This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
In Defense Of
Inter-Species Love-“The Shape Of Water”(2017)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Seth Garth
The Shape of Water,
starring Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, 2017
By rights this review,
the review of the 2018 Oscar for best picture The Shape of Water should have been done by Frank Jackman. While we
no longer have specific titles to reflect our areas of various expertise Frank
has long been the main political and cultural reporter on this publication. You
ask how does a film about the improbable love affair between a disabled woman
(a mute), a member of the human species, and a good looking if scaly creature
from the lagoons down the Amazon warrant a political touch. Well beyond this
seemingly blatant attempt to win “flavor of the month” status for yet another
oppressed identity group there is the now wide- open question of whether we,
meaning the human race should permit not only love between members of different
species but permit different species marriage.
However, if Frank had
tackled this film from that approach he would have had a hell-broth of
anti-gay, anti-same sex marriage crazies to contend with who would have claimed
that they had been righteously right to oppose those rights because see where
does the madness end and what about the sanctity of marriage when human pair
with other sentient being. Jesus it would be a blood-bath and Frank would
probably have to leave town or take an alias-maybe go out among the Mormons like
Allan Jackson tried to do, allegedly tried to do from what later reports by him
informed us happened and see if he could hustle some work with them.
So I drew the assignment
as a favor to new site manager Greg Green since he wanted to cash in on a
different variation on the “boy meets girl” theme that continues this one
hundred plus years later to be a huge hook for Hollywood productions (and a big
money maker too). And so you have what started out a mere curiosity by Elisa,
played by Sally Hawkins, a “talking challenged” person (hell I don’t know what
you call it although I know mute is far too cutting these days reminding me,
and maybe one and all, of the timid person who came up to you in the street
cards in hand claiming deafness and dumbness asking for cash donations. Asking especially
when you had a date you were out to impress with your humanity and gave the
person some change. Some of this I learned later when I was down on my luck was
a classic scam but some of which is the only way to get cash for hard-pressed
people with a disability in those days) when a mysterious creature from out in
the Amazon (a creature straight out of the 1950s creep thriller The Creature From The Black Lagoon) who
looks like maybe some missing link on the evolutionary trail is secreted in secret
CIA-type operation location where she is a cleaning lady to try to figure out
how to use the thing in the on-going Cold War then raging between the United
States and the former Soviet Union.
That curiosity about a sentient
being also trying to survive in a troubled world will eventually turn into what
between humans would be called love, and maybe in inter-species lingo as well. The
problem is that the creature is being mistreated, mishandled by the agent in
charge to the chagrin of Elisa and others including a scientist who is actually
a Soviet spy. Moreover when the agent in charge is ordered to vivisect the amphibian
all hell broke loose as Elisha plotted her honey’s great escape. After a few close
calls and some fancy foot work Elisa gets her man out of harm’s way for a while.
In the inevitable eventual confrontation before she can release her now ailing guy
(not enough sea water to keep his strength up) to the open seas where he will
be at home again they are both injured by that wicked Cold War agent who in
return is wasted by the amphibian. Things work out okay though because this mad
monk monster has some curative powers which gets he and his honey well in the
open ocean. Things work out well but if and when “inter-species” marriages
become the flavor of the month among progressives and others watch out all bets
are off. But at least you know where the campaign got its start.
When You Are Lost On The
Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Varsity Show”
(1937)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sarah Lemoyne
Varsity Show, starring
Dick Powell and a bunch of Lane sisters, the inevitable last dance segment directed
by max daddy (Seth Garth’s expression) Bugby Berkeley, 1937
Sometimes you just can’t
win when you try to be nice, try to stop a growing dispute with fellow
colleagues in what everybody knows is a cutthroat go for the jugular “you are
only as good as your last piece” somebody is lurking to take your place profession
like film reviews in its tracks. Damn, can’t get any traction out of calling a
truce so that you do not have to start off every film review, maybe every piece
at this publication with what in normal times would be ho-hum stuff best
reserved for titter around the office water cooler. Maybe what the older
writers have told me, especially my mentor Seth Garth the film reviewing
business does not allow for anything but cutthroat dog eat dog animus. Although
that shouldn’t be so apparently to go up, and stay up, on the review food chain
you must at least mortally wound whoever your competitor of the day is. For now
this brewing confrontation must see the light of day if I am to protect my
growing reputation and if I am to keep my hard fought place in the food chain
since one Sam Lowell, whom I off-handedly characterized as wizened and in his
dotage in my last review of a Dick Powell film from the 1930s Hollywood Hotel had decided that I need “my comeuppance” over
those remarks and what followed.
Sam bogusly claims that
my review of the Powell vehicle was not written, could not be written by me
since my only source of information about the period of the 1930s and 1940s
musical was my grandmother who was a child held on her mother’s knee back then
watching these “feel good” films to get through some tough times. He has
suggested that the only way this review could have been does as well as it was
is if somebody more familiar with the times wrote the damn thing (his
expression). Sam insinuated that the only person he knew who could handle such
a review having done a series of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films was his old
friend, still friend I assume, Seth Garth my kindly mentor had written the
piece and that I put my by-line name on the thing and sent it in to Greg Green
as my original work.
Of course Sam is looking
for tit for tat since he knows that almost everybody in the office over the age
of ten knows that he has a very large reputation going all the way back to the
1960s of having somebody write his reviews for him, usually stringers, usually
female stringers to boot or in desperation after some three day drunk or
cavorting just used the studio publicity department press releases and signed his
name to the document. I hear one time and if I am libeling him so be it he was
cavorting with some stringer on a three- day toot or something like that and
sent the press release in without clipping the studio name off the top. His old
buddy, another one of the half dozen or so guys from high school days who have written
for this publication over the years, editor Allan Jackson published it as is
Sam’s star was so high back then. Seth Garth
has been kindness itself in helping me up the ladder in the business and had
provided suggestions but that is it. I write my own material.Period.
More grating, more
insidious is that Sam has taken up the salacious office water cooler gossip
about some relationship beyond the mentoring one between Seth and myself implying
that I would get ahead on his coattails if I was nice to Seth. In that Hollywood Hotel review I made it quite
clear that Seth and I had merely a professional relationship and that it would
be absurd for me to have a personal relationship with a person old enough to be
my grandfather. I, moreover, mentioned that my companion has been having fits
over these rumors and we have had some shouting matches when she heard the last
product out of the rumor mill. Sam, the treacherous little wizened bastard,
that wizen thing always gets to him from what Seth has told me has been
spreading the word that something is up between us ever since he out of that
kindness I mentioned before took me to dinner one night.
Sam’s hook, Sam’s
fucking “hook” that is he is forever yakking about as necessary to draw a
reader in as if that wasn’t lesson one taught in journalism graduate school is
that Seth is just living out the life of Johnny Silver. Johnny, who I don’t
know from Adam, is one of their infamous and constantly talked about 1960s high
school corner boys who Seth wrote about in a long series of short pieces when
he got tangled up with a graduate student from Penn State after they had “met”
on Facebook a few years ago. That romance, that intergenerational sex, between
the pair who are still together is the hook Sam used to imply that his old
corner boy Seth was making the same kind of moves on me. Don’t these guys,
maybe gals too but I don’t know about that, ever think anything can be anything
other than some sex scheme when guys and gals are out together. Like I said my
companion went wild when she heard I had gone to dinner with Seth since he
received an e-mail about it from “anonymous.” I know there will be more in this
war of words but I will say Seth was right when he told me Sam was not above
anything and to be careful. He said he had known the wizened (a joke between
Seth and I now when we are referring to Sam in our mentoring sessions) Sam too
long to expect any quarter to be given. I have come a long way in a short time,
with Seth’s help, so I will not play the wilting violet. To the review.
Boy meets girl. Well if
you want my opinion that is essentially what this well-worn Hollywood trope is working
overtime on when you get to the close of Varsity
Club. This a college-based piece of fluff in the days when college entrance
was very circumscribed and mainly for the children of the elite, of those who
have already made it. Number one in making it was Chuck, Dick Powell’s role, an
alumnus of some private small maybe denomination Middle America school like
Kenyon or Oberlin Winfield College, who has made it big on Broadway although at
the start of the film he is on cheap street after producing a few flops, the kiss
of death to backers of such efforts. Meanwhile back at his old alma mater where
they are revolting, not revolting against the injustices and inequalities of
the Great Depression that my dear grandmother had to survive with lots of
trauma, but against an edict by the head of the music/drama department that the
annual varsity show should not disturb the dead. Not keep anybody awake. Be
pure vanilla meaning no cavorting (which would by reputations leave both withered Sam and
sweetie Seth out), no close boy-girl scenes and above all even in fully-clothed
post-Code days no references to sex, or maybe even biology.
The kids (although most
look much too old to have been in college then although today they would not
stand out with the demographic mix these days with people going to college for
lots of reasons, mostly serious, at older ages to get ahead in the world a bit)
don’t know what to do until some bravo latches onto the idea that they contact
good old Chuck to see if he can’t bring the thing into the 20th
century. After plenty of built-up, a few songs, a budding romance with a
sorority sister, one of the famous Lane sisters but I am not sure if it was the
one he snagged in Hollywood Hotel he
falls short, cannot move the production forward. Then led by Professor Fred
Waring (and his Pennsylvanians in tow) the whole cast winds up in New York
City, on the big white way where they will put on a bootleg production since the
staid college stage is out. Aside from the boy-girl thing between Powell and
Lane the virtue, the reason for existence of this mercifully short film is the
Bugby Berkeley show-stopper finale choregraphed to perfection in the way that he
and very few others could do. Finis. Well, no, anybody who was not old and
wizened maybe a shade bit senile in his dotage could tell in two seconds that
this review was written by me, by Sarah Lemoyne. Got it.
An Adieu (Until The 60th
Anniversary) To The Summer Of Love, 1967Under The Sign Of The Times When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps-
The Music Of Bonnie Raitt
By Zack James
[The world of on-line editors and
named bloggers is actually rather small when you consider what expansive
infinite cyberspace can allow the average ingenious citizen to do. Or
collective of citizens in this case, collective of people who in a previous age,
maybe twenty years ago would be found writing for hard-copy publications like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and especially American
Film Gazette and the Folk Music
Review, the latter which actually covered more than folk music in its time,
but its name reflected where it had come from. Now they are writing for on-line
publications like this one and the on-line American
Film Gazette which like a lot of hard copy operations had fallen on revenue
hard times and to keep going had to flow with the times and go on-line. What
this new technology has allowed me to do which otherwise would have been a good
idea thrown in the office waste paper basket by any shrewd hard copy editor is
to do a series highlighting some of the conversations between long-time music
critic Seth Garth and some of his growing up in North Adamsville (that is in
Massachusetts south of Boston) friends as he/they discuss various older CDs
which reflect a certain period in their then young lives growing up in the late
1950s and early 1960s.
An important component of the series
of sketches is based on information that Seth has provided me has come under
the sign of the Summer of Love, 1967 out on the West Coast, especially in the
San Francisco and Bay area. Two periods stand out in these conversations as far
as the effect of musical trends among guys who came up in the Acre neighborhood
of North Adamsville and saw some relief from their “from hunger” lives as Si
Lannon, one of the corner boys put it. When hitting their teenage years the
explosion best explained by the rise of rock and roll on their radios, and
later at school and church dances, when the authorities, school and church,
tried to put a cap on their energy and keep them away from hard sexual
fantasies unleashed by the new dispensation. Above all the names of the king of
kings, Elvis, mad hatter Chuck Berry, wild and wooly Jerry Lee Lewis stand out.
The other, which is reflected in the title of this piece, is a second wave of
rock and roll, slightly different after the first stage had been exhausted and had
been replaced by what Seth called “bubble gum’ music very much connected with
the 1967 Summer of Love which hit Seth and his crew like a lightning bolt. Hit
so hard that through one means or another, one person or another, one personal
intervention or another that it drove the crowd out to the West to “see what
was going on.”A million other kids,
mostly high school and college kids, from places like Lima, Ohio, Bath Maine,
Boise, Idaho and of course Peoria, Illinois broke loose for a while and did the
same thing, looked for something new in “drug, sex, rock and roll” and whatever
else anybody could come up with to stem the flush of youth nation alienation
and angst. So guys like the Scribe, Seth, Si, Frank Jackman, and my oldest
brother, Alex, rode the wave, went out to “edge city” (Alex’s expression picked
up from somewhere), went “walking with the king” (an expression culled from
Doctor Gonzo the late Hunter S. Thompson) and mostly lived to tell the tale.
Their later Vietnam War experiences and returns to the “real world” would not
be so gentle.
I am a bit too young by about a
decade to have had anything but a nodding acquaintance with the Summer of Love
experience. That era’s music did not form the basis for my musical interests
although I heard it around the house from older siblings but rather the music
of the 1970s which when I get a little bored with book reviews or general
cultural pieces I write about for various publications including this one I
write some music reviews. Knowing that let me take a step back so that you will
understand why I made that statement about the review world is really a small
place.
As I said earlier I was a little too
young to appreciate the music of the Summer of Love first- hand but my eldest
brother Alex was not. Had in fact gone out to the West Coast from our growing
up neighborhood the Acre section of North Adamsville that summer along with a
bunch of other guys that he had hung around with since highs school. He wound
up staying in that area, delving into every imaginable cultural experience from
drugs to sex to music, for a couple of years before heading back to his big
career expectations-the law, being a lawyer. The original idea to head west
that summer was not his but that of his closest friend, the late Peter Paul
Markin forever known in town and by me as the Scribe (how he got that is a long
story and not germane to the Seth sage). The Scribe had dropped out of college
in Boston earlier in 1967 when he sensed that what Alex said he had been
yakking about weekly for years that a “new breeze,” his, the Scribe’s term, was
going to take youth nation (and maybe the whole nation) by a storm and headed
west. A couple of months later he came back and dragged Alex and about six
others back west with him. And the rest is history.
I mean that “rest is history” part
literally since earlier this year (2017) Alex, now for many years a big
high-priced lawyer after sowing his wild oats and get “smartened up” as he
called it once the bloom of the counter-culture they were trying to create
faded had gone to a business conference out in San Francisco and while there
had seen on a passing bus an advertisement for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de
Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He flipped out, maybe some latent recoil from
those long- ago drugs and spend one “hooky” afternoon mesmerized by the exhibit
of poster art, hippie clothing, photographs and music. That was not all though.
When he got back to Boston he contacted all the old neighborhood guys still
standing who had gone out there in 1967 to put a small memoir book together.
One night they all agreed to do the project, do the project in honor of the
late Scribe who had pushed them out there in some cases kicking and screaming
(not Alex at the time). That is when Alex, knowing that I have had plenty of
experience doing such projects contacted me to edit and get the thing
published. Which I did without too much trouble.
The publication and distribution of
that book while not extensive got around to plenty of people who were involved
in the Summer of Love, or who knew the Scribe. And that is where Seth Garth
comes in. While he was not an integral part of the Summer of Love experience,
having stayed out there only through the summer, he did drift out west after
college to break with his Riverdale growing up home in the early 1970s. As a
writer he looked for work among the various alternative presses out there and
wound up working first as a free-lancer and then as staff as a music critic for
the now long defunct The Eye which
operated out of Oakland then. Guess who also was working as a free-lancer there
as well after he got out of the Army. Yes, the Scribe who was doing a series of
articles on guys like him who had come back from Vietnam and couldn’t relate to
the “real world” and had established what amounted to alternative communities
along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California. So yeah
it is a small world in the writing for money racket. Here is what Seth has to
say right now. Zack James]
A lot of the musical
switch-over from what is now termed classic rock and the later, let’s for
convenience sake, call it acid rock although that is too narrow a term for what
really went on was a shift in the role of women in the latter scene, as lead
singers and as instrumentalists in their own right. In the earlier period women’s
rock, girl music as it was called then centered on doo wop, do lang harmony of
small groups of three or four women, many black but certainly not exclusively so.
Somebody from mystical Tin Pan Alley would write the music and lyrics and the
doo wop would flow. Mostly girl/teen anguish/alienation and boy trouble stuff.
Great now in re-hearing according to Seth and the guys but then iffy. The point
Seth made was that latter gals like Alcie Frye, Grace Slick, Harley Devine,
Janis Joplin, and many others broke into the hard male world of rock and roll
on their own terms-mainly. Led groups, featured, played instruments and made it
safer for women to crack that crazy doped-up world.
The subject of this piece,
Bonny Raitt, fit that same mold even if she did not lead any famous bands like Jefferson
Airplane or Big Brother and the Holding Company. She honed her craft, learned
to play slide guitar under the tutelage of one Mississippi Fred McDowell the max
daddy
of country blues where
it counted down in the Jim Crow Delta country. Learned how to keep the crowd interested,
how to go through her paces, hang onto the quest for the high white note every musician
dreams big dreams at night about. Seth had met her at Jack’s over in Cambridge
just after he had gotten back from San Francisco and saw what potential she
had, saw how she could work like seven dervishes just like the guys. Sat and
watched her, sat and drank hard whiskies with her and saw the rising star up
close and personal. A little later he would be backstage on the Boston Common, the
year 1968, when she broke through in a concert series the City of Boston was
running to keep a lid, or try to keep a lid on, the new age of rock and roll
which they totally could not comprehend having stopped their rock around Elvis before
the Army time. What more needs to be said fifty years later she still rocks.
(By the way as is the way
with these old time North Adamsville corner boys including my brother they
still like to tout the “big score,” the sexual conquest really related to this
or that event. In the case of the Bonnie Raitt concert he was able to bring his
new girlfriend of the time backstage with him and she was so thrilled that later
that night she let him have his way with her, no sweat. Whether that was true
or not since most corner boys lied like crazy about sexual conquests I don’t
know but I am passing this on as information from Seth)
The Golden Age Of The
B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
The Unholy Four,
starring Paulette Goddard, Hammer Productions, 1954 (released in England as A
Stranger Came Home)
In my long career in the
film reviewing racket, a cutthroat where you are only as good as your last
review and the vulture competing reviewers are ready with the long knives if
you fall down profession. If you will though which is overall pretty subjective
one, filled with personal predilections and snarls when you think about it, I
have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade
with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. As the
headline above indicates I have been doing a serious of reviews of B-grade film
noirs by the English Hammer Production Company from the early 1950s. A B-grade
film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually
made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria
Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I have contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big
Sleep, and The Last Man Standing
to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different. In the current
series the well-known Hollywood producer Robert Lippert contracted with Hammer
for a series of ten films which would star let’s say a well-known if faded
Hollywood star like Dane Clark or Richard Conte as a draw and a cheap purchase English
supporting cast with a thin storyline.
I had done a bunch of
these reviews (minus a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin
I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using
a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs
in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short
summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that
the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not
see, the film. All well and good until about my fifth review when a reader
wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film.
Moreover, and this is the heart of the issue, she mentioned that perhaps I was
getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my
reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was
reviewing. Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out
with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have
had various contracts for work over the years but not that one.
The long and short of it
was that the next review was a stripped- down version of the previous reviews
which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora
Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film
series The Thin Man from the 1930s
and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me
with that odious expression of hers. (By the way one of the pitfalls of citizen
journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one
wants to say the most unsavory things and not flame any blow-back).
Here is the “skinny” in
any case and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. Four
guys go fishing, fair enough, but only three came back. The missing one,
Phillip, the husband of lure the audience in Paulette Goddard (on the downslope
of her career with this nondescript effort), playing Angie the non-grieving
wife. No foul play suspected, none that is until about four years later and
probably a dozen unacknowledged Angie affairs later Phillip inconveniently shows
up, claimed amnesia and maybe he did have it stranger things have occurred. Although
being bopped on the head, drugged and left to die are rough things to have
happen among friends. Those inconveniences Phillip showed up for were the
murder of one of the boys and somebody who was unhappy since they were making a
play, a gold-digger play for Angie. Angie playing on her best behavior helps
Phillip out while keeping her options open in case her hubby takes the fall,
takes the big step-off. Maybe Phillip should have picked better fishing partners
or taken up golf because before he is done one of those good old boys, one of
John Bull’s finest will actually be taking that big step-off. Oh, well, enough Nora,
right.