An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction

[As my replacement Greg Green, whom I brought in from American Film Gazette originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’ ethos and fate.        

As I said I will describe that transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime” I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival, about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around” something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The Roots Is The Toots  rock and roll coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket. (Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been present at the creation.               

That would have been the end of it but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.      

This time though the Editorial Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their opportunity to move up.  

That part I had no problem with, told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend” about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom I also helped stake to  his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.          

If the reader can bear the weight of this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason, although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.

Tapped out in the East for a lot of reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate. So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat. Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.              

The helping Madame La Rue, real name of no interest or need to mention,  running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly, said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place for a while until I had to move on. Done

The whole drag queen idea tells me that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East. Done.

But enough about me.  This is about two other working- class guys, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph in future segments.]

***********

Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

As long as Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris had known each other they never spent much time or effort discussing their early lives, the events and happenstances of their coming of age. Maybe it was because they shared many personal similarities. Like their doggedness in pursuit when something important was on the line as it had been when Sam had vowed to fight against the war in Vietnam after his best friend, Jeff Mullins, who had been killed on the benighted battlefield there begged him in letters home to tell people what was really going on if he did not get back and Ralph having served in Vietnam had turned against the war that he had fought and tried to stop it every way he knew how and both men now in their sixties having put their lives on the line back then had stuck with the better instincts of their natures and were still fighting the good fight against the American government’s endless wars. Like their willingness to forgo life’s simple pleasures in order to provide for their families, a trait they had picked up from their own hard-working if distance fathers (they in turn if truth be told, or if you asked the collective broods of Eaton and Morris kids, courtesy respectively of two marriages and two divorces apiece, were hard-working and distance as well, more than a couple of them mad as hell about it too and the cause some periodic mutual estrangements). Like, to speak of the negative side, to speak of the effects of their hard-scrabble existences and the pull of other guys when they were young their delights in the small larcenies of their high school corner boy existences in their respective growing up towns in order to satisfy some hunger. Those “sins” (since both had been brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, a religion known for categorizing sins, great and small), made a close call, six, two and even, whether they would succeed or wind up in some jail doing successive nickels and dimes in the “life” (really not so small larcenies when one realizes that these were burglaries of homes, one of which in Sam’s crowd had been committed with at least one gun, if in the pocket, at least at the ready).

Maybe it was the Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with another male (probably Catholic female too on that side but let’s stick to male here) both having come up “old school” working-class Catholics when that meant something before Vatican II in the 1960s when the “s” word was not used in polite society, not used either, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion came up of the obligation to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two point three children, propagate the faith; have scads of children to bump up the Catholic population of the world). Maybe closer to home, to domestic home life, it was the “theory,” probably honored more in the breech that the observance, of “not airing one’s dirty linen in public” drilled into them by their respective maternal grandmothers, especially when the “s” word was involved (certainly no parents gave the slightest clues on that subject probably assuming that the birds and the bees story line would suffice and both men learned like millions of their generation of ’68 kindred about sex on the streets, most of it erroneous or damn right dangerous).

Maybe, and this was probably closer to the core than the other possibilities, men of their generation, men of the generation of ’68 as Sam, the more literary of the two called their generation after the decisive year when all hell broke loose, for good or evil, mostly evil, did not as a rule speak much about private hurts, about personal issues unlike the subsequent generations who seemingly to both men’s  amazement (and occasional chagrin) kept their lives as open books in a more confessional time. That “generation of ’68” designation by the way picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) were winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.

So the two men never spoke of various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous or trysts, never spoke of their two respective divorces much beyond recording the facts of the disengagements, and the animosity of the settlements which made nobody happy except the lawyers (although neither men were gripping since Sam’s old corner boy leader Frankie Riley performed “miracles” to get both men out from under the worse initial terms). Never spoke much about the difficulties of fatherhood for men who were so driven by the “big picture” world around them and, never spoke about the deep-seeded things that drove them both to distraction. At least that stance was true in their younger days when they had more than enough on their plates to try to keep the dwindling numbers committed to an all-out fight against the American military behemoth that had in a strange manner brought them together.   

Maybe too it could have been the way that they had “met,” that strange manner, a story that they have endlessly repeated in one form or another and which had been told so many times by Sam mostly in the old days in small alternative presses and magazines and more recently in 1960s-related blogs that even they confessed that everybody must be “bored” with the damn thing by now. So only the barest outline will suffice here since their meeting is not particularly relevant to the story except to help sort out this reticence about relationships business. Sam, an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and Ralph an ex-soldier of that war who had turned against the war after eighteen months of duty there and become an anti-war activist in his turn with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) after being discharged from the Army “met” in RFK Stadium in Washington on May Day 1971 when they were down there with their respective groups trying to as the slogan of the time went “shut down the government, if the government did not shut down the war.”

For their ill-advised efforts they and thousands of others were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent to the bastinado (ill-advised in that they did not have nearly enough people on hand and were incredibly naïve about the ability and willingness of the government to do any dirty deed to keep their power including herding masses of protestors into closed holding areas to be forgotten if possible although Ralph always had a sneaking suspicion the government would not have been unhappy seeing those bodies floating face down in the Potomac). Sam and Ralph met on the floor of the stadium and since they had several days to get acquainted were drawn to each other by their working-class background, their budding politics, and their mutual desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once said. And so they had stuck together, almost like blood brothers although no silly ceremony was involved,  stuck politically mostly, through work in various peace organizations and ad hoc anti-war committees fighting the good fight along with dwindling numbers of fellow activists for the past forty plus years.                              

There were thick and thin times along the way as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York working in his father’s high-precision electrical shop which he eventually took over and had just recently passed on to his youngest son and Sam had stayed in the Greater Boston area having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston building up a printing business that he had started from scratch and from which he in turn had just turned over to his more modern tech savvy print-imaging son, Jeff. The pair would periodically take turns visiting each other sometimes with families in tow, sometimes not and were always available to back each other up when some anti-war or other progressive action needed additional warm bodies in Boston, New York or when a national call came from Washington. Lately now that they were both retired from the day to day operations of their respective businesses and also now both after their last respective divorces “single” they have had more time to visit each other.

It had been on Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively broached to him his interest in the genesis of a term Sam had always used, “wanting habits” as in “I had my wanting habits on” when he was talking about wanting some maybe attainable, maybe not but which caused some ache, some pain, created some hole in him by not having the damn thing just in the way he said it. Of course maybe Ralph had been “rum brave” that night since he had asked the question while he and Sam were cutting up old touches at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few blocks from Sam’s place and were drinking high-shelf whisky at the time. That high shelf whisky detail is important to the story if only by inference since in their younger days when they were down on their luck or times were tight they would drink low-shelf rotgut whisky or worst to get them through some frost-bitten night. Now they could afford the booze from the top-shelf behind Jimmy the bartender’s back. Of course as well since both men had been attached to music since childhood the reason besides being close to home that Sam liked to hang at Jack’s was that it had a jukebox stacked full of old time tunes that you could not find otherwise outside of maybe Googling YouTube these days.

The selection on the juke when Ralph posed the question had been the Mississippi Sheiks’ Rent Day Blues, a personal favorite of Sam’s, about how the narrator in the song had no chance in hell to make the rent and the rent collector man was at the door. Ralph had mentioned to Sam that at least his family had never had to worry about that problem, as tough as money times were before his father landed some contracts to do electrical work for the biggest concern in the area, General Electric. Ralph’s family had been the epitome of 1950s “golden age” working-class attitudes buying into the Cold War red scare every child under the desk in case the Russkies blow the big one, the atomic bomb, keep the damn n----rs out of the neighborhood, get ahead but not too far ahead and all the other aspects of that ethos but they also had enough dough to not need to have every penny accounted for and begrudged. Sam looked stunned for a moment as Ralph described his childhood existence and told Ralph that while they were both working-class guys coming up that his family lived much closer to the depths of society, closer to the place where the working poor of Carver met the con men, rip-off artists, drifters, grifters, midnight sifters and refuge of society, down in the projects, not a pretty place.  

Ralph, at first, could not see where Sam was going with the talk but then Sam let out some of the details. See his father, Thornton, had been nothing but an uneducated hillbilly from down in the coalmining country in Appalachia, Kentucky, had worked the mines himself. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he had jumped in with both hands and feet as a Marine seeing action, seeing plenty of action although Sam who had been off and on estranged from his family for many years before they had passed away did not find this out until later after his father died from an uncle, in all the big Pacific War battles they teach in high school. Thornton never ever talked about his war that much but did say one time when they were on speaking terms that between fighting the “Nips” (Thornton’s term popular among American G.I.s who faced the Japanese on the islands) and the coal barons he would take the former, the former gladly. Before Thornton was demobilized he had been assigned to the big naval shipyard over in Hingham, not far from Carver where his mother grew up. His mother, Delores, due to wartime shortages of manpower had worked in the offices there. One USO dance night they met, subsequently fell in love and were married and thereafter had a brood of five boys close together. Maybe not a today story but not that uncommon then.

But go back to that part about Sam’s father’s heritage, about coal-mining country. Where the hell in all the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was there room for a hard-working coalminer, a coal miner’s son. Delores had made it clear she was not moving down to the hills and hollows of Kentucky after one brief shocking humiliating trip there to meet Thornton’s kin, his expression, and he had no feeling for the place after being out in the big world so their fates hinged on Carver, or Massachusetts anyway. They took a small apartment in the Tappan section of Carver, the section on the edge of where the poor, the poor in Carver being the “boggers,” those who worked the cranberry bogs in season that the town was famous for, and the, what did Marx call them, the lumpen, the refuge of society meet. As more boys came they doubled up on everything but there is no air to breathe when seven people trample over each other in a small space. Moreover Thornton in the throes of the 1950s “golden age of the American worker” got left behind; was inevitably the last hired, first fired and was reduced to whatever was left, including time served in the bogs ( a personal affront to whatever dignities Delores had since she had been taught to despise the “boggers” in her polite society home).

That hand-to-mouth existence took its toll. At some point after repeatedly dodging the rent collector man the Eaton family was evicted from their small private apartment and they were reduced to the heap, the Carver public housing projects, the lowest of the low and recognized by one and all as such. Here is where that view of the world Sam assimilated got formed. The never having money, the battle of the six nights straight of oatmeal for supper and no lunch (in those days before the school lunch programs mercifully spared the worst of the hungers), some days  of nothing to eat but patience, the passing down of the too larger-sized older brothers’ clothing bought by a desperate mother at the Bargain Center and which had been out of fashion for many a year (causing baiting by the non-projects classmates who lived up the road about shanty Irish and worse, about being a “bogger’s” son).

While Sam was talking he suddenly remembered, as an example of how tough things were, one time to impress some girl, a non-projects girl, a daughter of a middle class professional man he thought, he had cut up his pants to seem like a real farmer at some school square dance and Delores beat him with a belt buckle screaming how dare he ruin the only other pair of pants that he owned. And that was not the only beating Sam took as Delores, who handled discipline, to spare the ever weary hard-pressed Thornton, became overwhelmed with the care of five strapping boys. And so Sam graduated to the “clip” at first to get some spare dough and later those larcenies that almost got him into the county clink doing nickels and dimes. After that spiel Sam buttoned up, would say no more as if to say that if he did then he would be far too exposed to the glare of the world’s eyes even if only Ralph’s.     

Ralph, ever being Ralph, thought for a couple of minutes about what Sam had disclosed and then simply said-“Sam, you earned your ‘wanting habits,’ earned them the hard way. I don’t need to know any more” Enough said.               

'Fantastic' Musings On The Financial Meltdown: Are We Miliant Leftists Today Prepared To Take Power In Order To Solve The Economic Crises?

Fantastic Musings Of An Old Militant: Are We Communists Prepared To Take Power Today In Order To Solve The Economic Crises Confronting Humankind?

COMMENTARY

Build A Workers Party To Fight For A Workers Government!!! Pronto!!!!

Those of us militant leftists old enough to have seen a few social battles like the struggle for black civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the 1960’s know that organizing such efforts don’t come fully formed out of thin air. They need to be organized. We have spend much of our time since that period fighting essentially rearguard actions in order to defend those democratic rights and those of other oppressed sections of society and attempting to slow down the American imperial military monster that is rightly seen to threaten the peoples of the world.

Thus, in one of those little ironies that history is filled with, we have been essentially condemned to a propaganda force trying patiently, if frustratingly at times, to bring the notions of socialism to the center of the political stage: centralized planning to even out the dislocations in the world economic order caused by the inherent irrationalities of the capitalist mode of production; fighting special oppressions like racism, sexism and for democratic rights, including the right to self-determination for national minorities; and, presenting a vision of what communistic solidarity would do for an advance in the culture of humankind

Frankly, we may have gotten too cozy with the concept of seemingly always having to have confront the great social issues of the day solely from a propagandistic perspective. In short, we may have developed a propaganda circle mentality. The recent virtual meltdown of important segments of the vanguard of the international capitalist system- finance capital- the operations that grease the wheels of international commerce has some implications for our work theses days. I therefore pose the question in the headline to this entry: Are we communists prepared today to lead the working class and its allies to state power in order to reconstruct human society on a new basis and solve some of the fundamental problems of human existence?

Naturally, this question takes the form of a fantastic musing – a Utopian idea if you will- on the part of this old militant, given the hard political realities we confront among them that nobody in national politics today is , in a lukewarm manner or otherwise, even projecting such a proposition-except presenting various schemes that amount to socialism for the rich. Some may, in fact, question whether Markin has had too much to drink or is sulking over his last weekend’s disastrous college football selections. No, not this time. That is the point here. We have to be able to move outside the envelope- a little audacity can go a long way.

With that in mind a little look at our international working class history may help us. It is always dangerous to draw too close an analogy with the Russian Revolution of 1917 when talking about prospects in America in 2008 but there is one idea we can take from that time. The Bolsheviks were an extremely small, virtually broken organization at the start of 1917. During the course of several months they increased their influence and directed their propaganda to the seizure of power. Why were they successful? They were able to articulate the demands of the populace that needed to be resolved- bread, land and peace. Moreover, with Lenin’s lead (and Trotsky’s support) they were audacious enough to think that they had the capacity to resolve those issues.


Of course there was more than that at play like the fact that the Bolsheviks had some authority in the Russian working class from years of legal and illegal work, their previous experiences in the Revolution of 1905 and the generally more pro-progressive and socialistic political orientation of the Russian plebeian masses. That said, we nevertheless need to have a fighting agitational perspective providing socialist solutions for the next period. Here is a start. No Foreclosures! No Government Bailouts For Finance Capitalism! For Workers Committees to Liquidate Bankrupt Operations! For Workers Control of Production! No To The Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Nader! For a Workers Party That Fight For Workers Government! Utopian? Maybe. Necessary? Absolutely

When The Con Is On-Enough Said -A Rebuttal To “When Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines-In Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) In Mind”

When The Con Is On-Enough Said -A Rebuttal To “When Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines-In Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) In Mind”  

By Will Bradley

Sometimes you have to bust a balloon. That is the case today after having recently finished reading my colleague Lance Lawrence’s fairy tale Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines-In Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) In Mind published September 21, 2018. In that piece Lance told a tale as told to him by a rum-dum, a guy named Billy Bartlett who claimed to have known a guy named Johnny Cielo, the greatest early aviator who could have been king the hill if he had the smarts of the Wright Brothers and the overweening desire of Howard Hughes. (A guy who had many aliases according to Billy although he didn’t remember many and he was not sure that Johnny Cielo was the guy’s real name which in any case I was not able to track down as a name having anything to do with aviation, airplanes, who knows if he every even had been on a plane, had bought an airline ticket.)

When I confronted Lance at the water cooler and asked him point blank whether he had checked sources he blanched and said no, he had taken the guy’s word for it. This lack of investigation strange as it may seem is not all that unusual in today’s 24/7/365 news craziness, not unusual in the profession at all. When I told Johnny that at that point I had found no record of this Johnny Cielo doing anything like what this rum-dum Billy said he challenged me to find out what was what. I accepted and here is the real story behind whatever this Johnny Cielo was about.  

The reason I was not able to get an accounting for Johnny Cielo is because this was not his real name either but tracing back from the Barranca airline episode with Letts Fagan’s grandson who is still running the family business down there his real name, the name on the contract which his grandfather kept was John Avian. According to what this grandson, Avery, said his grandfather had told him when he was a kid about how tough things were back when he had started out in Barranca and it was like the American Wild West, crazy with con men, grifters and desperadoes of all types. At some point Lett’s told Avery about Johnny, about how Johnny had stiffed him (the old man’s term) on the airline deal, the mail and supplies deal which would have been very lucrative, would have pull everybody on easy street if Johnny could have kept his cock in his pants, if he had had an honest bone in his body.         

Avery was kind of sketchy, as his grandfather had been to him, about how Johnny set down in Barranca except nobody who could fly and had anything going for them was not hanging around a then small- time banana republic. Nowhere. Lett’s had mentioned that Johnny had claimed all sorts of stuff including having a shot at the ground floor of Allegheny Airlines which would have put him on easy street. On the basis of those whiskey-sodden conversations they struck up a deal. And Johnny did pretty well for a while, until his luck changed and he started losing guys going over the hump, the Condor Pass and he didn’t have the nerve to go up and over himself (couldn’t check this basic act of cowardice out with Avery further but it has the ring of truth given later events) The long and short of it was when the contract looked like a dead duck Johnny blew town without as much as by your leave. Leaving Letts with no dough and nothing but a bunch of broken-down World War I-type airplanes.  

When I asked him about the Billy-fed stuff about Johnny bringing down Rita Hayworth Avery laughed. Johnny, he guessed thought his was, and maybe he was, a lady’s man, claimed all kinds of bigtime conquests. Letts told him when he was a teenager that Johnny had brought down a redhead looker when he hit town. Apparently he had tried to brush her off in America but she was determined for her own reasons to get out of the States. Name: Rita Hayworth. This around the time the real Rita had gone underground before hitting the sheets with the Aga Khan so Johnny played everybody with this Rita Hayworth gag. Avery said his grandfather said she was a looker, real good-looking but the only Rita, real Rita Johnny had was probably his old pin-up in his locker at the airbase, or strip of land called an airbase for lack of a better term, really just a dug-out dirt patch.

As for the “Rita” Johnny brought down she was some tramp he met in New Orleans and couldn’t shake. When Johnny went bust on the Barranca contract and split she was left as usual with Johnny when he went bust high and dry. Letts told Avery when he was an adult he let her use his backroom for taking care of some customers, gave great blow jobs, which meant at least that part of the whole Rita story was right before she skipped town without paying the old man his percentage (and whatever he was taking in trade).     

That leaves only Johnny’s heroic, heroic in some left-wing circles, exploits serving as supply sergeant to Fidel and the hombres. And of course his fateful deep blue sea splash. That Colonel Fiero who supposedly hired Johnny for hard cash was actually a double agent for the cocaine cartel who wanted to use Cuba as a base of operations for opening up their drug transits to hit the United States hard from ninety miles away. All bullshit. The last time anybody saw Johnny was when he was walking out of Jack’s in Key West with a good-looking redhead named Rita, that same Rita who stiffed Letts and Johnny had previously left high and dry so that part of the legend of a subsequent going under the sheets with “Rita Hayworth” was true, taking her, according to FAA records when they investigated the crash, along with him on his regular flight between Key West and Naples-Florida providing air service between those two points. Oh yes, the name they had listed on the flight plans was John Blade. So maybe the son of a bitch is still holed up somewhere with that luscious red-head. Lance don’t believe word one from rum-dums I learned that long ago but learned quickly to duck when they came my way.  

A Thoroughly Modern Romance-Ingrid Bergman And Cary Grant’s “Indiscreet” (1958)-A Snap Film Review

A Thoroughly Modern Romance-Ingrid Bergman And Cary Grant’s “Indiscreet” (1958)-A Snap Film Review   

DVD Review

By Associate Film Editor Austin Riley

Indiscreet, starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, 1958    

Everybody knows, or should know, at least those who have been to the cinema enough times that half of what passes for plotlines in many stories is the old boy meets girl (or reverse it if you like) trope .That notion has held together more lame (and more beautiful) films than the most cynical producers could dream of in a million years. It all depends on how the whole thing is carried off. With a sledge-hammer or as in the film under review, Indiscreet, with some style. Of course adding to the style factor is having a suave and dashing older Cary Grant, last seen in this space trying to steal half the jewels on the French Rivera (or was it Monaco I will have ask my editor Sandy Salmon about that since he did the review) to impress and win the heart of fetching Grace Kelly in To Catch A Thief . And to receive those manly attentions Ingrid Bergman last seen in this space torn between her duty to liberation fighter Victor Lazlo and her passion for hard-nosed café owner  Rick in Casablanca. (I think that is right I will have to ask film critic emeritus Sam Lowell about that one since he did the original review on that one.)

Although I did not going kicking and screaming about having to do a review on this film unlike with a documentary about Janis Joplin when I erroneously confessed to Sandy that I did not know who she was since I knew who both of the actors here were I still felt that a 1950s film when I had not even been born was a stretch. A stretch because after watching the thing under today’s social and moral standards I do not understand the indiscreet part-the supposed illicit love affair between two consenting adults. What was the big deal these type of affairs are like rainwater today. Sandy assured me that such affairs had to be discreet back then especially in high society since divorce (and accompanying alimony) was a hard nut to crack.   

But style is what really drives this romantic comedy from the first minute Phillip, Cary’s role, steps into Anna’s, Ingrid part, apartment to change clothes before a speech he is to give. Anna, unlucky in love of late, was easy pickings for the jut-jagged suave Phillip. And so after very few preliminaries they become lovers. There is one little problem though which twists around the plot a bit. Phillip is married, very married, meaning he cannot get a divorce from that scorned wife. Can’t even when Anna puts a full-court press on to get him to the altar. Except that little problem is not really a problem since in a reverse of what usually happens which is the man says he is single when he is really married just to get at the unsuspecting woman Phillip is not married, very not married meaning he can get married. When Anna finds out all bets are off as she plots her revenge. Almost off that is. Yeah, a boy meets girl vehicle but it’s all how you pull it off.        

Once Again Out In The Summer Of Love, 1967- “Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”

Once Again Out In The Summer Of Love, 1967- “Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”  

By Jeffrey Thorne

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes From The “Tin Cup” Underground- The Marquee Match-Up-The Battle Of The Titans

Notes From The “Tin Cup” Underground- The Marquee Match-Up-The Battle Of The Titans

By Si Lannon

[I have mentioned on more than one occasion that although sports, sports media, sports mania are a large representation of the American historical experience and therefore worthy of some note that generally we have tried to shy away from that subject on this site. Shied away understanding that there is no dearth of material on the subject elsewhere and certainly in the mass media. Occasionally we have reviewed the work of literary sportswriters, or literary figures who have written about sports like Damon Runyon (horse-racing) and Ring Lardner (baseball, especially the classic American summer pastime You Know Me, Al series) but that had much more to do with character development, mood and backdrop. The one serious attempt several years ago to have the well-known college game handicapper Shelly Newman cover a few college football seasons were sort of preempted once the NCAAA gurus finally adopted a semi-playoff format and took some of the fun, according to Shelly, out of weekly picking what he thought were the top 25 college football teams (and with it the all-important betting point spread). Given the formulas for inclusion in the Final Four selected at the end of the season the whole thing was weighted toward leagues with play-offs and many good teams like the SEC and Big Ten a lot of the suspense evaporated. (The SEC’s Alabama who have had a virtual lock on the mystical national title the past several years also dampened Shelly’s ardor for meeting those weekly deadlines inherent in covering such a diffuse cluster of games-and point spreads.)         

Earlier this year Si Lannon, who otherwise is a pretty solid citizen and good reviewer of books and films here and at the American Film Gazette, proposed to do a few pieces on golf. It turned out beneath that solid exterior and calm demeanor was a maniac for playing this arcane and time-consuming game with its fistful of rules which don’t make sense to the average layperson, at least to me when I tried to get a handle on why Si would get up at five in the morning to play at six on weekends when the rest of the world was either just going to bed or had a few hours left before hitting the skids. So yes Si is an avid fan and devotee of hitting small dimpled white balls with funny logos who never did anybody any harm into lakes, ponds, trees, sand traps and other devilish locations as far as I know. Each calumny with its own set of penalties and procedures for getting the ball back in play and down to the goal-to the green-in order to put that little white ball into a man-made hole, the old tin cup he called it, in finely trimmed and contoured grass that also never hurt anybody.    

Now Si is a guy who does not ask many favors and so against my better judgement I let him do a short piece on the subject. His choice was not some big time tournament like the U.S. Open which I might have appreciated some coverage on. Just to get a feel for who plays this game at the highest level these days when even I know that the well-advertised Tiger Woods no longer is the king of the hill of the sport. No, his choice a local, local to him, amateur golf tournament at his golf club, Frog Pond Golf Course, where he wanted to cover something called the club net four-ball club championship. Si can explain exactly what that format is for the clueless which included me until he told me about what that meant in the golf world vocabulary which apparently hasn’t changed since about the time of golf fanatic Charles I in England. Before he lost his head. (Not over golf but weightier matters like the “divine right of kings” idea he was working under and for which he paid with his life).     

It seems some of his regular six in the morning golf partners (so immediately suspect in my book since this reeked of some sort of sect or cult like Druids or Maypole denizens which I made clear to him) were involved in the tournament and so he had a rooting interest in the play. He moreover had predicted that the two two-person teams (therefore four-ball since each participant flails his own ball) which he friends had partnered in had reached the finals of the championship and would be slated to go head to head on in that final. Si begged, well, asked if he could a follow up on that first article to finish up in style. I was skeptical but told him to cover the “event” and write something up and if I liked it I would make sure it was posted. I did and here it is but I hope this satisfies Si’s golf craziness and he gets back to writing real film and book stuff about the American saga-Pete Markin]     

****

A Note From Si Lannon

[As my editor Pete Markin mentioned in his introduction to this piece, an introduction that may turn out to have been as long as this piece itself, I will explain, roughly explain, what the format for this net four-ball tournament is about which even he, a non-believer, could understand under constant repetition. Mercifully, mercifully to me as well as the average reader who knows of my film and book reviews, I will not except in spots discuss the arcane rules that govern seemingly every conceivable situation in golf here but just the outlines for the clueless and curious. Most readers may know about the high end of the sport, the pros, the PGA, or have seen major tournaments like the Masters or U.S. Open on television almost all of which are four day affairs in which the golfer with the lowest score for the four days wins (and these days wins a ton of money). But that is the elite, the top. The top players in an average golf club who in any case are far below that elite level are not plentiful enough to have such a tournament based on straight up stroke play. The spread between abilities is too great to make such competition fair so other formats have been created for those who want to compete against other golfers at the club level. Hence the annual club net team four-ball championship which I am covering in this piece.              

This way this type of tournament plays out is that as many interested two-person teams who enter play a qualifying round in order to reduce the field to sixteen teams. That qualifying round is based on the sixteen lowest team scores of best-ball golf. Best ball is based on handicaps. (This is where I lost Pete Markin and was the source of much repetition as he was incredulous about the whole system.) For example if both team members get a five on a hole which is a par four then then would be one over par on their gross score. But if one (or either) player has a handicap stroke on that hole then they would have a net score of four-par. That is the score that counts and so on through the eighteen holes of golf which constitute a round. Handicaps are based on the premise that two people with different abilities could play each other on a relatively equal playing field if the better golfer gave the other golfer some strokes to give that person a fighting chance of winning. Handicaps are based on a complicated formula of the average of several recent rounds of golf and I need not go further than that for an explanation.     

The sixteen qualifying teams then play elimination rounds to get a champion. In the first round (what in NCAA basketball championships would be the “sweet sixteen”) the top eight ranked teams play the lower eight teams in reverse order. For example the lowest qualifying team number one plays the highest qualifying team number sixteen and so on. The surviving eight then play a second round (the NCAA elite eight), the surviving four (the NCAA Final Four)a third round and the last two teams standing play a fourth round for the championship. This is where the vagaries of the format came into play when I predicted my friends the teams of Frenchie Robert and Caz Casey and Sand-Bagger Jackson and Kenny Lou would as they actually did do meet in the finals. The former team had been the top seed and the latter team number ten. If the Jackson-Lou team had been seeded eighth or less then no way could the two teams meet in the finals since they would play each other in an earlier round. As it turned out each pair fairly easily went through their earlier rounds so the final would provide bragging rights and side bet cash for the winning team for the rest of the season-and maybe beyond.   

The final as it turned out was held on a granite gray late September morning and the two pairs, Frenchie and Caz, Sand-Bagger and Kenny seemed to be primed to do battle, to do the clash of titans as advertised in the headline.  To give a little color to the proceedings I should mention that Frenchie, the redoubtable Frenchman a generation out of Quebec is the best golfer of the four and intensely competitive ( best meaning he has the lowest handicap which means that he got no stokes to help him against the other guys). Caz is a wily Irishman who has now safely gotten his brood of kids past the college albatross around his neck had only taken up the game the previous couple of years and so had the highest handicap (meaning he gets more strokes on certain holes than the others which could help his teammate considerable if he played well-which he did). This team was considered by the assorted touts hanging in the clubhouse bar the “young upstarts” since they had only been playing as a team for a couple of years and had not won a major championship. Sand-Bagger as his designation indicates is an old geezer, older than me, who has been playing in these events seemingly forever and is always grousing about how he should have more strokes (as he takes our money at the end of the golf round more often than not). Kenny is a diminutive Chinese who can be the best player in the world one day and a rank amateur the next. When this pair is on though it is like a perfect storm. Around the clubhouse bar, among those gadflys and barflies who populate every club not a few who have fallen under the wheel to this tandem, they are the “veterans” as their names on various plaques testify to. So this one set up as a David and Goliath affair.            

This is the way Jack Jones, the Frog Pond gadfly and barfly-in-chief put it tongue in cheek in a memo tacked onto the message board in the club’s men’s locker room:

“The Moon is in the Seventh House. The usually sleepy hamlet of Huron Village will be inundated with a motley crew of people and vehicles early tomorrow morning after procuring the hottest ticket in town for the improbable match-up of the upstart newcomers the redoubtable, whatever that means, Frenchie Roberts the brash transport from up Quebec way and his erstwhile partner the mysteriously named Caz Casey against the rags to riches bloodied and hardscrabble veterans Sand-Bagger Jackson and his wily long-time partner Kenny Lou for the coveted Frog Pond Four-Ball Net Championship.   

“Upon hearing of the pairing after Frenchie and Caz had vanquished their third round opponents while travelling back to his hometown to pick up his recalcitrant high school son, recalcitrant since despite constant pleading the young man has taken up the much more civilized sport of tennis, the mercurial Mr. Lou when the AP caught to him simply stated “We will take no prisoners.”

“The more sagacious Sand-Bagger has been quoted by Reuters as saying-“We are just happy to be in the tournament after last year’s failure to qualify and look forward to facing this unknown pair of upstarts for the biggest prize of all. We are pleased to be able to be pitted against a couple of young up and coming players who will give us all we can handle although the fate sisters would seem to favor that long hitting pair. It will take everything we know to have a chance against these stroke-strewn opponents. We will just play one hole at a time and see what happens”          

“More to the point Sand-Bagger was quoted as saying that he and Mr. Lou had won many championships and much prize money but that the really important thing was to win that side bet of one hundred dollars per man for bragging rights the rest of the season.”   

And it was as advertised a battle royal as both teams brought “game” to the vaunted showdown. I won’t bore regular readers with the play by play, hole by hole details except to say from personal experience tensions ran high on the first tee box even against long-time buddies, maybe especially against longtime buddies, and continued throughout the match as emotions ran up and down depending on the results of each hole until the end somewhere on the course hopefully not before the regulation eighteenth hole. Frenchie and Caz came out strong based on Caz playing out of his shoes that day. They were soon two holes up meaning they had won two more than their opponent (although that two up lead would be their highest lead of the day as Sand-Bagger and Kenny battled back to “stop the bleeding,” allow the young upstarts to get no further up on them). But the day belonged to the veterans on Kenny playing way out of his shoes although they did not seal the deal until the eighteenth hole when Kenny sank a ten foot birdie putt to end the game. Based on the level of play that day Sand-Bagger and Kenny had had their second lowest collective score ever. And Frenchie and Caz were only one stroke more. So yeah, as Sand-Bagger said in jest as they were waiting to tee off on the first tee this was a “friendly game to the death.” Enough said.          

[In the interest of full disclosure the reason I was able to cover this event was that my teammate, Rags Johnson, and I failed to qualify-did not make the cut a subject we will hear no end of from this year’s finalists. We had actually won this same tournament last year which also shows the vagaries of golf-Si Lannon]  

When The Blues Was Dues- The Classic Alligator Records Compilation

When The Blues Was Dues- The Classic Alligator Records Compilation

CD Review

By Zack James

Classic Alligator Records, many blues artists 

Long before Seth Garth became back in the day, the 1960s day, the music critic for the now long gone The Eye published in those day out of Oakland, California he had been bitten by the blues bug. Of course in the 1960s if one was to be a successful and relevant music critic one had to concentrate on the emerging and then fading folk music minute (of which the blues was seen as a sub-set of the genre especially the country blues wings with the likes of Skip James, Son House, Bukka White, and Mississippi John Hurt) and then post-British invasion and the rise of the counter-cultural movement what was called “acid” rock. So Seth’s blues bug, except for an occasional sneak-in was cut short by the needs of his career. Even then though Seth would keep up with the various trends coming out of places like Chicago and Detroit and of the artists who had formed his first interests.  

Strangely Seth had come to his love of the blues almost by accident. Back in the 1950s he had been like many teenagers totally devoted to his transistor radio to shutout the distractions of parents and siblings around the house. In those days though he was drawn to the fresh air jail breakout of rock and roll, guys like Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. One Sunday night though almost like a ghost message from the radio airwaves the station he usually listened to WMEX was drowned by a more powerful station from Chicago, WABC. The show Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour (actually two hours but that was the title of the show). The first song Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying. He was hooked, hooked mainly because in those days the blues coming out of Chicago sounded like a very primitive version of rock, like maybe it had something to do with that beat in his head whenever a serious rock song came on WMEX like Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller. He couldn’t always get the Chicago station on Sunday night, something to do with those wind patterns but he was smitten.

Like a lot of things including his later interest in folk music and acid rock Seth always wanted to delve into the roots of whatever trend he was writing about. That was how he found out that a lot of the songs that he heard on the Be-Bop Benny show were the genesis of rock. Also that rock had eclipsed the blues as the be-bop new thing leaving many of the most popular blues artists, overwhelming black artists, behind to pick up the scraps of the musical audience (only to be “discovered” later by some of the more thoughtful rock stars like the Stones just as the old time country blues artists from the South had been “discovered” by folk aficionado in their turn).  

Seth also dug into the technical aspects of the industry, who was producing the music. Those where the days when there were many small, small by today’s mega-standards, essentially mom and pop record companies producing blues material. In Chicago, with the huge migration of blacks from the South during the previous two generations there were a myriad of labels. But two stuck out, two were the ones who grabs the very best artists around Maxwell Street and made them stars, from the many one hit wonders to classic stars like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King. 

Of course most people have heard of those artists who worked out of the Chess Record label. But the other big label, the one under review, Alligator, also produced a shew of stars. So that very first night Seth had heard the legendary Hound Dog Taylor doing The Sky Is Crying he was under contract with Alligator. For more artists check out this two CD compilation of those others who also graced that label. Then you will be up to date on the genesis of the Chicago blues explosion that changed blues from acoustic to electric back in the day.           

For The Fifty- Steve McQueen’s “The Great Escape” (1963)-A Film Review

For The Fifty- Steve McQueen’s “The Great Escape” (1963)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and a fistful of male stars to round out the cast, 1963

One of the great things about my long stay at this site (and at the now on-line American Film Gazette) is that Pete Markin, my editor (and Ben Gold at the Gazette) almost without exception let me review almost anything cinematic from virtually any genre and not grumble about my choices. That is true of this encore presentation the classic iconic (the big motorcycle chase for one thing) 1960s World War II movie The Great Escape as well. The encore part needs a little explanation since my first review of the film was written for my high school newspaper the North Adamsville High Magnet back when I was a sophomore. Of course that review of the film seen at the now long gone Strand Theater in Adamsville Center one Saturday afternoon was all about detailing the action, detailing how the good guy Allied officers outwitted the nasty Nazi night-takers who were trying (and almost succeeding) in over-running all of Europe and who knows where else, and concentrating on the long drama (with intermission) as it unfolded. What it did not entail, what got missed, was the little point about the murder of the fifty officers who were captured after the great escape and executed against even the barest minimum of Geneva Convention standards. What got missed then but not now as well is the dedication in the film (and in this headline) of those fifty murdered men who after all were only doing what the fog rules of war were expecting of them-escape and/or create as much havoc for the enemy as possible if you cannot.             

The storyline is actually pretty simple for an almost three hour movie. A group of hard ass Allied officers who have already off-camera created problems for the German High Command by a collective untold number of escapes from other POW camps are transferred to a state-of-the-art facility. Needless to say from about minute one they individually attempt to escape. No go. Then a senior British officer just recaptured and transferred comes up with the big plan –a massive escape of 250 men to tie down as many German troops as possible. The bulk of the film then concentrates of the logistics, the temporary set-backs, and the division of labor among the officers who brought different skill sets to the table. Then the big day came but due to some problems only about seventy men escaped. As I have already telegraphed of that lot fifty were captured and executed, a few escaped, and a few were captured and returned to the camp.

The central figure in all of this, the one highlighted throughout the film is Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, who between bouts of solitary (with American as apple pie glove and ball in hand to while away the time) and that aforementioned great motorcycle chase gave the Germans all they could handle. Alas he was one of the captured and returned ones. Yeah, this one, this based on a true story about the camp and the Nazi night-takers actions is for the fifty. Enough said.