On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- One More Time On The "Beats" -"The Source"

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- One More Time On The "Beats" -"The Source"


A "YouTube" film clip of "beat" fixtures, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

DVD Review

The Source, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and a gang of other poets, pranksters, and preachers of the beat in the 1950, 1999

Over the past several months I have, seemingly, grabbed every film documentary about the “beat” literary movement of the 1950s that I could get my hands on. This film, “The Source”, continues that quest. And why am I interested in this movement, essentially a literary movement and not particularly, at least overtly, a consciously political movement that would not seem to fit in with other literary movements that I have given space to here? Well the short answer is that I just like the free verse spontaneous literary styles of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and company. More to the point I have been trying, as this documentary and others reviewed in this space have attempted as well, to link the liberating effects of that 1950s scene as forbears of my own generation, the Generation of ’68, a much less literary-inclined generation.

That idea sets one of the parameters of my interest. Another is the question of what of this collective wealth of archival footage, interviews and readings that virtually all the films reviewed have presented gives the best idea of what was going on then for those of us who were really too young (or were not born yet)to appreciate this breathe of fresh air. This effort is one the better ones for two reasons. First, the producers have established clearly who they believe are (as I do) the central players in this drama, the above-mentioned Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Of course, the “beat’ scene is not complete without recognizing the role that madman-for-all seasons Neal Cassady, Zen-master poet Gary Snyder, street poet Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (if for no other reason that the establishment of the City Lights Bookstore, a central hangout) , and host of other minor poets, hangers-on and crazies played. They are given space here, as well. But without the core literary/philosophical leadership of the three there make not have been such a phenomenon.

Secondly, and more importantly, in recognition of that centrality the producers have given over a fair amount of time for a rather short documentary (about an hour and a half) to extensive readings of Kerouac’s work (by Johnny Depp) , Allen Ginsberg’s ground-breaking and defining “Howl”, and Burroughs “Naked Lunch” (by Dennis Hopper, who else, right?). These readings are important. “Beat” was driven by the sounds of jazz and the blues, among other aural influences so the sounds (and nuances) of the works are more critical than more cerebral efforts. Although to our current ears much of this may sound self-indulgent this was the breakout sound of the “beats”, and to paraphrase Kerouac’s ending to “On The Road”, the sound of the fathers, the fathers that we never knew, Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs.

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"(1957)-Beat" Poet's Corner- "The Drugstore Cowboy" William S. Burroughs

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"(1957)-Beat" Poet's Corner- "The Drugstore Cowboy" William S. Burroughs

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for "beat" poet, mentor and author of the classic "beat" novel, "Naked Lunch"- "the Drugstore Cowboy", William S. Burroughs.

A Thankgiving Prayer-William S. Burroughs

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.


Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.


Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"- Out In The Be-Bop Night- Fragments On Working Class Culture- Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Highway 1969

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"- Out In The Be-Bop Night- Fragments On Working Class Culture- Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Highway 1969

By Book Critic Zack James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*******
The scene below stands(or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.

Scene Three: A First Misstep In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night

Let me tell this story, okay, this story about a couple of guys that I picked up hitch-hiking out on the 1960s highway. I’ll get to what highway it was later because it could have been any highway, any American or European, or maybe even African or Asian highway, if those locales had such highways, at least highways for cars back in those days. Anyway it’s their story, these two guys, really, and maybe around the edges my story, and if you are of a certain age, your story, just a little anyway.

Some of it though just doesn’t sound right now, or read right, at least the way they told it to me but we will let that pass ‘cause it has been a while and memories, mine in this case, sometimes seize up even among the best of us. Ya, but this part I do remember so let’s just subtitle this one a segment on that search for the blue-pink great American West night and that makes this thing a lot of people’s story. Let’s get to it right now by picking up where they and I intersect on the great American 1960s road:

Two young men were standing pretty close together, talking, up ahead at the side of a brisk, chilly, early spring morning 1969 road, a highway really, a white-lined, four-laned, high-speed highway if you want to know, thumbs out, as I came driving down the line alone in my Volkswagen Beetle (or bug, hey, that’s what they were called in those days, you still see some old restored or well-preserved ones around, especially out on the left coast), see them, and begin to slow down to pick them up. I would no more think not to pick them up than not to breathe. A few years earlier and I would have perhaps been afraid to pick up such an unlikely pair, a few years later and they would not have been on that road. But the thumbs out linked them, and not them alone on this day or in this time, with the old time hitchhike road, the vagabond road that your mother, if she was wise or nervous, told you never ever, ever to take (and it was always Ma who told you this, your father was either held in reserve for the big want-to-do battles, or else was bemused by sonny boy wanting to spread his wings, or better yet, was secretly passing along his own long ago laid aside blue-pink highway dreams).

This pair in any case, as you shall see, were clearly brothers, no, not brothers in the biological sense, although that sometimes was the case, but brothers on that restless, tireless, endless, hitchhike road. My hitchhike road yesterday, and maybe tomorrow, but today I have wheels and they don’t and that was that. No further explanation needed. I stopped. From the first close-up look at them these guys were young, although not too young, not high school or college young but more mid-twenties maybe graduate student young. I’ll describe in more detail how they looked in a minute but for those who desperately need to know where I picked them up, the exact locale that is, let me put your anxieties to rest and tell you that it was heading south on the Connecticut side of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border of U.S. Interstate 84, one of the main roads to New York City from Boston. Are you happy now? Not as sexy as some of those old-time Kerouac-Cassady late 1940s “beat” roads, but I believe their ghosts were nevertheless hovering in the environs. Hell, now that I think about it, would it have mattered if I said it was Route 6, or Route 66, or Route 666 where I picked them up. I picked them up, that was the way it was done in those halcyon days, and that’s the facts, man, nothing but the facts.

Hey, by the way, while we are talking about facts, just the hard-headed fact of this pair standing on the side of a highway road should have been enough to alert the reader that this is no current episode but rather a tale out of the mist of another American time. Who in their right mind today would be standing on such a road, thumb out, or not, expecting some faded Dennis Hopper-like flower child, or Ken Kesey-like Merry Prankster hold-out to stop. No this was the time of their time, the 1960s (or at the latest, the very latest, about 1973). You have all seen the bell-bottomed jeans, the fringed-deerskin jackets, the long hair and beards and all other manner of baubles in those exotic pre-digital photos so that one really need not bother to describe their appearances. But I will, if only to tempt the fates, or the imaginations of the young.

One, the slightly older one, wispy-bearded, like this was maybe his first attempt at growing the then de rigueur youth nation-demanded male beard to set one apart from the them (and from the eternal Gillette, Bic, Shick razor cuts, rubbing alcohol at the ready, splash of English Leather, spanking clean date night routine, ah, ah, farewell to all that). Attired: Levi blue-jean’d with flared-out bottoms, not exactly bell-bottoms but denims that not self-respecting cowboy, or cowboy wanna-be would, or could, wear out in the grey-black , star-studded great plains night; plaid flannel shirt that one would find out there in that bronco-busting night (or in backwoodsman-heavy Maine and Oregon in the time of the old Wobblies or Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion); skimpily-sneakered, Chuck Taylor blacks, from the look of them, hardly the wear for tackling the great American foot-sore hitchhike road which makes me think that these are guys have started on something like their maiden voyage on that old road; and over one shoulder the ubiquitous string-tied bedroll that speaks already of ravine sleep, apartment floor pick your space sleep, and other such vagabond sleep certainly not of Holiday Inn or even flea-bag motel sleeps; and over the other shoulder the also ubiquitous life’s gatherings in a knapsack (socks, a few utensils, maybe underwear, and the again maybe not, change of shirt, a few toilet articles, not much more but more than the kings (and queens) of the roads, 1930s ancestor forbears carried, for sure , ask any old Wobblie, or bum-hobo-tramp hierarch- take your pick-who took that hard-scrabble, living out of your emptied pocket road).

And the other young man, a vision of heaven’s own high 1960s counter-cultural style: long-haired, not quite a pony tail if tied back and maybe not Easy Rider long but surely no advertisement for Gentleman’s Quarterly even in their earnest days of keeping up with the new tastes to corner the more couth segments of the hippie market; cowboy-hatted, no, not a Stetson, howdy, Tex, kind of thing but some Army-Navy store-bought broad brimmed, sun-bashing, working cowboy hat that spoke of hard-riding, branding, cattle night lowing, whiskey and women Saturday town bust-ups, just right for a soft-handed, soft-skinned city boy fearful of unlit places, or places that are not lit up like a Christmas tree; caped, long swirling cape, like someone’s idea of old-time film Zorro stepping out with the senoritas; guitar, an old Martin from the look of it, slung over one shoulder, not protective cased against the winds, rains, snows, or just the bang-ups of living, but protective in other ways when night falls and down in the hills and hollows, or maybe by a creek, heaven’s own strum comes forth. Woody Guthrie’s own child, or stepchild, or some damn relative. I swear.

Welcome brothers, as I open up the passenger side door. “Where are you guys heading?” This line is more meaningful than you might think for those who know, as I know, and as these lads will know, as well, if they spent any time on the hitchhike road. Sometimes it was better, even on a high-speed highway, to not take any old ride that came along if, say, some kind–hearted local spirit was only going a few miles, or the place where a driver would let you out on the highway was a tough stop. Not to worry though these guys, Jack and Mattie, were hitchhiking to California. California really, I swear, although they are stopping off at a crisscross of places on their way. A pretty familiar routine by then, playing hopscotch, thumbs out, across the continent.

These guys were, moreover, indeed brothers, because you see once we started comparing biographical notes, although they never put it that way, or really never could just because of the way they thought about things as I got to know them better on the ride, were out there searching, and searching hard, for my blue-pink night. Christ, there were heaven’s own blessed armies, brigades anyway, of us doing it, although like I said about Jack and Mattie most of the brothers and sisters did not get caught up in the colors of that night, like I did, and just “dug” the search. Jack and Mattie are in luck, in any case, because on this day I’m heading to Washington, D.C. and they have friends near there in Silver Springs, Maryland. The tides of the times are riding with us.

And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story or at least this part of it, am I heading to D.C.? D Well, the cover story is to do some anti-war organizing but, for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a women who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here, although that theme might turn up again. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novels section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you will find here.

I’ve got a kind of weird story to tell you about why Jack and Mattie were on this desolate border stretch of the highway in a minute but let me tell a little about what they were trying to do out on that road, that west road. First, I was right, mostly, about their ages, but Jack and Mattie were no graduate students on a spring lark before grinding away at some master’s thesis on the meaning of meaning deconstuct’d (although this reference is really an anachronism since such literary theories were not then fashionably on display on the world’s campuses, but you get the drift) or some such worthy subject in desperate need of research in a time when this old world was falling apart and the bombs were (are) raining (literally) on many parts of the world.

In one sense they were graduates though, graduates of the university of hard knocks, hard life, and hard war. They had just a few months before been discharged, a little early as the war, or the American ground troops part of it, was winding down, from the U.S. Army after a couple of tours of duty in ‘Nam (their usage, another of their privileged usages was “in-country”). I swear I didn’t believe them at first, no way, they looked like the poster boys for the San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967. Something, something big was going on here and my mind was trying to digest the sight of these two guys, “good, solid citizens” before the “man” turned them around in that overseas Vietnam quagmire who looked in attire, demeanor, and style just like the guy (me) who picked them up.

Ya, but that is only part of it and not even the most important part, really, because this California thing was also no lark. This is their break-out, bust-out moment and they are going for it. As we rode along that old super highway they related stories about how they came back from “in-county”, were going to settle down, maybe get married (or move in with a girlfriend or seven), and look forward to social security when that distant time came. But something snapped inside of them, and this is where every old Jack London hobo, every old Wobblie, every old bummer on the 1930s rail highway, hell even every old beat denizen of some Greenwich Village walk-up was a kindred spirit. Like I said, and I am sitting right in the car listening to them with a little smirk on my face, the boys are searching that same search that I am searching for and that probably old Walt Whitman really should take the blame for, okay. I’ll tell you more, or rather; I’ll let them tell you more some other time but let me finish up here with that weird little story about why they were at that god forsaken point on the highway.

Look, everybody knows, or should know, or at least knew back then that hitchhiking, especially hitchhiking on the big roads was illegal, and probably always was even when every tramp and tramp-ette in America had his or her thumb out in the 1930s. But usually the cops or upstanding citizenry either ignored it or, especially in small towns, got you on some vagrancy rap. Hey, if you had spent any time on the hitchhike road you had to have been stopped at least once if for no other reason than to harass you. Still some places were more notorious than others in hitchhike grapevine lore in those days, particularly noteworthy were Connecticut and Arizona (both places where I had more than my own fair share of “vagrancy” problems).

So I was not too far off when I figured out that Jack and Mattie were on their maiden voyage. Thumbs out and talking, the pair missed the then ever-present Connecticut state police cruiser coming from nowhere, or it seemed like nowhere, as it came to a stop sharply about five feet away from them. The pair gulped and prepared for the worst; being taken to some state police barracks and harassed and then let go at some backwater locale as the road lore had it. Or getting “vagged”. Or worst, a nice little nasty trick in those days, have “illegal” drugs conveniently, very conveniently, found on their person.

But get this, after a superficial search and the usual questions about destination, resources, and the law the pair instead were directed to walk the few hundred yards back across the border line to Massachusetts. Oh, I forgot this part; the state cop who stopped them was a Vietnam veteran himself. He had been an MP in ‘Nam. Go figure, right. So starts, the inauspicious start if you think about it, in one of the searches for the blue-pink great American West night. Nobody said it was going to be easy and, you know, they were right. Still every time I drive pass that spot (now close to an official Connecticut Welcomes You rest stop, whee!), especially on any moonless, starless, restless, hitchhiker-less road night I smile and give a little tip of the hat to those youthful, sanctified blue-pink dreams that almost got wrecked before they got started.

The Transformation Of Jedidiah Donne-With Singer-Songwriter Greg Brown’s Phrase “…our prayers was in English, but we was all just speaking in tongues” in Mind

The Transformation Of Jedidiah Donne-With Singer-Songwriter Greg Brown’s Phrase “…our prayers was in English, but we was all just speaking in tongues” in Mind    

SPEAKING IN TONGUES LYRICS

A wild high cry flew up out of our brother
He was moaning and shaking, shining like the sun
He fell down like a dead man, Some people helped him up
He was all right, He was just speaking in tongues

When someone was sick we gathered all around them
And lay our hands upon them, all of us, old and young
We prayed that God Almighty would heal them
Our prayer was in English, but we was all just speaking in tongues

When I really feel my way back to that church and them people
The little hairs stand up all over me
And I hope that this nation like that congregation
Will give it up and pray for our soul, which is in misery

And that one day we may lay our hands on one another
And seek the healing for ourselves, this earth and our young
And sing that old song of many colors, many rhythms
And listen with our hearts to the speaking in tongues

By Bradley Davis

Jedidiah Donne made it out of the hills and hollows around Hazard, Kentucky, you know down in Appalachia, down in old time coal country by the skin of his teeth. Got his ass, go his “hinny,” his expression reflecting something of the old time religion he got bathed in and that stuck with him when words like ass, hell, bitch, fuck got thrown around in his presence. Not that he was a prude, or rather he did not know that for guys, rough-hewn guys from the cities, from farms, hell, probably from anywhere except down in the “burned over” hills and hollows around Hazard, Kentucky and a few other places such talk was everyday guy talk so that maybe he did not know that such objections were, hell, prudish.            

Let me get to Jed’s story and maybe it will make sense that in the year 1998 that a perfectly good and sane guy would be fretting about words like ass, damn, fuck, and hell, hell. See I met Jed, by the way it is okay, okay at least for me to call him Jed although everybody who knew him when we first met called him “hick” and ‘hayseed” right in front of him when we were in basic training down in Fort Dix in New Jersey, a place where they still train Army recruits in the basics of Army life. My reason, hey by the way my name is Fred Kelly in case anybody is asking, Frederick on the birth certificate but nobody called me Frederick since that would immediately refer to my father, Frederick Kelly, Senior, for being down in Dix was that I had been caught stealing about ten automobiles for a guy running a “hot car” ring and the judge in the Stoughton, Massachusetts gave me the “choice”-three to five at the state pen at Cedar Junction where he assured me that I would be somebody’s “bitch” from day one, assured me right in open court, or “volunteer” for the military. He didn’t give a tinker’s damn, his term, which branch just that I got my young ass in there, ass also his term. I checked it out and my best deal what with my education and time to serve so I headed to the Army Recruitment station on I think it was Tremont Street in Boston to sign up.

That was how I got to Dix. How Jed got there is quite another story. See his family since about the 1800s, since they found coal in the hills and hollows down in Appalachia, rich veins from what Jed said, had been coalminers one way or another all the way back to Jed’s great-great grandfather, also a Jedidiah. But back in his father’s generation the mines were beginning to play out and the coal companies started closing the mines and heading west, or someplace where they could mine coal on the cheap and avoid union wages and benefits. (Actually from one night when we were talking the mines had begun to play out in Jed’s father’s generation so any number of Donnes, including his grandfather Prescott were more than happy to sign up for the military the day after the Japs dropped the shit on Pearl Harbor. Jed said Grandfather Prescott had told him before he passed away that between the cancerous “black lung” mines and the Nips, Japanese, he would take his chances in the Pacific). So all Jed had going for him since he had as most of the male members of the family had going back generations dropped out of school at sixteen to work at something. That something never really materialized and so one day Jed just up and left to head to Lexington (Kentucky) to sign on the dotted line at the Army Recruitment Station there.

It was hard for me, a city boy and maybe too wise to the ways of the world, maybe better to say the underworld to see such a naïve and backward guy. Hell, according to the drill sergeant who met us from the transports at the Basic Training Center at Dix later after he had put us through hell and back Jed didn’t even had shoes, store bought shoes anyway when he got off the bus. Didn’t know squat about much except that he would get clothes and three square meals a day. Wasn’t looking for much more than that. My own father when I told him that was shocked to hear that information because back in the 1960s, back in Vietnam War days, his war, he would also run into guys from places like Hazard (and places even more down at the mouth like Bridgeton also in Kentucky) who were getting their first pair of serious shoes and who thought they had died and gone to heaven when they saw the “delights” of three square meals a day for the first times in their lives in the mess hall. Jesus.                 

While we are on the subject of Jesus, the subject of what I want to tell you about Jed you should know that he came from a very strange church background, one that baffled me, still does, when I think about the matter as I am doing now. He was a rock solid member of a church called the Church of the Everlasting Brethren, an old time religion church which Jed said went back to the old country, to England in the 1600s and was still going strong in places like Hazard. My own church background was sort of a formal Catholic but I didn’t think about it much once stealing fast cars for some serious money, serious money to me became my religion. That and getting into my girlfriend Jenny Martin’s pants (or having her give me a blow job which she was more amenable to doing since she was always fretting about getting pregnant so she pieced me off by “playing the flute” she called it having gotten that expression from her older brother). So I didn’t think anything of it after he told me his basic story.

Then one night, maybe after midnight so one morning

I “learned” first-hand about his religion, about his mania is a better way to say it. I had been up late having a few brews with some other trainees at the Enlisted Men’s Club the first time we were allowed to do after six weeks in Basic so it must have been a Saturday night, early Sunday morning. The way the barracks were set up was that four men would sleep to a room, two sets of bunk beds one on one side of the room and one on the other. I had the bottom bunk on the left hand side of the room as you entered which meant all I really had to do was almost fall down into bed. Eventually I dozed off without realizing that Jed was in his bunk above me.

After a while, don’t ask me how long, maybe half an hour I began to hear what sounded to me like gibberish in a semi-musical kind of voice. The words sounded like no words I had heard before and while I never learned any other language but English I had a feeling when I heard Spain, French or one of those languages even though I would not have been able to tell you word one about what the speaker was talking about. It was then that I noticed that it was Jed speaking that foreign language, speaking it in very soft flowing almost religious way, the way in my Roman Church the choir would sing on some special holy day like during Lent. Was doing this act with only his trousers on, bare-chested and with what looked like his eyes closed like he was singing to some unknown space. I kept thinking that maybe I would pick up what he was talking about if I listened enough. The only phrase I was able to pick up was “aloo, aloo, oni sacke aloo”, something like that when I mentioned it to Jed about fifteen minutes later after he stopped (and done with what he called his trance state later when he told me what he had been up to).         

Once Jed stopped, opened his eyes and smiled at me as I was sitting upon my bunk perplexed and awestruck I asked him what the “fuck” was going on, was he a crazy man. Calmly he answered, “I was just speaking in tongues, speaking to my people back home in our little Brethren church.” I asked what language he was speaking in and how did a kid who dropped out of school in rural Kentucky learn some foreign language when he could barely pass the English literary test (that according to Jed’s own testimony since he told me he was scared that he would flunk the entrance exam). Still with a smile he said he did not know any foreign language, any heathen language he might have called it, I forget, Jed said “I was singing to the angel choir when I heard the noise of wings as they approached my bed and called me to their own.”

What did it all mean, what did “aloo, aloo, oni sacke aloo” mean. His answer was in the negative, he was clueless about what any of it meant. Except to say that Preacher Roe, the leader of that little Brethren congregation, said they might be speaking in English but the Lord in his wisdom allowed them angelic speech in tongues. I roomed with Jed for the rest of Basic and later in Advanced Infantry Training for a few weeks before they shipped him out to parts unknown but I stayed as far away from him as possible. Jesus, speaking in tongues.             

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

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

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

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

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

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

  

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