Tongue And Cheek In The Victorian Age-With The Film Adaptation Of Oscar Wilde’s Play “An Ideal Husband” In Mind (1999)-A Film Review

Tongue And Cheek In The Victorian Age-With The Film Adaptation Of Oscar Wilde’s Play “An Ideal Husband” In Mind (1999)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

An Ideal Husband, starring Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, Minnie Driver, Cate Blanchett, Rupert Everett, 1999

Oscar Wilde certainly took a beating, a serious beating including some jail time in Reading Gaol which he wrote about, for his sexual preferences in late 19^th century Victorian England. Stuff that today would draw a yawn in most quarters but which then was scandalous. (As we all know not everybody is on board with the idea that you should be able to love whomever you want to love even in the 21^st century.) Moreover showing the sheer hypocrisy of the times Mr. Wilde took a beating for doing what a good portion, a greater portion than I would have thought, of the gentry and ruling class were doing themselves, especially coming out of the segregated by sex public schools (in America private schools). And nobody thought much about it except you had best stay in the closet-or else. A whole identification underground sub-culture grew up around that closet for both same-sex attraction cultures.

Before I get to the review of the film adaptation of Mr. Wilde’s ironic take on the courting rituals and expectations of late Victorian society among the straights, An Ideal Husband, in the interest of transparency I should note that growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid- 1970s I shared all the prejudices that were prevalent in my neighborhood on the question of sexual preference. That despite, and maybe because of, Cambridge a progressive center for gay and lesbian rights and life-style in the post-Stonewall riots world. I am ashamed to admit now that back then I had a boyfriend, a high school boyfriend, who with his buddies would go down to Provincetown, a historically friendly summer watering hole for gays and lesbians from elsewhere, for the sole purpose of taunting and beating up gay guys in back alleys. And, then, I thought nothing of it. Well, as Josh Breslin my old companion and current fellow writer here loved to say “you can learn some things in this wicked old world.”

On to the story now, the idea behind the sardonic appearances of the ideal husband when among the upper crust making a good marriage for every reason except maybe love was in order. One stem of this plot revolves around the role of women in late Victorian society. On the one hand Lady Chiltern, played by Cate Blanchett, is something of a suffragette, independent political factor and high end moral force on the other she is subordinately devoted to husband Sir Robert’s, played by Jeremy Northam, rising political career. On the one hand Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert’s sister, played by Minnie Driver, is a strong and determined independent young women and on the other she is fatally attracted to cad and gadabout Lord Goring, Sir Robert’s close friend, played by Rupert Everett. He, in turn is a committed gadabout but also a pillar of friendship to his friend Sir Robert when the deal goes down.

A second stem is the duplicity of politics and political power when a worldly and wary Mrs. Cheveley, played by Julianne Moore, enters the lists with a bogus proposition about governmental funding of another one of those can’t miss canal schemes which dotted later Victorian life as the British Empire reached it high side. To grease her skids she has damming evidence against the upstart Sir Robert whose original sin was that he had insider knowledge of deals going down and made the killing on the stock market that started his upward career march. Lastly this is also a send-up on class, on the strange mores of the upper crust, their mating rituals, and their willingness to bend with the breezes to keep their respective places. That attitude and an undertow by Wilde who would soon see just how that high society could be the frivolous existences that a goodly number of the upper crust lived.

Yes, Oscar Wilde knew what castles he was setting on fire with this look (and with The Importance Of Being Ernest), although he probably didn’t know that they would break him, that those works would be the high side of his literary output.        

Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf Coming Up The Mississippi From The Mister James Crow South And Blowing High White Notes In Mind

Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf Coming Up The Mississippi From The Mister James Crow South And Blowing High White Notes In Mind

Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweaty profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come. 

Some nights they were on fire at blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white, I swear, blew out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he was not in his prime.         

The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating father Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.

Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.  

They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their won and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade whiskey (or so he called it).

So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, pretty good right.  

 

 

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake And Satruday Red Barn Dances And White Lightning Dreams In Mind

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake And Satruday Red Barn Dances And White Lightning Dreams In Mind    

Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart said when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after. 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.  

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s. After some thought I pinpointed the first time to a seventh grade music class (Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well) when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of music made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.

In thinking about when I first heard Pete Seeger sign I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time I heard the emerging folk minute. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene. In those days, the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush. Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized. Interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle. Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook.

You Have Come A Long Way, Baby-Maybe-Traversing The Woman Question, Circa 1940-With Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell And A Fistful Of Notable Lesser Female Stars And Starlets-No Men-“The Women”(1939)-A Film Review, Maybe

You Have Come A Long Way, Baby-Maybe-Traversing The Woman Question, Circa 1940-With Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell And A Fistful Of Notable Lesser Female Stars And Starlets-No Men-“The Women”(1939)-A Film Review, Maybe

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

The Women, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and the above mentioned fistful of lesser stars, starlets, fashion models, some producers’ mistresses, a few tramps, a couple more who look like they came out of a high-end bordello in the high rent district of New York City, a couple of  taxi dancers, a few lap dancers and at least half a dozen gold-diggers and not necessarily those lesser females, directed by George Cukor he of the trio of directors who made the classic age of romantic comedy classic, adapted from a play by Claire Luce, she of the Luce of Time magazine founder, screenplay by Anita Loos, she of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes adage (sparked by Dorothy Parker’s Big Blonde the prototype for all subsequent blonde worship and hair rinses), 1939                

Why the hell have I been forced marched into writing a freaking, Sam Lowell’s favorite expression more on him in a moment, silly review about the fantasy lives of the rich upper-crust, the Riverside Drive set, in late Great Depression New York, the film The Women, which I dozed off on at least a few times without missing a beat. More on that in a moment, and hopefully the new policy instigated by site manager Greg Green that some films, some turkeys can be dispensed with by a short brutish swipe and then more on. What I feel compelled to explain is why me, Leslie Dumont, out of the blue has received this loser as her latest assignment.   

This is where Sam Lowell comes in, comes in on the negative side where later when actually dealing with the film after I have had my bilious say he will be redeemed, for now. Greg Green, always Greg Green when stupid stuff happens at this publication, has had a bee up his bonnet around the lack of reviews about art in this publication indirectly pointing the finger at previous site manager Allan Jackson who before he went over the edge a couple of years ago around commemoration of all things 1960s assigned tons of political commentary and film, book and music reviews. (Somebody asked Allan recently on his return here as a contributing editor, whatever that is, if he had ever gone to an art museum, he gave that sly sideways glance when he was in his “don’t suffer fools gladly” mood meaning WFT.     

Sam who had actually been heading toward an art career, had been pushed by his high school art teacher who had paved the way for him to be admitted to art school had always dreamed of being an artist. Having grown up desperately poor his stern and practical Irish Catholic mother who had lesser visions eventually talked him out of that path hoping instead he would get a nice white- collar civil service and push the family fortunes up a notch. He didn’t do that either. Nevertheless, having haunted art museums for years, he was the logical choice to take the continuing assignment, a gravy train assignment meaning he would have had to travel to various art museums and the like. No go though since Sam of late has been knee- deep in his other love writing about the fates of various private detectives and currently why they have or have not been inducted in the P.I. Hall of Fame. He is hot on the case of famous California P.I. Lew Archer who despite a great start in the profession never made the cut. Sam has a theory, a theory about Lew’s sexual impotency which was the major cause of his failure to thrive as he ended up doing “repo” work and peeping through keyholes when that was lucrative divorce work. Greg Green has given Sam a bye on the art front to pursue those leads.      

Now things get dicey. Greg desperate to get started on this projected continuing series cornered me at the water cooler one day and asked me if I wanted the assignment. No way, not interested, never been to an art museum since about high school when we took at trip from Trenton to the Met in New York City. Me and my then boyfriend snuck in some back halls and made out until we were ready to get the bus back to Trenton. To hold Greg off I mentioned that Laura Perkins, a fellow writer here and Sam’s longtime companion, had told me once that she had taken art classes in high school and college and had been to at least one art museum. So, yes, I, according to her “ratted her out.” But revenge is sweet and now that she is herself knee-deep in doing art research and articles and immune from other work, she has put the word in to Greg, who is her poodle now, to give me crazy film assignments like the brain-dead thing I am being forced to review, and review right now.

At this point Sam Lowell redeems himself for a very simple proposition-if you are at a loss, a total loss for a “hook” which every storyline needs to float then go back to tried and true “slice of life” when as here you have an old-time film. And frankly that is the only way that I can figure to say two words, positive or negative, about this film despite the fact that it has an all-female cast. Actually, that may be what is wrong with the thing, with the concept behind Ms. Luce’s original intention. To 2018 eyes which have gone through a few phases of feminism this thing doesn’t fly. For lots of reasons. Here is where I probably should make an act of contrition about any bottom-dwelling I have said about the 24/7 Christmas-etched films which have recently ended on the Hallmark channels. With the lame slapstick and over-the-top sudsy melodrama every Hallmark venture looks like an Academy award nominee.

Okay, slice of life time (thanks again, Sam). This is about the rich and spoiled women who despite the Great Depression still in full blast (it would not really abate until the cataclysmic beginning of World War II in the Pacific for this country) had nothing but time bile on their hands. “Catty” is the word that came to mind very early as the vultures flocked around the latest victim to scavenge. That being pure as the driven snow, Mary, played by super-melodramatic Noma Shearer who made a career doing this tearful muck. Mary, who in real life is the appendage of one Stephen Hanes. One Stephen Hanes, unseen as are all other men from minute one to the end, at least breathing men although the whole plot stinks of men and their perfidy, has left the reservation. Who is having an affair, who is paying the rent for some hat check girl. No, for a damsel in distress met at the perfume counter of Black’s Department Store which I believe is now part of the Macy’s chain but which in its day was the place of places for the high-hatted high-toned set, female division. Middle life crisis Stephen has a yearning for exotic Chrystal, played by Joan Crawfish, oops, Joan Crawford, I am under the influence of a Jack Kerouac short story about a film she did in San Francisco which he witnessed and wrote about. (By the way this is the 50^th anniversary of Kerouac’s too early death.)      

The sweet Mary, sultry Chrystal axis will drive the film’s ups and down, ups and downs aided a cluster of chucking hens led by Rosaline Russell who will convey far and wide at the drop of a hat, maybe just a hefty tip to the all-knowing wait staff at the exclusive combination beauty parlor and health spa where they all go to get refueled for the next bouts whose marriage is on the chopping block. Tough work between sitting through exotic (and truly over-the-top) fashion shows, long martini lunches and back to the exercise room. Tough work too the little witty bon mots and flaming arrows thrown around without discrimination for the truth of the matter or how hurtful it might be to the victim of the latest “be-heading” (the only discrimination, real , is the shabby second-rate treatment of the working class white and black female help which would make one hard pressed then, maybe now to, to believe that every woman is part of one sisterhood)    

Naturally younger gold-digger Chrystal will win round one, will win it almost without a fight which is something these high society dames seem incapable of when the deal goes down. Mary is out on streets. No, that is not the way of that world. She just goes to the West, to Reno for a sweet divorce with all the trimmings. Chrystal wins round two as well snagging Stephen into the marriage bed and easy street. But see Chrystal both overplayed her hand and is nothing but a gold-digging tramp who once she snagged Stephen started lining up the next best thing. Even Stephen got wise by then. And Mary when she got the word drew some from nowhere inner strength to go after her man. Round three to Mary although why she wanted back with her lover man I don’t really know, maybe he made her toes curl in bed, although in 1939 Code world we can’t even think such sexy thoughts. Maybe in the end this is really just another variation on the “boy meet girl” trope that has carried many movies and is another “hook” when you are desperate. I will stick with “slice of life,” circa 1940 since no way would a film like this be produced, not even on the Hallmark channels.  

Finally, and this might sound crazy but when I watched this film, watched it with Josh Breslin and yes, we are friends and let’s leave it at that for the rumor-mongers on the Internet, he blurred out that this film should be reviewed by a male, by a man. I agree.

Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics' "Our Day Will Come" In Mind

Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics' "Our Day Will Come" In Mind

By Sam Lowell

This is the second installment (the first dated January 13, 2018) set as an introduction to the history of the American Left History blog. I am, as pointed out before one of the few people, more importantly one of the few writers, who has taken part in almost all of the key junctures in this forty something year attempt to address the unwritten history of the poor and oppressed in America and the world. That includes the latest flare-up which has brought about a new regime, partially with my help, so I am well-placed to tell the tale. As part of the “truce” arranged with current site manager Greg Green I will tell the story and will elicit comments from a couple of other Editorial Board members. The first installment dealt with the genesis of this blog with predecessors going back to the late 1960s when a number of the older writers still standing came on board, many through long friendships with the previous site manager going back to high school days, including myself.  Today I will deal with the old hard copy version of ALH and the transfer due to economic necessary of going on-line at the beginning of the century.           

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With the seed money we were able to gather after the sale of Progressive Nation we put together the hard copy version of ALH. We, as well, got a big financial boost from our old high school friend and great running back for the North Adamsville Red Raiders, Jack Callahan,  who now is Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and has sold a million cars based on his charming ways (and that of Mrs. Toyota, Chrissie McNamara, his forever high school sweetheart whom he is still married too unlike the rest of us who have at least two marriages per person, a ton of kids, and two tons of college tuitions which are still being paid for or only recently extinguished).  Our idea, really Allan’s idea, no again, really way back when Markin’s idea was to do in a journalistic way what Boston University professor the late Howard Zinn did with his book The People’s History of the United States which is to say look under the rocks, the crevices, the off-beat places in the American experience. Tell the story that doesn’t make the mainstream media, or didn’t for a long time certainly in the time of Reagan’s time in the 1980s when everybody but us it seemed was keeping his or her head down.

So in a funny way we were running against the stream, having only a small steady dedicated readership and writing staff made up of guys I have already mentioned and who readers will know including Josh Brelin from up in Maine who we treated like one of our own. That last statement is important because what happened (and might be the real genesis of what brought about Allan’s downfall) was that for financial reasons, emotional reasons, and a certain tendency on the part of all those involved to get wrapped up in a nostalgia trip back the halcyon days of the 1960s when you couldn’t walk a block in most cities and college towns without running into fellow kindred spirits, some cause bringing people to the streets, and a feeling that the new breeze that Markin had talked endlessly about from high school days on was going to happen almost by default. We were going to turn the world upside down and for keeps.

Obviously at the height of the Reagan era (1980-1992 throwing the first Bush, number 41 in the succession, into the mix) and beyond for a while that was a very tough dollar to pull off as the years going by would develop a divide between the old-time “hippie” base and the generation turning into two generations who were off in a different direction, could as I mentioned in the recent internal wrangling “give a f- - k” about the 1960s except maybe the dope and cool fashions now somewhat revived in a retro movement. For years though Allan and the rest of us were in a running battle over where to go and still deal with our basic mission which is still on the masthead of this blog. Allan would wax and wane with that deep tendency to drift back to the 1960s and cover stuff like all the folk movement stuff when the folk minute (almost literally) was in bloom.

Against a reality, against the real world where except Bob Dylan, and even that would be suspect, nobody knew any of the folk singers and the spirit that drove Allan and me as well, probably everybody but Si Lannon who to this day cringes whenever anybody mentions a guy like faded folksinger Erick Saint Jean whom we thought would be the next Dylan. Spent much cyber-ink of stuff like film noir which was all the rage in college town 1960s film festival retrospectives, Bogie, Robert Mitchum, the French “New Wave.” And deeply into reviewing and commenting on books and the politics of the times which had clearly faded into the dust and that even our older readership got tired of hearing about since they had drifted out of politics seeing the whole thing as a “bummer” to use a 1960s-etched expression or had drifted rightward to the party of the possible-the Democrats. They definitely did not want to hear about the finer points of the Russian Revolution, the Stalin-Trotsky fist fight, or the food fight among American radicals toward the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.                

Every once in a while we would change course a bit, would get more into contemporary politics, move onto the newer versions on the musical scene, review more current books and films but there was something missing. Something that the younger writers in the recent dispute hollered about endlessly when asked to write about the 1960s 24/7/365 when Allan finally went off the deep end for good in the summer of 2017. Having to endlessly write about the Summer of Love, 1967 which set up the explosion that brought everything to a head. Having to write about stuff they were clueless about which is what we were feeling when we confronted the changes in the 1990s. Even then Allan would try an end around and force everybody like he did last year with Alden Riley to write stuff as “punishment” for not knowing every single piece of arcana from the 1960s even if was about, oh I don’t know, plastic surgery, something weird like that.

As you could expect off of this lack of focus drained individual writers, we lost Sal Rizzo, Danny Shea, Henry Sullivan to the ennui, to hubris and lack of candor. Lost a lot of money too, a lot of Jack Callahan’s dough although he was always too much of a good guy to complain (and would tell us “I will just sell more Toyotas”). So we had to when we saw an opportunity to keep going with an on-line publication we did. That would cut expenses dramatically (and Jack would say I don’t have to carry such a large car inventory now) not needing a large office, paper costs and such. We also, or rather Allan came to a big decision which we rubber-stamped, a very big decision once we did transfer to an all on-line operation-bringing in new blood, bringing in younger writers with the original idea to get a more current take on the American political, cultural, social experience. It was a tricky proposition since the older core, including me and Allan, were worried that bringing in more professionally trained writers which is the norm these days since nobody can get anywhere without some kind of Iowa Writers Workshop pedigree would run circles around us. They, I, could not see then that this was necessary, In the end we, Allan, squandered that talent by the straight-jacket maneuvers mentioned earlier driving them to write second-rate stuff just to fill space and fill Allan’s ego when crunch time came.

I was going to finish up this second installment by discussing our first new writer, the now long gone, Jesse Perrier, yes, that Jesse Perrier, who went on to write that slew of crime novels that you see in every airport kiosk, but I will wait and introduce him in the third installment when I discuss the first few years of ALH on-line. More later.     

       

A YouTube film clip of Ruby & The Romantics performing the classic, Our Day Will Come. 

Our day will come
And we'll have everything.
We'll share the joy
Falling in love can bring.

No one can tell me
That I'm too young to know (young to know)
I love you so (love you so)
And you love me.

Our day will come
If we just wait a while.
No tears for us -
Think love and wear a smile.

Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way
Our day will come.
(Our day will come; our day will come.)

[Break]

Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way.
Our day will come.
Our day will come.

 
As I mentioned in a review of a two-volume set of, for lack of a better term, girl doo wop some of the songs which overlapped in a six volume series, I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and that was just fine, all agreed including eventually the parents who saw the whole thing was harmful after a bout with the “devil’s music” nonsense we kids had to put up with), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (a good question, right, which I spent three marriages with all the trimming trying to figure out ,unsuccessfully). I noted there that I had not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I would expand that observation here to include girls’ voices generally. As there, I make some amends for that omission here.

As I also noted in that earlier review one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy’s heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.

And reviewing the material in that volume gave me the same flash-back feeling I felt listening to the girl doo wop sounds. I will give similar examples of that teen boy alienation for this CD set, and this approach drove the reviews of all six of these volumes in the series. I won’t even go into such novelty silly songs as the title self-explanatory My Boy Lollipop by Barbie Gaye; the teen angst hidden behind the lyrics to Bobby's Girl by Marcie Blane; or, the dreamy, wistful blandness of A Thousand Stars by Kathy Young & The Innocents that would have set any self-respecting boy’s, or girl’s, teeth on edge. And prayed, prayed out loud and to heaven that the batteries in that transcendent transistor would burn to hell before having to continue sustained listening to such, well, such… and I will leave it at that. I will rather concentrate on serious stuff like the admittedly great harmonics on Our Day Will Come by Ruby & The Romantics that I actually, secretly, liked but I had no one to relate it to, no our to worry about that day, or any day, or Tonight You Belong To Me by Patience & Prudence that I didn’t like secretly or openly but gave me that same teen angst feeling of having no one, no girl one, belonging to, me.

And while today it might be regarded as something of a pre-feminist feminist anthem for younger women, You Don't Own Me by Lesley Gore, was meaningless for a guy who didn’t have girl to own, or not own, to fret over her independent streak, or not. Moreover, since I was never, at least I never heard otherwise, that I was some damsel in distress’ pining away boy next store The Boy Next Door by The Secrets was wrapped with seven seals. And while I had many a silent, lonely, midnight waiting by the phone night how could Cry Baby by The Bonnie Sisters, Lonely Blue Nights by Rosie & The Originals, and Lonely Nights by The Hearts give me comfort when even Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry hard-rockin’ the night away could not console me, and take away that blue heart I carried like a badge, a badge of almost monastic honor. Almost.

So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of age. Yah, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.

And from girls even.

This Ain’t Your Whistler’s Mother-Traipsing Through The National Gallery Of Art In Sunnier Pre-Shutdown Times-James McNeill Whistler’s “The White Girl,” Symphony In White Whatever Hustle They Are Pulling Now With The Title

This Ain’t Your Whistler’s Mother-Traipsing Through The National Gallery Of Art In Sunnier Pre-Shutdown Times-James McNeill  Whistler’s “The White Girl,” Symphony In White Whatever Hustle They Are Pulling Now With The Title  

By Laura Perkins      

Some people apparently, at least in the art work have a hard time moving on, letting things go. That is the case with one Arthur Gilmore Doyle (hereafter Doyle sine I utterly refuse to buy into the late 19^th fashion among the bluebloods and their wannabes to set themselves apart from the plebian Tom, Dick and Harrys with the three- name moniker to prove I think that they were not illegitimate, foundlings or could trace their genealogy back to the “Mayflower”). Doyle has been my upscale upstart nemesis since I took on this assignment under duress (when my longtime companion Sam Lowell balked on the assignment to pursue other interests I was “ratted out” by Leslie Dumont for having taken a couple of art classes and gone to an art museum making me candidate number one against the rest of the field here).

First Doyle challenged my assertion that the famous, or infamous, Madame X (Madame Guiteau) of John Singer Sargent’s (ditto on the trifecta names) The Portrait of Madame X where she flouted her stuff was a tramp, originally, I said a whore but we are being a little more high-toned now working against a blue-blooded scion. I replied, taking up way too much time away from my commentary on John White Alexander’ Isabella and the Pot of Basil at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (see, Archives, January 15, 2019) in my second foray, that all the documentation, all the memoirs and biographies not basically done by her press agents, then or now, pointed to her sleeping her way up the food chain into French high society. And with all regard to the #MeToo movement today what of it. History is replete with woman who have used their beauty to get ahead in the world, professional beauties who we hope don’t have to do so in the future. Doyle to the contrary argued showing his knowledge of the class as well as sex line, that if Sargent painted her she must be as pure as the driven snow or he would not have truck with tramps, whores, professional beauties. We have gone over that so enough said except I still find it strange that he or anybody else wanted to spill their bile over my comment about Madame’s horrendous bird-like nose. Apparently that was a sign of beauty back then although today nothing by sorrow for her ghastly condition.                      

Now Mr. Doyle, seemingly with plenty of time on his hands indicative of the leisure class has after reading my screed on Alexander’s Isabella has challenged my claims to be an art critic, that I am a disgrace to the profession for stating that this Isabella was some kind of doped up Johns the Baptist-initiated cultist for being sexually aroused by her murdered lover’s head (by her fearful brothers) in that so-called pot of basil. Doyle apparently had not read the fine print or was so bilious about my take on Madame X that he “forgot” that I am not an art critic, not a member of the art museum curator, art gallery owner, high-end art collector, or art journal fraternity which runs the art world. I have already mentioned that I took this art assignment under duress when Greg Green approached after hearing what Leslie Dumont has said about my art “resume.” I took this assignment with the understanding that I would following my muse, my art muse, and pepper my comments with ideas, with my take, which would not be found in the vocabularies of the curators, gallery owners, collectors and journal editors. And I have not.     

What has made Doyle’s temperature rise this time, why he felt the need to foul up cyberspace was my comments about dear Isabella’s drug problem and about her devotion to that bizarre “head in a pot” cult (or platter, bowl, in hand I have seen many variations on how the severed head was handled but they all shared that fetish to worship at the shrine with sensual, sexual desire hence bizarre). He challenged my assertion based on Sam Lowell’s expertise that the plants in the jar were not harmless if symbolic basil but poppies, the stuff of opium and heroin. Sam rechecked the plants at my request and asserted that definitely the plants were poppy. Here is where the class and sex issues totally go over Doyle’s head. Like with the purity of Madame X argument he believes that Alexander would never stoop, his word, to painting some twisted dope fiend hung up on a bizarre cult. That could be left to those Frenchman of the day who made their money by titillating the plebes. Doyle seems to have been obvious to among other things in high Victorian times sniffing dope, snuff boxes, mixing up lanadum was an everyday occurrence to get through the day, especially but not exclusively by women. What about it though if it got them through the day, or through their sorrows. Beyond that I cannot educate the man, nor will I.

On to finally Whistler’s Woman in White, Symphony in White, Number 1, The White Girl or whatever name some curator or high-toned art critic wants to put on one of James McNeill Whistler’s great mood painting in order to argue that the model is either the Madonna, a whore, no, a tramp, somebody’s kept woman, a streetwalker or a nymphomaniac. I will stop there although I have not run out of names for the poor gal depending on the theory being presented. Some Earth mother thing connected with the Pre-Ralphelite Brotherhood being the most popular, although the most ludicrous since her lips are not nearly Angela Joie-full enough for Rosetti and the brethren, a sure tip off Whistler was in some deep opium funk when he created this piece and messed up the lips. Or ran out of ruby red paint. What it is not though is Whistler’s mother, oh, excuse me Symphony in Gray and Black if we want to humor the guy in his funk, and in his bogus art for art’s sake hustle like some preternatural colorist (meant to bring in big bucks from unknowing but rabid collectors looking for something for the wall above the fireplace mantle with cachet).

Let’s get real though this is not down at the heels shop girl who didn’t know the score, didn’t know a certain truth that would forever haunt her image, her reputation.   It took about my fifth time down at the National Gallery of Art in sunnier times when it was open, now closed by government shutdown to figure what was going on here. The deep symbolism which puts Brother Whistler right in vortex as the precursor of the Surrealist movement of the next century. Maybe as one art critic speculated this was a tip of the hat to the coming storm in Whistler’s America, the gathering storm when they had painter’s bloc.  Doyle is not going to like my comments on this one any more than my sexual suggestiveness regard three-name moniker Singer and Alexander and Madame X and Isabella respectively. This portrait has nothing to do with first communion-like virginity, bride of Christ or lost innocence after the Edenic fall, far from it.

What this painting is though is a homage to the Whole of Babylon, the queen bee of courtesans which is how Whistler saw his model, his girlfriend what did they call their relationship in polite society then, yes, consort. Don’t be fooled like all the high-brow Victorian art critics with their handy snuff boxes and be taken in by the white dress, the too skinny red lips, the white curtain, that very convenient white rose. That is all show. That is for the gullible art collectors and museum patrons. The key is the wolf’s head, and I am surprised nobody else has caught the naked symbolism. Although I don’t read or speak Aramaic there is a clear reference in the Book of the Dead according to the Babylonian history scholar James Cee about the wolf’s head and the Whore of Babylon. That the wolf’s head and fur were both an advertisement for a high-born courtesan and as an aphrodisiac for her clients. Nice work, James. For those who have me written down as some Freudian sexual reference cretin or frustrated post-menopausal matron well go to work. As for Doyle when he comes out of his dead faint after reading this give it your best shot. Give it your best shot.    

          

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.                   

     

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.