When The Capitalist World Was On The Rise-The Dutch And Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery-A Reply

When The Capitalist World Was On The Rise-The Dutch And Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery-A Reply

By Frank Jackman

Normally I don’t have occasion to response to something written by one of the other writers in this space but young William Bradley has set the pace by referring to your humble servant in his piece about his take on Vermeer and his cohort who after Rembrandt, Hals, Reubens, and Van Dyck lit up the firmament and kept the torch burning for the rest of that impressive Dutch and Flemish-driven century when they were kings of the hill. That Bradley reference to me came after he had seen Vermeer and crew in a big retrospective down at the National Gallery in Washington which since he was down there for another reason site manager Greg Green had assigned him. Somehow young Bradley had been thoughtful enough about his assignment to check the archives here to see if anybody had written anything about this period of Dutch-Flemish ascendancy in European art (and really the last time that this section of Europe made a big splash on the art world for reasons that I could speculate on but which don’t really concern us here so I will push on).    

What William found in the archives was a short piece I did several years ago after I had been down at the National Gallery myself and was smitten by a huge mural-like painting at the 4^th Street entrance detailing in exhaustive fashion a banquet that a small cohort of self-satisfied Dutch burghers were attending and that sight sparked an idea that had been in my head for a while about the days when now wore out capitalism, worn out to do anybody but lift a few people up, was a progressive force in the world. That sense (along with that self-satisfied well-fed feeling that the world was their oyster) is what put pen to paper. Not so much for the art aspect, the painting was done by a lesser light and would if were judging on a scale was only so-so in the heady atmosphere of 17^th century Dutch painting, but for the way art intersects with economic forces. That (and I don’t know what else Bradley might have seen in the archives that would have helped him) was when he came to me to ask a few questions since his take as anybody could see from his short screed dealt with the art for art’s sake aspect of what he had seen at the Vermeer exhibit.

I had originally written that little nugget rank for the on-line edition of Progressive Nation when I was the senior political commentator here under the old regime, a time before Bradley came on boards so the art part was not fundamental to my idea.  I agree with him though that I liked to write about the proud beginnings when the rising bourgeoisie was going mano a mano (my words from the piece he saw in the archives and used in his article) against the old stagnant feudal society that depended on the static-and hard core universal church Catholic religion which promised the good life not now but in the great by and by. These guys were not worried about paying some middleman indulgence trafficker to insure their road to salvation. They were getting theirs in this world and if God approved so much the better if not well too bad.   

I did a whole series of articles under the title When The Capitalist World Was Young to be found in the archives making the connection between the artistic sensibilities of the rising bourgeoisie and their clamoring for paintings which showed that they were on the rise, that they were the new sheriffs in town and could afford like the nobles and high clergy in the ancient regime to show their new-found prosperity by paying for portraits, collective and singular, and displays of their domestic prosperity. Of course my perspective as an old radical from the 1960s was coming from something like a Marxist prospective. I had to laugh, laugh a bitter laugh that through no fault of his own Bradley was clueless about such a prospective. About not knowing much about Marxism except it had a lot to do with the demise of the old Soviet Union now Putin’s Russia so he was clueless about how that artwork had anything to do with politics. What I told him, and I don’t want to get into a big discussion about it is that Marxism, Marx saw capitalism as a progressive force against the feudal society and that would get reflected in lots of things like art and social arrangements.      

Under that set of ideas I was able to give a positive spin on a lot of the art from the 16^th and 17^th century, especially Dutch and Flemish art in the days when those grouping were leading the capitalist charge via their position in the shipping, transport and the emerging banking world. Funny young Bradley took my point once he saw the painting I was referring to and noted that these guys and it was all guys except the hard-pressed wait staff even though he was still not sure that you can draw that close a connection between art and economics.  We have a lot of make-up work to do for the lack of serious leftist perspectives the past couple of generations. 

I left William with a few political ideas to think about. Also told him to look at that self-satisfied burgher business, look at the pot-bellies of the men and the rounded face of the young women which indicated how well-fed they were, look at the very neat way they arranged their domestic lives. Most importantly look at those unadorned halls and churches which a very far away from the medieval overkill of the huge centuries to build cathedrals that kept everybody tied down to looking inward. Like I said these guys were the “elect,” knew they were the elect and they could push forward come hell or high water.  

The Jar Of Isabella X- A Journey Through The Arts-The Boston School, Ah, At The Museum Of Fine Arts-Thwarted Love With A Bizarre Twist- Alexander’s Keats’ Inspired Isabella And The Pot Of Basil

The Jar Of Isabella X- A Journey Through The Arts-The Boston School, Ah, At The Museum Of Fine Arts-Thwarted Love With A Bizarre Twist- Alexander’s Keats’ Inspired Isabella And The Pot Of Basil

By Laura Perkins    

I will get to the subject in hand, a take on the marvelous and mesmerizing Isabella, Or A Jar Of Basil seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a while back while on assignment for this upstart series which site manager has given to me under circumstances not of my own making. However the reaction I received to my first foray into this new review area for when in discussing John Singer Sargent’s The Portrait of Madame X has forced my hand to reply if that is the right word to all kinds charges of pandering to what is essentially soft-core pornography, or taking such a view of the painting. I might repeat for what it is worth that when I took this assignment, I told Greg Green that I would decide what I wanted to focus on in each painting, Not what the art world, the world of self-serving curators deemed the reason the damn things were in some museum other than as pace-fillers. So I will vent as is my prerogative. Laura Perkins]      

You never know what will happen in this business. This latter-day publishing business where unlike the old days you can lose stuff in an instant, lose by an injudicious hit of the delete button. That happened to me of late in something of an omen when I tried to do a second installment of what is according to site manager Greg Green an on-going series of painting which I am at liberty to choose to get us up to date in the art world, an area woefully under- represented in this publication. If I behave myself of which more below. Without overestimating the old days and their sluggish technologies there was something to be said for hand-written yellow pads and carbon copy smudge typewritten materials even without all the comforts of what the new technology has brought us. In any case I am starting to get the hang of it, the last barrier of cyberspace, getting used to the idea that not every utterance, every word needs to be etched eternally in the ether. Strangely I did believe that proposition in yellow pad (some of which I still have from my 1970s days as a free-lancer) and typewriter times (some also when I was weaned off of the yellow pad which was both too cumbersome and too slow when I had to make a day to day living out of my words). That typewriter in turn gave way to word processor and such when that too proved too cumbersome and too slow to make a day to day living out of my words. I would also add as will become clear below that I miss the old days when a reader had something bilious to say, some vitriolic smattering of words she or he had to not only write the spiel out but put stamp to envelope and actually go mail the damn thing. Which meant that they had to put some effort into the task unlike today they can fire off some silly salvo and move on to the next target of their villainy.    

But enough of personal recollections in the dark ages of this “publish or perish” business. As one and all should know by my first foray into the subject, at least first foray since I was named “unofficial” art critic I am taking quirky looks at some of the great paintings that intertest me. And not for art curator purposes either. I became an Art critic by default when Sam Lowell, my longtime companion who balked at doing this assignment. Sam, for better or worse, balked since he is in hot pursuit of why famed California private detective Lew Archer, yes that Lew Archer, who if you are old enough to remember solved the Galton kidnapping case, the Carlton murders and the infamous wife-done Hallman serial killings all under the noises of the public coppers, never made the vaunted P.I. Hall of Fame after such a glorious start. Sam has a “theory” which he can tell the reader if interested all I know is that site manager Greg Green let him off the hook to pursue his leads. Let Sam off the hook and put me on the hook once he knew from Leslie Dumont I had taken some art classes and at least had gone to an art museum unlike his other potential candidates.

By the way Sam’s credentials are far greater than mind could ever be since I only took art appreciation classes in high school and college and since then have limited my experiences in the field to an infinite number of doodling sessions when some windbag is fouling up the air at one conference or another. Sam actually could have gone to art school, his high school art teacher encouraged him endlessly and would have paved the way for him. Actually, now that I think about it did pave the way for him at his alma mater the highly regarded Massachusetts School of Art. Sam, from the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville where he grew up got a serious chill, a serious no when his mother found out he had applied and been accepted. She painted, nice word although not literally true, a horrendous picture of him in some flea-bitten, rat-infested and crime-ridden cold-water flat garret with him barely able to hold his frozen hand brush to canvas for the rest of his life. Her idea, a not uncommon one in the Acre from what some of the other guys who grew up there have told me, was for him to be the first in the family to have a nice steady white-collar civil service job which would bring the family fortunes up a notch. He didn’t do that but neither did he to his sometimes-later regret pursue that art dream, cold water flat and frozen fingers or not. I got the job even though I made it clear to Greg that I would not pose as an art critic and would take my shots where they would lead me without any regard for what they meant for the greater art world.  

My first foray not so strangely was John Singer Sargent’s Portrait Of Madame X which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. How it got there is a long story as is the story behind many art acquisitions but will not detain us because I have bigger fish to fry today. My main axis on that first assignment was to deal with the obvious sexual allure (circa the 1880s which was demurer than now) of the painting and of Madame’s scandalous sex life considering she was married to some French pillar of society, a well-heeled and connected banker. You can read my take in the archives (see January 8, 2019) but mostly what I have found out was that Madame Guiteau, no need to be coy about that “Madame X” business she foisted on a less than candid world was that she was so intend on being a social climber, of working her way up French high society that she slept with any guy who could get her moving up what Seth Garth calls “the food chain.”

Fair enough then if today not fair enough in a post-#MeToo world since beautiful women, perceived beautiful women were known to, for good or evil, use their “profession” beauty to get ahead in this wicked old world. I said some other stuff, but this is what has brought me a ton of blow-back, blow-back which Sam, dear Sam in this instance, warned me would happen when I laid out my argument. He always said reviewing was a tough cutthroat racket and now I have had my baptism of fire. The gist of the responses has dealt with exactly how John Singer Sargent (hereafter Singer Sargent we don’t have to go on endlessly with the robber baron era habit of three name monikers among the elite to show pedigree or prove legitimacy in or more democratic age) got the Madame to pose so provocatively in the first place.

Even Sam was surprised though at the apparent source of the criticism not of me, although that may be in question the evangelicals. People not known to frequent this publication but who saw an opening to see who was, or was not, doing Satan’s work, who was damned and why. Here is where we get into what Sam and others call the “trolls” and their “alternate facts,” actually alternate universe outlook. A major rash of e-mails pointed out that Singer Sargent had obviously picked his model up out of the gutter and gave her a few sous, francs, some French money to pose for him, that he got some kind of sexual pleasure out of what he was doing as well as painting a great if toilsome masterpiece. Those skimpy straps ready to tell all, something like that. Certainly the gown and her provocative pose spoke of eternal damnation to these mob. The other big “school of thought” was that the model, nobody wanted to tie Madame Guiteau, a well-oiled member of high society looking to move upward with the age old art of using her professional beauty to work her way up that chain, had been tossed out of a high-end bordello in New York City after she had “stolen” some dough from one of the customers. Jay Gould, yes, the robber baron Jay Gould, and had to flee to avoid his wrath and her imprisonment.        

            

Under either theory what these ding-dongs have in common is the erroneous idea that Singer Sargent was getting sexual pleasure out of the provocative poses of the model, especially that very suggestive slipping of one of the straps of her evil thought jet black evening gown. What they could not factor in was the idea that Singer Sargent, as was well know, had a number of “assistants,” male and female, who found his bed. Which ones, which sex is problematic but most people with an opinion have mentioned that the females acted as cover. I have uncovered some useful information in that regard. The great English poet and self-acknowledged gay man when that was not cool to say in polite society, when it was the love  “that dare not speak its name,”    W.H. Auden had always claimed Singer Sargent for the “Homintern,” a name which he or one of his crowd, one of his gay friends maybe Christopher Isherwood or Stephen Spender, coined as a spin-off from the Comintern which both had at one time supported to mean that the guy was a member of the fraternity, was gay in the cloaked terminology of the times. Yes, the evangelicals will have a field day with this one if they can figure it out. What I don’t get is people who are ready to absolve every sexual predator alive if he or she repents has no mercy for somebody who used their sex, as with Madame X, to get ahead whether we agree or not.      

Most of the other comments descended downward from that Madame is a whore trope and are not worthy of comment. What is worthy is one that attempted to take the high road, attempted to in the end try to whitewash the whole sordid affair. One Arthur Gilmore Doyle, here we go with the “three name” Brahmin (although not all the “three name” crowd were Brahmins, Boston variety since Singer Sargent would trace his lineage from the Philadelphia Main Line crowd but they are all of a piece), who argued, if that is the right word, that Singer Sargent would not stoop to having some “fallen woman,” his term, pose for him under any circumstances. So here we have the class line drawn in lieu of the sex line. Or maybe both lines since he seemed very fussy about the whole matter.

Doyle further mentioned that Madame X if she posed for Singer Sargent was a pure as the driven snow. Worse disputed the evidence presented by the famous Parisian paint-maker Bleu who provided Singer Sargent (and others) with his paints in his memoir that when Madame was in her plebian wants mood he was her lover. Going up the back stairway to her boudoir, sometimes when her husband was down in his study figuring out ways to make money to keep his growing number of creditors at bay. Disputed as well, the testimony of Madame’s personal maid that she let him in and further, under orders from Madame, had cut that provocative gown strap with her own scissors. You see according to Doyle one   could never believe the hired help, not even somebody who had to change the sweaty sheets after each exhortation. Yes, the class line indeed.

We have already dealt with the predilections of Singer Sargent for his male “assistants” which may not freak out Brother Doyle as much as it was the gay-bashing evangelicals since it was an open secret that half the bluebloods were same-sex inclined. And everybody knew and accepted it unlike in poor Oscar Wilde’s irate father of Lord Alfred Douglas who was crazy with hate about the whole matter. Where the heck do you think they got the term “Boston marriage” when two unmarried women lived together lesbian splendor.

What has amazed me about this first volley into the art world, or the social aspect of it is that nobody thus far has mentioned word one about why Madame had not allowed herself to be posed in a frontal position by Sargent (and upon further investigation by any other artist with one possible later exception to be mentioned below). That is she did not want her beak-like nose to be fully exposed to the light of day. Apparently Madame was so vain to have that horrendous little pointed nose shown too prominently would have detracted from his sullen suggestive pose. Remember she was using her professional beauty to advance in the world, a hard task for an “ice queen” and so that was her order. Upon further investigation there is some evidence that later in life, in 1907 she did pose in a frontal position but by that time the wear and tear of using her beauty for social advantage, the dissipation showed through. And the nose was even more hideous that I expected. So Madame did make a smart move, very smart. Still I don’t know why nobody in the flutter of responses picked up on that beak even to defend her against my charges that maybe men liked that kind of nose then. Fashion and beauty tend to change with the ages, with time.   

But let’s move on. Finally I can get to the subject matter for today’s piece, John White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil which is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (here we go again with the three name moniker business that drives me crazy so let’s call him Alexander and be done with it). Alexander was linked to the Boston School who were for the most part interested in realistic portrayal of whatever subject matter they were painting. When you first go into the room where the painting is located you are immediately drawn to this high Victorian beauty in a great gauzey with sharply drawn flowing lines dressing gown strangely caressing a jar, a big jar with 

When The Capitalist World Was On The Rise-Vermeer and Friends at the National Gallery-2017

When The Capitalist World Was On The Rise-Vermeer and Friends at the National Gallery-2017   

By William Bradley

Frank Jackman, a fellow writer in this space and I believe in the on-line edition of Progressive Nation when he was the senior political commentator here under the old regime, a time before I came on board, according to the archives loved to talk about the days when capitalist was a progressive force in the world.* He liked to write about the proud beginnings when the rising bourgeoisie was going mano a mano (his words from a piece I saw in the archives) against the old stagnant feudal society that depended on the static-and hard core universal church Catholic religion which promised the good life not now but in the great by and by.

Frank did a whole series of articles under the title When The Capitalist World Was Young to be found in the archives making the connection between the artistic sensibilities of the rising bourgeoisie and their clamoring for paintings which showed that they were on the rise, that they were the new sheriffs in town and could afford like the nobles and high clergy in the ancient regime to show their new-found prosperity by paying for portraits, collective and singular, and displays of their domestic prosperity. Of course Frank, an old radical from the 1960s a period that he and the older writers here have spent an incredible amount of time writing about some of it interesting and informative and others written seemingly since they had nothing else to write about and figured a nostalgia trip, trips would get them space in a blog dedicated to bygone history and culture, was coming at his view from something that he called a Marxist prospective. A prospective which not knowing much about it except it had a lot to do with the demise of the old Soviet Union now Putin’s Russia and why it had failed I asked him about since I was clueless about how that artwork had anything to do with politics. What he told me, and I don’t want to get into a big discussion about it is that Marxism, Marx saw capitalism as a progressive force against the feudal society and that would get reflected in lots of things like art and social arrangements.      

Under that set of ideas Frank was able to give a positive spin on a lot of the art from the 16^th and 17^th century, especially Dutch and Flemish art in the days when those grouping were leading the capitalist charge via their position in the shipping, transport and the emerging banking world. In one part of that above mentioned series Frank highlighted the connection between art and economics by referring to a famous painting in the National Gallery down in Washington, D.C. where some very self-satisfied burghers and civil officials were feasting and showing off their new found emergence at trend-setters. I took his point once I saw the painting he was referring to and noted that these guys and it was all guys except the hard-pressed wait staff even though I am still not sure that you can draw that close a connection between art and economics.    

That discussion with Frank was in the back of my mind when I was assigned by Greg Green, since I was down in Washington for another reason, to check out the Vermeer and friend retrospective at the National Gallery (that Frank referred painting of the burghers was nowhere in sight and I wound up viewing it on-line while we were discussing it). I took a different view of what I saw there since I am not very political and certainly would not draw the same line as Frank did. What struck me, and I am willing to bet many others who viewed the exhibit as well, was the extreme attention to detail in almost all the paintings observed. The sense that the artists had to whether it was portraiture, domestic scenes, or landscape, including those famous frozen lakes and canal winter activity scenes, show in extreme detail and shadowing exactly what they were observing. I admit I am more interested in let’s say abstract expressionism that this kind of  imagery but my hat is off to those who were able to do such detailed and exact work. Whether or not they were rising with the high tide of capitalist expansion.      

*[I am not sure I am supposed to address this issue but I will write my comment and let the editors blue-pencil the thing if it is beyond the pale but under the old regime Frank was given the official title of Senior Political Commentator after the old site manager brought in a few others to assist in that work who were dubbed Associates. Under the new more democratic regime everybody is just identified by their names as was the case when this publication was hard copy and in its early on-line days.]           

On The 100th Anniversary Of The World War I Armistice-Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman” (2017)- A Film Review

On The 100^th Anniversary Of The World War I Armistice-Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman” (2017)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

[If the name Laura Perkins seems familiar to the readers of this space that is right since she has been the subject of several pieces by Sam Lowell, her long-time companion, who before his retirement was the Senior Film Critic when the blog gave its personnel job title under the previous regime. Sam has always called Laura his muse and now the tables are turned as Laura has decided with this first review to take a stab at writing pieces on her own. She has told me that she did not feel any particular encouragement from the previous management to act as anything but Sam’s muse in this space but the combination of the issue of war and a potentially feminist icon motivated her when I asked her to take on the assignment. Greg Green]

Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, from the DC comic characters stable, 2017 

An essentially blanket condemnation of humankind’s follies, its folly that war can resolve human disputes, is a tough dollar to break through as the film under review, Wonder Woman, has made amply clear. Apparently Ken Burns when talking about his ten part, eighteen hour overview of the Vietnam War which was a central defining point of Sam and my youth and thereafter when we tried to keep the lamplight burning on the issues of war and peace is not alone in his view that “war is in our DNA.” When the whole thing gets boiled down, both by the dialogue and the action in the film, that is what stands out to these eyes about the film-makers motivations. Of course since we are also dealing with a female character, Wonder Woman aka Diana Prince, played by Gal Gadot, even if a comic super-hero there are feminist issues raised as well. I want to address them but I have noticed that the folly of war has gotten lost, as it has lately in at least American society in the almost non-existent peace movement lost among the swelter of other social concerns even by progressives and leftists. Believe me Sam and I know of whence we speak on that one since more than once we have been among very few kindred out in the street protesting the current craze for war with North Korea or Iran, or both by the madmen in the White House, Pentagon and the Congress.          

As Sam always likes to say, which I can reveal now that he got from me who got it from my Irish grandfather, here’s the “skinny” on this one. I will admit I have played a little tongue in cheek on which seems right or a comic book-etched super-hero. Apparently Zeus, yes the Greek god, created humankind out of an act of hubris, who thereafter proved to be troublesome and not into perfection after the Fall, you know, the exit from the Garden of Eden, that he had created to give them something to do. His son, mother unknown, or at least unknown to me, Ares, who will armor up as the God of war in the pantheon, has the bright idea that the way to bring back the purified Garden now lost due to human culpability, is to kill off all the citizenry (an idea shared by the various generals in WWI given the casualty numbers). In short to make the good green Earth a wasteland fit only for him apparently. Zeus wastes but does not kill Ares in a titanic sky battle so he will live to wreak havoc another day.

Enter Diana, aka Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, or rather her mother who created her out of clay although the real deal is that she, the Queen mother, coupled with Zeus on the quiet. When all hell broke loose in the heavens among the menfolk she led her Amazon warriors, and no men, to a secluded spot and set up a female commune, nunnery, convent, military academy waiting for the wounded but not defeated Ares to make his inevitable charge. Diana will be the vessel who will champion the Amazons, champion the humankind cause once she breaks out of that female retreat and heads out into the messy real world.          

Enter the real world out of nowhere in the person of her future star-crossed lover Captain Steve, played by Chris Pines, who happens to be an American on loan to the British who are using him as a spy.  A spy trying to figure out what the nasty brutal Germans, the Huns, are up to in the days leading up to the Armistice maybe trying for one last bit glory and victory. The German strategy. Develop serious gas to exterminate everybody on the other side, along with those who get in the way. Steve finds the secret formula book laying around the secret lab of the well-known notorious Doctor Poison who is cozy with General Death (Ludendorff but let’s call him by his generic name, an evil guy no question who has a serious junkie drug problem from what Sam said when I asked about whatever Doctor Poison provide medication was giving him the energy to be a bad ass).   

After saving Captain Steve Diana (you already know aka Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman so let’s stick with her given name) and hears his story about the mass murder, injustice and civilian collateral damage going out in the real world beyond the retreat she senses this is the work of that damn Ares her mother keeps alluding to but wouldn’t confide in her about. Off they go to London so Steve can give the book to the proper authorities and await further instructions. For a foreigner, an isolated island young woman, she acclimates to society pretty well. Takes everything in stride, including sex and other such things that if she was not a super-hero she would be clueless about. She keeps clamoring to go to the front like any action junkie super-hero and so Steve and some comrades who Steve picks up along the way escort her there. Once there she cannot believe what humans will do to each other for whatever reason those in charge give.

Everything Diana was bred and trained for back in the barracks at home comes to the fore now and Steve and the other guys are just ornaments, back-up for whatever caper she is into. This is strictly her show from here on in. Along the way she solves the trench warfare stalemate that has taken many lives and driven many generals crazy by a frontal attack on the German trenches to get to that poison gas lab and a confrontation with General Death who she thinks is Ares in earthly disguise. Along the way the obvious attraction between her and Captain Steve plays out and they go as guys like Sam like to say “under the silky sheets” but I will just say have sex (off-stage of course). Her intelligence proved to be wrong after a mini-battle with General Death when she finds that the people are still going about the business of war full throttle.

These humans certainly have messy and contrary motives. As it turns out Ares is alive and well in the area in the person of a British War Council member who is conning the world into believing that he is leading efforts to bring an armistice to fruition. (That armistice will come in the real world on November 11, 1918 which is now commemorated in the United States as Veterans Day which Sam and his crowd is trying to get changed back to the original intention he wishes me to tell you). Diana, as you know daughter of Zeus in “real” life and hence a goddess, goes hand to hand with her brother Ares who now is dressed up in funny costume and she vanquishes him forthwith. Unfortunately for the lovely couple Steve committed suicide when he took a plane loaded with poison gas up and exploded it saving his little segment of humankind. Probably better that he got killed early on since Diana was still around 100 years later and he would have been long gone by then. Yeah, she was still around trying to figure what makes these humans tick and why does she have to endlessly go out and save their butts.    

It seems rather fitting, to me at least who has always been on my own and with Sam interested in history (we actually met at a forum on the influence of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the October one, on world politics in the 20^th century), that the backdrop to the storyline in this film is the fruitless, insane blood-letting of World War II. Yes, the war to end all wars, a faulting premise for going to war from the start, which this year will be commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the armistice that stopped the slaughter. For a while but as we are painfully aware did not resolve anything in the great scheme of things. Ironic as well, and probably every general’s wet dream was to have a warrior woman who could break the awful trench war stalemate by the force of her singular personality. The irony being, as is always a subtext in these comic philosophical underpinning, that the peacemaker will untold wreak havoc on her chosen bad guys (who not so strangely from an American view, comic strip or otherwise, happen to be the very same enemies of the British and the Americans with the “bloody Huns represented by a renegade general as the bad guys) with as many kills under her belt as any machine gun or bombshell. The old adage of blessed are the peacemakers takes a holiday in this film except as the two main characters go back and forth about the foibles of humankind.       

To finish up in the year 2018 after all of the stuff about male sexual harassment and sexual crimes against well-known women, and as it turned out by not so well known women by powerful public men in Hollywood, Washington, the media, academia and wherever else some men given an unequal power relationship use that for perverse purposes I have to deal with the implications of a film showing a super-woman with plenty of regular woman traits (empathy, sense of justice, compassion, sorrow) and some useful warrior traits that some of the #metoo women could have used to advantage. As mentioned above there is an odd confluence here between Diana’s basic “human” empathetic instincts and her means of playing that out as an aggressive warrior not unlike every warrior who has come down the path worried more about kill ratios than trying to figure another way to deal with the problem. Sometimes that is the only way but not always and you don’t have to be a pacifist to say that. You also don’t have to be a feminist, although it helps, to wonder out loud about what image being projected on the screen those very impressionable girls and young women with the tubs of popcorn and cup of soda in hand and cellphone at the ready are seeing about the way women have to navigate in the world.       

I won’t bother to address the “dress,” the scanty dress issue which seems to have been a bugaboo for some feminists, some women in general since the real point is about the character was projected and how and not about her attire, well-bundled proper lady in London and scanty warrior princess on the killing fields.   

[I would like to acknowledge, at least a little, Sam Lowell’s help on this first film review and some of the touchstone points may reflect the fact that we have been companions for a fair amount of time now and I have been reading his reviews for years. After this maiden voyage I will be better able to reflect my own “voice” a bit better. Sam thinks so too. Laura Perkins]    

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Australia, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, 2008 

I suppose I am not supposed to talk about it under some bogus agreement Sam Lowell made with the current boss but I will test the waters while I am still here. Still have a job. Finally I have gotten a goddam assignment that doesn’t belittle my intelligence, belittle the intelligence of anybody except maybe “stable genius” Donald Trump. (I know, I know you are not supposed to mix politics with movie reviews but I couldn’t resist the comparison after what I have had to endure the last few months and my time is short here anyway from the look of things). Finally have gotten away from a steady diet of super-hero flicks, Batman, Superman, Ironman, those clowns, whose collective plotlines wouldn’t fill a whole page unless I did my puffing-out magic. Got those silly assignment as “punishment” called “broadening my horizons” by certain influential parties. (I do still have the right to characterize the nature of the work without recrimination, don’t I?) So I bled over the carpets a little and drew if not a great film then an adequate one to sink my teeth into Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s great blue-pink  Australia Western night film, ah, Australia (those Aussies know how to promote themselves).       

Funny except for the Aussie English accents and local slang words like “sheila” for woman, the names of the major cities, the time frame of the film just before and during World War II with the Japanese breathing fire on Australian ports, the  positive spin on the native population, the Aborigines, the weather and seasonal differences since Australia is as they say “down under,” and the stuff the ranch hands and citizens drink for hard liquor this film could have been a classic cowboy movie set in the America Wild West before the taming in the late 1800s. And that is the riff I think that the film-makers were trying to play off of in this one what with the desperate cattle drive through the desert making one think of John Wayne trying to get the herd to market in Rio Bravo, the “good injun” coming  to manhood through some rites of passage (read here Aborigine) versus the bad gringo white bastard land grabber trying to grab the neophyte landowner’s land, the feeding at the public trough with Army meat contracts and the shoot ‘em up stuff every few minutes.       

That might be what the film-makers in their cinematic dreams were looking for but this film is really about two things. The “cat and mouse” game played by that neophyte land-owner rancher Lady something from England played by the handsome and still at times eye-catching Nicole Kidman and the everyman every cowboy man “Drover” played by the beautiful, no, that is too good a description for him, pretty boy Hugh Jackman. From the minute Lady eyes Drover and he her you know, you can bet six, two, and even that they will be messing up some sheets before this one is over, well before it is over. The other point is an interesting look at what in old time American Westerns would never be looked at except as an aside-at best-at what coming of age means in Native cultures. We have come a long way from the idea that “the only good injun is a dead one” in relationship to Native cultures in the struggle to tame the west-America or Australia.       

The latter idea is pretty straight up with a precocious youth and a wizen wise old man of the earth showing the way that the culture gets passed through (and in the clinch saving some gringo asses as well). That leaves the boy meets girl thing, man meets women, in this one via the common struggle of Drover and Lady to save her inherited ranch from bankruptcies, unscrupulous cattle barons, and deadly “land hungry” upstarts. Like I said the stars were aligned and Lady and her Drover man  hit the sack not without prior and subsequent differences as befits to culturally different characters (he had had an Aboriginal wife whose death was a result of white racism in not getting her medical treatment and she had shown up without a clue shortly after her husband had been murdered by parties at first unknown but later proven to be that land-grabbing son of a bitch ). So now you have the “skinny” as old Sam Lowell who apparently has lost a step or two with that silly pact with the devil site manager used to like to say in the days when he wrote reviews hot and fast.          

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, with Jazzman Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and his All-Stars coming up and stealing the show-a few big scenes anyway, music and lyrics by legendary Tin Pan Alley composer Cole Porter, 1956

It is a little ironic that I am doing this assignment at the same time as my fellow writer here Sam Lowell just finished doing a short review of folk troubadour Bob Dylan’s tribute to Frank Sinatra, In The Shadow Of The Night from several years back. Ironic in the sense that those of us who came of age in the 1960s like Sam and me whatever else we may have disagreed on, no matter whether one took Sam’s hippie path or my more middle class career we almost universally rebelled against the music of our parents’ generation the Tin Pan Alley-derived stuff that got them through the Great Depression and World War II. And number one on their hit parade was “the Chairman of the Boards,” one Frank Sinatra just as Elvis was our growing up rock and roll hero and for some of us, not me, that folk minute hero Bob Dylan now covering one Frank Sinatra.    

All of this as prelude to talking about Mr. Sinatra in another of his musical performance films here. This time not about his Oscar-winning role as a wise-ass Army grunt in pre-World War II Hawaii in the film adaptation of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity, the madman “max daddy” junkie fixer man in the film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm or the eerily chilling role of presidential political assassin in Suddenly but as the odd-man out in a love triangle down in Mayfair 1950s Newport. In the 1950s Jazz Festival times not the old time summer watering hole of the ultra-rich robber barons who built the massive mansions back in the 19^th century but still quaint and high end Newport before the tourists swarmed in.

Frank definitely gets his shots at his first career, the singing that in the 1940s made all the bobby-soxers take off their bobby-socks and who knows what else if you go by the frenzy Elvis provoked in a later generation here in the musical/drama High Society.  Add in a word as well about the jazz for the Festival being hot as per Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong or off-stage like Dizzy, Charlie, the Duke who blew away a 1954 crowd of younger upstart Mayfair swells and almost caused a riot when his max daddy sax player hit the high white note.

But enough of that Frank sex stuff, Satchmo blowing big rings around staid Newport or even Mister Cole Porter from up in Tin Pan Alley land doing his popular music American Songbook thing because musical, musical comedy if you will although the gags are strictly from nowhere, or not this is about romance, romances. And that seems about right if you figure that Grace Kelly is the protagonist who gets all the attention. I might as well say here in the interest of transparency, or drooling, take your pick, that for a while now I have been adding this too every Grace Kelly pic review. After seeing her here, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and High Noon I now understand why Prince Rainer, her husband, not a man given to public display of emotion had wept openly at her funeral when she passed away in that awful car accident.

To the film.  Here’s how the Mayfair swells go about their private business in a not so private way since half the world knows what it knows. Tracy, played by gracious Grace, now happily divorced from low-ball achiever/mere musician/composer and not classical like Mozart or Bach but jazz if you can believe that, and not a big time financial operator like her father, three name C.K. Dexter, played by another crooner from the 1940s Bing Crosby, is ready to do the deed again with a real self-starter, a guy who worked his way up the food chain and not some sportsman scion of the wealthy set like old C.K. (By the way that divorce business not then, or now for that matter, not well-disposed of by the money set as it confuses wealth transfer and other technical problems.)

That little fact, that underachiever and ne’er-do-well part sets the tone for what will be become a “battle of wills” between Grace and Bing who as you know already to my mind is still rightly in love with her. Enter Mike Connor, an world wary everyman regular guy played Frank, not at this moment like in other entry moments in the film ready to burst into song either alone or with Bing, but as a reporter who is out to get the low-down on the rich and famous for a sleaze bag publishing outfit. To get any juicy pics worldly wise Liz, played by Celeste Holms, who is half in love with Mike but letting him  out on a long leash, tags along for the ride.         

Scene set the rest of the film, interrupted by song and more importantly by savior Satchmo and his All-Stars doing some great old time jazz to make the heart flutter is a breeze through. (Please remember Satchmo and his gang and Bing are there for the Newport Jazz Festival and are merely “crashing” the wedding festivities.) Tracy and C.K. cat and mouse it while the intended groom is in the dark, clueless and moreover happy about that fact until the hammer comes down. The happy hammer coming down at the pre-nuptial wedding digs where Tracy gets blasted and runs off with… No, not C.K. things are too 1950s chaste for that but with a smitten Mike (to work partner Liz’ chagrin). That short intoxicated fling over the next morning the wedding is to be called off once that intended groom takes the high moral ground and foolishly (oops) doesn’t take Tracy in all his arms and carry her off. Wait. You cannot disappoint Mayfair swell guests come for a wedding any more than any other wedding. So Tracy and Mike, no, C.K. retie the knot. Who knows how long that rematch will last with these two wild kids.       

If this all sounds familiar, sounds like a film review plot that I have done before it is. This is just a musical remake of the classic version of the story in black and white The Philadelphia Story with Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in the respective roles. Cary naturally in Bing’s place. That’s the go-to film unless like Prince Rainer you need to see Grace when she was in her prime. And Satchmo in high dungeon.     

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Frank Sinatra “Shadows In The Night” In Mind

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Frank Sinatra “Shadows In The Night” In Mind

By Sam Lowell

If anybody has read the introduction to my review of an early part of these American Songbook series about the legendary Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band dated January 11, 2018 In The Beginning Was The Jug…in the archives you will already know that I have been given the task of writing the history of this site and it personnel as well as the internal in-fighting that roiled the publication over the last few months of 2017 in order to finally put an end to the turmoil. Below is one part of that history which I have decided I need to cut into parts or the whole project will overwhelm me. If you want to skip this and wait until the whole project is archived be my guest. I will let you know when the whole thing is complete.     

***********

The American Left History blog has been in cyberspace, on-line, for the past fifteen years or so and which readers can reference to any particular article via the ALF archives. What many people do not know is that there has been a much longer history to the ideas and purpose of the site going back to the 1970s and maybe even a little to the 1960s if you add in Peter Paul Markin’s work, the real Peter Paul Markin who I will talk about later when I explain why I used the word “real” before his name. In those days, the Summer of Love, 1967 days the 50^th anniversary last year of which started the firestorm that followed over the latter part of 2017 at this publication Markin worked on and off for The Eye and The East Bay Other two of what were called in those days alternative newspaper to distinguish them from the main stream media which gave short shrift to the political and cultural events that stirred us, you know the New York Times and Washington Post.  Sound familiar? Except those alternative publications did not deal with so-called alternative facts or carry on about conspiracy theories like today but other things of interest to young people, “hippies” for lack of a better word that the mainstream media were clueless about.           

That Peter Paul Markin that I mentioned above won a few awards for his articles, his series on his fellow Vietnam War veterans some who like him had a hard time adjusting to what they called the “real” world, the non-Vietnam world and set up camps and such along the rivers and railroad tracks out in Southern California where he joined them for a time because he himself had a hard time adjusting as well and told their stories. No, that is wrong, let them tell their stories. The series entitled The Embattled Brothers Of Westminster (one of the biggest railroad campsites) would from what I heard inspired Lenny Lawrence to write a very popular song about those lost souls using that title if I recall. So that was one early piece of what would follow over the next forty years or so.

Markin, everybody called him Scribe when he was growing up and that name stuck but I will use Markin here was not alone in working for those publications. After he got back from Vietnam he reunited with Josh Breslin, yes, Josh Breslin who writes for this blog even now so you can start to make the long drawn out connections, a guy from up in Olde Saco, Maine whom he met out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1967 (you can also start to see how that event, how those times played a key role as well in what followed) and Allan Jackson whom he, we, had grown up with in North Adamsville and had followed Markin, as I did as well, out to the Summer of Love. The three of them were all crazy to write, write about the war, write about the counter-culture everything and The Eye and later The East Bay Other were ready-made for guys who wanted to look at the steamy, seamy side of life.          

Like most things in the 1960s when the hammer went down, when the war turned everybody sour, and then later in reaction the other side decided that things had gone too far and started a counter-offensive which more than one writer, young or old, in this space has noted has been going on for the past forty years or so things like grassroots, fly-by-the-seat-of –your-pants and woefully underfunded alternative newspapers were going to ground in droves. That was the fate of those two papers. Josh, Markin, Allan and I would join them as well in the mid-1970s after I had been roaming around the country “sowing my oats” as my grandfather used to say although he would have been mortified at my motto, our generational motto-“drugs, sex, and rock and roll” were crazy to continue writing, writing the kind of stuff they had been writing but with a little more of a political twist than those mainly culturally-oriented papers had been. That is where the idea for Progressive Nation came from in the beginning. The Progressive Nation that a number of us still write for on occasion although it had changed from our hands and from our brand of left-wing street politics many years ago.         

That idea though almost went stillborn for a while for one main reason-that real Peter Paul Markin who I have been alluding to. We had gathered some seed money from a few still extant “hippies” with trust funds to get the publication started mainly through Markin and Josh’s connections via The Eye and The East Bay Other. The rest of the financing would come from advertisers (we were totally naïve about the horrible influence that would have on what we were trying to do with our good idea. If you want a current day example of just how off the rails a good idea can go once the advertisers sink their claws in check out an early version of Rolling Stone and one today-Egad) and other “angels” and subscribers. Then Markin ran away with the money to buy dope, to buy the emerging cocaine that he would eventually become addicted to and which would cost him his life down in Sonora, Mexico over a busted drug deal when he was the loser, the six feet under in a potter’s field grave which still has unexplained parts to the story until this day.        

That obviously is the bad part about Markin, that “from hunger” part that he more than the rest of us never got over. And which Vietnam only accentuated. Not that the war did him in like many others but it did not help either the few times he would talk about his experiences, about what he had had to do, and had seen others do as well in that hell-hole. But the good part, the part that wanted the revolution to win, the world to be turned upside down is the part we knew and loved. Not all the guys we grew up with had those same feelings, the guys who had no dough like us and hung around street corners to get out of tumultuous home life, but a small crew did, a crew that was always led by Markin. Not a leader in the organizational sense that was Frankie Riley who has written a few things here about Markin, but in the spiritual sense is the best way I can put it.

That is what has bound Allan Jackson, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Frank and me over the long years. That buying into Markin’s vision even though he personally could not go the distance, came up short. Funny before we lost track of him, or really Josh Breslin lost track of him since he was his housemate in Oakland in the days when they had a communal house there and he was the last person to see Markin alive in America Markin would always say that Progressive Nation would carry us into our old ages. That did not happen since I have already mentioned he flew the coop and later when we got some more dough and published for a while we sold that enterprise off when the political winds shifted dramatically in the 1980s and we had to cut our loses. What did happen and made Markin a prophet after all was that we then established the hard copy version of ALH and then went on-line I think in 2003. All from that original ideal spawned by the real Markin. So it was a no-brainer when we started the on-line version that Allan Jackson our site manager when it came time to take cyberspace necessary monikers would go back to the old days, to our growing up days and honor our fallen brother by using his moniker in this space. Hell, it just seemed right.

More next time

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A couple of years ago when I was Senior Film Critic before I gained emeritus status and before Greg Green the new site manager abolished all titles which the previous site manager had bestowed on senior personnel, many his longtime friends and co-workers I did a review of Bob Dylan’s latest CD, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley Frank Sinatra. In that review I noted that such an effort was bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins and so on. That proposition though seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he, whether he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.

What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs however he is interpreting them at the time. Just like Frank when he was in high tide. What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back where he is singing Hank Williams stuff or a ton of country stuff from the Basement tapes). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now his hero is Frank Sinatra.

I may long for the old protest songs, the songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank, Tex-Mex, the Carters, the odd and unusual like Desolation Row or his cover of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (it was always about the lyrics not the voice even when young but now that voice seems not to bad) I do wonder though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards.” What goes around comes around.             

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- With The Dubs Could This Be Magic In Mind- Jenny Dolan Speaks Her Mind, Circa 1962

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- With The Dubs Could This Be Magic In Mind- Jenny Dolan Speaks Her Mind, Circa 1962

By Si Lannon

[Some of the stories from the old Acre working-class neighborhood in deathless North Adamsville by some of the original “present at the creation” older writers which former site manager Allan Jackson (a former Acre denizen himself) let them do as they pleased seem worthy of an additional presentation. What Allan called an encore presentation when he did a re-run of a rock and roll series based on these same Acre corner boy experiences. With this proviso that I do some introductions and some updating if necessary.

I should point out that I am not of that Acre corner older boy generation which came of age in the 1960s (I came of age with guys like writers here Zack James and Lance Lawrence about a decade later although Zack’s oldest brother Alex had spoon-fed Zack on stories of the old days in their Acre neighborhood). Thus on some occasions when I reviewed these stories they set my teeth on edge since I came up in a fairly rich family in New York and had never brushed shoulders with poverty, with what that meant and never either had anything but a storybook knowledge of corner boy life except I steered very clear of the town toughs in Croton-on-Hudson where I grew up).

That said some stories are eternal like the one here where anybody, certainly any young woman, any high school young woman could relate to Jenny Dolan’s longings for some boy who seemingly didn’t know she existed-or so she thought. I personally never had a girl that was all that determined to get my attention, but I sure wish I had. When I asked Seth Garth what he knew about the Jenny Dolan-John O’Connor romance which sparked this remembrance he froze, froze in his tracks at the name. When he defrosted, he told me that he had had a crush, a very 1960s word from what I can gather on that same Jenny Nolan and even fifty years later he wished she had given him the looks she saved for her John. So Jenny’s story has the ring of truth to it although in my neighborhood no self-respecting guy, certainly no football player would expose himself to comradely ridicule by letting a girl sit on his lap and dare him to put her off.     

One of the things that I am interested in is what happened to the parties involved in these stories, if that is known. In this case, strangely, according to Si Lannon who wrote the original story after seeing Jenny at the 50^th anniversary class reunion and she gave him the details of the tryst she had with Johnny that Chrissie McNamara who was supposedly Jenny’s friend stole Johnny away from Jenny in senior year. The strange part is that Johnny and Chrissie, Mr. and Mrs. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts to let you know their fates, are still married while Jenny, has been married four times and confided in Si that she never got over that “theft” of Johnny by Chrissie although she held no animosities. What she did say was that she thought he multiple marriages were a fruitless search for another Johnny or failure to keep Johnny, take your choice. Such is life. Greg Green]      

A YouTube film clip of The Dubs performing the classic, Could This Be Magic.

THE DUBS


"Could This Be Magic"

Could this be magic
My dear
My heart's all aglow
Could this be magic
Loving you so

Could this be magic
My dear
Having your love
My prayers were answered
So far from above

I thought it would be
Just a memory
To linger my heart in pain
But too much pride
I opened up my eyes
And I'm with you dear once again

Could this be magic
My dear
Having your love
If this is magic
Then magic is mine
Could this be magic
Then magic is mine

Jenny Dolan speaks from out of the 1960s night:

I suppose everybody in America knows, knows by heart now, that John O’Connor and I, Jenny Dolan, are an “item.” The poster boy and girl sweethearts of North Adamsville High according to one piece of gossip that I heard, or overheard, Joanne Doyle saying sarcastically in the girls’ lav at school one Monday morning when she was giving her weekend round-up report to all who would listen. What I couldn’t spread around about her and her lover boy, Frankie, but that was old Jenny, old miserable Jennie, before I got my John, and got him good. Of course, Joanne only retells what the pizza pie in your eye corner boy king, so-called, Frankie, Frankie Riley if you are one of the about three people in the Class of 1964 who doesn’t know him, has already started spreading around. The gist of tale is that he has lost his ace-in-the-hole (really just his bodyguard for when he makes the wrong move, Joanne Doyle not around wrong move, on some real tough guy's girl), Jumping John O’Connor (although I am putting a stop to calling him that name, and fast) to a frill (that’s me, or that’s me when Frankie does his 28 flavors of disrespect to girls thing, except to no-nonsense mistress Joanne, by calling them frills, molls, frails and everything else that he has picked up from watching too many 1930s gangster films, and reading too many Raymond Chandler crime novels). See John and Frankie go back to first grade together over at North Adamsville Elementary and somehow Frankie thought that was enough to keep the “twists” (girls again) at a distance so John could be his full-time “body-guard.”

And if Frankie hasn’t spread the news around about John and me then Peter Paul Markin, clueless Peter Paul when it comes to knowing anything about girls (and girls and guys who get together for more fun, Saturday night fun, than just some silly reading books at the library, or going to a debate about whether Red China should, or shouldn’t be admitted to the United Nations, or stuff like that) will, once Frankie unleashes him to spread it around. Now everybody respects Peter Paul for his knowledge, for his devotion to learning more about stuff, and for sticking up for the, as he calls them, the “fellow down-trodden” of the earth but he has been strictly blind-sided by Frankie ever since he came to North Adamsville. When I was lonely (lonely for my John, if you want to know) I went out with Peter Paul, once, but no thanks. So between Joanne (really Frankie), Frankie (really Joanne) and Peter Paul (really Frankie, and maybe Joanne) you’ve probably got the story all wrong. Like the why behind why John and I did not get together until just now, although we were made for each other and that’s the truth and has been the truth for a long time.

Let me tell the story, my side, and see if it is anything like you heard from Frankie, or Peter Paul. Although now that I think about it if you got it from Peter Paul then you haven’t finished reading the treatise on the subject of John O’Connor and Jennifer Dolan yet and I can save you some time and save your eyes too. See back in sixth grade when I was just starting to get a little shape but was still really just a “stick” I went to Chrissie McNamara’s twelfth birthday party. Now Chrissie and I had been friends for ages so I expected to be at the party but what really got my girl temperature up was that John was going to be there.

Now John was good-looking even then, kind of quiet, a good all-around athlete (a great football player-in-the-making even then, even then in little Pop Warner League), and, I think, shy around girls but I had eyes for him. Big eyes, and not just twelve- year old big eyes, but going way back to first communion at Sacred Heart where we were boy white suit and girl white dress paired together to walk down to the communion rail and I had to calm him down because he was scared of the idea of eating the wafer, the body and blood of Christ. No, I was not every day in every way crushed up on him but crushed up somewhere deep inside since then. In sixth grade time though when I started getting my shape a little, you know, I couldn’t keep from thinking of him. So at Chrissie’s party I was flying high in expectation. I had my best dress on, had taken a long soapy bath, and worn some of my mother’s perfume (don’t tell her, okay). And I wasn’t disappointed because he asked me to dance, dance close, dance airless close. I almost kissed him then, but I waited until the lights went out that signaled the time for some “petting” games to start and then ran over to the sofa and planted the biggest, hardest kiss I could on him. Boy, did I have my signals crossed because he pushed me aside (not hard but definitely aside) and ran out of the house. That’s how he got the name Jumping John O’Connor once Frankie got the story out. He hated the name, and I did too.

After that I didn’t run into him enough to get nervous because at school we were in different classes and, obviously, I wasn’t hanging around shabby, two-bit, greasy pizza parlors wasting my good time and energy listening to Frankie (and his lap dog, Peter Paul) play his lordship and chamberlain. Besides Joanne, Joanne Doyle, Frankie’s plain jane, so-called girlfriend, and I never got along ever since I told her that Frankie was calling me up on the telephone anytime they had a “misunderstanding.” She flat-out didn’t believe me but ask Peter Paul, he knows, he knows everything about Frankie Riley and his “love” life.

This year though, sophomore year, John and I have our daily last period study class together and a couple weeks into the class I noticed that he kept looking (for a second anyway) in my direction. More than once. And I started looking in his direction (for a second anyway, and more than once). As we found out later everybody in the class, including the study class monitor, Miss Wilmot, the old dyke, knew we were “making eyes” at each other. Except, of course, maybe Peter Paul who was also in the study hall down front and reading. Still, naturally, that will not stop him from claiming in his treatise that he was the key to introducing John and me.

Believe me I didn’t know what to do at first. I was “gun-shy” from that sixth- grade fiasco party so I was afraid to think that he might be interested in me. But, and I admit it, I was miserable, and had been pretty miserable since John’s rebuff that Chrissie’s party night, even though I went out with lots of boys. Then one day I figured out (and talked to Chrissie about it, and she agreed) that John, shy, quiet John wasn’t going to do anything about me unless I started the ball rolling. And here is what I figured out to do (on my own, no Chrissie help). I was going to go into the lion’s den, the holy of holies, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor where Frankie and his boys, including John, hung out a lot and just flop myself in John’s lap and dare him, no double- dare him, to throw me off in a public place. And I was going to do it too, once I got my courage up, or was miserable enough to try anything.

Well, one Friday night, one October Friday night, a few weeks ago I got so miserable at home that I decided to go for broke. I walked up the Downs and entered Salducci’s, fearful, very fearful, but then I saw John sitting on the outside of the booth with the boys (Frankie, Peter Paul, Fingers Kelly, John and a couple of other denizens) and saw my chance. I quickly walked over and flopped myself on John lap. And you know what he said. “I’m sorry” as he gently, very gently, broke my fall with his strong arms. My heart went crazy with fear. I thought that I had once again misinterpreted his looks at me in study class just like at the party and started to get up. But as I started to get up John held me close, held me close like maybe it was going to take the whole football team, both offense and defense, and scrubs and water boys thrown in, to get me off his lap before he finished his red-faced say.

And this is what he said and said in a way that he had been thinking about it for a while. “I’m sorry, real sorry, that I pushed you away at Chrissie’s birthday party and ran out and never apologized. I just didn’t know what to do then.” And he added, “Will you forgive me?” Frankie and the boys were flabbergasted but John, red-faced and all, maybe more so after saying his piece, held his ground. I wanted to say all kinds of witty, smart things but all I could blurt out was, “yes.” I started to get up but he would not let me up (and truthfully I wasn’t trying very hard anyway) until he asked to walk me home. You know the answer so I will not be coy. As we walked and talked it seemed like an instant until we got to my house. The lights were out but John said he wanted to talk a little, and we did, boy and girl things that you don’t need to know about. And while we were talking, he reached out and held my hand. And I got all red-faced, especially when every once in a while, he would loosen up his grip and then gently squeeze my hand again like he was afraid to let go. And I was afraid to let him let it go. I will tell you that night, I swear, John could have done anything he wanted with me, anything, but we just held hands, tight hands. Okay, you have the story straight now.