For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50^th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

By Lance Lawrence

[In the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late daughter (she died in 1996)  whom he never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very young-then)

We had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows. Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.    

I also knew Allan Ginsberg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young to have appreciated his Howl which along with the elegant Kaddish (for his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.) 

This piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsberg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat, the family pet.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsberg and his Peter although they were in friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and maybe in some older sets still in use  Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope, the new religion for the lonely and the lonesome. All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsberg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBERG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance Lawrence]

*(We have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50^th anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac.) 

***********

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.

The Nighttime Is The Right Time-With Fritz Lang’s Film Adaptation Of Clifford Odets’ “Clash By Night” In Mind

The Nighttime Is The Right Time-With Fritz Lang’s Film Adaptation Of Clifford Odets’ “Clash By Night” In Mind  

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

No, I am not here to look over somebody’s, some other reviewer’s shoulder now that Greg Green, the moderator on this site has let the cat out of the bag and told one and all that with my review of 1956’s Giant I was, as he put it, putting myself to pasture. Although I would not have put it that way a few more or less serious medical problems have required me to back off a little on reviewing films, a task I have done now for over forty years-and will continue periodically to do.  (I should add beyond the medical problems, or rather in conjunction with those medical problems my long-time companion Laura Perkins who graces this publication with her occasional reviews had raised holy hell if I don’t slow down and back off-you know that is definitive then.)

Today though I am here to comment on a review of Clash By Night by one of the in-coming reviewers, Sandy Salmon, whom I have known for at least thirty year and have respected for his work at the American Film Gazette almost as long. That is saying something in this cutthroat film critic business where it seems the only real hearing you get is if you plummet some other reviewer’s take, which after all is just a subjective take, and draw blood. As fitting commentary to that respect is that I have freely “stolen” plenty of stuff from his pithy reviews over years (another “trick of the trade” when you don’t have anything bright to say or were hung-over or otherwise indisposed). So enough said about that.  

After reading Sandy’s review I also realized that I was not familiar with the film under review although as the regular readers know I live for film noir, or variations of it which I think is closer to the nut in Clash. So naturally I called him up to ask to borrow his copy of the DVD which he sent me a few days later and which I viewed a couple of days after that. No question as Sandy pointed out Clash is a little hidden gem of a film with the standout cast of Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, and a pre-iconic Marilyn Monroe. With top notch direction by Fritz Lang, the exiled German filmmaker who first drew my attention with his magnificent Metropolis. Lang knew to the marrow of his bones how to set a mood in black and white from the beginning of a film to the end here with a close up look at the shoreline of Monterey setting us up for the clashing waves to come-human clashing waves and with a screenplay by my old friend Artie Hayes from the hot pen of playwright Clifford Odets who before he turned 1950s red scare fink, snitch, sell-out did some very good work (interesting that most of the finks and slinkers like Elia Kazan, Langston Hughes, Josh White and a million others never did produce that much good work after they  went down on their knees to McCarthy or the HUAC and guys like Dalton Trumbo, Dashiell Hammett and Howard Fast who carried their toothbrushes ready to face the stinking bastinado with them into the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch-hunt tribunals lived to do some good work after the red scare blew away like dust.   

No question this film had a good pedigree, had the stuff that kept things moving along in the funny little human drama being played out among ordinary folk with ordinary dreams which got smashed up against  the real world. Sandy made some good points as he summarized the ploy-line for the reader.  I have no quarrel with that but what I want to do is highlight some things that Sandy, the soul of discretion, kind of fluffed. (Remember every good film critic, maybe the whole freaking journalism profession such as it is, depends on some bloody spilling, giving that praise with one hand AND bombshells with the other already mentioned in this damn cutthroat profession-the lord (or lady) giveth and taketh away.) My take on what was going on with all that high-end dialogue that Artie produced to throw in the main character’s mouths. 

For openers let’s call things by their right name, this Mae Doyle, the role played by Barbara Stanwyck, was nothing but a tramp, a drifter and nighty-taker, nightery of any handy warm bed if it came to that. Sure Mae had some femme fatale qualities, Sandy was right to make a comparison with Phyllis, the wanton femme and man trap who put Walter Neff through the wringer in Double Indemnity also played by Ms. Stanwyck, but she was strictly from the wrong side of the tracks. That Phyllis had a certain style-a fatal style like all the beautiful femmes have as well as some handy pocketbook gun and a handy back-up guy waiting in the wings to bail her out when jam time came. Mae, and here Sandy and I will not disagree or if we do he is wrong since he is young at the film nori wars, was bound to let some guy who just wanted a good-looking woman to fill his house with kids take the gaff.  Mae had come home to working class Monterrey after having been out in the big wide world and gotten her younger years dreams crushed. She was now world weary and wary looking for a safe port. Call me politically incorrect or culturally insensitive but once a tramp always a tramp.

Here’s the play- Mae returns to her small family home where her brother, a commercial fisherman, remember old-time Monterey was the sardine capital of the world, Cannery Row now a shopping mall on the bay, made famous by John Steinbeck, is enthralled by Peggy, played by Marilyn Monroe, who is a lot more forgiving about the fate of a lost sister than her brother who nevertheless lets her stay. While keeping a low profile as something of a home body her brother’s boat captain, Jerry, played by gruff and throaty Paul Douglas, a regular sea dog working stiff comes a-courting. After a while, succumbing to a strong desire to have somebody take care of her, to be settled she accepts Jerry’s offer of marriage. Even in accepting Jerry’s proposal though she warned him that she was spoiled goods.           

Things go along for a while with Jerry and Mae, about a year, during which they have a child, a baby girl, but Mae begins to get the wanderlust, begins to get antsy around the very ordinary and plebian Jerry. Enter Earl, or rather re-enter Earl, Jerry’s friend, who had been interested in Mae from day one when Jerry introduced them. He, in the meantime, was now divorced and takes dead aim at Mae. And she takes the bait, falls hard for the fast-talking cynical Earl. They plan for Mae to fly the coop with the baby and a new life. Not so fast though once they confront Jerry with their affair, with his being cuckolded. This is where the dialogue gets right down to basics. Mae gives Jerry what’s what about her and Earl, about her needs. Jerry, blinders off, builds up a head of steam and in another scene almost kills Earl before he realized what he was doing.

This is the “pivot.” Jerry takes the baby on his boat. Mae suddenly realizes that the baby means more to her than Earl who as it turned out didn’t give a rat’s ass about the child. Having been once bitten though when Mae goes to Jerry to seek reconciliation he is lukewarm but as she turns to leave he relents. Maybe they can work things out, or at least that is the look on Mae’s face when she is brought back into the fold at the end of the film.  You really have to see this film to get a sense of the raw emotions on display, and on the contrary feelings each character has about his or her place in the sun. Nicely done Fritz and crew, nicely done.        

Mae knew it, knew it all the time she was leading poor sap Jerry, the role played by Paul Douglas. She took a supposed tough guy, a guy who had been hardened by the sea and twisted him around in and out in two second flat once she got her hooks into him. Earl knew that, Earl played by Robert Ryan, knew from minute one that whatever play Jerry was making for Mae he, Earl, was going to go down and dirty under the silky sheets with her before he was done-wedding ring or no wedding ring. And guess what as you already know she, when she got bored with the frankly boring Jerry and his fucking fish smells, his goddam sardine aura, she was ready to blow town with the hunky Earl. Didn’t think twice about it even with a little child in the way. Yeah, Jerry was made for the role of cuckold, maybe deserved it for having, what did Sandy call him, oh yeah, the blinders on way before he found some silky negligees and come hither perfumes hidden in her bureau drawer (courtesy of Earl or who knows who when she was “going to the movies” every night).       

Then he man’s up, man’s up when it is too late as they, Mae and Earl are ready to take a hike with that little baby in tow. Then Mae got cold feet, supposedly was mother-hungry for the child and was ready to do penance for her indiscretions. Earl had it right though, had Mae pegged as a tramp, as someone looking for the next adventure. That is what makes the end of the film run false as she practically begs Jerry to take her back now that she had seen the light. Jesus what a sap. Earl said it best. If she didn’t go away with him then it would only be a matter of time before she got bored again and took a walk, maybe came running back to him, him and the wild side of life. I bet six, two and even and will take on all-comers that she blows town before the next year is out. You heard it here first- a tramp is always a tramp-end of discussion. Nice first review here Sandy even if you didn’t get it all right, babbled the ball in a couple of places, good luck.      

Dancing Cheek To Cheek, Oops-Ginger Rogers And Fred Astaire’s “Roberta” (1935)-A Film Review

Dancing Cheek To Cheek, Oops-Ginger Rogers And Fred Astaire’s “Roberta” (1935)-A Film Review 

[Sam Lowell, the now retired free-lance journalist who worked with a number of reviewers here has already given his take on being a kid with two left feet in a companion piece to this review. (Actually, in his usual over the top way he only used this review as a foil to express his boyhood frustrations at not being able to dance. I know my man well having worked with him to old days when we were both stringers at American Film Gazette before he moved on and I worked my way up the food chain there before coming over to this publication to finish out my career and once again reunite with the old curmudgeon.) Naturally an over-the-top guy has to try and out shine whoever is doing the companion piece. Unfortunately I don’t have a story at hand to compete with Sam’s high school flame experience meshing with a girl with two left feet whom he did not trip over while dancing the famous, maybe infamous, last chance last dance of the school or church event.

Sam didn’t get a chance to trip over those feet because she tripped over his (to his apparent delight the way he related the story) and full of apologies tried to placate him by accepting his offer to head to the shore and watch the “submarine races.” That is what the teens called it in his locale we just called it fogging up the window shield if in a car and “necking” if not but it was the same heated hormones adventure in either locale. For one of the few times in his life, certainly he never told the truth about any fellow film reviewer during his career in this dog eat dog business, Sam confessed to the girl in question that he did know how to dance either thereafter suggesting that they form a Two-Left Feet Club. He went to heaven when she replied -with only two members. How are you going to compete with a story like that. No way. Truth: I never got a chance to display my own two left feet for except in the acknowledged privacy of my lonely midnight hour room I never went to dances in high school. So I will just have to present this review and take a backseat on this stuff. S.S]

 

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Roberta, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Irene Dunne, music by Jerome Kern, 1935

I can’t dance, can’t dance a lick. Like a lot of guys, maybe gals too but I will just concentrate on guys here, I have two left feet. Nevertheless I have always been intrigued by people who can dance and do it well. Have been fascinated by the likes of James Brown and Michael Jackson growing up. As a kid though I, unlike most of the guys around my way, was weaned on the musicals, the song and dance routines where the couples kicked out the jams. Top of the list in those efforts were the dance team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers whose dancing mesmerized a two left feet kid just at a time when I was coming of age, coming of school dance and checking out girls age and once in a while in the privacy of my lonely room I would try to work out a couple of steps sent on the big screen. No success. Although I had never viewed the Rogers-Astaire film under review back then I got a distinct rush of déjà vu watching this film, Roberta.          

Déjà vu is right since although I had not viewed the film on one of those dark Saturday afternoon matinee double-features when they were running a retrospective at the local theater I already knew what was going to happen. I had seen say Top Hat then and if the truth be known the formula did not vary that much in the whole series of song and dance films Astaire and Rogers did together. It was not about story line although it probably helped the director to have a working script so he could figure out where to have somebody burst out in song, or trip over a table and begin an extended dance routine. That said the “cover” story here is Fred leading a band of upstart Americans into gay Paree (gay in the old-fashioned sense of being happy, thrilled) expecting to have a gig which went south on them. Fred meets Ginger working as Polish countess who is into high fashion which I expect everyone knows old Paris is famous for. That’s allows those bursts into song and dance to go forth without too much interference from the story-line. In short do as I did as a kid and now too just watch Ginger and Fred go through their paces. That’s worth the price of admission.  That and tunes like Smoke Gets In Your Eyes via the magical and under-rated composer Jerome Kern         

In Honor Of The Fallen Vietnam War Brothers Of North Adamsville Whose Names Are Now Eternally Etched In Stone At Town Hall And Down In Washington

In Honor Of The Fallen Vietnam War Brothers Of North Adamsville Whose Names Are Now Eternally Etched In Stone At Town Hall And Down In Washington

By Frank Jackman  

You know I don’t think I really have given the reader the hard edge of how the deaths of our corner boy comrades Rick Rizzo and Donald White who laid down their heads in muddy fields of faraway Vietnam back in the 1960s and are now forever remembered at Town Hall and in black granite in Washington affected all of us when we heard the news. By then, by 1966 and 1967 when they passed, the corner boy crowd from the North Adamsville High Class of 1964, their and our class mostly had passed through seven winds, were scattered to and fro although mostly still Acre connected by parents and siblings. Some still in town like Bart Webber or nearby colleges like Pete Markin, forever known as the Scribe. So the hard solidarity we had accumulated, most of us, the core, from those junior high school days at Atlantic (now renamed North Adamsville Middle School since a couple of schools were combined) at start-out Doc’s Drugstore corner holding the bricks up and racketed up in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school might had dissipated some but it was hard to shake off that a couple of our number had passed so young in the days when we all, including Rick and Donald, thought we would live forever. Writing over fifty years later has some of that same dissipated quality, that time has done its job to make us forget enough to keep back most of the tears.

But that is just plain wrong, wrong enough to need some additional thought and words to speak of the deaths of guys who we thought then, 1966, 1967 then were doing the right thing even if later we mostly changed our minds when we in our turns had to do military service. Maybe not so much on Rich who really was a mad man to beat commie ass, to wipe away whole countries if necessary so we in the Acre could have some, well, whatever we had, peace I guess. Donald (nobody ever called him anything but Donald from as far back as I remember) who really did get a snow job from the Army recruiter who promised the world and brought only the death that Donald’s mother never got over, drew her to an early grave. There I said it, said stuff that should have been mentioned in the previous tributes, the stuff about broken-hearted mothers, and broken-hearted corner boys. Maybe for the first time I will admit, despite my long years as an anti-war activist and peace crusader, that I privately went to Adamsville Beach one night after hearing the news and wept copious tears over poor Donald’s demise. Hopefully that will give the reader a much better sense of how we took our fallen comrades’ deaths.           

When I wrote the first couple of tributes I mentioned that I was probably the surprise choice to take up an  assignment honoring a couple of my Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys, Rick Rizzo and Donald White, from the early 1960s who grow up in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville and laid down their young heads in some now forgotten battlefields of Vietnam.  A key reason for that judgment when the other guys asked me to put a little tribute together that this year is the 50^th anniversary of my struggle as a military resister to that same war. A very, very different storyline from Rick and Donald’s. I was the only one from our crowd who at that time joined the internal Army resistance. I had refused orders to Vietnam, did stockade time and that was that. I have, and others have too, gone through the particulars of my experience elsewhere so that need not detain us here. Besides this is about Rick and Donald. Now the choice seems right, seems righter than rain. So let’s run with the thoughts about these brethren a little bit.

    

Rick was a gung-ho guy, a tough little bastard who imbibed all the anti-communist red scare stuff that we were being force-fed but he was a true believer, a guy who really did want to eliminate every enemy of America. In the early 1960s during what was still the deep Cold War even if there had been some abatement in the national red scare epidemic I had been almost as firm in my beliefs about the “commie menace” as the next guy although maybe not as much as Rick. When Rick blasted us about the latest atrocities by the Communists somewhere we all went ho-hum, even the Scribe who was the most political of all of us. There were a few other guys, maybe Frankie Riley whose parents were rabid Irish Catholics and serious archenemies of the commies, who hung around Tonio’s like Rick but most of us just wanted to get laid and have some booze, stuff like that. Regular high school guy stuff then, and almost mandatory for life among the corner boys.

Rick signed on the dotted line right after high school in 1964 I think with the idea of making the military a career, a choice of many not going to college guys looking to grab a skill while serving their country. In those days in the Acre, the serious working- class section of North Adamsville and home to all the corner boys, not many of the guys expected to, wanted to, or were smart enough to seek the college path. Life was -graduate high school, get a job where you might pick up a skill, get married, have kids, and after a billion years retire and nobody would have been surprised if some young man decided to go into the military rather than be drafted to have some choice in learning a skill. That was Rick to a tee.    

When Rick came home from basic or maybe it was AIT he was all spit and polish and frankly we looked up to him whether we ourselves would enlist or not. (With maybe a couple of exceptions for guys with some kind of medical problems or sole support of the family every guy in the roving Tonio’s corner boy crowd served in the military.) Sometime in late 1965 he got orders for Vietnam and we had a big party for him, as it turned out the last time we would see him. In August of 1966 somewhere in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam during a major confrontation Rick got blown away. The news when it came to us was a shock and each one of the corner boys whatever our subsequent views on that Vietnam War, or wars in general, probably to this day has a little sorrow in his heart for Rick’s too young fate.

Donald White was slightly different. He had gone to college for a year but just couldn’t cut it, was not his thing. Donald never was much of a student, could not bear to listen when the Scribe would start reading stuff out loud, something by a freaking faggot(then) named Allan Ginsberg whom he was all hot and bothered over after reading the explosive poem Howl.  (Some recruiter from North Adamsville Junior College came through the school senior year and grabbed a bunch of kids including Donald who were not qualified to get into a four- year college to enroll in their two-year program with the idea of eventually going to some other school). That drop-out subjected him to the getting very familiar notice to report for induction from his “friends and neighbors” at the local draft board. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop Donald decided to enlist and grab a clerk’s job, maybe as typist, as his MOS. Two unfortunate things befell him. One the war in Vietnam was raging out of control with call-ups of addition manpower every few months and so despite his clerical training he was assigned to an infantry unit in-country when he got orders in 1967. Two, there were really no battle-lines in that damn war like in Europe in World War II and so even lowly clerks had to act as infantrymen, build perimeters, lay mines, dig foxholes and do sentry duty, or get blown away. He, from what one of his Army buddies told us later, was in the thick of the firefights when unit positions were under attack. One night when “Charlie” came over the top Donald fell down, laid his golden blonde hair down in some muddy field.           

All of us guys still standing, pro-war, anti-war, Vietnam vets or “era” (like me) still around agree that there was a very big difference between what got Rick and Donald to join the war effort without qualms before 1968 and what TET and the endless calls for escalation, more bodies chewed up did to the morale of the American forces and the possibilities of winning. The no longer possibilities of winning. Most of us who did our military service did so in the post-1968 and that reflected the chance in spirit even among those who had not the slightest desire to resist (by the way not one of our Tonio’s guys was a draft resister and like I said before I was the only military resister).

All this to say whatever our personal attitudes then or now we had no wish for the death of any individual soldier. Certainly not Rick and Donald. So maybe that is why I was the guy selected to give this late eulogy for our Tonio’s fallen. Now included with tears for my fallen corner boy brethren.

      

Happy, Happy 100th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

Happy, Happy 100^th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)-San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for City Lights Bookstore a very important location in the westward expansion of the "beat" generation of the 1950s from New York City.

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine),   Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Lenin on WWI: For Revolutionary Defeatism (Quote of the Week) In August 1914 at the onset of World War I, a bloody interimperialist war to redivide the world, the Second (Socialist) International collapsed as the leaders of its national sections, with few exceptions, supported their own capitalist governments. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to split those parties and win subjectively revolutionary elements to proletarian internationalism.

Workers Vanguard No. 1159 23 August 2019 TROTSKY LENIN Lenin on WWI: For Revolutionary Defeatism (Quote of the Week) In August 1914 at the onset of World War I, a bloody interimperialist war to redivide the world, the Second (Socialist) International collapsed as the leaders of its national sections, with few exceptions, supported their own capitalist governments. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to split those parties and win subjectively revolutionary elements to proletarian internationalism. Lenin’s program of revolutionary defeatism, which saw the defeat of one’s “own” imperialist bourgeoisie as a motor force for the proletarian seizure of power, was strikingly confirmed in the October 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party. Is it not treachery to Social-Democracy when we see the German socialists’ amazing change of front (after Germany’s declaration of war); the false phrases about a war of liberation against tsarism; forgetfulness of German imperialism, forgetfulness of the rape of Serbia; the bourgeois interests involved in the war against Britain, etc., etc.? Chauvinist patriots vote for the Budget!... Even given the total incapacità and impotence of the European socialists, the behaviour of their leaders reveals treachery and baseness: the workers have been driven into the slaughter, while their leaders vote in favour and join governments! Even with their total impotence, they should have voted against, should not have joined their governments and uttered chauvinistic infamies; should not have shown solidarity with their “nation,” and should not have defended their “own” bourgeoisie, they should have unmasked its vileness. Everywhere there is the bourgeoisie and the imperialists, everywhere the ignoble preparations for carnage; if Russian tsarism is particularly infamous and barbarous (and more reactionary than all the rest), then German imperialism too is monarchist: its aims are feudal and dynastic, and its gross bourgeoisie are less free than the French. The Russian Social-Democrats were right in saying that to them the defeat of tsarism was the lesser evil, for their immediate enemy was, first and foremost, Great-Russian chauvinism, but that in each country the socialists (who are not opportunists) ought to see their main enemy in their “own” (“home-made”) chauvinism. —V.I. Lenin, “The European War and International Socialism” (late August-September 1914)