Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-The Complete Trilogy

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-The Complete Trilogy

 “The Scribe Turns The World Upside Down”- “Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”- “When Butterfly Swirl Swirled”

[The well- known writer and book critic Zack James eventually began to feel that he had signed on to an assignment from hell after spending a fair amount of time this summer of 2017 chronicling the 50^th Anniversary of the San Francisco-centered Summer of Love, 1967. Especially so since he was far too young by about a decade to have any personal affinity to that celebration. His whole involvement had come about after his oldest brother, Alex, had taken a business trip to San Francisco and had noticed an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park entitled The Summer of Love Experience. For Alex it was crucial that he attend that exhibition since he had actually been out there in that decisive summer of 1967 and for about two years afterward before settling down to pursue his current life as a high-end lawyer in Boston. When Alex returned to Boston he gathered together whatever friends were left standing as he called it from his growing up town of North Adamsville and who had also gone out to the Bay area for various amounts of time in 1967.

As a result of that meeting the group of seven agreed with Alex that they should commission Zack to help write, edit, and prepare for publication a small book of memoirs of those times. The book to be dedicated to the late Peter Paul Markin, forever known among that crowd as “Scribe” once Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader of the guys he hung around dubbed him with that title for his blasted tenacity about knowing every possible fact in the universe for any occasion. More importantly the Scribe had always been something of a bell-weather for all kinds of trends like the rise of folk music in the early 1960s, the anti-war movement, and what he called according to Alex who was his closest friend at the time, the “fresh new breeze coming through the land.” The Scribe was the first to head out to San Francisco after quitting college in the spring of 1967. (The consequences of that ill-advised decision will be mentioned below.) He came back a couple of months later and rounded up every “corner boy,” that is what they were called then, to head back by bus, by hitchhiking or whatever means they could get there.

Zack put together the book and saw to its publication thinking that was the end of the matter. Not so. Alex, and then the others, kept asking him to write more stories about the Scribe and those times. That led to some reviews of the music, books, and other social events of the times. Some ten pieces in all. That is when he said enough. Told Alex to tell the “brethren” (Zack’s word) he needed to finish a book on the legendary revolutionary pre-Civil War abolitionist John Brown which was running up against a publication dead-line. That is when he “drafted” me to do some short pieces remaining from that period. Of course I am even younger than Zack so I had only heard about the Summer of Love through books and lately through looking at YouTube videos which are plentiful. Since I owned Zack couple of favors I agreed to finish up for him.

At first the three pieces that I contributed stood by themselves based on some postcards Alex had given Zack as prompts to write up about. But as I looked into more background material especially that Scribe tribute memoir book Zack had carefully put together I came to see that they all were linked together. Linked together by the character of the mad monk Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe. So I have, after re-writing some of the material, put the pieces together as a trilogy. If Alex and his guys want to dedicate this stuff to the Scribe then that is okay by me-Jeffrey Thorne]                    

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The Scribe Turned The World Upside Down

The Scribe said it best one night, one Summer of Love, 1967 night, one cold San Francisco night, a summer night when the Japan currents went awry and reminded one of old Mark Twain’s witty sayings about the coldest winter he had ever spent-August in the city of sweet brethren Saint Francis, when he declared (so like that mad man to use the seventh person imperative, to declare in his world-historic way, for such small letter asterisk events), that the breeze coming through the land would shake society to its foundations. Would make nine to five work-a-day world a bore (and give his poor brethren a chance to partake of the golden age that he, his parents, his Acre neighborhood, and most of the known world had been short-changed of for millennia), make that long suburban tract complete with dishwasher and sanitary garbage disposal obsolete before the last mortgage payment hit the dirt (get people to think differently about space, about community, and give that same and give that poor brethren a chance to partake of the golden age of living space that he, his parents, his Acre neighborhood, and most of the known world had been short-changed of for millennia), would make those three point two kids and that one dog a victim of old-fashioned thinking (well, okay).

Said, get this for a guy who became a non-believer, a non-believer in risen Christ if you can believe that very early in his teens (and went to church, sliding side door church solely to sit a few rows behind some lovely he was pining over just to watch her ass so yes a non-believer) that the new dispensation was at hand-if they could keep it, keep the bastards, and you know who the bastards were then-the night-takers and guys who conned you into nine to five dreams, suburban flats and, what was it three point two kids (we will pass on the not mandatory dog) from barking at the door.  

Sure the Scribe talked the talk and walked the walk, oh boy did he, spouting forth about one love, about the new garden of eden (small case is right remember he was a non-believer, maybe had always been something of an outlaw even when he cruised the books, had his nose in some book, for a sign), about that turning the world upside down and making it stick. Making the night-takers back down (night-takers Zack’s word via the Scribe which I am happy to ‘steal”). Hell, from what the corner boys said in their memories of the guy he sounds like he was always a closet Digger. Not the Diggers who fed the people in down-trodden Haight-Ashbury when the desperate young had wandered to San Francisco with nothing but dreams and knapsacks but the people around Gerrard Winstanley on Saint George’s Hill who, for a while before they were kicked off that spot by Oliver Cromwell’s agents, tried a form of primitive communism based on communal living and common use of land. Check that out sometime if you delve back into the 17^th century English revolution. They appear to have been forbears of what went down in 1967 before the experiment got out of hand through hubris, dope and confusion about how to keep the thing going against the wrath of the night-takers. Of course coming “from hunger” he, the other guys, Zack’s brethren and the Scribe’s corner boys, were not above certain larcenies, scams, cons to keep body and soul together. That contradiction was suppressed for a time, for the time before the night-takers came back with a vengeance. The ebb the Scribe called it as he descended down a slippery slope in the mid-1970s.            

That was the rub, that was the factor that got away from the Scribe as much as he knew that he/they were on tender mercies ground, knew that that little counter attack from out of the blue would come when he thought the world had stopped turning on itself and had gone upside down that eventually would do in even the Scribe. Would turn his mouth to ashes, would turn a sainted brethren (not many out in Frisco in those days knew his full given name began with Francis at a time when everybody was “reinventing” themselves including clustering up new monikers to get washed clean, also a Scribe expression and so only knew the moniker) down the gutter road, float him out to the Japan seas long before he ever heard the Duke blast that high white note. Yeah, blast the times, blast the whole fucking world for taking down a brethren as pure as snow.   

[I was not sure where I should put a bit of information about the Scribe’s fate although I knew that I had to bring some information out in the interest of completeness and to give sense of the Scribe’s contradiction so I am placing it here. I have mentioned above something about “wanting habits” and how they were suppressed for a time. The Scribe’s downfall, as witnessed by all who mentioned him from the old days, started with his quitting college given up a scholarship to “find himself” out in San Francisco in fateful 1967. Such were the times that a lot of people did that. His problem, a big problem, was that left his subject to the draft which came the next year. For reasons I could never understand at this remove he accepted induction and wound up in Vietnam as an infantryman, did his tour and came back to what he called the “real” world where he on the surface thrived for the next few years while the spirit of the communal vision 1960s still held sway. Stayed on the West Coast and did some good journalism around the fate of some returning fellow Vietnam veterans who were “lost” and living out in camps and other places away from the “real” world. But all his guys mention that there was something that Vietnam had taken out of him, had left him internally shattered. When the 1960s faded, when that “newer world” idea faded he lost his mooring. Got more heavily into dope, into cocaine. Started dealing to keep his growing habit intact. Then took a mysterious trip to Mexico to consummate a drug deal. Whatever happened and nobody has much to go on he wound dead in a back street in Sonora with two bullets in his chest. The situation was so fraught with danger that he was buried in a potter’s field down there. Like I said I still am not able to get a handle on all of that but there it is-maybe the contradiction of the times if it came right down to it.]

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“Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”  

Beat down (not to be mistaken for abuse, child abuse or anything like that against up against it mothers and distant fathers but just poor, bedraggled poor, “wanting habit” as the Scribe would have coming jointly out of their respective Acres).  Beat around (check beat down except just hanging around luckless, shoeless, waiting for somebody else’s shoe to drop). Beat sound (hell easier to figure, listen to the swish of the sticks battling the pots and pans, some out of Africa our mother riff culled into cool be-bop be-bop and all that jazz away from big swing and into the big blast air). Beat to the ground (luckless fellahins stashed away in back room closets, gambling, washing endless dishes, what did some wit call it-diving for pearls, losing always losing, losing worst when blood-lust bullies take the law into their own hands).

Fuck it, fuck explanation since everybody will get it wrong just like the guys back in the Acre could never figure what was bothering the guy, what made him jump. Fuck it Jack just jumped into it, into its sea, into it misty sea, foghorn blasting some jazz-like moan, from his beautified beatified skull, maybe thinking of youthful skull behind some bushes or out on some back road highway jumping the bones of some friend’s one and only, that is pure speculation though. But really and truly Jack man, Jean-bon in old times jumped from some river of life, mill town life like a million guys before him and now in foreign lands a million guys after him, the river flowing to steam up some engine to grind the fabric that will clothe the world. Ha, like we who come naked into this holy coil can take solace from that low catholic trip it took him, and not just him but lots of others who broke the square habit at least for a time, for the youth duration. Damn beatitude in the end when all the shouting was over and Jack in some drunken grave under a pile of suffering dirt (the Buddha in him cried out as it did for that guy down in Sonora before they found him in some hideous back alley unnamed and unloved, maybe un-nameable if there is such a word) Why couldn’t he have listened to that guy out in Frisco town, the guy, a kid really, maybe sixteen set up in a too big older brother 1940s zoot suit, a wisp of beard which could not be shaven so wisp, eyes glazed on dope , on love on the high, on the low, who all nervous on bennie nevertheless blew that high white note that was in his DNA, provided by grandma, mother left for parts unknown, father shiva blew town with some chick who had a stash and gave her gash, to like everything else out to the fucking China seas. But that was at the end. That was when the music was over, when it no longer made sense. At the beginning hell no said Jack.

The world wasn’t big enough to hold all his desperations, keep them in check, keep those wanting habits every poor boy has inside him talk about DNA. Even rama jamma Buddha didn’t have no cure for that except maybe some jimson and jetsam and mystical balm for a shattered world. Like I say that was at the end though. At the beginning our boy took off as fast as he could from that mill town river and never looked back (except to take the dust off his shoes and bow down before our Lady of the River when luck ran out, the booze ran out, hell, the sweet tea sticks ran out and all of beat solace ran to catholic rivers, yeah I know capital C but those were the breaks, the end knotted up in some rat hole, some mother-forgotten rat hole and no more joy, stick either). Took it on the lam, went west east south north (I think on that last direction maybe back to the homeland, back to the stinking big river up north that some earlier Jack, some Jacques, crossed to get to that fucking mill river, Jesus, looking for the holy grail, looking for about six ways to get out of that beat down, beat around, beat sound, beat to the ground bitch stuff. Took up with some fat fast mad secular monk with crazed mom and sweet word poet father, not father William Blake but worldly father, who spouted stuff about negro streets (and angel-headed hipsters like we didn’t know he hung around Time Square Joe and Nemo’s midnight coffees looking for queers, con artists and hustlers, always hustlers, crazies (in and out of the asylums of the mind) and Moloch devouring the land (make no mistake ancient and evil dressed in grey flannel suits and quoting stock prices into those same China seas as that benny-suckled kid blowing that high white Frisco note), the land of milk and honey, rama rama, went to the mat (secret love in more ways than one with that loose bastard who couldn’t keep his mouth shut or cock in his pants -and that was that-for a time). No, not then that street wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with the language and ladies’ pocketbooks or that highbrow junkie hanging around New Orleans looking for quick fixes although they qualified if it came to that.

For a time no question since the pull of fast fat monks could wear off fast under the sun of boze, booze, bennies and grand simon jimson ladies. Took his hat off and let the world slip in-thought maybe the way was the way. Startled guys like desolation angels and dharma bums into thinking they could do what had never been done like some lead pipe cinch. Ran up the mountain (no Prometheus Adonis more likely who was to know) to place incense in the fatted calf body singing, singing, singing some cross between the stations of the cross and plastic nirvana (just to be cute, cute as a nine thieves). Saw Siva run the river gauntlet and leave satiated beyond compare, saw Rama too walking down Post Street in his nightshirt.

Then fame got in his way, somebody bought into his million word notebook thoughts wanderings this is poor boy long time waiting wanting habits Jack we are talking about remember in case you have lost the drift. Make him surly and brazen wondering why the hell if fame was fame didn’t it jump out at him when he started on his Calvary Road road(and it was such a road breaking from deep incense and Adam and Eve free falls so much for free will, started out in dirty sneakers and crusted blue jeans, and when he jumped out of his skull and fled that mountebank river town. Funny no more Harvard hipsters and Columbia ranters and raspers or Denver Adonis. Now fools and jesters following his every move, hiding in bushes and make that fat monk look like some holy fool, like a goof (again remember please not that street-wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with language and ladies’ pocketbooks). Ah, sullen lost planet life.         

How was he to know, how was Jack to blessed know that his illegitimate children, not child, children would abandon their flea-etched sins only a short time later, hang out their own signs, reach for their own suns, reach with thumbs furled, and follow the pied piper. Follow the brethren saint mad man with the wooly beard and the incense announcing his arrival at the table singing, singing, singing and it wasn’t hosannas but some odd unspoken tune which ripped across the land for a while. Defying that man in the grey suit (defying mother and father got to dust and never figured out). Drew magnetic forces around themselves and expected the kingdom to last until end times. Hah, Jack could have given them the word on that little mistake. I am the light Jack thought and then he faded from the scene into utter darkness those unwashed, unloved, unspoken for illegitimate children to lay waste to the desert for forty years. Jesus        

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Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

By Jeffrey Thorne

The times were out of sort, the times were frankly a mess and in that little window of time, the time of Josh Breslin’s Summer of Love, 1967 time he saw a little chance to jailbreak out of his humdrum existence, to skip the nine to five world that his parents thrived in and expected him to follow like a lemming to the sea and thrive too for a while anyhow. We will skip all his thinking that got him there, got him to act on his jailbreak impulses, he had done enough thinking on lonely desolate roads heading west in placed like Neola, Iowa, Grand Island, Nebraska, Winnemucca, Nevada and a whole slew of nameless Main Street pass-through towns to last a lifetime. Except to say that he was not alone in his jailbreak passions as the decade as it progressed gave ample evidence of and that he was maybe unusually sensitive for a guy who ran in circles that were anything but receptive to jailbreak ideas. Let’s get him to Summer of Love epicenter Frisco and into the whole thing, the passion thing, the thing that happened between Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love.

For those who are already confused by the now seemingly strange fetish for  monikers  that somehow were expected to wash one clean that latter one was Josh Breslin’s self-anointed moniker once he hit Russian Hill in that Bagdad of a city (Bagdad not of these times, not humbled bombed-out times, but back when that town was an epicenter of the world and whole civilization flocked to imitate the latest ideas, cultural artifacts and visionary experience and Frisco could stand the comparison without shutter). In those days, in that little window of time when the world was turned upside down(an expression from back in the 17^th to express what was happening in revolutionary England when lots of amazing similar experiences were being attempted as that Cromwellian Puritan-like  brethren tried to in its turn wash itself clean), or a small segment of society, mainly young, when you looked back from a fifty year view, everybody was try to “reinvent” themselves, making a new washed clean beginning and so an epidemic of name-changing rushed the land. (Of course those who were trying to seek the “newer world” a Lord Tennyson phrase but apt assumed that everybody was on board that everybody was into the turmoil but while the media-driven headlines were large the nine to five world went about its nine to five business which encapsulated that great majority of young-don’t be fooled by universal long hair, granny dresses and talk, endless talk of dope and sexual fantasies those were just signposts not the real deal.)  Josh a very good looking guy what with that Sam Shepard father-aided gene and mother- aided Quebec flair, with some ego, a lot of ego for a working class kid from up in ocean-side Maine, Olde Saco to be exact, decided that he was royalty or something and so tagged himself with that moniker. (The Scribe, whom we will get to in a moment, used to kid him that he was really the Prince of Lvov, a Podunk town in Poland just to tweak his ego a bit. By the way after careful research the long-held rumor that the Scribe gave Josh his moniker is erroneous. Josh had been thinking about that moniker almost all the way from that Maine until he reached the Pacific shores).        

So Josh Breslin just out of high school and full of the getting the dust of Podunk Maine off his shoes hit Frisco town, hit first stop Russian Hill after being told by some holy goof, that term no put down but a real live Yippie freak who called attention to himself using that idea, in Golden Gate Park, the epicenter of the epicenter at a certain point, that righteous dope could be had up that hill. (Holy goof as Josh was later to find out from the Scribe a term used to describe certain personages by Scribe hero “beat” writer Jack Kerouac who got it from Buddha himself.) As he walked up the long drawn out hill in a city with a fistful of hills, mostly long and drawn out, he stopped near a park when he saw this amazing sight, amazing to him then but common to the emerging scene as he would find out later, a converted yellow school bus. Converted the operative word. The bus had been transformed on the outside into some fantastic psychedelic moving art show and inside a cheap travelling mobile home of a new sort after the seats had been ripped out and mattresses completely covered the floor and in the back boxes filled with spare clothes, food, and utensils. Topped off by a big sound speaker system just then blaring out some unheard of by him music from he thought maybe India or something (music which turned out to the Jefferson Airplane as they moved into the acid rock music world which took a spin as the rock genre of choice among the dope aficionados of the time like cool jazz had sustained the tea head “beats” a half generation before).

More importantly for our tale as he approached the bus for closer inspection Josh noticed a young guy, a guy who looked a few years older than him but still young with a long beard and long hair (Josh was beardless, would never have much more than stubble whenever he tried to grow a beard, a wisp of a beard really, and had only let his jet  black hair start to grow after he fled staid bi-weekly routine barber shop Olde Saco and got on the road) sitting on the sidewalk beside this monster of a bus. Without hesitating a moment Josh walked up to the guy and asked if he had a joint. The guy, the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin, also without hesitation, reached into his denim jacket pocket and passed Josh a big old joint, a blunt in the dope world language of the day, and said “fire her up brother, fire her up.” (Josh’s first dope experience which is a bit outside what we are trying to get across here was the usual endless and chaotic coughing that seized beginners not used to the harshness of the dried plant once he took a few “hits” and a kind of trance-like feeling in his brain that the cares of the world had been left behind.) That exchange began the Josh-Scribe friendship, a little rocky at times, but a lasting time until the Scribe’s untimely and mysterious early death several years later.      

What that converted yellow school bus was about to give an idea of the times was that the owner, although don’t make a today’s assumption about the owner part, Captain Crunch (real name Jack Shepard, Yale, Class of 1958) had bought it or traded for it that never was clear to Josh as he heard different stories from different sources for a bag of dope in order to roam up and down the West Coast ocean-side highways picking up and letting people off along the way. The Scribe, who had quit college in Boston to head west once he heard about the Summer of Love stuff happening. Stuff which had confirmed for him his long time prediction that a new breeze was about to hit the land, to hit youth nation in particular had met Captain Crunch in Golden Gate Park and had already taken one trip up and down the coast to San Diego and back. It was on that trip back up the coast in Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego that Kathy Callahan, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968, the Butterfly Swirl of this scenario comes into the picture.    

Kathy, let’s call her Butterfly Swirl to keep with the times and her time, had been nothing but a Southern California surfer girl meaning in those days that she looked beautiful, tanned and curvaceous on the beach while her golden-haired surfer boyfriend went hunting for the perfect wave. It was along the Pacific Coast Highway one late afternoon as it passed through Carlsbad where the yellow brick road bus had stopped to see the breath-taking ocean view that the Scribe spied Butterfly Swirl sunning herself waiting for her by then pruned surfer boy to come ashore for the day. The Scribe used to the more intellectually driven and somewhat neurotic co-ed who he was addicted to in the Boston-Cambridge haunts he frequented was fascinated by Butterfly Swirl fresh new world look. (The Scribe would admit later that he was totally unprepared to see hundreds of such beauties up and down the coast waiting on land for their own golden-haired surfer boys seeking their won perfect waves.) He went up to her and started asking questions about surfers, surfing, a subject he knew nothing about having come from the East where such a sport did not have any cache then. They talked for a while and during that time the Scribe found out that Butterfly, kind of restless going into her senior year of high school about what to do with her life, whether to go to college, whether she should work on her art, was intrigued by what she heard was happening up in youth nation San Francisco. 

Yeah, the times were like that. You would expect a guy like the Scribe to head west once he got the message. Hell he, driven by his faded beat dreams, was built for that experience. Maybe even expect a guy like Josh before heading on to other things, as most of the brethren who formed that small segment of youth nation would eventually do, to head west and see what was what. What was extraordinary was the jail breakout of a gal like Butterfly Swirl who if she was a few years older would have been so totally immersed in the surfer culture that she could have given a damn about some weirdos up north where the weirdos congregated and had done so for a couple of generations. The long and short of it was that a couple of days later Butterfly Swirl after the Scribe’s coaxing was “on the bus” heading north.

One of the things that guys like the Scribe was trying to break out of was the old girl-guy one and only thing although breaking through that barrier had been easier said than done. For a few weeks though as the bus headed to Xanadu, Big Sur, Carmel, and Monterey then up through Pacifica before landing once again in Golden Gate Park the Scribe and Butterfly Swirl were lovers. The Scribe gave Butterfly Swirl her first experiences with dope mostly marijuana, peyote buttons and mescaline, the LSD, the Kool-Aid acid test would come later. And Butterfly being an easy-going young woman began to fit in with the travelling band of gypsies spiritual and intellectual wanderers who populated the bus.       

Then the same day Josh met the Scribe on Russian Hill after he had brought Josh on board the bus Butterfly Swirl who had been out pan-handling to get some provisions for the bus saw him and that was that. Something happened between them from minute one but it was not until later that night that the big switch happened after they were all stoned. The Scribe who had taken a half-lover, half-fatherly interest in Butterfly Swirl once he saw that she was not very intellectually curious beyond her restlessness and her fear of a surfer girl’s fate (although very sexually curious and inventive) saw the writing on the wall and “blessed” the union, became head of that little trio family. Being just a few years older in youth nation made him a logical little father. A couple of weeks later at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love had their first Kool-Aid acid test and through the dreams and colors became “one with the universe.” The Scribe, satanic love preacher that night “married” them. Yeah, like I said the times were like that, exactly like that.     

[As mentioned above the Scribe and Josh would be friends until the Scribe’s untimely death in the mid-1970s. As for Butterfly Swirl by summer’s end she had had enough of roaming and cavorting and returned to her golden-haired surfer boy still looking for that perfect wave. Not everybody was built to go the distance even in the Summer of Love. J.T. ]   

When Private Detectives, Shamuses, Gumshoes, Key-Hole Peepers Stepped Up In Class-“The New P.I.” Circa 1950s-Ross MacDonald’s “The Ivory Grin”-A Book Review

When Private Detectives, Shamuses, Gumshoes, Key-Hole Peepers Stepped Up In Class-“The New P.I.” Circa 1950s-Ross MacDonald’s “The Ivory Grin”-A Book Review

Book Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Ivory Grin, by Ross MacDonald

Well the battle lines are finally drawn; the dirty underbelly of this cutthroat business can see the light of day. Sam Lowell, who used to be the official senior film critic in the days when Allan Jackson, recently returned as a contributing editor or some such make-shift title pressed upon Greg Green by the Editorial Board conveniently headed by one Sam Lowell, ran the show, was the site manager which meant that he doled out the assignments to friend and foe alike, has laid down the gauntlet or whatever you call it when you are challenged to a no holds barred unto death duel. It seems Sam, as my good friend and mentor Seth Garth, warned me would happen, has finally blown his gasket, has in his words “had enough.” Had enough of being challenged on his “cred,” his term, on the issue of his expertise in the film noir world. Has taken umbrage, my term, on my continual reference to his so-called definitive tome on the genre The Life And Times Of Film Noir:1940-1960 as so much eyewash, so “retro” and out of date and geared to the hoary Dashiell Hammett- Raymond Chandler-Phillip Larkin trio who allegedly took the, Sam’s expression, “parlor pink amateur detective” and made him, and it was solely hims in that world of blood and guts hard-nosed avenging angels with angles seeking rough-edged justice in this wicked old world.

Yawn. Yawn to threadbare theory and yawn, double yawn to a nine hundred, maybe I had better write the number in numerical form so you too can have your eyes boggled 900, paged volume which by my estimation could have been done in say three hundred pages. The use of the word estimation no accident since try as I might I lost interest about the time I got to 1953 when he dribbled on and on about one Mike Hammer and how despite his ardent anti-communism and bull in a china shop manner was a hard-boiled lady’s man of a detective in the mold of  Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, Hammett’s Sam Spade (notably absent was his Nick and Nora Charles except by indirection), and Larkin’s Jack Logan.

A reviewer, a conscientious reviewer, can only be expected to take so much, take a volume loaded with plenty of book and film reviews allegedly written by Mr. Lowell in his salad days which formed the bulk of the work so he essentially double-dipped getting paid, I hear, by the word from Jackson and getting whatever royalties from the pricey in those days twenty-five dollars from the book publisher Wainwright Press. (I would be remiss, would be taken to task, and continually chuckle and continue to write every chance I get as well if I didn’t mention Seth Garth’s reaction when I asked him if he had read all 900 plus pages of Sam’s volume. Seth, who has known Sam since Hector was a pup, Seth’s expression, gave me his patented Seth smirk and said are you kidding nobody, not even Sam could read that thing, a real snorer was the way he put. Seth also insinuated what is now common knowledge around here on the question of authorship of his reviews that Sam surely had not written the whole thing himself given his skirt-chasing drunken revels in those days and that Seth had written half of it or at least gave lots of input into the project.]

I have made it clear for a while now, at least since I got my own by-line, thanks Seth, after surviving about six different onslaughts from Sam on noir and young Will Bradley on Marvel Comic so-called heroes, that I intend to be the diva for the 21^st film noir world. Sam balked at that idea when I first presented it in print-and Seth said go for it. What has Sam really in a lather is that after he finished his tome he never updated the damn thing so that all the neo-noir, all the films that came after those based on his work are sealed with seven seals to him. Like any good reviewer I saw my spot, my place in the vacant landscape and I am going to make my mark. I have decided to deal with an expose of Sam’s omissions and neglect (like as I mentioned given short shrift to Nick and Nora Charles despite almost two hundred pages on Hammett’s Spade and fifty alone on his early nameless Continental Op in Red Harvest) by starting with a classic writer, film adapter, who Sam gave short shrift to since his career spanned well past the 1960s benchmark, Ross MacDonald (Ken Millar real name). Sam barely mentions him, barely mentions his central private detective Lew Archer although Lew had all of the balls of Marlowe and Spade and about twenty times more psychological insight in what drove up against the wall “perps” over the edge.       

Properly speaking Lew Archer, at least in this first book, The Ivory Grin, that I picked at random out of the twenty-plus books in the Archer series, despite the his short height, or at least that is what is known about his physical stature moves away from the really bull by the horns, knock heads and let God separate out the guilty from the innocent at his leisure, skirt-chasing of Spade-Marlowe-Logan trio much touted by Sam as the epitome of the post-parlor pink detective world. Those guys except when they actually wrap up a case, beating the public coppers with a gong while they are still scratching their heads, to take down some cruddy criminals best gotten off the streets leave me cold, could have better gone back to key-hole peeping before say Chandler, for example, let them handle cold cases, got them out of the threadbare offices waiting around sucking up low-rent whiskey from the bottom desk drawer. Archer used his wits and deductive powers to bring a little rough justice to the world, what Seth, citing a guy from his youth named the Scribe, called this wicked old world.

I am sure, well maybe not sure but I hope, when Sam, or whoever he has read other’s reviews and write his reviews these days finally realizes that his balloon has been burst he will drag up some escapade of Marlowe’s saving an old dowager with wild daughters some grief or Spade busting up a stuff of dreams con or Logan outwitting the dragon king by stealth to counter my contentions about Mr. Archer. Let him do his best. Meanwhile Lew, short or tall, chain-smoker or dope head, drunk or sober will by guile and indirection solves his mysteries without bang-bang and sucker punches every two pages. Here is how he figured out what happened to Charles Singleton when he went slumming among the plebes and got nothing but that ivory grin in the end for his troubles.

Yes, that is the Charles Singleton of the very, very Singleton family that came over with John and Priscilla on the merry Mayflower who made a name for himself in World War II as a pilot, a lady’s man in full uniform and a guy who after the war knew how to turn a dollar-if he had to. But see Charles, and maybe it was that too much inter-breeding among too close cousins which destroyed many old-line families, had a kinky side, liked to go down in the mud with whores, or as the term was used then maybe now too loose women of no known address. As long as they were Helen of Troy beautiful and willing to succumb to his kinky side, to the wild side. That is what tripped him up in the end, what caused Lew to lose some sleep because Charles picked up some tramp, some round-heeled beauty with no vocabulary but who gave good head (unspoken but assumed in 1950s dime store detective literature) in some gin mill out in California when he was stationed in the Air Force and winning fistfuls of medals.

This woman, let’s give her a name beyond her “profession,” Alicia was nothing but a mantrap, was nowhere but from hunger grabbing onto whatever safe harbor she could grab onto. Problem, very big problem, whatever her feelings for Charles and all was that she had been a second level gangster’s moll back in the Midwest, a nice nest but dangerous especially if somebody else takes something from a gangster-then bang-bang and no questions asked. Oh, another little problem she was married out West, out in the California valley to a Walter Mitty-type doctor who was running a low-rent medical practice which was not giving dear Alicia the kind of life she had expected. The long and short of it was Alicia had three guys on her string.

That would be the undoing of one Charles Singleton, he of mansions and Mayflowers, once her gangster man who was getting a bit screwy came West and found out she was shacking up with a Mayfair swell. Bang-bang poor Charles. That was where Lew came in first as a replacement for a corrupt private detective looking for the main chance by Charles’ blue-haired mother and subsequently by one of those too closely related female cousins who was in love with her flyer boy. Mission: find out where the hell Charles had disappeared to. To pose the question was to give the answer. Along the way a young black woman who was trying to help Alicia got murdered as did that self-serving private eye. In all three murders and a few twists and turns.

Here is where human nature as it has evolved thus far gets a big workout.  Everybody and their sister were trying to cover up the fact that our gangster with a screw loose had shot and killed Charles. The helpful black woman, the gangster’s ill-disposed sister, Alicia who in desperation brought the seemingly mortally wounded Charles to hubby doctor’s clinic to see if he could survive.  He didn’t but not due to that gangster fusillade. Old Walter Mitty doc loved his Alicia, wanted to protect her in his own way. Yeah, Doc blew his Hippocratic Oath and did bleeding from all pores Charles in. Moreover, to cover his tracks he dissected the guy and left him a skeleton in a closet where nobody but Lew could figure out what happened. Nice work Lew and the public coppers are still scratching their heads having been out-classed by a new breed of private eye.                               

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review 

CD Review

By Seth Garth

The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 1, 1933-1935,

[Sometimes I get in a Nelson Algren moment as here. But that I mean I want to get down in the mud, get back to the roots, talk about the days when it was not clear which way I was heading-a life of crime or its cousin reading and writing to try to make sense of the world (just kidding on the cousin part, okay so avoid a tweet storm please). Want to talk about the blues since I am here reviewing a Lady Day, Billie Holiday of the orchid-ripped hair. Want to talk about the people like Billie who lived on the edge, who fell down, who got back up and fell down again. Yeah, the ones Nelson Algren he of the Walk On The Wild Side, Man With The Golden Arm talked about, the Frank Machines, the Dove Linkhorns, the people I came from if the truth be told.

I swear I don’t to this day understand what those people I talked to several years ago that I noted below who wrote Billie off as some long-gone junkie of no account. Not after she saved many a day for me when I was blue, maybe beyond blue, maybe ready to meet the dawn turned into night, if you really want to know. See even a stone-cold junkie has the capacity to give something-if she or he has some talent. But here is what the squares and by that I include those dunces who dismissed Billie out of hand, didn’t want to hear how she “saved” me on many a misbegotten tough day or estimate, fathom what pain she had to endure to give what she could give. Maybe some people have become so sanitized, so vanilla they know not of what I speak when I talks about Lester Young blowing that seldom attained high white note every instrumentalist seeks out to the damn China Seas. Don’t know what it took even on good days for Billie to run the rack, to pick up her head long enough to do what she had to. Who gives a fuck, the old corner boy from the hard-pressed Acre section of downtrodden North Adamsville coming out with that fuck word, whether she needed the fixer man to come and get her well when you think about it for a minute. Yeah, no wait let me go and listen to about two hours of Billie rather than slip into a blue funk and forget that Nelson Algren spoke for the little voiceless people who knew their Billie backward and forward. Knew her junkie pain, needed their own fixer man to get well.

For the record I will say it here again today-if I had had the capacity to do so I would have provided Billie with all the dope she needed-be her every loving fixer man just so she could chase my weary blues away. That’s the ticket. The hell with the squares. S.G.]               

Everybody, that meaning everybody who knows anything about the blues knows of legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew she was tied up hard with junkie fever, knee deep in junk. Knew that information either from having read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in the recent retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin. Had turned her into some hustling gal with dark lights out of a Nelson Algren story about her daddy making her blues go away, had the “fixer” man making the pain going away for a moment.

(I believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young who himself blew many a high white note out to the China seas as the phrase went on the West Coast when he was “on” gave her that name. Put lady and day together and it stuck. He backed her up on many recordings, including here, and in many a venue, including New York café society before they pulled her ticket. The name fit her as did that eternal flower arrangement, sweet gardenia speaking of sexual adventures and promise, in her hair)     

Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if you listen to this CD under review like the other ones in this series and other compilations that I am reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger” wanting habits mood about Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while about music that moved me, spoke to me. In this second volume in the series you will also know why in the first part of the 21^st century guys like me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place, by that slight hush as she envelopes a song which kept your own blues at bay. I repeat kept your blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment forward.

That last statement, those last two sentences are really what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than a single selection spending half the night turning over vinyl, flipping tapes, changing CDs if you don’t have a multiple CD recorder, or grabbing the dial on an MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours, tune that vinyl over in my case, and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.

Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit.  Once a few years ago I was talking to some young people about Billie and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own blues   away. That is why we still listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today. 

Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the 1930s, the time of her time, covering Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. This first may be a little more uneven that her later work when she teamed up with serious jazz and blues players like the aforementioned Lester Young blowing out high white notes to the China seas while she basked in the glow of the lyrics. But just check out Miss Brown To You, What a Little Moonlight Can Do, and the classic Sunbonnet Blue and you will get an idea of what I am talking about. And maybe get your own blues chased away    

The 50th Anniversary Of The Anti-Vietnam War March On The Pentagon (1967)-With Norman Mailer’s “Armies Of The Night” In Mind (1968)

The 50^th Anniversary Of The Anti-Vietnam War March On The Pentagon (1967)-With Norman Mailer’s “Armies Of The Night” In Mind (1968)  

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman  

  

Earlier this year driven by my old corner boys, Alex James and Sam Lowell, I had begun to write some pieces in this space about things that happened in a key 1960s year, 1967. The genesis of this work has been based on of all things a business trip that Alex took to San Francisco early this spring. While there he noted on one of the ubiquitous mass transit buses that crisscross the city an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum located in Golden Gate Park. That exhibition The Summer of Love, 1967 had him cutting short a meeting one afternoon in order to see what it was all about. See if he was just having a “flashback” (not uncommon back the day for those who did not take their Kool-Aid straight but laced with mysterious chemical imbalances). What it was all about aside the nostalgia effect for members of the now ragtag Generation of ‘68 (an AARP-worthy generation but I prefer the less commercial Generation of ’68 to tag that crowd, my crowd) an entire floor’s worth of concert poster art, hippy fashion, music and photographs of that noteworthy year in the lives of some of those who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. The reason for Alex playing hooky from his important business meeting was that he had actually been out there that year, had been out in Haight-Ashbury-etched 1967) and had stayed and imbibed deeply of the counter-culture for a couple of years after that. (Imbibed not in running out of steam fast Frisco but on a magical mystery tour yellow brick road former school bus courtesy of Captain Crunch which went up and down the West Coast searching, hell, just searching.)

Alex had not been the only one who had been smitten by the Summer of Love revival bug because when he returned to Riverdale outside of Boston where he now lives he gathered up all of the corner boys from growing up North Adamsville still standing to talk about, and do something about, commemorating the event. His first contact was with Sam Lowell the old film critic who also happened to have gone out there and spent I think about a year, maybe a little more. As had most of the old corner boys for various lengths of time usually a few months. Except me which I will explain in a minute. Alex’s idea when he gathered all of us together was to put up a small commemoration book in honor of the late Peter Paul Markin with memory pieces by each of us. See Markin, always known as “Scribe” after he was dubbed that by our leader Frankie Riley (now a big time lawyer with a swanky office in downtown Boston but then poor as a church mouse and nothing but a serious con artist), was the first guy to go out there when he sensed that the winds of change he kept yakking about around the corner on desolate Friday and Saturday nights when we had no dough, no girls, no cars and no chance of getting any of those quickly were coming west to east.

Once everybody agreed to do the book Alex contacted his youngest brother Zack, the fairly well known writer, to edit and organize the project. I had agreed to help as well. The reason I had refused to go to San Francisco then had been that I was in the throes of trying to put together a career as a political operative by attempting to get Robert Kennedy to run against that naked sneak thief of a sitting President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had us neck deep in the big muddy of Vietnam and so I had no truck with hippies, druggies or “music is the revolution” types like those who filled the desperate streets around Haight-Ashbury. Then.  Zack did a very good job and we are proud of tribute to the not forgotten still lamented late Scribe who really was a mad man character and maybe if he had not got caught up in the Army, in being drafted, in being sent to Vietnam which threw him off kilter when he got back to the real world he might still be around to tell us what the next big trend will be.              

[I should mention here for the young or clueless something about corner boy culture since you no longer see guys hanging around corners at variety stores, pizza parlors, bowling alleys and the like as that scene has successively been replaced by mall “rat-dom” and now “don’t look up from the fucking phone” social media. (Don’t see gals either for the same reasons although back in the day the gals hanging around corners were with guys, glued to guys, otherwise they generally were inside say Doc’s Drugstore soda fountain or the pizza parlor spending their who knows where they got it discretionary money throwing dimes and quarters into the jukebox to play the latest heartthrob tunes). Corner boy-dom was a rite of passage in working class neighborhoods like the Acre section of North Adamsville where we grew up having certain corners passed on to you as you grew older like our progression from Harry’s Variety in elementary school to Doc’s Drugstore in junior high to Tonio Pizza Parlor in high school and beyond.

You, we, I hung on the corner for a very simple reason in those days- no dough. No serious dough although everybody had some scam from roughing up younger siblings for coin or a back door sneak at mother’s pocketbook to the midnight creep which best be left at that since who knows if the statute of limitations has run out on those high crimes and misdemeanors. No dough meant no car, meant nowhere in golden age of the automobile America where any guy with a car, handsome or ugly, had some young thing sitting very close in the front seat of his Chevy something. Meant even if you could find a girl who didn’t mind taking the bus or walking you had no money for dates even for a cheapjack movie date much less say hitting a drive-n restaurant. And no dates meant no girls hovering around which meant the corner with that cohort of guys in the same condition as you. Meant having a bunch of sullen surly guys with time on their hands, lust and larceny in their hearts, and an overweening desire to fall outside the law. That most of us survived is amazing but it was a close thing, very close.]

That initial impetus to think about 1967 at a time when I was in love with Robert Kennedy and that kind of grass-roots progressive politics of which we see very little now led me to do a piece about the first Monterrey International Pops Festival held at the beginning of that summer and where revered names for the Generation of ’68 like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar (he, additionally the papa of today’s Norah Jones) had made their first big splashes. I always loved the music, always loved to go to concerts, generally free or cheap concerts if you can believe that in these days of nostalgia high-priced tickets for groups and singles well beyond their primes on Boston Common and elsewhere and hear what was what. Those were the days when I heard the first stirrings, and maybe half wanted to believe it was true, that “the music was the revolution.” That somehow new sounds and the emerging lifestyle, the hippie lifestyle of communal sharing, good vibes and easy going would be the impetus for a new ethos. That some idea of “dropping out” of bourgeois society (not a term I would have used then but which now kind of fits what I am getting at) would bring the new utopia onto our doorsteps. The Scribe and the others at the time having been through the initial stages of the Summer of Love out in the West were filled with such ideas to the extent that they could articulate such a vision. (The Scribe was able to and did at the time and carried the others with him.) I was having none of it, or very little, since at that time I neither believed in any kind of revolution nor did I think that society needed anything more than tweaking (with me helping the throw the tweak switch.) I argued against and I believe, unfortunately, that those who professed the “music is the revolution” idea have been shown to have been totally over their heads and left no serious mark on the social fabric.                        

There was another trend, another 50^th anniversary trend which I would argue was counter-posed to the above mentioned theory. This event is the 50^th anniversary of the famous, or infamous, March on the Pentagon in October of that year. The one that the late writer Norman Mailer wrote about in his well-received and highly honored The Armies Of The Night a review of which I have reposted elsewhere on this blog. That event was not the first massive Washington anti-Vietnam War demonstration (the first had been in New York in 1965) nor the first to feature acts of civil disobedience but it was the first threshing out, the first understanding that something big was going to be needed to stop the fucking war. That the government was not going to stop the madness on its own hook. Moreover that despite whatever residue remained from the intoxicating Summer of Love “dropping out” under the rubric of the “music is the revolution” mantra was not going to create the “newer world” in the words of the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson those of us from supporters of Robert Kennedy to the left were seeking.         

Of course as described in detail including an overabundance of detail about his own part, his own arrest in the melee by Mailer this effort was very much a helter-skelter thing with mixed results. The key idea to be taken by any serious anti-war militants that the government (run by either major party as it later turned) was going to viciously thwart any such people’s efforts to bring an end to the damn thing. There would be a parting of the ways essentially not only between “drop out” and “confrontation” partisans but within the confrontationists camp a split over peaceful mass marches and more vigorous actions. The March on the Pentagon was the laboratory for all those ideas from “levitating” the place to a guerilla warfare-type actions to shut the place down.    

Of course today I am commemorating an event, not for the first time, that at the time I was adamantly opposed to, saw as very disruptive to the attempts by first Senator Eugene McCarthy and his insurgent run at Lyndon Baines Johnson and later after Johnson’s withdrawal from candidacy by Robert Kennedy to solve this problem through parliamentary means. In short while I was vaguely anti-war, or thought I was only at that level, I did not participate in or honor such efforts. The turning point would be later, the next year as it turned out, when I was drafted by my “friends and neighbors” at the Draft Board in North Adamsville (that greeting was how the letter of induction actually started) and accepted induction even if half-heartedly in the U.S. Army. I have written, and others have written as well, about my complete turnaround once I was inducted and of my two year struggle including serious stockade time for refusing to go to Vietnam. One of the books I read during that time was Mailer’s The Armies Of The Night taking to heart some of the lessons from that experience (although still a bit put off by the centrality of Mailer’s ego in the whole process).

Here is the payoff though. In the spring of 1971 shortly after I had been released from the Army I started hanging around with a bunch of Cambridge radicals. The big idea at the time was to have a massive May Day civil disobedience action in Washington around the theme-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” I did not even think twice about not going, of not getting arrested and of thinking that such as action was desperately necessary. Although I drew some other conclusions about how to end war from that aborted experience I saw it as a continuation of that struggle at the Pentagon in 1967. And whatever else I never regretted my actions in 1971 and I hope those who were at the Pentagon in 1967 have not either, not in these desperate times.