In The Days When Parlor Pink Private Detectives Ruled The Roost- The Film Adaptation Of Crime Novelist Agatha Christie’s “The Pale Horse” (1997)- A Review

In The Days When Parlor Pink Private Detectives Ruled The Roost- The Film Adaptation Of Crime Novelist Agatha Christie’s “The Pale Horse” (1997)- A Review     

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Pale Horse, starring Colin Buchanan, based on the crime novel of the same name by Agatha Christie, 1997  

[In the interest of continuity although this review was written well after a previous one by Sarah Lemoyne reviewing Dick Powell’s Varsity Show I have placed it here today with hers since the pair are still in the throes of their “dispute.” Greg Green, site manager]   

This is no pun I am on my high horse, pale or otherwise, today. No, not about this so-called dispute between my old friend from high school day Seth Garth’s young protégé or whatever else they have decided to call her relationship with him Sarah Lemoyne. Mentor is the word I think they have been using to try to cover up whatever is going on there. When Seth Garth is involved, as in the interest of transparency I will admit was true of me as well when I was younger, when it comes to women younger or older don’t believe a word of “just friends” noise, a word of denial. That is when you double down on a guy like Seth as I have learned from bitter experience in the days when he would think nothing of sweeping up some woman I was interested in with no moral qualms whatsoever. Would laugh at an expression like “moral qualms” a term unknown to hard corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and by extension in the cutthroat world of film reviewers where if you don’t cut somebody’s idea, some witty insight, some weird take on a film then you are not long for the profession. Why else would anybody put up with such doings when you are only giving your subjective opinion for the world to feast on (and now on the downside of the Internet experience have to put up with all kinds of dingbat thoughts from average citizens who know think that based on having seen a film that gives them the right, the god-given right to read some of the stuff to bore the rest of us with their ill-considered “takes” on the spot).    

In any case that is not what I am after today although I continue to steam, mighty puffs of steam, over the now almost libelous comments Ms. Lemoyne has made about who has, or hasn’t, written my reviews for me other than myself once I moved up the film review food chain many years ago. Totally libelous and subject to legal action if I was that kind of guy but I am not a snitch is the false accusation that long ago I used the studio press releases as my reviews with just the top snipped off and mailed in to whatever publication I was writing for at the time. I have just mentioned the cutthroat nature of our profession, so I am inured to such misinformation about my career. I will admit Ms. Lemoyne writes good reviews and had enough sense to go to Seth as a mentor or whatever he is to her at the office or elsewhere, but I can handle these young and hungry types since that is exactly where I started out trashing the legendary film critic Walt Wilson when he was riding high and now nobody remembers his name. What has me burning up today is one Greg Green’s lame attempt to bring back parlor pink private detectives with this review of the film adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s crime novels The Pale Rider. (Pale rider a reference from the Bible meaning death a not unimportant part of the plot line in both the novel and the film which diverts from the novel in several ways but is on point about the death part, plenty of it and who the hell the pale rider is when the deal, the final deal, goes down)

Everybody knows, everybody seriously interested film noir which hinges in many cases on the plots of crime novels, knows that I have written what many, except apparently the totally ignorant Ms. Lemoyne who was not even born when I made my big splash and whom Seth should have wised up, call the definitive book on film noir. I like to think that the reason for that status was my ground-breaking work on the private detective novel on film with its moody, dark scenarios and hang-by the fingernails twists and turns before the crummy felons get some quick and rough justice from our mere mortal no superhero bombast gumshoes.  Moreover that noir explosion and the work of crime novel writers like Jim Jenson, Jack Cullen, and above all Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had put paid to the old-fashioned amateur detective sitting around waiting for the villain to out of shame or something throw up his or her hands and come clean, come to justice without so much as by your leave. Take a warming cell or the big step-off for their errors in judgment while the crafty amateur goes off to lunch or on holiday after such strenuous work.

As Zack James, my and Seth’s old friend Alex’s youngest brother, has made clear in a number of astounding crime short stories about real private detectives this is no business for amateurs. I heartily agree since that profession is mainly about “repo” work the professional repo men can’t handle, bogus insurance claims, missing husbands or wives, looking for lost animals, dogs and cats mainly, and in the old days, peeping Toms on divorce cases involving sultry adultery (and which saved many a struggle P.I. before no fault divorce and just living together destroyed that part of the market leaving some guys, mostly guys, with nothing but hanging around a beaten down desk taking generous slugs from the low-shelf whiskey bottle in that bottom desk drawer). But on the screen, and in crime novels, those gumshoes, those peepers get the royal treatment, get the royal treatment if they are hard-nosed, tough, wind-mill chasers, skirt-chasers, heavy smokers and drinkers, and not afraid to take a slug or two, a roughing up for the good of the cause. Lenny Larkin was the epitome of the type who was also not afraid to whiplash a guy for looking at him the wrong way. Naturally when you mention Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe chasing a million wind-mills for some old general, or looking for some lady in the lake, or looking for big Moose’s lady friend comes to mind. Sam Spade of course from the Dashiell Hammett stable not only chased skirts, took a few punches for her, but when it was him or her he sent her over, sent her to the big step-off and the fuck with the stuff of dreams trying to own some freaking fake bird.

Which brings us to this little film. What we have here, a guy named Eric somebody does the last name matter since he is not going into the annals of private detection, no way. A damn sculptor, not even an amateur detective but a guy who makes art, modern art and not bad from the quick looks we get when he is around his art gallery, a guy who is trying to keep the noose from around his pretty head when he is accidently involved in a murder when he looked too much like the real felon and the coppers, the public coppers, as they will grabbed him and were ready to call it a day on the case. Sent him off with a smile claiming he wasn’t much of a sculptor anyway. Case closed.

They set this film in 1960s London so you get a modish crowd as background including two young women, one very rich and proper taking a ride down in class to give our Eric a run for his money but whom he spurns and another, Rhonda something does it matter her last name since she will not go down in the annals of private detection, no way. The latter he met at a funeral after her friend had died from what appeared to be some natural cause disease. The connection. The priest who was supposed to bring a message to a third party as the deathbed wish of another women who also appears to have died of natural causes is the guy whom Eric is supposed of have murdered and Rhonda friend’s name was on that message. Rhonda is not buying natural causes and so she is on board as an assistant sleuth. No femme fatale not at all but another freaking amateur detective to gum up the works. 

Later naturally as well there will be a love interest between these two and I can’t blame Eric on that score since she is one of those fetching types, yes, the ones who are not ice cold beautiful with personalities to match but the ones who an hour later you wonder what they are doing and are willing to do it with you. But just as naturally in these parlor pink private detection novels there is a red flag, although I hesitate to use that expression now that it is a catch word among the world’s growing population of conspiracy theorists. A prime suspect for this gumshoe pair centered on an eccentric wealthy art collector who had been chair-ridden since youth with polio. That was a ruse though, a cover for a very successful bank robbery in which the plotline involved taking the robbery proceeds and investing in art. Investing in a time when the art market was exploding, and he actually when “outed” as prime suspect for a while got to keep his ill-gotten gains. No, the real villain, the guy who in his psychopathic mind went over the edge was the attending physician of a number of patients who had been involved in what turned out to be an insurance fraud scheme with a few modern-day witches a la Macbeth and a bookie covering the insurance angle and the good doctor subtlety poisoning them using ordinary consumer goods like toothpaste as the murder weapons. 

Nice play, nice racket which any old Acre corner boy would appreciate but when Rhonda became the subject of the scheme and nobody knew how to cure her you know that mad monk doctor was doomed. It was the toothpaste, stupid. Get the freaking antidote asap. In the end Eric and Rhonda go off in the sunset their amateur private detection minute over. Not a minute too soon either.               

From The Archives -“Stop the War$ on Mother Earth” 2016 Maine Peace Walk-Build The International Peace Front

From The Archives -“Stop the War$ on Mother Earth”  2016 Maine Peace Walk-Build The International Peace Front

By Fritz Taylor

Recently in a short archive caption about the Bath Iron Works in Maine where many of the top-of-the line and billion-dollar expensive destroyers are built I mentioned, as a little background for knowing about the place that I am a Vietnam Veteran. I also mentioned in an earlier archive caption while I hate the NRA I favor my Second Amendment right to bear arm. But whatever vestiges I have of my growing up in Fulton County, Georgia I “got religion” on the questions of war and peace through the hellhole of Vietnam experience. Not right away, certainly not right away since I come from a long, a very long line of military people and not completely at first since I initially mistook being anti-war with pacificism which I was, am uncomfortable with. Now though I am comfortable with the twenty plus years I have spent screaming (if necessary) against the endless wars, the bloated military budgets and the glorification of the fog war creates in the public, and among soldiers and politicians.

Now I was strictly Army, Fourth Division so you know I saw some hellish action in Vietnam, particularly when we were sent to re-enforce up in the Central Highland and I can tell you plenty about that branch of the service, the waste and the like. You can always learn sometime new though in this struggle against war and endless budgets. I certainly did the year I went up to Maine to walk the walk Peace Walk then held annually about quiet Bath and its well-oiled shipbuilding capacity.  Each year they organizers, more about them in a minute, try to gather in a theme that speaks to the militarization of our country, of the world, the particular role Maine plays in that process and of course from our perspective some alternatives.

In 2016 that was around creating the environment for a sustainable future, very much more in doubt in the few years since that walk, which meant a serious frontal attack on the role the military plays in not making the future world sustainable. Sustainable may today mean livable, as in livable planet, from the dire news just in the headlines about the huge Artic and Greenland melts, record high temperatures in placed not know for some levels, more and more endangered species falling off the chart since they could not adapt to the dramatically changed environment fast enough and many more strange doing if you read a new book called Inhabitable Earth along with the attention to the bad news days. Meanwhile in the White House and places like Houston and the Dakotas they are drinking their champagnes out of fossil fuel container and secretly making sure they have their places many miles from the coasts and high above the projected water table lines.

I knew in Vietnam about the various defoliate programs to search out the so-called enemy most famously Agent Orange and about the incredible number of unexploded bombs that plague that country forty years later but I was unaware how much material the Navy (and maybe other branches as well) in their everyday functions spew into the world’s oceans including the coast of Maine. I knew of the climate change effect maybe ten years ago when I would go to Maine beaches and note that the new high tide marks were eating severely into the wetlands in places like Ogunquit. I should have mentioned before that leaflets are passed out with messages along that line of thought, along the military  waste  along the line of march, the sites selected like Bath Iron Works where things need to be changed and evening programs at the various nightly stopping points dealing with the overall theme message.

I noted in the last archival caption that I have been doing these walks for a few years even though I had my fill of marches in the Army. Moreover, I had my doubts whether such a walking program over a couple of weeks would do anything for the cause, still have some questions. Enter the great equalizers.  I started, kicking and screaming at first about doing this trek once my friends and fellow members Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris went up to Maine to help out in the annual Maine Peace Walk sponsored by the Maine chapter of Veterans for Peace and other local activist peace groups. Ralph and Sam pointed out that even a few VFP dove-encrusted flags on the march would ensure that some message was getting through. Having seen that flag business work a million times before I bought in -for part of the trek.  

Of course if you had read the previous caption you know that “helping out” entailed walking half the freaking state of Maine at least on the oceanside, the side where U.S. Route One slithers down the coast. Over a period of several days. I had started up in Brunswick, up at Bowdoin College where I met walkers who had started up I believe in Rangeley which I do not have a clue where that is except it is pretty far north in Maine with plenty left before you reach the Canadian border. (As it turned out Sam and Ralph who started their own treks there were clueless when I asked where the place was except the military has a tracking station there which links that nowhere Maine town with the American’s military’s globalization of their forces in many fields. I said good work brothers for starting there, yes, good work indeed.    

Ralph Morris and I are Vietnam veterans, Sam didn’t serve because he was the sole surviving son of a mother who had four young daughters to raise after Sam’s drunken father passed away of a heart attack in 1965. It took me a while, took me a while as it did to “get religion” on the issues of war and peace, and to get over the false division between anti-war activity and working with avowed pacifists to accept Sam as a brother. Hell as a winter soldier although I already knew from Ralph that as early as 1971 in Washington on May Day where they “met” after being arrested in Robert F. Kennedy football stadium where they had with their respective groups attempted to stop the war by stopping the government that Sam was some old righteous Puritan angel avenger out of the John Brown mold. Took a while but knew deep in my bones that this guy was for real, that when he said something you could depend on him. Yeah, now in 2019 we are in desperate need of winter soldiers. And if you don’t know, are not familiar with that term then think about that small band of stalwarts was held firm at Valley Forge come fight against the British and their hirelings. The defenders of the republican idea when that was very dicey indeed. Like now.        

“Stop the War$ on Mother Earth”

2016 Maine Peace Walk

The 5th Maine Peace Walk will take place on October 11 – 26.  The organizing team is made up of individuals who are dedicated to creating a more peaceful, sustainable and just world.  We come together out of our deep concern about the many different wars being waged on Mother Earth, ranging from over-fishing, deforestation, and human-caused extinctions, to climate disruption and endless war. 

Close to home we support the Penobscot Nation’s struggle for Justice for the River, opposition to the East/West Corridor, and conversion of war production to alternative energy at Maine shipyards.  We know from past experience of walking through rural and urban Maine that many people will be reached with our messages. We hope this spiritual act of walking and sharing conversation and food will help people in our state feel less isolated and despairing about the future.  

We welcome everyone to join our walk for an hour, a day, or more and to help in any way they can to contribute.   We invite environmental, peace, church, and social justice organizations to sign on as a co-sponsor of the walk.  We ask co-sponsors to make a donation of their choosing and to help spread the word about the walk to their members/community.    Tax-deductible donations can be made by check to Global Network, designated “For Peace Walk” and sent to:

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

PO Box 652

Brunswick, ME  04011

For more information:  Please contact Bruce Gagnon at: globalnet@mindspring.com  (207) 443-9502

Current Co-Sponsors:  Smedley D. Butler Brigade Veterans for Peace (Boston area); Global

Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space; Maine Veterans for Peace; Citizens

Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST); Veterans for Peace (National); Peninsula Peace and

Justice; CODEPINK Maine; PeaceWorks; Maine War Tax Resistance Resource Center;

Veterans For Peace, Jim Harney Chapter 003; Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine;

Greater Brunswick Peace Works; Alliance for the Common Good;

Everybody Loves A Con Man-Except-Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s “Paper Moon” (1973)-A Film Review

Everybody Loves A Con Man-Except-Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s “Paper Moon” (1973)-A Film Review     

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Paper Moon, starring Ryan O’Neil, Tatum O’Neal,directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1973

Every theater-goer, at least I am going to assume so, likes a “feel good” storyline. Maybe not as first choice but in the basket. I confess to that feeling. But as an old corner boy from the working class neighborhoods where I grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire I also appreciate a good “con” storyline. Not con as in convict but as in con artist and although we had plenty of both in the old Acre neighborhood I gravitated toward the latter, except when the con was on me which it was a few times. The film under review Paper Moon with the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal going through their paces gives us that combination I have mentioned.            

Here’s the spiel. Here’s basis of the con in this one.  Moses Pray (great name given the grift he is working) is a Bible salesmen in Great Depression-era Kansas and Missouri (that Great Depression the one in the 1930s not the more recent one this century). His grift, check out the obituary columns of the local newspapers to see what men had passed to the great beyond recently (in the days when such publications were plentiful) and head out to the bereaved widow and hustle her into paying for a Bible, a deluxe edition Bible, which the late breadwinner had ordered prior to passing away. Since the Bible was inscribed to the vulnerable widow they usually paid for the thing. Nice steady work. Later when times were tough Moses would step up in class and do the classic sell (bootleg whiskey in the specific case) the owner his own goods con (with untoward results). But the basic style of Moses had been etched in that Bible hustle.       

  

The “feel good” parts in when Moses attends the funeral in Kansas of a woman friend with whom he had been intimate. That is when he met his nemesis (and maybe his on-screen daughter) Addie, played by Ryan’s real life daughter Tatum. She is an orphan with no place to go except her mother’s sister’s house in Missouri. Moses gets corralled into taking her to the sister’s house and the bulk of the film is centered on the adventures and misadventures of the pair on the way there. The most important part to note of this pairing is that Addie has almost as larcenous a heart as Moses. Maybe it was genetic if the suspicions about Addie’s unknown father had any basis. Through a series of events, cons, including that ill-fated hustle of that irate bootlegger Moses and Addie bond, bond as thick as thieves. Yeah, a con and “feel good” that is the ticket.             

From The Archives Of Second Change Cat Rescue- Frida Kahlo And Jasper Johns

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes it is nice to be vindicated especially when some professional calls your bluff. Of late I have become an art critic, an amateur art critic proud to say,  in this space based on my love of art, my having studied it in my youth and because I still haunt art museums (and a less worthy reason that nobody else in this philistine operation would dare go within ten blocks of a museum having been “wised up” in about sixth grade on that fateful field trip to some art museum and they

have never gotten over it.) Along the way I have gathered what amounts to things called trolls according to my fellow writers here who have ranged from spiteful evangelicals to people with axes to grind without purpose and a few professional art critics like Clarence Dewar. That last troll is what today’s archival caption is about.

Dewar, a professional art critic for Art Today, has apparently made it his life’s mission to rid the field of what he considers, get this, citizen critics, people who would mess up his well-oiled art theories by exposing them as no less subjective than their poor offerings. He has made me the “poster child” for his wrath having replied and commented on every single article that I have pushed out the door the past several months. He went crazy when I exposed Edward Hopper, holy of holies, as organically incapable of drawing anything but mud faces. Took a nutty when I mentioned that Jackson Pollock’s drippings had plenty of material embedded in the work which indicated that he had been a sexual dervish, with who I don’t know on at least a few of the early productions. (Of course, such “madness” his term required him to defend his mentor Clement Greenberg who was the max daddy of critics hailing abstract expressionist art in general and Pollock’s semen drippings in particular. Leaving later generations to have to try to break free of that stigmata). There have been a million other controversies as well but that gives the tenor of the so-called “duel” between us.       

I thought we were going to have to send an hospital emergency room squad specializing in bilious behavior after my most recent “discover” about modern artist, abstract and maybe pop artist thrown in, Jasper Johns and the route he took to define his own working life. Let me lay out the story as I heard it first. Early in his career he had been like all young artists awash in representational painting (even mad Surrealists and Dadaists started out “by the numbers”). The Johns’ household was something like a sanctuary for second chance cats, kittens really, you know rescue cats from animal shelters.

One cat named Jasper was always around when Johns was doing his artwork. One day dear Jasper spilled a bucket of paint from the worktable, color charcoal grey, onto a painting of some scene Johns was working on. At first furious at the frisky cat after picking up the “damaged” goods he noticed that the results looked extraordinary like a AAA map of Augusta, Georgia (where he had been born in 1930). This would be the lesser known Piping Number 4 dedicated to Jasper, most art critics, most professional art critics including the villain Dewar when I researched the matter, assumed that he was referring to himself. From there Johns made a career, a lucrative career out of such common symbols as maps, flags, numbers, using various materials, not all paints as such.

Enter Dewar our esteemed professional art critic to counter my so-called story with the usual blather about Johns being influenced by Pollock, Rudy Zane, Billy Bligh, Christ even Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali. Dismissed, as usual, any idea that an accident by a beloved animal might have influenced him. Of course if the average art lover knew anything about Johns it is the multitude of American flags he created out of many materials and with many variations. These flags have sold for many millions, many, many millions. That is the standard a guy like Dewar measures works by. What Dewar did not know is on this one I was able to get the “skinny” on the cat story by the grandson of Johns’ late art dealer and the person who put him on the New York art world map. He confirmed the story (and moreover has the painting given to him by his grandfather when he was young). Touché.

Touché for a minute because as the reader will note the headline includes the name of famed (maybe more famed than Johns now) Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Now Frida and Johns have little in common other than being well-deserved famous artists whose works sell for mucho dinero but a reader enthralled by the Johns cat story wrote that cats played a significant role in Kahlo’s early career.

No question that Frida was influences by her husband Diego Rivera and his circle of muralists and by what today is called Arte Mexico, an appreciation of the indigenous cultures of her country. But according to my reader, and I have begun to see that she is right, Frida also was influenced by a cat, or cats. Had been sometime after the horrible injuries received on a runaway tram been frightened almost to death by a cat who ran across her chest several different times while she was recovery and had not way to stop the beast. That is the genesis of the many cats (and other animals as well) in her works. Go figure. Go figure as well Clarence Dewar will have to say on this one.                      

 

When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Varsity Show” (1937)-A Film Review

When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Varsity Show” (1937)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Varsity Show, starring Dick Powell and a bunch of Lane sisters, the inevitable last dance segment directed by max daddy (Seth Garth’s expression) Bugby Berkeley, 1937  

Sometimes you just can’t win when you try to be nice, try to stop a growing dispute with fellow colleagues in what everybody knows is a cutthroat go for the jugular “you are only as good as your last piece” somebody is lurking to take your place profession like film reviews in its tracks. Damn, can’t get any traction out of calling a truce so that you do not have to start off every film review, maybe every piece at this publication with what in normal times would be ho-hum stuff best reserved for titter around the office water cooler. Maybe what the older writers have told me, especially my mentor Seth Garth the film reviewing business does not allow for anything but cutthroat dog eat dog animus. Although that shouldn’t be so apparently to go up, and stay up, on the review food chain you must at least mortally wound whoever your competitor of the day is. For now this brewing confrontation must see the light of day if I am to protect my growing reputation and if I am to keep my hard fought place in the food chain since one Sam Lowell, whom I off-handedly characterized as wizened and in his dotage in my last review of a Dick Powell film from the 1930s Hollywood Hotel  had decided that I need “my comeuppance” over those remarks and what followed.     

Sam bogusly claims that my review of the Powell vehicle was not written, could not be written by me since my only source of information about the period of the 1930s and 1940s musical was my grandmother who was a child held on her mother’s knee back then watching these “feel good” films to get through some tough times. He has suggested that the only way this review could have been does as well as it was is if somebody more familiar with the times wrote the damn thing (his expression). Sam insinuated that the only person he knew who could handle such a review having done a series of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films was his old friend, still friend I assume, Seth Garth my kindly mentor had written the piece and that I put my by-line name on the thing and sent it in to Greg Green as my original work.

Of course Sam is looking for tit for tat since he knows that almost everybody in the office over the age of ten knows that he has a very large reputation going all the way back to the 1960s of having somebody write his reviews for him, usually stringers, usually female stringers to boot or in desperation after some three day drunk or cavorting just used the studio publicity department press releases and signed his name to the document. I hear one time and if I am libeling him so be it he was cavorting with some stringer on a three- day toot or something like that and sent the press release in without clipping the studio name off the top. His old buddy, another one of the half dozen or so guys from high school days who have written for this publication over the years, editor Allan Jackson published it as is Sam’s star was so high back then.  Seth Garth has been kindness itself in helping me up the ladder in the business and had provided suggestions but that is it. I write my own material.  Period.

More grating, more insidious is that Sam has taken up the salacious office water cooler gossip about some relationship beyond the mentoring one between Seth and myself implying that I would get ahead on his coattails if I was nice to Seth. In that Hollywood Hotel review I made it quite clear that Seth and I had merely a professional relationship and that it would be absurd for me to have a personal relationship with a person old enough to be my grandfather. I, moreover, mentioned that my companion has been having fits over these rumors and we have had some shouting matches when she heard the last product out of the rumor mill. Sam, the treacherous little wizened bastard, that wizen thing always gets to him from what Seth has told me has been spreading the word that something is up between us ever since he out of that kindness I mentioned before took me to dinner one night.

Sam’s hook, Sam’s fucking “hook” that is he is forever yakking about as necessary to draw a reader in as if that wasn’t lesson one taught in journalism graduate school is that Seth is just living out the life of Johnny Silver. Johnny, who I don’t know from Adam, is one of their infamous and constantly talked about 1960s high school corner boys who Seth wrote about in a long series of short pieces when he got tangled up with a graduate student from Penn State after they had “met” on Facebook a few years ago. That romance, that intergenerational sex, between the pair who are still together is the hook Sam used to imply that his old corner boy Seth was making the same kind of moves on me. Don’t these guys, maybe gals too but I don’t know about that, ever think anything can be anything other than some sex scheme when guys and gals are out together. Like I said my companion went wild when she heard I had gone to dinner with Seth since he received an e-mail about it from “anonymous.” I know there will be more in this war of words but I will say Seth was right when he told me Sam was not above anything and to be careful. He said he had known the wizened (a joke between Seth and I now when we are referring to Sam in our mentoring sessions) Sam too long to expect any quarter to be given. I have come a long way in a short time, with Seth’s help, so I will not play the wilting violet. To the review.                     

Boy meets girl. Well if you want my opinion that is essentially what this well-worn Hollywood trope is working overtime on when you get to the close of Varsity Club. This a college-based piece of fluff in the days when college entrance was very circumscribed and mainly for the children of the elite, of those who have already made it. Number one in making it was Chuck, Dick Powell’s role, an alumnus of some private small maybe denomination Middle America school like Kenyon or Oberlin Winfield College, who has made it big on Broadway although at the start of the film he is on cheap street after producing a few flops, the kiss of death to backers of such efforts. Meanwhile back at his old alma mater where they are revolting, not revolting against the injustices and inequalities of the Great Depression that my dear grandmother had to survive with lots of trauma, but against an edict by the head of the music/drama department that the annual varsity show should not disturb the dead. Not keep anybody awake. Be pure vanilla meaning no cavorting (which would  by reputations leave both withered Sam and sweetie Seth out), no close boy-girl scenes and above all even in fully-clothed post-Code days no references to sex, or maybe even biology.       

The kids (although most look much too old to have been in college then although today they would not stand out with the demographic mix these days with people going to college for lots of reasons, mostly serious, at older ages to get ahead in the world a bit) don’t know what to do until some bravo latches onto the idea that they contact good old Chuck to see if he can’t bring the thing into the 20^th century. After plenty of built-up, a few songs, a budding romance with a sorority sister, one of the famous Lane sisters but I am not sure if it was the one he snagged in Hollywood Hotel he falls short, cannot move the production forward. Then led by Professor Fred Waring (and his Pennsylvanians in tow) the whole cast winds up in New York City, on the big white way where they will put on a bootleg production since the staid college stage is out. Aside from the boy-girl thing between Powell and Lane the virtue, the reason for existence of this mercifully short film is the Bugby Berkeley show-stopper finale choregraphed to perfection in the way that he and very few others could do. Finis. Well, no, anybody who was not old and wizened maybe a shade bit senile in his dotage could tell in two seconds that this review was written by me, by Sarah Lemoyne. Got it.        

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- Where Have All The Anti-War Protestors And Their Songs Gone?

Click on title to link to Bob Feldman's site that asks this very question. I have a short comment there, as well.

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- *In Pete Seeger’s House- Heading For The Roots And The Mountains

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the Greenbriar Boys performing "Roll On Buddy" on Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest". For the New Lost City Ramblers check my archives for earlier reviews.

DVD Review

Rainbow Quest, Pete Seeger, The New Lost City Ramblers, The Greenbriar Boys, Shanachie, 2005

In a year that has featured various 90th birthday celebrations it is very appropriate to review some of the 1960’s television work of Pete Seeger, one of the premier folk anthologists, singers, transmitters of the tradition and “keeper” of the folk flame. This DVD is a “must see” for anyone who is interested in the history of the folk revival of the 1960’s, the earnest, folksy style of Pete Seeger or the work of the also tradition-oriented New Lost City Ramblers made up of (early on) the folklorist and master photographer John Cohen, Tom Paley ( a valuable folk source in his own right as witness his comments in various documentaries about the New York City part of the folk revival of the early 1960s) and Mike Seeger, Pete’s half-brother (it is in the genes, right?). I have now reviewed several of these “Rainbow Quest” productions and it is clear that, kinship aside, Pete, along with his use of a whole range of folk instrumentation that gets a full workout in this presentation, is most comfortable with this group as he joyfully plays along with the boys.

Also included on this DVD is a performance by the legendary Greenbriar Boys, a group that combined urban folk aficionados and real mountain music men to take advantage of the early interest in the mountain music roots of a lot of what the 1960s folk scene was searching for, authenticity . Additionally, Pete, as an early exponent of what is now called “world music” does some lesser known traditional songs and does a hearty rendition of the classic radical labor anthem “Joe Hill”.

This DVD contains some very interesting and, perhaps, rare television film footage from two of Pete Seeger shows, packaged in one DVD, entitled “Rainbow Quest”. Each show is introduced (and ends, as well) by Pete singing his old classic “If I Had A Golden Threat” and then he proceeds to introduce, play guitar and banjo and sing along with the above-mentioned artists.

One final note: This is a piece of folk history. Pete Seeger is a folk legend. However, the production values here are a bit primitive and low budget. Moreover, for all his stature as a leading member of the folk pantheon Pete was far from the ideal host. His halting speaking style and almost bashful manner did not draw his guests out. Let’s just put it this way the production concept used then would embarrass a high school television production class today. But, Pete, thanks for the history lesson.

In Defense Of Literary, Rationality And Civility-Long Gone, Sadly

In Defense Of Literary Flourishes, Rationality And Civility-Long Gone, Sadly   

By Phillip Larkin

Recently I did a short archival caption piece here recounting the effect that one Miss (yes Miss in those days) Rose Enos, English teacher at North Adamsville High had on a bunch of unruly, yes, unruly, Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys back in the early 1960s. In the end she saved many of us from strange and sullen fates by her perseverance in one matter-language matters, literature matters, the written word matters. Almost sixty years later I can still recite the party line. Thanks Miss Enos.

Thanks Miss Enos but that is not the end of it, or rather that was the end of it. As I noted in the previous caption in the early 1960s from 10^th to 12^th grade at least in Math and English you would have the same teacher. We were all terrified at the end of ninth grade that we might get her and mortified at the beginning of 10^th when almost all of us got her, although not all in the same class. We put up some minor struggles but in the end we conceded the point that what she had to teach us was worth the hell that she put us through especially with those infinite number of book reports and oral debates on weird subjects. The only one who loved it all was our “in-house intellectual” Pete Markin, the Scribe although in the end he fell down, couldn’t be saved against the forces of his own hubris.  

Miss Enos might have had our numbers in class but we were basically devoted to the corner boy ethos otherwise. Meaning, except again as always Markin, that we didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything except girls, cars and figuring, legal or illegal ways to get some dough for the former two. Some of us were into school sports and the like but mainly we were into our own little sub-culture. That is why it was surprise when we got our yearbooks at the end of senior year to see that the school had an after school Great Books club. None of us at the time had we known it existed would have given a rat’s ass about it.

But that was then and now with egg over at least several faces we surviving corner boys finally get what Markin, the Scribe was talking about after graduation when he damned himself for not having joined club with all hands and maybe the coin of fate, his fate in particular might have gone in a different direction. Just maybe the debates, the smell of the books, the printed word in those days could have spared us a lot of wasted time and foolish hubris.  

From The Archives Of Second Change Cat Rescue- Jasper Johns Unchained

From The Archives Of Second Change Cat Rescue- Jasper Johns Unchained 

By Laura Perkins

There was no earthy reason to believe that once I started to “duel” with one Clarence Dewar, art critic, professional art critic for Art Today (against my purely amateur status proudly worn) around the genesis of modern artist Jasper Johns work. I related the entirely possible story that one of his cats, one of his rescue cats, you know second chance cast from some animal,  shelter do way back when spilled some paint onto the surface of a representational work he was doing and that wound up with a little work keeping the piece which in term was one of his earliest attempts at breaking into the abstract expressionist market. (Piping No. 4) Began to see what guys like Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko were getting at in the nuclear age.   

Look it is well known that artists like writers, like singers “steal” from each other. This is the genesis of Dewar’s scoffing at my story about little playful Jasper being the inspiration for Johns’ movement away from representational art. He claims, mouthing his mentor Clement Greenberg back in the day, that Johns was influenced by some paintings he saw exhibited at the Nova Galleries in New York City by a second wave of abstract artist like Roy LeRoi, May Devine, Louise Hunter and Max Stern. Naturally I am happy to see Mr. Dewar get egg all over his face since I have it on the word of one of Johns’ agents that the “cat story” is true if not the only way he saw the road forward when he was stuck for salable material. (See photograph below of "Jasper" when young and before he became a "muse")    

From The Archives-The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now- Chicago 1968-The Late Norman Mailer's View

From The Archives-The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now- Chicago 1968-The Late Norman Mailer's View

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?_r=1


Commentary/Book Review (2008)

This year, also a presidential election year, marks the 40th anniversary of the bloodbath in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention. I have reposted Norman Mailer’s work Miami and the Siege of Chicago originally posted on this site in September 2007 that recounts many of the incidents that occurred during that week. Mailer’s work is as good example as any that I have read from a journalist’s perspective so can stand here, as well.

Parts of the review also detail my own political positions during that period. Readers can get the gist of those positions below. I would only add that during this particular week I was in Boston manning the phones while others in the Humphrey campaign had gone to Chicago. In retrospect, the most painful detail of that week was the necessity of answering many irate calls from Gene McCarthy supporters and others about the police riot in Chicago. Even stranger was being denounced as a “hawk” for supporting Humphrey’s Vietnam position. Oddly, my own position at the time- for immediate withdrawal- was actually far to the left of what the irate callers were arguing for. Such is the price of my youthful opportunism though.

The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now

COMMENTARY/BOOK REVIEW

MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO, NORMAN MAILER, THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK, 1968

As I recently noted in this space while reviewing the late Norman Mailer’s The Presidential Papers at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that he wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels in his time like The Deer Park I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon.

With that in mind I recently re-read his work on the 1968 political campaign Miami and the Siege of Chicago -the one that pitted Lyndon Johnson, oops, Hubert Humphrey against Richard M. Nixon. This work is exponentially better than his scatter shot approach in the Presidential Papers and only confirms what I mentioned above as his proper place in the literary scheme of things. Theodore White may have won his spurs breaking down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The Making of a President, 1960 and his later incarnations on that same theme but Mailer in his pithy manner gives an overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America in that hell-bent election. I would note that for Mailer as for many of us, not always correctly as in my own case, this 1968 presidential campaign season and those conventions evolved in a year that saw a breakdown of the bourgeois electoral political process that had not been seen in this country since the 1850’s just prior to the Civil War.

The pure number of unsettling events of that year was a portent that this would be a watershed year for good or evil. Out of the heat, killing and destruction in Vietnam came the North Vietnamese/National Liberation Front Tet offensive that broke the back of the lying reports that American/South Vietnamese success was just around the corner. Today’s Iraq War supporters might well take note. In the aftermath of that decisive event insurgent anti-war Democratic presidential hopeful Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy’s seemingly quixotic campaign against a sitting president jumped off the ground. In the end that Tet offensive also forced Lyndon Johnson from office. And drove Robert Kennedy to enter the fray. The seemingly forgotten LBJ spear carrier Hubert Humphrey also got a new lease on life. I will have more to say about this below. Then, seemingly on a dime, in a tick we started to lose ground. The assassination of Martin Luther King and the burning down of the ghettos of major cities in its aftermath and later in the spring of Robert Kennedy at a moment of victory placed everything on hold.

That spring also witnessed turmoil on the campuses of the United States exemplified by the Columbia University shut down and internationally by the student –ignited French General Strike. These and other events held both promise and defeat that year but when I reflect on 1968 almost forty years later I am struck by the fact that in the end one political retread, Richard Milhous Nixon, was on top and the front of an almost forty year bourgeois political counter revolution had began. Not a pretty picture but certainly a cautionary tale of sorts. The ‘of sorts’ of the tale is that if you are going to try to make fundamental changes in this society you better not play around with it and better not let the enemy off the hook when you have him cornered. That now seems like the beginning of wisdom.

I have written elsewhere (see archives, Confessions of An Old Militant- A Cautionary Tale, October 2006) that while all hell was breaking loose in American society in 1968 my essentially left liberal parliamentary cretinist response was to play ‘lesser evil’ bourgeois electoral politics. My main concern, a not unworthy but nevertheless far from adequate one, was the defeat of one Richard Nixon who was making some very depressing gains toward both the Republican nomination and the presidency. As noted in the above-mentioned commentary I was willing to go half the way with LBJ in 1968 and ultimately all the way with HHH in order to cut Nixon off at the knees.

I have spent a good part of the last forty years etching the lessons of that mistake in my brain and that of others. But as I also pointed out in that commentary I was much more equivocal at the time, as Mailer was, about the effect of Robert Kennedy the candidate of my heart and my real candidate in 1968. I have mentioned before and will do so again here that if one bourgeois candidate could have held me in democratic parliamentary politics it would have been Robert Kennedy. Not John, although as pointed out in my review of The Presidential Papers, in my early youth I was fired up by his rhetoric but there was something about Robert that was different. Maybe it was our common deep Irish sense of fatalism, maybe our shared sense of the tragic in life or maybe in the end it was our ability to rub shoulders with the ‘wicked’ of this world to get a little bit of human progress. But enough of nostalgia. If you want to look seriously inside the political conventions of 1968 and what they meant in the scheme of American politics from a reasonably objective progressive partisan then Mailer is your guide here. This is the model, not Theodore White’s more mechanical model of coverage, that Hunter Thompson tapped into in his ‘gonzo’ journalistic approach in latter conventions- an insightful witness to the hypocrisy and balderdash of those processes.