Dana was the weak link wanted to waste him, put him out in the Pacific deep heading to the China seas maybe.  Dana in turn, turned copper –a no-no in our old neighborhood and by general consensus a “fink,” “rat,” “stoolie” better left six feet under. Even Lenny understood that, maybe Lenny better than anybody since he knew he could do whatever he wanted, whatever larceny, sex acts, etc. he wanted and the Omerta oath of the corner boy neighborhood would protect his young. But this is Dana remember, shades of Lenny, and so he lands on his feet. I don’t know what to make of this film but one thing I do know I kept thinking about Lenny all the way through the film.  You probably have your own Lenny and will too. 

Every Corner Boy’s Dream, Getting Out From Under The Sign Of “From Hunger”-The Big Score -With Sterling Hayden’s “The Killing” In Mind

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A Very Different Look At The Native American (Indigenous People, If You Prefer) Experience In America-The Film Adaptation Of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last Of The Mohicans: A Narrative Of 1757 ” (1992)

A Very Different Look At The Native American (Indigenous People, If You Prefer) Experience In America-The Film Adaptation Of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last Of The Mohicans: A Narrative Of 1757 ” (1992)

DVD Review

By Alex Radley

The Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis,  Madeleine Stowe, based loosely on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, 1826 and an earlier film adaptation in 1936, 1992

I am grateful to Greg Green the site manager at this publication for giving me, a stringer, a chance to break into the film review department which these days according to him drives a lot of what goes on here. Greg approached me about doing a review of the film adaptation of James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last Of The Mohican since I was the only one he contacted that had not read the book and he did not want the political types around here like Frank Jackman, Seth Garth and Josh Breslin to get their hands on the thing and go on and on about the screwing of the Native Americans, the indigenous peoples who populated this continent way before the Spanish, English, French and who knows maybe the Russians staked claims to land not their own. To speak nothing of the later decimation once those bloody English colonists got their independence and went after those peoples hammer and tong. Didn’t want (and he told me to make sure I go this into the review) to hear about the destruction of the land, the trail of tears and the contemporary situation with the plight of the indigenous population although he was painfully aware since his ex-wife was part Lakota Sioux (the guys who gave General Custer all he could handle and more at Little Big Horn) that some terrible injustices have been done to those peoples. Also Greg did not want to hear (although he did not ask me to make a point of saying this so I am doing this on my own hook) about how James Fennimore Cooper knew nothing about Native Americans in upstate New York, except  maybe what he heard around the taverns that he reportedly frequented where he got whatever he knew about anything and used that to run the rack on a bunch of woodland gothic romance novels which would have embarrassed any Harlequin Publications romance novelist.

Since I qualified on all counts I got the nod, got the nod too when after viewing the film I mentioned to Greg (and to Sandy Salmon who I assume told Greg that I had not read the book because I don’t recall telling anybody else here that information when the question came up around the water cooler one morning) that I liked the film very much even if there was more gore and off-hand violence than necessary. He asked me to skip that observation but when I said it would be hard to write the review without mentioning that violence he said put it here before I got to give the reader the skinny and forget about it later. (I admit I am a rookie but I never heard the word “skinny” as a way to say tell the story before I landed here and I kept hearing an old guy, a bent over old guy who looked about one hundred years old named Sam Lowell, telling everybody he ran into about making sure that they did a good job on the “skinny.”)    

   

The whole film hinges on Hawkeye, played by versatile Daniel Day-Lewis, a white guy adopted by the last of the Mohicans, or who would become the last after his biological son was killed in a confrontation with another tribe, a tribal warrior, and Hawkeye’s abilities to keep a couple of daughters of the British commander at Fort William Henry alive during a year, 1757, of the big showdown between the French and English over who would control the continent. As we know it was touch and go between the two enemies, no quarter given. No quarter given especially by the French who outnumbered in the area of conflict upstate New York made alliances with some of the tribes in the area. Of course in the film there are the good Indians, the Mohicans even if destined to wither away, aiding the British and bad Indians, headed by ruthless savage Huron warrior prince Magua, a real bastard who I would not want to run into in a dark alley or out in the wilderness either.  

Leslie Dumont who knows some stuff told me that I should play this film up on the big romance between frontiersman Hawkeye and the older daughter, Cora, played by what Leslie called fetching Madeleine Stow, who despite about seven battles, a couple of massacres and plenty of blood wind up giving each other meaningful glances no matter what the situation (much to the chagrin of her main British officer suitor who will go to his death on the fire rack cursing her name-in French). I suppose you could see the film that way, a frontier, when the frontier was upstate New York not the West of later times, romance in the well-worn, according to Leslie, Hollywood trope of running a “boy meets girl” angle wherever possible to draw on the sympathies of the majority female audiences for such films while the blood is being spilled all around by ghastly tomahawks, knives, spears, guns, cannons and every other munition of war.

But to me what makes the film interesting is that thing that Greg warned me away from, the struggle for control of the continent up close and personal between the commander of the garrison, Colonel Munro, Cora’s father and French General Montcalm who would get his comeuppance on the Plains of Abraham up in Quebec and the English would win the big prize, and the hell with the Indians. I think maybe Frank and Seth, I don’t know Josh yet but I hear he is a character who has been around a while too were on to something trying to go with the “stolen land” angle I hope Greg doesn’t get too ticked off about that and I wind up sucking wind re-writing Sam’s pieces which they say is the “kiss of death” around here.      

*From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge On The British Social-Democratic Federation (1894)

Click on the headline to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.