The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-“You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His Merry Pranksters In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-“You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His Merry Pranksters In Mind

As Told To Allan Jackson

[Christ is there anybody who does not know that a bunch of corner boys led by the late Peter Paul Markin forever called Scribe for his two million notes, his six bulging notepads at any time from his funky long sleeve shirts as always as well totally out of style by the time he wore them courtesy of mother buys at the Bargain Center, a pre-Walmart cheapjack place where she bought her boys twice yearly (beginning of school and Easter the never-ending sequence, which sold last year or the year before style, and I should know since my mother was probably ready to lay on hands once the mothers got to the bins of suck-ass clothing for their charges) headed to California in the Summer of Love, circa 1967 along with a hundred thousand or so others in the same damn boat looking, looking for something. The reason I ask, ask theoretically, is that very recently when I was out there, out in that same California trying to start my life over in the publishing business and then when that idea went into the tank mainly because I was too old to start over (really that somebody had put the kiss of death on me calling me, me of all people, hard to work with) and subsequently had to hit the Bay Area to call in some cash from sources that I had helped in the past I met Jacko Devine on Post Street and he asked me whether what he had heard about us, us North Adamsville corner boys, back in the Summer of Love about riding on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road converted school bus sucking up every known substance in the pharma world, sucking down pooh bear wine and sleeping with every women not tied down was true. Naturally I said it was and was ready to move on when he told me that he had heard it from a friend of Phil Larkin, the guy this sketch is about and his conversion from “Foul-Mouth” Phil in the old Acre neighborhood to “Far-Out Phil when he went West, who had read it here several years ago and had contacted Phil then and was told it was total bullshit. Of course Phil now a successful sell-out businessman denied his past like everybody from Bill Clinton to Harry Harnett just in case anybody important might find out the obvious about our generation-everybody who could do so without total physical harm smoked and ingested as much dope as was around, and there was plenty. In those days Phil, and a whole bunch of others as well saw their rebellion as some red badge of courage but perhaps I speak too much of ancient history.

That reference to Phil in either of his identities made me think back to those days and how Scribe had to pull Phil kicking and screaming to get him to go out. Said he didn’t want to be part of the freak show, didn’t want to be some low-rent carnival act. Then we get him out there and he is like the resurrection and the light. Goes literally from that low-sling corner boy to an upper layer of the hippie kingdom. The girls went crazy for him. That is kind of what I wanted to get off my chest, what I get kind of bilious about when I think about what madness Scribe put us through and how some of us, and I wish to include myself as one of the brethren and will brook no contradiction on the fact, were washed clean by the experiences, took a very different path than what working class boys wearing last year or the year before fashions expected to get out of life. Others like Phil and I will only pick on him because Jacko mentioned his name tome last year out in desolation row Frisco town couldn’t go the distance, didn’t get washed clean, maybe couldn’t and so when that long-range backlash blow-back hit the shores he folded. Folded when he didn’t have to like Madame La Rue had to do since she was only a fellow-traveler at best. There is a great accounting coming, maybe already has come for those who were part of the great Generation of “68 experiments. I wonder if Phil knows that.

P.S Scribe with his two thousand at the ready facts from who the fuck knows where. (I can say that since right this minute the bile in rising when I think about all the crap he laid on us on those lonesome Friday nights in front of hang-out Tonio Pizza Parlor looking, looking for who knows what.) Those two thousand fact his lame idea of how to impress girls who were supposed to fall down at his feet in awe like he was the second coming, or maybe the herald of end times. I have already mentioned and it not worth doing so again that he never after a few fateful attempts mainly with Minnie Murphy and Melinda Loring which proved totally futile and which he moreover smart guy that he was knew were totally futile had date number one with any growing up town North Adamsville girl, from high school or in town. I didn’t either but get this somehow Scribe was the conduit, maybe they saw him as some kind of eunuch, for all the confidential information the girls would tell him like he was an older brother or priest or something and was an invaluable source to every corner boy about the status of any girl of interest. Where those two thousand facts did come in handy was when he hit Harvard Square and laid his line on the neurotic, intellectual girls, what we called “beatniks in that pre-hippie time who went crazy for him in the Hayes-Bickford night but somebody already told that story and this is about a more crass figure from that time who abandoned ship when it was convenient for him to do so. So let’s get to it. Allan Jackson]        

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Everybody, well everybody who checks things out here, or on other sites that I am associated with, knows that I am dedicated to swapping lies about the old days. The old days in this case being the 1960s, and more specifically the 1960s old time corner boy days in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, my growing-up working class hometown. And, of course, if one wants to swap lies about those old days, or any days, then one needs a, well, foil, or foils. Needless to say, via the “miracle” of the Internet, in its various manifestations, all one has to do is latch onto some search engine, type in “corner boys,” “North Adamsville,” or some such combinations and, like lemmings from the sea, our homeland the sea, every surviving corner boy with enough energy to lift his stubby little fingers will be on your screen before you can say, well, say, be-bop night.

Frankie Riley, our lord and chieftain was the first, although he has lost much speed in his pitch since the old days. I won’t bore you with the details of his “exploits.” You can fumble through the archives for that. Nor will I speak of fast-talking Johnny Silver, except to point out that he is the culprit, there is no other way to put it, who started the sexual revolution. No, no the real one that started with “the pill” in the early 1960s and continues through to today with the struggle for women’s liberation, liberation from all kinds of second-class citizen stuff from jobs and wages to help with childcare and housework. No, Johnny started the AARP-version of the sexual revolution-old geezers looking for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, if you ask me but nobody is, asking that is. Those gripping tales can also be found in the archives.

All of this, of course, is prelude to the real subject here. Phil Larkin’s transformation from corner boy “Foul-Mouth” Phil (and he really was, as he would tell you in that moment of candor that he is occasionally capable of) in early 1960s North Adamsville to “Far-Out” Phil on one of the ubiquitous Merry Prankster-inspired converted yellow brick road school buses that dotted the highways and by-ways of the American be-bop heading west night from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (maybe a little earlier in the ‘70s). (For those too young to know, those who have forgotten, and those who have conveniently feigned forgetfulness just in case some statute of limitations has not run out check Wikipedia for an entry for the Merry Pranksters.)

When last we hear from Phil he was heading to Pennsylvania to meet up with some doctoral program research addict whom he “met” on Facebook. That tale, ah, can also be found in the archives. However, unlike these seemingly endless “haunting the Internet” schoolboy antics from guys old enough, well I am no snitch, so let’s say old enough to know better, looking for the fountain of youth, or whatever this Phil transformation story actually interests me. And so here it is. As usual I edited it lightly but it is Phil’s story, and I am pleased to say a good one.

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Phil Larkin here. Jesus, The Scribe [Markin: Like I warned the other guys, Phil, watch on that scribe, or The Scribe thing] actually liked this idea of me telling about riding the, what did he call it, oh yah, the yellow brick road bus, back in my prankster days [Markin: Just to keep things straight, since Phil still likes to play a little rough with the truth, not the famous Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters bus made famous through Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but certainly inspired by it]. I barely got by with my stories about real stuff that people want to read like the trials and tribulations of an older guy trying to “hook-up” with the ladies on what amounted to a sexless sex site and my rendezvous with Amy (and she is not a research addict, Markin, no way, although she is an addict another way but you don’t want to hear that real stuff story), my lovely sociology doctoral student down at Penn State (Go, Nittany Lions!). But he is all over, all f—king over, some little bit of “cultural history” stuff that nobody, except AARP-guys (and dolls) would do anything but yawn over. And those AARP-guys (and dolls) are too busy trying to “hook-up,” to grab some sex before is too late to spent more than two seconds on ancient history. So this one is strictly for The, oops, Peter Paul Markin.

What got the whole memory lane thing started was that somewhere Markin picked up, probably second-hand off of Amazon if I know him, a CD from Time-Life Music entitled something like Shakin’ It Up: 1966. Now the music on the compilation, the music in the post-British invasion, heart of acid rock night, was strictly for laughs. But the artwork on the cover (as Markin told me was true on other CDs in this expansive classic rock 'n' roll era series) featured nothing more, or nothing less, than a day-glo bus right out of my prankster days, complete with some very odd residents (odd now, not then, then they were righteous, and maybe, just maybe still are). That scene gave us a couple of hours of conversation one night and jogged my memory about a lot of things. Especially about what Markin, hell, me too, called the search of the great American freedom night. (He put some colors, blue-pink like just before dark, dark out West anyway, in his but we, for once. were on the same page.)

Naturally, Markin as is his wont [Markin: “Wont” is my word not Phil’s. His, I prefer, strongly prefer, to not to post], once he played the CD and played me for information (I know this guy, remember) ran off like a bunny and wrote his version as part of a review of the CD. Of course, being, well, being Markin he got it about half-right. So let me tell the story true and you can judge who plays “rough” with the truth.

Markin at least had it just about right when he described that old bus:

“A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s, come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”

“Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo splashes, and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. 

To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffel bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night you could take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high- grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically.”

That says it all pretty much about the physical characteristics of the bus but not much about how I got on the damn thing. Frankly, things were pretty tough around my house, things like no having much of a job after high school just working as a dead-ass retail clerk up at Raymond’s Department Store in Adamsville Plaza. Not really, according to dear mother, with dear old dad chiming in every once in a while especially when I didn’t come up with a little room and board money, being motivated to “better myself,” and being kind of drift-less with my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys long gone off to college, the service, or married, stuff like that. Then too I was having some girl trouble, no, not what you think girl baby trouble just regular the battle of the sexes stuff when my honey, Ginny McCabe, practically shut me off because I didn’t want to get married just then. But I knew something was in the air, something was coming like “the scribe” was always predicting. [Markin: I'll let that small case scribe pass, Phil] And for once I wanted in on that. But the specific reason that I split in the dead of the North Adamsville night was that I was trying to avoid the military draft, now that the war in Vietnam was escalating with nowhere else to go. I knew my days were numbered and while I was as patriotic (and still am, unlike that parlor pinko, commie, Markin) as the next guy (and these days, girls) I was not ready to lay down my life out in the boondocks right then. So I headed out on the lam.

[Markin: Phil, as he related this part of the story that night, had me all choked up about his military plight and I was ready to say brother, welcome to the anti-imperialist resistance. Then I realized, wait a minute, Phil was 4-F (meaning he was not eligible for drafting for military service due to some medical or psychological condition in those days for those who do not know the reference. A prima facie example, I might add, of that playing rough with the truth I warned you about before.]

Hey, I am no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work boots on my feet.(Sandals would not come until later when I got off the road and was settled in a “pad” [Markin: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment, hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten-mile walk to the nearest town in front of you). I mention all this because that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1966 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.

So short on dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness then, I started to hitchhike with the idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish, or one of those old-time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, no problem, let’s get going. Especially no problem when just a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stopped on Route 128, backed up, and a guy who looked a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says, “where are you heading?” (Okay, okay, Markin, young women, alright.) West, just west. And then the beatified words, “Hop in.”

Most of the road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little adventures like that. A mini-van frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a few short twenty-miles non-descript rides in between but heading west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight working class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just mentioned called me when I “passed” on smoking a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex {Markin: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was finally shaking off the dust from that place.

Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van or school bus handy for their “search” for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple in back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!

After we settled in, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that, no sir), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me then, probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy wasn’t around, well we both agreed there was something there but in those 1966 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway whether it was generally honored or not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before (weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few years anyway).

Naturally, well naturally after the fact once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarefied dope (no, again, no on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing just then. In the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love of 1967, and after that, is when the acid hit, and when I tried it but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away from what you were in North Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.

So that night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we all, as it turned, out were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t square about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out all the way to the end right then for the chance might not come again.

The next day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became “Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked that day (herb, hashish, a little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of mescaline), I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood to start the cooking of the night’s pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagey, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world, started dancing by himself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, the one that traced the max-daddy rocker of the late 1960s night Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? One of the scenes at one of the concerts, an outdoor, maybe desert outdoor one, had him, head full of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Yah, one of those Indian (Markin: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in late May of 1966, if you can believe that.

And see, although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing the night before. This Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. [Markin: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that point from you in my review.] Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before. I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like stuff because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin, from what I can gather, is always running on about. She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so, danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far out. And Far-Out Phil was born.

Oh, as for Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been as wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys away. I even worked some plebeian “magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that worked for me every Sunday after 8:00 AM Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with foxy Millie Callahan, back in the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or not.

No offense against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think. No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his clot of merry pranksters, real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride). Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was merely the “leader” here. The driving was left to another, older guy. This driver was not your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one noticed those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music-stoned, that those things passed like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Haverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and about one hundred years more experienced, also weary, very weary of co-eds, copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to see his girlfriend, or his wife, I am not sure which in Denver so I knew where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.

And the passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual, lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We did know for sure that Casey was driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Other whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s girlfriend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it), Dallas Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they were also, or almost all were, twenty-some-things that had some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they were all either searching or, like the Captain, were at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.

As for the rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, as the bus approached the outskirts of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town poky. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures, thinking back on it now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll with a little food on the side. If you want to hear about them just ask Markin to contact me. The real thing though, the thing that everybody should remember is that dance night in Ames, Iowa when Phil Larkin got “religion,” 1960s secular religion. He slid back some later, like everybody does, but when he was on the bus he was in very heaven.

Markin note: No question that this story, except perhaps for hormonal adolescents, is better than those dreary old geezer searching for young love tales that he ran by us before. By the way Phil, you don’t happen to have Luscious Lois’, ah, Sandra Sharp’s, cell phone number or e-mail address. And don’t lie and say you don’t have it. You never crossed off a woman’s name from your book in your life. Give it up.

On The Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side

Markin comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
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Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861

Controversy Over the Trent Case


Written: December, 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 340, December 11, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: S. Ryan;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney.


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London, December 7, 1861
The Palmerston press (and on another occasion I will show that in foreign affairs Palmerston's control over nine-tenths of the English press is just as absolute as Louis Bonaparte's over nine-tenths of the French press) -- the Palmerston press fells that it works among "pleasing hindrances". On the one hand, it admits that the law officers of the Crown have reduced the accusation against the United States to a mere mistake in procedure, to a technical error. On the other hand, it boasts that on the basis of such a legal quibble a haughty ultimatum has been presented to the United States such as can only be justified by a gross violation of law, but not by a formal error in the exercise of a recognised right. Accordingly, the Palmerston press now pleads the material legal question again. The great importance of the case appears to demand a brief examination of the material legal question.

By way of introduction, it may be observed that not a single English paper ventures to reproach the San Jacinto for the visitation and search of the Trent. This point, therefore, falls outside the controversy. First, we again call to mind the relevant passage in Victoria's proclamation of neutrality of May 13, 1861. The passage reads:

"Victoria R."


Whereas we are at peace with the United States ... we do hereby strictly charge ... all our loving subjects ... to abstain from contravening ... our Royal Proclamation ... by breaking ... any blockade lawfully ... established ... or by carrying officers ... dispatches ... or any article or articles considered contraband of war.... All persons so offending will be liable ... to the several penalties and penal consequences by the said Statute or by the law of nations in that behalf imposed.... And ... persons who may misconduct themselves ... will do so at their peril ... and ... will ... incur our high displeasure by such misconduct.

This proclamation of Queen Victoria, therefore, in the first place declared dispatches to be contraband and make the ship that carries such contraband liable to the "penalties of the law of the nations". What are these penalties?

Wheaton, an American writer on international law whose authority is recognised on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean alike, says in his Elements of International Law, p. 565

"The fraudulent carrying of dispatches of the enemy will also subject the neutral vessel in which they are transported to capture and confiscation. The consequences of such a service are indefinite, infinitely beyond the effect of any contraband that can be conveyed. 'The carrying of two or three cargoes of military stores,' says Sir W. Scott [the judge], 'is necessarily an assistance of limited nature; but in the transmission of dispatches may be conveyed the entire plan of a campaign, that may defeat all the plans of the other belligerent.... The confiscation of the noxious article, which constitutes the penalty for contraband ... would be ridiculous when applied to dispatches. There would be no freight dependent on their transportation and therefore this penalty could not, in the nature of things, be applied. The vehicle, in which they are carried, must, therefore, be confiscated.."

Walker, in his Introduction to American Law, says:

"...neutrals may not be concerned in bearing hostile dispatches, under the penalty of confiscation of the vehicle, and of the cargo also."

Kent, who is accounted a decisive authority in British courts, states in his Commentaries:

"If, on search of a ship, it is found that she carries enemy dispatches, she incurs the penalty of capture and of confiscation by judgment of a prize court."

Dr. Robert Phillimore, Advocate of Her Majesty in Her Office of Admiralty, says in his latest work on international law, p. 370:

"Official communications from an official person on the public affairs of a belligerent Government are such dispatches as impress an hostile character upon the carriers of them. The mischievous consequences of such a service cannot be estimated, and extend far beyond the effect of any Contraband that can be conveyed, for it is manifest that by the carriage of such dispatches the most important operations of a Belligerent may be forwarded or obstructed.... The penalty is confiscation of the ship which conveys the dispatches and ...of the cargo, if both belong to the same master."

Two points are therefore established. Queen Victoria's proclamation of May 13, 1861, subjects English ships that carry dispatches of the Confederacy to the penalties of international law. International law, according to its English and American commentators, imposes the penalty of capture and confiscation on such ships.

Palmerston's organs consequently lied on orders from above -- and we were naive enough to believe their lie -- in affirming that the captain of the San Jacinto had neglected to seek for dispatches on the Trent and therefore had of course found none; and that the Trent had consequently become shotproof through this oversight. The American journals of November 17 to 20, which could not yet have been aware of the English lie, unanimously state, on the contrary, that the dispatches had been seized and were already in print for submission to Congress in Washington. This changes the whole state of affairs. Because of these dispatches, the San Jacinto had the right to take the Trent in tow and every American prize court had the duty to confiscate her and her cargo. With the Trent, her passengers also naturally came within the pale of American jurisdiction.

Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co., as soon as the Trent had touched at Monroe, came under American jurisdiction as rebels. If, therefore, instead of towing the Trent herself to an American port, the captain of the San Jacinto contented himself with seizing the dispatches and their bearers, he in no way worsened the position of Mason, Slidell and Co., whilst, on the other hand, his error in procedure benefited the Trent, her cargo and her passengers. And it would be indeed unprecedented if Britain wished to declare war on the United States because Captain Wilkes committed an error in procedure harmful to the United States, but profitable to Britain.

The question whether Mason, Slidell and Co., were themselves contraband, was only raised and could only be raised because the Palmerston journals had broadcast the lie that Captain Wilkes had neither searched for dispatches, nor seized dispatches. For in this case Mason, Slidell and Co. in fact constituted the sole objects on the ship Trent that could possibly fall under the category of contraband. Let us, however, disregard this aspect for the moment. Queen Victoria's proclamation designates "officers" of a belligerent party as contraband. Are "officers" merely military officers? Were Mason, Slidell and Co. "officers" of the Confederacy? "Officers," says Samuel Johnson in his dictionary of the English language, are "men employed by the public", that is, in German: Öffentliche Beamte. Walker gives the same definition. (See his dictionary, 1861 edition.)

According to the usage of the English language, therefore, Mason, Slidell and Co., these emissaries, id est, officials of the Confederacy, come under the category of "officers", whom the royal proclamation declares to be contraband. The captain of the Trent knew them in this capacity and therefore rendered himself, his ship and his passengers confiscable. If, according to Phillimore and all other authorities, a ship becomes confiscable as the carrier of an enemy dispatch because it violates neutrality, in a still higher degree is this true of the person who carries the dispatches. According to Wheaton, even an enemy ambassador, so long as he is in transitu, may be intercepted. In general, however, the basis of all international law is that any member of the belligerent party may be regarded and treated as "belligerent" by the opposing party.

"So long as a man," says Vattel, "continues to be a citizen of his own country, he is enemy of all those with whom his nation is at war."

One sees, therefore, that the law officers of the English Crown reduced the point of contention to a mere error in procedure, not an error in re, but an error in forma, because, actually, no material violation of law is to hand. The Palmerston organs chatter about the material legal question again because a mere error in procedure, in the interest of the Trent at that, gives no plausible pretext for a haughty-toned ultimatum.

Meanwhile, important voices have been raised in this sense from diametrically opposite sides: on the one side, Messrs. Bright and Cobden; on the other, David Urquhart. These men are enemies on grounds of principle and personally: the first two, peaceable cosmopolitans; the third, the "last of the Englishmen"; the former always ready to sacrifice all international law to international trade; the other hesitating not a moment: "Fiat Justitia, pereat mundus", and by "justice" he understands "English" justice. The voices of Bright and Cobden are important, because they represent a powerful section of middle-class interests and are represented in the ministry by Gladstone, Milner Gibson and also, more or less, by Sir Cornewall Lewis. The voice of Urquhart is important because international law is his life-study and everyone recognises him as an incorruptible interpreter of this international law.

The usual newspaper sources will communicate Bright's speech in support of the United States and Cobden's letter, which is conceived in the same sense. Therefore I will not dwell on them.

Urquhart's organ, The Free Press, states in its latest issue, published on December 4:

"'We must bombard New York!' Such were the frantic sounds which met the ears of everyone who traversed the streets of London on the evening of this day week, on the arrival of the intelligence of a trifling warlike incident. The act was one which England has committed as a matter of course [in every war] -- namely the seizure on board of a neutral of the persons and property of her enemies."

The Free Press further argues that, in 1856 at the Congress of Paris, Palmerston, without any authority from the Crown or Parliament sacrificed English maritime law in the interest of Russia, and then says:

"In order to justify this sacrifice, Palmerston's organs stated at that time that if we maintained the right of search, we should assuredly be involved in a war with the United States on the occasion of the first war in Europe. And now he calls on us through the same organs of public opinion to bombard New York because the United States act on those laws which are theirs no less than our own."

With regard to the utterances of the "organs of public opinion", The Free Press remarks:

"The bray of Baron Munchausen's thawing posthorn was nothing to the clangour of the British press on the capture of Messrs. Mason and Slidell."

Then humorously, it places side by side, in "strophe" and "antistrophe", the contradictions by which the English press seeks to convict the United States of a "breach of law".

* 'A TERRIBLE BEAUTY WAS BORN' -HONOR JAMES CONNOLLY AND THE EASTER RISING, 1916

*** 'A TERRIBLE BEAUTY WAS BORN' -HONOR JAMES CONNOLLY AND THE EASTER RISING, 1916

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of The Wolftones Performing The Song In Honor Of "James Connolly". There are also some very good photographs of the destruction of Dublin after the British shelled the downtown area of "their province" to kingdom come.

COMMENTARY

ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CONNOLLY, COMMANDANT- IRISH CITIZEN ARMY- EXECUTED BY THE BLOODY BRITISH IMPERIALISTS MAY, 1916. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP AND THE 10 MARTYRED LONG KESH HUNGER STRIKERS. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE 90th ANNIVERSARY OF THE EASTER UPRISING, 1916. BRITISH TROOPS OUT OF IRELAND TODAY (AND WHILE WE ARE AT IT OUT OF IRAQ).

A word. They tell a story about James Connolly that just before the start of action on Easter Monday, 1916 he told the members of the Irish Citizen’s Army (almost exclusively workers, by the way) that if the uprising was successful to keep their guns handy. More work with them might be necessary against the nationalist allies of the moment organized as the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers were mainly a petty bourgeois formation that had no intention of fighting for Connolly's vision of a Socialist Republic. True story or not, I think that gives a pretty good example of the strategy and tactics to be used in colonial and third world struggles by the working class. Would that the Chinese Communists in the 1920’s and other colonial and third world liberation fighters since then have paid heed to that strategic concept.

James Connolly, June 5, 1868-May 12, 1916, was of Scottish Irish stock. He was born in Edinburgh of immigrant parents. The explicit English colonial policy of trying to drive the Irish out of Ireland and thus created the Irish diaspora produced many such immigrants from benighted Ireland to England, America, Australia and the far flung parts of the world. Many of these immigrants left Ireland under compulsion of banishment. Deportation and executions were the standard English response in the history of the various “Troubles" from Cromwell’s time on.

Connolly, like many another Irish lad left school for a working life at age 11. The international working class has produced many such self-taught and motivated leaders. Despite the lack of formal education he became one of the preeminent left-wing theorists of his day in the pre- World War I international labor movement. In the class struggle we do not ask for diplomas, although they help, but commitment to the cause of the laboring masses. Again, like many an Irish lad Connolly joined the British Army, at the age of 14. In those days the British Army provided one of the few ways of advancement for an Irishman who had some abilities. As fate would have it Connolly was stationed in Dublin. I believe the English must rue the day they let Brother Connolly near weapons and near Dublin. As a line in an old Irish song goes- ‘ Won’t Old Mother England be Surprised’.

By 1892 Connolly was an important figure in the Scottish Socialist Federation which, by the way, tended to be more militant and more Celtic and less enamored of parliamentarianism than its English counterpart. Later, the failure to gather in the radical Celtic elements was a contributing factor in the early British Communist Party’s failure to break the working class from the Labor Party. Most of the great labor struggles of the period cam from the leadership in Scotland and Ireland. Connolly became the secretary of the Federation in 1895. In 1896 he left the army and established the Irish Socialist Republican Party. The name itself tells the program. Ireland at that time was essentially a classic English colony so to take the honored name Republican was to spit in the eye of the English. Even today the English have not been able to rise to the political level of a republic. Despite Cromwell’s valiant attempt in the 1600's and no thanks to today's British Labor Party’s policies this is still sadly the case. All militants, of whatever nation, can and must support this call- Abolish the British monarchy, House of Lords and the state Church of England.

In England Connolly was active in the Socialist Labor Party that split from the moribund, above-mentioned Social Democratic Federation in 1903. During the period before the Easter uprising he was heavily involved in the Irish labor movement and acted essentially as the right hand man to James Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913 when Larkin led a huge strike in Dublin but was forced to leave due to English reprisals Connolly took over. It was at that time that Connolly founded the Irish Citizens Army as a defense organization of armed and trained laboring men against the brutality of the dreaded Dublin Metropolitan Police. Although only numbering about 250 men at the time their political goal was to establish an independent and socialist Ireland.

Connolly stood aloof from the leadership of the Irish Volunteers, the nationalist formation based on the middle classes. He considered them too bourgeois and unconcerned with Ireland's economic independence. In 1916 thinking the Volunteers were merely posturing, and unwilling to take decisive action against England, he attempted to goad them into action by threatening to send his Irish Citizens Army against the British Empire alone, if necessary. This alarmed the members of the more militant faction -Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had already infiltrated the Volunteers and had plans for an insurrection as well. In order to talk Connolly out of any such action, the IRB leaders, including Tom Clarke and Patrick Pearse, met with Connolly to see if an agreement could be reached. During the meeting the IRB and the ICA agreed to act together at Easter of that year.

When the Easter Rising occurred on April 24, 1916, Connolly was Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, and as the Dublin brigade had the most substantial role in the rising, he was de facto Commander in Chief. Following the surrender he was executed by the British for his role in the uprising. Although he was so badly injured in the fighting that he was unable to stand for his execution and he was shot sitting in a chair. The Western labor movement, to its detriment, no longer produces enough such militants as Connolly (and Larkin, for that matter). Learn more about this important socialist thinker and fighter. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CONNOLLY.

A word on the Easter Uprising. The easy part of analyzing the Uprising is the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland and militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it and therefore doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the strategy and tactics of the action and of the various actors, particularly in underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations. The British (or fill in the name of whatever colonial power applies) were entirely committed to defeating the uprising, including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and all other militants today is the same as back then in 1916- All British Troops Out of Ireland.

In various readings I have come across a theory that the Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders, only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. Let poets rule the land, an old idea. As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. Some formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Soviet Commune of 1917 did not figure in the political calculations at that time.

As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic. That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter Rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own revolutionary experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime merited support. This is based on the old socialist principle that the main enemy is a home. Chocky Ar La.

THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN FROM MEMORY AND THUS SOME OF THE DATES AND ORGANIZATIONAL NAMES MAY BE INCORRECT. THE WRITER WOULD APPRECIATE ANY CORRECTIONS. NEEDLESS TO SAY, NOTWITHSTANDING SUCH ERRORS, THE WRITER STANDS BY HIS POLITICAL CONCLUSIONS.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Be-Bop Baby Boom Jail Break-Out-The Cats Are Still Rocking –With The Chiffons He’s So Fine In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Be-Bop Baby Boom Jail Break-Out-The Cats Are Still Rocking –With The Chiffons He’s So Fine In Mind

By Allan Jackson

[A while back, maybe a couple of modern introductions ago I mentioned that out in the corner boy night a lot, a very lot if one can use such a term, of the talk was about girls, and not just the local girls who gave us more hard times and hard luck than you could imagine (that hard times and hard luck having a lot to do with them to use a crude term of art of the corner boy times not “coming across” meaning exactly if you were, are, a teenage boy no sex, or worse no “do the do” as we called after we heard the old blues master mad monk Howlin’ Wolf use the term in one of his blues songs, which might be expected after they got you all worked up although that did not preclude, not preclude at all lying our asses off saying we got whatever we wanted from some sullen frail of interest. That too a very lot part of the stifling corner boy night around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” where we working class boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville hung when we weren’t doing something). We also talked, endlessly talked when the Scribe was on the run, when he wanted to dazzle us with one of his two thousand arcane facts about other faraway girls, girls which I would later following Mick Jagger call the girls with the faraway eyes.

The big category in high school though, this long before the Scribe dragged us out to the West Coast at the time of the Summer of Love uprising in 1967 were the golden dream girls of Southern California, the ones that the Beach Boys were endlessly writing songs about and   which in our vapid imaginations made us hunger for those seemingly easy blonde, tanned, long-legged surfer girls who according to urban legend or against our from hunger minds were ready to do the do at the drop of a hat. Nice dream if not the reality, well, no the reality for me anyway as much as I loved the ocean and figure that I could have learned to surf, learned to fret about not having a little deuce coup, fret about that perfect wave and such. That was then though, the dream time which made our many girl-less nights, our many no come across nights a little less onerous.     

Here’s the funny part, the part that drove me to re-think about that phantom surfer girls experience when the real deal went down. When we did get to the West Coast a few years later after high school we could see the sea change in dramatic form, in the form of “Butterfly Swirl” for one who can stand in for what I want to mention today about the genesis of this sketch. Butterfly Swirl, obviously not her real name but a moniker I think Josh Breslin, who had an affair with her as did others from our crowd, put on her since she was a flaming light for our sore eyes, real name Kathy Callahan, from Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego whom we met when we were riding Captain Crunch’s merry prankster yellow brick road converted bus to psychedelic travelling caravan home down into La Jolla. La Jolla one of the surfing kingdom’s hot spots.

In 1963 said she, we, would probably not come within ten thousand miles of each other-Carlsbad surfer girl and North Adamsville corner boys not matter what our desires, our Beach Boy-etched desires. In 1967 though there was convergence in an odd way. Butterfly really was the classic surfer girl of the day all blonde, corn-fed great figure as opposed to her Okie forebears who left the dust bowl to seek the Garden of Eden written with hunger on every face, the bluest of blue eyes but most importantly she had imbibed the whole surfer culture which meant then, not now when you can’t tell the gender of the surfer until they come ashore and take off their wetsuits, waiting on some forlorn beach looking beautiful if bored until your surfer boy found his perfect wave-which usually took all day. That bored part is what got Butterfly to come over to the bus and ask what we were about, whether we had dope which she had heard about, the answer yes, and where we were headed. Anyplace. That night, no the next night Butterfly fed up with waiting around those forlorn beaches decided to travel with us for a while. Those travels, her affairs for the few months she was with us have been detailed elsewhere. Like I have said before-wasn’t that a time. A time when surfer girls and hippies plied the same sodden path. But also like I said before the road, the long winding road seeking that newer world that the Scribe was always yakking about wasn’t for everybody and it wasn’t for Butterfly who having flown the coop for a while went back to her perfect wave surfer boy. Yeah, but wasn’t that a time. Allan Jackson]          

************        

Everybody knew, everybody who got within fifty feet of him, distance enough for him to bellow out some 1950s song, sometimes on key sometimes off depending on his pipes since he had not been gifted with perfect pitch, knew that Jimmy Jones had been on some kind of childhood nostalgia kick back in 2012 when he went wild or as he said more soberly at the time, “I have recently been on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in an extensive commercial Rock ‘n’ Roll series and have kicked out the jams doing that deed.” Done so for a purpose to be described now. Well, hell, you already know if you knew Jimmy back in the day, back when that rock and roll music was just coming off the presses as fast a discretionary spending teenagers could get their hands on the latest be all and end all number, or like I did when I met him about twenty years ago when he was married to my sister Jenny, his third and hers too so there was no crying about what to expect, or not expect out of that institution, that it had to be about some woman.

A lot of the nostalgia gag, given that Jimmy had just turned seventy at the time, and frankly should have been past such childish things had been a result of running into Melinda Loring, an old classmate and one time dream flame in high school, Hampton Falls High up in New Hampshire, although nothing had come of it then. Nothing had come of it after he, having been properly warned off after inquiring of some guys at school about whether she had a boyfriend or not, important information to avoid the fatal faux pas of making a “move” on somebody who was “taken” that she was “unapproachable,” had moved on.

There are books that could be written, and maybe they have already, about the subtle and not so subtle codes in that old time mating ritual but I think Jimmy had it about right to move on rather than test the waters and become the tittle at some Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest where such an indiscretion would have been the kiss of death for him for the rest of his high school time. See too Melinda confirmed that information when he ran into her at some class reunion thing or I think he said it was the class celebrating all those who had survived three score and ten having gained some wisdom from two broken marriages. Get this though and you may not find it in any code book but maybe just the book of getting on in life she said that she was not “unapproachable” to Jimmy now.

And so they had had a short affair, a few month thing not exactly a fling but not exactly forever, an affair that just didn’t have the will power to survive on both parts, her with her incessant need to plan in detail their every move for the next three years and he by an incessant need after his own three failed marriages to keep running away from the serious commitment that she craved. However during the high life of the affair Jimmy felt that he needed to go back and retrace their musical times, felt as was his wont that he had to trace every blessed song (and bellow them out as well) from their youth in order to impress her with his sincerity. See that was his style, his way to work the woman scene back then and it worked, worked on girls who were as nerdy as him but not genuine foxes like Melinda (and looking at an old high school yearbook photograph, no, not the silly class picture where everybody looked like they had just done five to ten for armed robbery at the state pen, even the girls, but one of her as an officer some club, the Glee Club I think, confirms that “fox” designation).

And so the affair, or whatever it was in each of their minds, might not have lasted but his CD review work has a certain lasting quality that he insisted that I read. See I knew guys like Jimmy in high school, nerdy guys who had to know every blessed thing about some subject or they felt stupid or incomplete but you had better ask your shrink about that, and being the same age roughly knew the music (unlike my sister Jenny who was ten years younger and so knew “acid rock” and later stuff) and so I became something of a sounding board as he “discovered” each new selection. Oh yeah, and in case you don’t remember I would have been a guy who warned Jimmy off of Melinda back in the day, and that little recent affair they had as well except I was in California then, and so he said I “owed” him. In the interest of full disclosure, and Jimmy knows this opinion of mine so I am not telling tales out of school. See I too was a guy who was interested in a girl, Diana Wilson, and another classmate had warned me off her as “unapproachable” except I did not move on and faced a few Monday morning before school girls’ locker room bashings (again showing how important intelligence is to have before making some fatal blushing move).       

Jimmy told me a lot of his reviews had been driven by the artwork which graced the covers of each CD, both to stir ancient memories and reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may, to the themes of those artwork scenes. The series basically went from about 1955 to 1965 the time now called the age of classic rock and roll. One year, the year I want to hone in on, 1959, Jimmy found the artwork a case of the latter, of the not fitting in.

He said on the cover (actually he showed me the cover after he described the thing since I just had to see it), a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our generational breakout), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow, were “checking out” the scene. A term back then, maybe now too, meaning only one thing in summer, hell, in any season, meaning checking out the frails (a localism that got started as far as Jimmy knew by his corner boy, Frankie Kelly, who had about twenty different names for girls, so many that he and the other corner boys could not keep up).

The two blonde surfers, although not all surfers were blonde even though I think all their girlfriends were out there in sunny California, were just the front. Just the frosting, okay. The important scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, the place where oldsters, even old hipsters in the black night let out for a day of sun are not welcome here, and certainly not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and tacky hot dogs and tepid hamburgers, longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that primitive time before we called them sister, and woman. No question that this whole scene had been nothing but a California come hinter scene. One thinks ahead to warm night breezes and souped-up cars traveling the boulevard (also not pictured) looking, and looking hard like we all did, and not just in cool breeze California for the heart of Saturday night.

No way that it has the look of Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. This is nothing but early days California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed bikini girls. These surfers, if that is what they are calling themselves are, no question “beach bums,” inventing themselves in classic Hollywood-driven California style, little did we know in the frigid East unless we had relatives or friends there that whole sub-cultures, or what would be called sub-cultures by the hoary academics who wanted to explain everything, of surfers, hot-rodders, outlaw bikers valley boys, and later girls, out there waiting for the winds to blow eastward. No way that they are serious surfer guys, certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House La Jolla gang where those surfers lived for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity though for avoiding becoming a prune waiting on those perfect waves needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of those shes they are checking out Jimmy said he would leave to the reader’s imagination.

And what caused Jimmy not to fit into that scene other that the fact that he was not blonde, had not known until he actually when out there in the mid-1960s that surfers as a culture even existed, and as we know had been rebuffed before he started by a fetching girl who probably, no definitely, in summer was one of those bikini-clad frails. Eastern version. Believe it or not Jimmy was afraid, or at least half afraid, of the ocean even though he had grown up (as had I) a stone’s throw from the ocean all his growing up times. I had actually gone many times to the beach with him when he was married to Jenny (and we were talking not always coterminous) and had forgotten that I had never seen him go in the water. There was a reason for him not going into the water, although he said that he would go in when the spirit moved him or he was hot, just not over his head.

Reason: when Jimmy was about eight or nine he had almost drowned when he lived on the other side of town, down at the treacherous Snug Harbor Beach. That summer shortly after school got out he had been out swimming on a decent day, not a threatening day at all, and had lazily drifted out with the tide. While there he grabbed on to a floating log, a telephone pole, and drifted some more until he realized that he was pretty far out for a kid who was not a good swimmer. Typical kid’s move though as he started back for shore he let go of the log as he swan back. Swimming for a while and getting tired he knew he could not make it back and started to go down. Somehow his older brother, Sam, saw what was happening and called for help to the swimming instructor who was stationed at the beach that day. She went out and saved him before he went down for the third time. When she got him ashore and revived him he thanked her and scurried off totally embarrassed. And also made his brother swear not to tell their mother. So that was why he was cold to that 1959 cover art. Why he could not relate to the surfers, beach bums or whatever they were trying to pull off. 

Oh yeah, get this, the woman who saved him was Melinda Loring’s mother and Melinda had been on the beach that day sitting with her mother since she was too young to be left at home. She had watched the whole episode, and vividly remembered that her mother was both shaken and elated. Shaken since Jimmy was very close to drowning and elated because she had acted coolly and saved a life, her first save. The way Jimmy found out about that connection was when he mentioned that he had gone to Snug Harbor Elementary School and Melinda thought back the times when she would accompany her mother to the beach which was near the school.  Melinda had mentioned in an e-mail about her mother saving an eight or nine year old boy at the beach and that was that. One of the things Jimmy said to Melinda before they started dating, while they were still feeling each other out about getting together, was that they might as well get together since they had already “met.” Melinda laughed and agreed. During their short time together both thought for a while that the “meeting” at the beach when they were eight or nine meant that their thing was “written in the stars.” It was not but Jimmy said don’t blame the sea for that.            

As for the music that Jimmy was crazy for Melinda to know about, the 1959 music that backs up this cover art that didn’t quite fit well that didn’t fit either, really. As Jimmy said we were clearly in a trough as anybody who had heard the shift in musical tone on the transistor radio that provide the source of most of our music and formed our tastes knew. The golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Chuck Berry was fading, fading fast into what Jimmy said when he described the music scene back then could only be called “bubble gum” music. (Strangely or maybe not, Melinda told Jimmy she liked the Fabian -Bobby Vee – Bobby Darin-Everly Brothers stuff that dominated that year and a few years after which may have been an omen but maybe Jimmy was just exhibiting sour grapes about the affair and not a fair evaluation of what these guys were doing except they were “pretty” to the girls who grabbed their fan magazines).

Jimmy said sure he listened to it (and so did I), listened to it hard on his old transistor radio (as did I), mainly because that was all that was presented to us. It would be a while until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock (aka “acid” rock) engulfed us. Jimmy said the bulk of this CDs contents attested to our marking time. There were, however, some stick-outs there that have withstood the test of time. They include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite then at the local school dances by a New England boy  who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr. Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance), The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for a while). So that was Jimmy take on the music year 1959.

Oh yeah I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this. After a recent trip to the Southern California coast I can inform you that those two faux surfer guys are still out there and still checking out the scene. Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. Forget the girls part.  Moreover their days as cover art material have taken a turn for the worst, No artist would now, or at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo blonde hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” (2006)-A Film Review

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” (2006)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Casino Royale , starring Daniel Craig, Judith Dench, 2006

[I am not a guy who endlessly speaks about how this and that was better in the old days although surely some stuff was and some stuff today is unquestionably better as well. After yet another firestorm around this freaking two bit 007 Bond, James Bond series which site manager, Greg Green, the guy who figures what films to review and by whom in an effort, a futile effort if you ask me, to reach the younger more action film-oriented crowd I am coming to believe that maybe in the old days when the Hollywood studios sent out the press releases on films they were releasing and you took it from there better. A film reviewer, critic, acrobat or whatever you want to call him or her only had to if he or she was in his or her cups, had snorted too much cocaine or was off on a tryst for a few days just snipped off the top, added a couple of synonyms, added his or her name and sent it along for payment to whatever publication was footing the fool’s bill. (Those the days when we were getting paid by the word and could depend on some 3000 word minimum on a press release especially when the writer when crazy describing the plot. Now I can’t even charge for this foolish in brackets introduction part of the review which maybe longer than the review itself and certainly to me at least more interesting.)

I could, and maybe someday will, tell you some tales about the profession, about big time film critics like Arthur Lemay, Heddy Harnett, and our own Sam Lowell which would make your hair stand on. The beauty of the scam was that the studio, or rather the screenwriter for the film who did double-duty writing up the press release since he or she at least had the story line down even if the film was based on a book and the author had disowned the film as being nothing like he or she had written hand, wasn’t going  to complain when the reviews were uniformly positive and the poor schmuck of a writer couldn’t claim any infringement since that would expose who wrote the damn thing so nobody kicked. Nobody except the audience who actually had to watch the ton of turkeys that had gotten undeserved thumbs up. Such is life.         

Now though in the age of alternate facts, fake news, extraordinary self-serving bullshit and a phalanx of flaks, flak-catchers and screwballs with monomania you have to at least pretend that you give a damn about most films on your own dime, have to actually watch or hire somebody to watch the damn things. And make pithy comment on such or risk the scorn of some, get this, cinematic studies freshman looking to make goodie points with some erstwhile professor who couldn’t make the real film industry cut. Get cut to pieces in some arty cinema journal which nobody reads, not any live audience, except maybe those kids whose parents paid out a ton of dough so their aspiring film critic could cast scorn on guys who have really done it for a living-and survived to tell the tale.

Of course having to actually look at the film and come up with some interesting slant comes with its own set of dangers as I learned when I made a few casual comments in my last 007 review neo-007 Danny Craig’s Skyfall. I mentioned Bond creator Ian Fleming’s affair with Queen Elizabeth back in the old days in the 1950s when her old man, Prince Phillip, yeah, the Duke of Earl, no, Edinburgh up in nowhere Scotland was off with his Protestant whore out in the moors, mentioned the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger’s, now Sir Mick Jagger, 1960s affair with the good queen immortalized in his tribute song Sister Morphine (and speculated that was how he got that vaunted knighthood), and orphan boy, stone-cold killer 007 Danny Craig’s later tryst with her majesty. None of this history, none as the old time actor Sydney Greenstreet was fond of repeatedly saying was schoolboy history nor Mr. Wells’ history but was history nevertheless. And unless you are that schoolboy which excuses you from knowing anything other than the Pablum they feed you in school then some kind of mock shock at the revelations seems extremely naïve. That is all I can take from the firestorm of criticism not from the usual suspects Phil Larkin and Will Bradley who were as surprised as I was that adults were clueless about the inner workings of the royal households of Europe. While it would take about a ten thousand page book to gather in all the infidelities and off-hand trysts of the incestuous and inbred European royalty shock over modern doings seems bizarre to me.

Let me go by the numbers. Look MI6 in the 1950s was not only the plaything of Soviet spy Kim Philby or of the so-called Homintern, the public schoolboys with a fondness for other boys in their youth carried over when they ran the spy organization and clubbed up with the likes of Auden, Spender, Isherwood and the Queen’s art collector Tony Blount but of serious if bureaucratic types like Fleming who were after the main chance. Fleming saw his road to upward mobility going through Windsor Castle so when he found out the Duke was playing footsie somewhere he took his shot. It was all over the papers at the time that the Virgin Queen, part two (that was a good one back in namesake Queen Elizabeth I times when everybody from the ill-fated Earl Of Essex to the stable boy was the subject of her “favors,” wink, wink) was seeing quite a bit of a junior MI5 officer and wondering whether he was giving her the high hat on Soviet intelligence-or what.

Sure the Fleming scandal was hush-hush in the days when you could count on the media to allude to goings-on and not spread every lurid photograph on the front page but the Jagger affair was much more public in the days when Mick, not the Queen, not Her Majesty was conning older women into his expansive bed. I think Charles said something about it (while he was mussing up his own pillows) but Phillip was pleased as punch since with the Queen shooting up with a known junkie he could run around with one of his Catholic whores for solace. I urge you to go back into the archives, especially the younger set not around when the Queen was eating magic mushrooms and such. I will say in her, their defense that I was appalled as anybody else when the rumor that Mick was cavorting with Queen Mother Mary went the rounds. Is there no decency in the world at all anymore.

The Danny Craig incident is a little more problematic since he was an orphan and was trained to be an old school stone-cold killer for God, Country and the Queen. I don’t know whether it was a mother fixation or his own version of that attraction to older women that Mick went through until he got older and started going the other bopping teenagers but Danny begged to be assigned to the Queen livery or whatever they call it in order to protect her from international terrorists, the IRA, Rupert Murdoch, the late Dennis Hopper whom she called her easy rider, or Prince Phillip once he got impotent and took up with some Quaker lass. That is all I can say for now and I hope that you don’t feel cheated by the film review after all the total truth information I have just laid at your doorsteps. Seth Garth]                  

*****

I really do feel these days that Big Brother is watching over me, and not the usual suspects NSA, CIA or FBI. And no I am not paranoid at least not in this instance where I know from whence my suspicions emanated. Big Brother has a name, two names, Phil Larkin and Will Bradley two fellow reviewers on this site who have also waded in on this seemingly never-ending 007 James Bond series which somehow site manager Greg Green thought might help boost readership among the spy thriller aficionados, especially the 24/7/367 action every minute tribe. Meaning of course that is the kids who those of us who knew better have had a big laugh over since the bastards don’t read toney reviews, don’t read at all as far as I can see. Phil and Will have, or had been having a running feud over who best portrayed the spirt of 007 on the screen the former a partisan of Sean Connery and the later Pierce Brosnan. No others need apply. How I got caught up in this madness was that I have been assigned the Daniel Craig 007 segment and off-handedly mentioned that their respective selections seemed to be the two best examples of the spirit of the Bond character if skewed away from Ian Fleming’s hard copy book hardball flame-throwers. That was like meat to the sharks, the great white probably, as both tried to use that benign comment to enlist me as a partisan on their respective sides.

Of course the reality has nothing to do with the merits of any individual Bond, James Bond actor, hell one of them could have taken Roger Moore if it came to that. It has everything to do though with turf, with moving up the food chain, in the profession which is done, no fooling, by blasting the inadequacies of your fellow’s review of some film or some character. I have characterized this as worse than the back-biting in the academy which is going some since those contenders as least have some intellectual position staked out and probably an array of learned papers and conferences at their beck and call. I have also mentioned that back in the old days, Phil would know this although twenty-something Will would not, we used to just grab our copy from whatever the studios put out, what they called press releases, and either worked from that or just put our names on it and sent it in.

Now it is all about “game,” about cutthroat competition anyway and in any place you can. Thus I was drawn into the abyss by these guys. The latest “play” on this game board was a passing remark I made about a recent Craig 007 review where I mentioned that the gratuitous and seemingly non-stop violence was over the top even for action-filled Bond vehicles. That unleashed a thunderclap of comment from both Phil and Will once again pointing out that their respective candidates got by with plenty of guile and charm and didn’t have to resort to over the top bang-bang and chase scenes to get the bad guys at bay.   

Which brings us to this Casino Royale segment of the Bond legend which was actually Daniel Craig’s first run at the role of the bulky muscled super-man spy. The problem for me was that somehow things got screwed up here in the assignment department and I was given the sequel to this episode first Quantum of Solace where they are many references back to the action and particular the Bond love interest, Vesper, who like a great many of the more serious Bond love interests from the very first film Doctor No has a fatal fate in store for her.  

Of course like all post-Cold War products in this series the obvious bad guys are no longer Cold War Russian enemies or their allies but vague but widespread international criminal cartels who don’t care who or what they fund as long as the rate of return makes the grade. This one involves a young neophyte Bond working his way up the 00 chain. MI6 in the person of M, played by Dame Judith Dench, has given Bond the task of connecting the dots between a well-known financier of international terrorist organizations and that murky cartel.

In the end it is all about Bond’s ability to play high stakes poker with the high rollers, with that financier who made a serious mistake with an African mercenary group who let him invest their money in a scheme to short stock on an airline bringing out a new model which he has hired help to destroy and which James saves from destruction just in the nick of time. Hence our financier’s need for serious dough, a hundred million anyway. Bond, with the aid of fetching but as I have mentioned doomed Vesper, played by Eve Green, his “banker” from the British Treasury and later love interest through several travails including being poisoned by the financier’s girlfriend wins “the pot.” Not good, not good at all by that loser financier’s light and so Bond and Vesper are kidnapped to fork up the dough won at the gambling tables. Bond won’t give up the password to the Swiss account even under torture so as we later find out Vesper, now Bond’s lover, bargained with the bad guys for his life in exchange for the money. That did not sit well with Bond as he thought she had sold the whole operation out. According to M Vesper bargained the dough for the bastard ingrate Jimmy’s life. But that was later long after Vesper had died during the big final scene where Jimmy is facing off against the bad guys in Venice. Like I said the Bond character is hell on women, eye candy love them and leave them as earlier in the series and of late when there is some intimacy and sharing of emotions reflecting a difference sensibility these days.

I noticed when looking at the Internet to see how at the time reviewers critiqued this one they were very favorable in their estimations. A good number thought the change to a more original Ian Fleming book-based stone cold killer even if for a good old cause take made the grade. That and the romance for more than two minute copulation end. I have already mentioned that I thought the plot was thin against other efforts and that the violence and mayhem was way over the top. I guess I have to add now this reversion to a more originally Fleming conceived character did not sit well with me after what Sean had built up from day one. Phil and Will make of that what you will.