When The World Lived For Film Noir Heaven-With The Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” In Mind

When The World Lived For Film Noir Heaven-With The Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” In Mind

By Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs

[Ever since I came on board on this site as site manager first taking over the day to day operations, handing out assignments, editing, researching that sort of thing and then when Allan Jackson retired the whole operation I have tried to do some innovations both in the way the work was assigned and how it was presented.*There was a rough period of some serious internal struggle between the old guard who had hung on Jackson’s every word and received whatever assignments they liked many times taking whatever struck their collective fancies and submitting to be automatically rubber-stamped by Jackson and the guys who have come to be known in urban legend around the office water cooler as the “Young Turks” who had to take the old guard’s leavings-or else.

Frankly as a result of what I would call nepotism, there is no other word for it although Allan claimed it was impossible since that term only dealt with feathering family nests, all the plum assignments were reserved for those whom he had grown up with him in the old working-class of North Adamsville or had met on the highways during the turbulent 1960s beginning with the well-known Summer of Love, 1967 centered in San Francisco. That hard fact true even when of necessity due to retirements and tiredness he had to bring in a cohort of younger writers who wound up mostly doing rehash jobs on what the old guard left behind. Not a good situation which in the end was the undoing of Jackson since the self-styled “Young Turks” rose up to smite the dragon and he left packing his bags for parts unknown vowing revenge unto to the seventh generation. More importantly, leaving me to try to pick up some pieces.

The first of which was to cut way down, cut down to nothing in the end on the proliferation of titles hanging on each and every writer. After an unsuccessful trial run as describing everybody as self-evident “writer” we have gone to simple given and surnames in the by-line line. The second, to be kind to myself, we are still trying to work out, by having both young and older writers write out of their comfort zones. If you wrote about old time films, which was fine by me coming over from the American Film Gazette where we did a million of those, then try your hand at more modern stuff. That is where as they say “the rubber hit the road.” Where there was almost another civil war here headed on their respective sides by the two writers who will do the review below.

In order to placate both parties who wanted to do this fantastic review of one the super-classic all-time great movies I decided to have both give their takes on the film and together glean the high points through mutual rebuttals. Kenny, having done that kind of thing at his last job agreed without a fight. Phil reared up on his high horse and bucked me every minute until I threatened to put him back on probation which would have meant “doing penance” writing about some zombie film, or worse having to do some television series reviews. Needless to say he saw the light of reason after that. So below is the experiment in its first glow with each take first and then some play by play. Greg Green     

*There has been a persistent undercurrent around the shop about what actually happened to Allan Jackson in the internal dispute. That situation got a big push by both sides when Allan wound up in Utah doing stringer work for some Mormon publications. The old guard called it a purge, an exile, thinking that this little hiccup was on the order of the Stalin-Trotsky fight during the Russian Revolution period since most of them, along with Allan, had been at least around the fringes of serious leftist groups in their youth after they shed their Summer of Love dope-addled goggles. The “Young Turks” a little more vicious having had to hold fire under the Jackson regime or they would have been in Utah or North Dakota themselves also called it openly a purge. Were glad once the old goat was gone to revel in their victory.

The truth? Remember I was the distinct beneficiary of his demise. Allan would not have retired, no way, and I had many talks with him about it before the hammer came down on his poor misunderstanding head, unless he had been voted out by the coterie of writers, including the vote, the decisive one, of his oldest friend Sam Lowell who said it was time to “pass the torch.” In Sam’s words “nobody under about sixty gave a fuck about all the bright shining stuff that the 1960s was supposed to represent before it all turned to dross.” So maybe it was a purge but a soft-core one if you think about the matter. ]           

Phil Larkin’s The Maltese Falcon take:

Forget all the bullshit about crime doesn’t pay that always comes with the package in these kinds of films whether it is the 1940s or now (hell the “crime doesn’t pay” gag goes all the way back to the Garden, back to Adam forcing Eve to grab the brass ring, a no-no, and maybe even before that). Forget too all the nonsense about a guy, a guy in the low-life key-hole peeper private detective racket upholding the honor of the profession, Jesus, profession he called it, and having to move heaven and earth to find the nasty killer of his partner. That is strictly for the sob sisters and terminal flick junkies like the so-called protagonist Sam Spade could have given a fuck about old Miles when he was playing footsie with Miles’ wife and had his name stricken from the world about two seconds after he dropped by the office and had his Girl Friday do the deed after Miles has taken a couple of well-earned slugs for being skirt-crazy. Forget too writing off Brigid or whatever her name really was and once you get into the high-end alias racket to cover your tracks as long as you have enough well-doctored passports names don’t matter as some gun-simple dame. That won’t wash either. 

This one is strictly about a girl (a woman nowadays okay) having to do what a girl had to do in a time when women had many fewer options, for good or evil. See I know the back story, I know what the post-Code Hollywood censors would not let the 1940s world know about and even Dashiell Hammett, no prude, fudged on it too. This Brigid, let’s go with that name since that is the name that she went to the big-step off under, and maybe under the seven veils that was her real name, had been in Hong Kong a high priced whore, call girl they call them now, maybe then too, at Madame Chiang’s bordello which serviced frisky British senior civil servants and wired Chinese mandarins tired of their wives with every kind of pleasure they desired. (This Madame Chiang if you know your history was the older sister of the infamous Madame Chiang kai-shek, wife of the powerful Nationalist Chinese leader of the time how else do you thing she was able to get the dough to go to Wellesley College.) The problem, always a problem with fickle men was that the good old boys either got tired of her, she faded like all things do, or both. When the Fat Man and crew came storming into Hong Kong on a lead about the fabulous jeweled bird they were seeking out of Istanbul she joined up with his crowd once she showed him and his gunsel then, Thursby, around the world. (It must have been tough going even for a seasoned pro like Brigid to deal with that Fat Man’s girth.)         

Now you can see things fall into place. Using her still powerful feminine wiles on that Fat Man crew (except Joel Cairo who being what they would have called then if they dared on screen “light on his feet,” a sissy, would be impervious to her charms) and half the guys in port like sucker bait Captain Jacoby who actually wound up getting the bird out even if he paid for it with a few slugs in the mix. (Not from her although at trial the less than chivalrous Sam Spade trying to suck up to the D.A. and get out of his own legal troubles by trying to tie her into every unsolved murder from Hong Kong to Frisco Bay.)

Brigid’s winding up at the good offices of Miles Archer and Sam Spade made perfect sense. Just some more man bait. By the way, here’s another back story tidbit, Brigid never was referred to the pair at her hotel but once she figured out her plan, as far as she could figure such things in advance, she had picked the name out of a telephone directory. Archer came up first. If somebody named Abbott say had been the first name he would have been sitting six feet under now instead of jerkwater Miles.  

              

She played the sullen, slightly soiled (quaint term for a fallen woman, yes) damsel in distress to Sam perfectly. Played him like a yo-yo once she got him in heat. Made him buy the Archer story, the Thursby story, and best of all until she saw he had his limits of use to her the Fat Man story. Would have seduced the impervious Joel Cairo someway if it had suited her purposes, lavender boy and all. A smart private detective, if there is such an animal whose main joy in life is peeping through keyholes and drinking shoddy whiskey from the bottle at the bottom of their desk drawers, would have walked away once they knew about this Thursby character, about his putting newspaper around his bed so nobody could sneak up on him. Jesus, no amount of trips around the world with the experienced Brigid working her skills was worth tangling up with these bad characters.     

The rest of the play was a piece of cake. Play him off and on against the Fat Man and if things got dicey let the Fat Man’s gunsel put a few slugs in Sam’s ear. Hell if he got rough then she might have to do the rooty-toot-toot herself. Here’s where the play fouled up and it wasn’t really her fault in the end although she would step off for the whole thing anyway. That fucking hyped-up bird, that Maltese Falcon, was a fake, the dingus was nothing, not real nothing but blacken enamel. Seeing that there was no dough from any source Sam cut bait, cut up his honey and seeing he was built to be the fall guy if he didn’t pass the blame off sent her over. This is where the faded beauty Brigid part comes in. Maybe if she had been about ten years younger, and about fifty years less of a whore she could have coaxed him into running away with her. No dice. Here’s another little back story tidbit they didn’t tell you in the movie tough guy hard-boiled detective Sam Spade after she was gone spent many a cold winter night wishing he had run away with her. Yeah, the stuff of dreams works in funny ways. Still a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do.       

Kenny Jacobs’ take:

I had better admit that I know already through conversations with Phil Larkin and what I could figure would be his take on this film given his inclinations that he would hone in on the relatively minor figure of Brigid. I agree with everybody who has reviewed this movie over the past seventy-five years that there are serious questions about whether her real name was Brigid O’Shaughnessy  but we will go with that name as good as any others and as a few commentators have noted when the Frisco coppers finally put the 

cuffs on her after Sam Spade was forced to send her over to save his own neck that was the name she gave on the police blotter. And the name she took the big step-off under. So much for what dreams are made of which had the coppers scratching their heads in bewilderment when Sam said that remark going down that long elevator run. They were always behind the curve on the case anyway, had already deposited Miles Archer’s, Thursby’ and Captain Jacobi’s deaths in the cold files and would only resurrect them when they decided to clean the slate of half a dozen cases and lay them at Brigid’s doorstep since she was already going to take the big step-off for Archer’s murder anyway. But enough of that little dimwitted gun simple mantrap because when the deal went down the one really pulling the strings was Caspar Gutman, the “Fat Man.”

Figure it out for yourself. Brigid-down for the count. The cheapjack gunsel, Wilmar, Gutman hired down in a shootout with the coppers as he was trying to take the Oakland ferry. Joel Cairo face down in Frisco bay after a night with some rough trade Jean Genet types down along the waterfront. Hell they even tried to take Sam’s ticket but his quick-witted lawyer made short work of that attempt and although it cost him a few bucks they both had a good laugh this second time the tried to pull that license crap. They never caught up to the Fat Man and who knows he might have grabbed the goddam bird after all. But mainly he got away and that says a lot about the whole caper.  

Look at it this way who else could have masterminded the whole operation. Yeah so you see it had to be the Fat Man. Here’s the back story which will surprise everybody who thought Brigid just stumbled into the low rent back alley building the Archer& Spade operation ran out of along with repo men, con artists, disbarred lawyers, unlicensed dentists and swift insurance jobbers. And don’t believe that bullshit about Brigid picking the name out of some vagrant telephone book. She, whatever her sexual charms and skills,   wasn’t bright enough for that heavy a task. Gutman had checked around with local guys he knew from the international cartel he was fronting for and Archer & Spade came out number one on the “from hunger” list. Once the Fat Man dangled Brigid in front of either man, once they got a whiff of that gardenia fragrance and dreams of silky sheets the game was on. Sending “light on his feet” Joel Cairo to back Brigid up, to make the whole thing look like a tong war, make it look like it was everybody against everybody else in the scramble for the fucking black falcon. Brilliant.           

But that was not the end of the Fat Man’s magic once it turned out Sam Spade was the one left standing once Brigid blew Archer’s brains out so the gunsel could take down Thursby when it looked like he was trying to front Brigid to cut his own deal. He has Brigid lure Sam into his spider-web, they meet and the Fat Man promises Sam the world. Sam bites, bites big time figuring with his share that he would be able to keep Brigid for himself, keep her off the street corner tricks which is where she was heading. That of course before he found out that Brigid after about fifty “heartfelt” denials had lied to him about killing Miles. And before the freaking dingus turned out to be as fake as Gutman’s idea of cutting Sam in for some serious change and he needed someone to take the fall. Hell, the Fat Man might have been carrying too many extra pounds for his own good but he moved swiftly enough when danger lurked. Not a scratch or a breeze on him. Nice work Caspar.        

*********

Phil Larkin’s rebuttal:

As Greg Green, our esteemed site manager and social media guru, mentioned above in his introduction I went kicking and screaming into this so-called dual review with the young kid Kenny Jacobs. I have never shared a review in my life, the damn idea seems like an oxymoron or something. Some silly idea like this was to be some Siskel and Ebert gab fest in cyberspace. WTF. I hope this little so-called experiment will be the last one I have to wade through. Now Kenny as I have found out in not a bad guy, writes some pretty good stuff about zombies and super-hero comic book kiddie stuff that nobody under the age of thirty will read but he is totally out of his depth in struggling to figure out what the hell is going on in a simple private detective greed and glory flic like The Maltese Falcon. I won’t belabor the point but his so-called credentials for this review, which Greg Green must have been drunk to let go by, was that he had film noir in his DNA because his parents had taken him to a million film festival retrospectives when he was a kid of about eight. As against my well-known connoisseurship of this beloved genre since my own lonesome travel youth cadging many a Saturday afternoon matinee double-feature at the old now long gone Strand Theater in the town I grew up in.               

If you have read this far then you know that Mr. Jacobs and I have very different “takes” as Greg Green is fond of calling them. What I question is whether he actually saw this movie or had, like a lot of the other younger writers here, just cribbed from a summary on Wikipedia. Or maybe he is remembering back to when his parents took him to see this film when he was eight and he got scared by the big fat guy who was giving Sam Spade a hard time because no way in God’s good green earth is Caspar Gutman, the Fat Man the person pulling the strings on this one. Hell he had trouble enough just walking across the room never mind trying to get his greedy big hand on a precious stone bird.          

The only thing I believe we agree on is that Sam Spade is just a foil, some jabbering for the real action and that somebody else was pulling the strings. Hell Brigid, dear sweet Brigid, bless her little whorish heart had this one down from scene one. Kenny claims, erroneously, probably based on information from Wikipedia that the Fat Man through his international cartel connections, mainly a bunch of guys working for an Armenian rug merchant who desperately wanted that black bird for his mistress once she had read the story in some historical novel by Sir Walter Scott about what had happened to the dingus before it ever got to Spain, had gathered the information for Brigid to run over the back alley office of Archer &Spade for some local manpower. Yes, the Fat Man fronted the dough and all for the operation I will not deny that but the real record shows, what Brigid herself told the coppers when she was trying to get out from under taking the big step-off for the murder of Miles Archer, was that she had picked their names out of the telephone book. You hardly need to pull in half the criminal world to do that soft task.        

What Kenny missed, consciously missed as far as I can see, is that Brigid’s connections with the Fat Man were tangential, she was running her own operation from the time she met the Fat Man in Madame Chiang’s brothel in Hong King and he confided his tall tale story to her. Once she saw his entourage she saw easy pickings, some flaming sissy, Cairo, as we called gay guys in the old neighborhood when we didn’t call them fags, a bent gunsel Thursby who thought so much of the Fat Man that after about two minutes in Hong Kong he sided with Brigid and another hired gun, Willmar who some crippled newspaper boy had been able to steal his guns without batting an eyelash. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight as the late New York City columnist Jimmy Breslin used to say. So all she needed to do was grab some local Frisco muscle, it didn’t matter if it was Archer or Spade or if the first name in the directory was Abbott whom she took around the world since once she got her claws in either would be putty in her hands although she claimed she would have personally favored the more handsome Archer to the “runt” Spade but the coppers dismissed that as so much bad blood once Sam stopped doing her bidding. Once he sent her over to save his own gutless neck after the bird proved to be a fake which some Greek merchant in Istanbul had fobbed off on some other guy before the Fat Man and then Brigid got their hands on it. Her big mistake and an easy one to commit once you believed the reason for covering the bird in black paint was not having it evaluated in Hong Kong before she left. (Little did she know that the “fake” had been a set-up by that Greek merchant who would eventually sell the real one to that Armenian rug merchant which did the trick to get that mistress to start doing tricks out of the Kama Sutra he kept begging her to do.)            

(As if to put paid to Kenny’s bogus take the Fat Man did not fade into the woodwork although he did get away from San Francisco easily enough once he shed Willmar to the sharks. He wound up in Amsterdam where the old Interpol grabbed him on an international warrant but would eventually let him go once San Francisco decided to clean up its cold case load and pin everything Brigid. It turned out he was related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so wound up back in England living on Baker Street somewhere.)

Kenny Jacob’s rebuttal:

I agree with my esteemed if edging toward senility fellow writer Phil Larkin that Sam Spade, hell even Miles Archer if things had turned out that way, was nothing but trimming, a fall guy, extra baggage on the real action that was happening that he was clueless about until the end. Or almost the end when he found out the dingus was a fake and that it was either he or Brigid who was going to take the fall and he, having lost in the “stuff of dreams” derby sent her over to his buddies the coppers who really wanted his hide. But Phil must have been smoking that wacky weed, that dope you can on some days smell around the office when some of the older guys having a flashback to that Summer of Love, 1967 they have been going on and on about ever since I arrived here in early 2017 decide to go to nostalgia land. (Greg is not happy about the dope during working hours but is unsure what to do about it since “precedent” from Allan Jackson’s time was the place was some opium den or something.)     

Yeah Phil most definitely is on something if he thinks that the little what does he call the women, oh yeah, the frill Brigid was running the operation to grab the black falcon. Christ I don’t even think she would know what a telephone directory was if pressed never mind actually picking some name starting with the letter “A.” And if Phil wasn’t high as a kite when he came up with the “idea” that Brigid was running the show then the only other reason she came into his head was that Phil is a notorious skirt-chaser. Has regaled me with stories from his youth thinking that I was one of his good old boys.  I have seen him in action when Josh Breslin’s old flame, Leslie Dumont, who now courtesy of Greg has a by-line something she never had with Allan as long as he had known her, is around and you can see that the stars and moon single-handedly revolve around women.       

Yeah, no way is some little whore like Brigid, even if she was once a high-priced call girl, a treat in white women-starved Hong Kong, had the dough to run such an enterprise. She was strictly bait for either Archer or Spade, whoever grabbed her first for the Fat Man      

who knew exactly who he was latching her onto from his local sources. Two, take your pick, guys from hunger, working out of some back alley building with repo men and failed dentists, as skirt crazy as Phil. (Archer licked his chops when he first saw her even though he was married and Sam was having a torrid affair with his wife right under his nose so let’s not dismiss that skirt-crazy idea out of hand Phil.

Look at the play though. Brigid down to her last few hundred, having to hock her furs when Sam needed dough, led Sam by the nose not to some operation of her own but to the Fat Man once she knew he was in town. Every action she took from leading Sam to the Fat Man to begging Sam to let her get away with Archer’s murder once the caper was heading in the wrong direction  let’s anybody, let’s everybody, private detective or not, know that she was just a cog in the wheel, a mantrap and nothing else. The final proof although Phil will probably deny it is nobody did a damn thing to spring her once Sam sent her over. Yeah, she took the big step-off alone. And like Phil said the Fat Man eventually walked. As Sam Spade had nothing to do with it-“case closed.”            

Yeah, The Dark Night Alright When The World Needed Super-heroes And Psychos To Bring Us Down In The Mud –“The Dark Knight” aka Batman (2008)-An Anti-Film Review

Yeah, The Dark Night Alright When The World Needed Super-heroes And Psychos To Bring Us Down In The Mud –“The Dark Knight” aka Batman (2008)-An Anti-Film Review  

DVD Review

By Greg Green

Batman: The Dark Knight, Christian Bale, Heath Leger, 2008

As a rule I don’t review or in this case anti-review, films although I am the one who does the assignments sometimes based on suggestions from the writers and sometimes from something I see as pressing to review. In any case I always review the films personally to see whether they have enough going at some level to be reviewed in this space. This is the first time however in the short time I have been here and in my many years at the American Film Gazette that I have refused to assign one of my writers to write a review of something I have seen and have decided it was beneath anyone’s dignity to write about, even the woe begotten stringers and “on specs.”  

I have been kidded, sometimes mercifully by young and older writers alike, about my attempts to get to a younger audience in this space (and the past few years at the Gazette for some of the same reasons) by reviewing various youth-oriented films like ones about cinematic versions of comic books like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. They chided me that I was pandering to the butter drenched popcorn and refillable soda pop cup young people who could care less about film reviews and only cared about sitting through a couple of hours of bam-bam action whatever the quality, or lack of quality. Could care less what the paid film critics thought was being produced. What symbolism the film was trying to get at.

Despite my own growing misgivings about continuing to dwell on these type films since it was beginning to dawn on me that they all were the same bam-bam action which left some writers who had to review the films numb I kept going forward. Keep up my own pre-viewing including the film The Dark Knight which is why I have declared this an anti-review. This despite the fact that the film grossed a zillion dollars, the kids went cuckoo to see it and the critics, the paid-up Hollywood critics, gave it positive reviews. The high-brow ones from some of the reviews I read trying to see how the struggle that unfolds between vigilante Batman, in this rendition played by Christian Bale, and the psychopathic Joker, played by the late Heath Leger who actually won a posthumous Oscar for his supporting actor role replicated the post-9/11 struggles of various world leaders against whatever brand of Islamic fundamentalism was on top at any given moment.

WTF. Like any kid (remember butter-drenched popcorn and soda sugar-high) gave a damn about that symbolic eternal war business. Or any adult either who would watch the thing. Or, and this goes to the real problem here, would sent their kids with a twenty, maybe a twenty and a ten to see the thing. I have already outlined in about one sentence the inevitable struggle between good and evil (or better marginally civilized society versus the utter dregs). Whatever the virtue of that notion as a plot-driver the real deal is that this Joker psycho from hell was nothing but an excuse for some of the most gratuitous violence ever put on film in almost every scene in the film. With some acts so gruesome that they make me think that this was all very calculated to benumb everybody in the audience to accept this level of violent behavior as “cool.”  I have seldom felt the need to purge myself after viewing a film but then again previously I have never felt the need to “protect” my civilized writing staff from having to write about this pathological craziness. Enough said.           

           

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Misstep- With Elvis’s That’s When Your Heartache Begins In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Misstep- With Elvis’s That’s When Your Heartache Begins In Mind

That's When Your Heartaches Begin" was written by Fisher, Fred / Raskin, William / Hill, William.

If you find your sweetheart in the arms of a friend
That's when your heartaches begin
When dreams of a lifetime must come to an end
That's when your heartaches begin

Love is a thing you'd never can share
When you bring a friend into your love affair
That's the end of your sweetheart
That's the end of your friend
That's when your heartaches begin

If you find your sweetheart
In the arms of your best friend, your brother
That's, that's when your heartaches begin

And you know, when all your dreams
When all your dreams of a lifetime
Must, must all come to an end
Yeah that's, that's when your heartaches begin

Oh, you see love is a thing that
That you never can share
And you know, when you bring a friend
Into your love affair

That's the end of your sweetheart
That's the end of your friend
Well, that's when your heartaches begin

…Laura Simpson and Fiona Sims were inseparable friends from that first day in ninth grade at North Adamsville High School in 1960 when due to the vagaries of the alphabet and homeroom class row seating rules they sat one in front of the other in Miss Williams’ home room class. Maybe it meant nothing in the great mandela of things but neither Laura , named after the title of the 1940s film noir thriller Laura starring Gene Tierney which her mother had seen three times  nor Fiona, named after great stonewall cottage Irish Fionas going back a few generations, liked their first names and that had been their first substantial conversation once they left Miss Williams’ convent-like homeroom and got a chance to talk in the second-floor girls’  “lav” that had been beyond memory set aside as the freshmen girls’ lav (others might enter as needed depending on urgency and no one would have crabbed if they had used other lavatories in the building but that was acknowledged freshman girls’ headquarters. Oh, wait a minute, they and sophomore girls as well, were not permitted under penalty of death in the fourth floor junior and senior girls’ lounge, not if they wanted to live to tell the tale since those girls guarded their prerogative as fiercely as anyone).       

[This Miss Williams as both Laura and Fiona would be the first to tell you once they had completed four years of her home room craziness had been a Miss for a reason, not so much because she was one of the plainest women in America and wore no make-up to wash away some of that plainness but because she demanded, demanded do you hear, that everybody be absolutely quiet in homeroom, homeroom for chrissake. It was not until years later when the winds changed in a more confessional age that these young women found out that as a result of her own youthful indiscretion Miss Williams had secretly befriended many girls, some known to them, who had gotten in “trouble,” gotten “in the family way” and she had helped them out. Sometime somebody from North Adamsville should write that story, write it in big letters too.] 

So Laura and Fiona sat next to each other and sensed in each other that subtle fear of the unknown that every, or almost every, freshman has felt since, well, since Socrates’ time, maybe before. So they sought shelter from the storms together, and later with a small coterie of other adrift teen girls who gathered round them when those other girls sensed that they were not alone in their angst and ignorance and that Laura and Fiona seemed to have a better grip on what ailed them collectively. Why they also had that subtle fear but this story is about Fiona and Laura so we will let that latter settle in the background. And of course since they were teenage girls they all were bothered by the same set of anxiety associations that have bothered teenage girls since about sixteen hundred or whenever teen-age hood was developed. You know about boys, about their fearsome sexual appetites and cunning ways to get nice girls in compromising situations, about expectations in being girls getting ready to be wives, mothers, helpmates and every other menial task that his lordship “delegated” to them, about getting recognized for serious achievement in a male-dominated world, especially the professional world where there were few role models but where they wanted to head, about sex, not the boy part, that they had down as well as could be expected, but what to do about those raging hormones that were causing them sleepless nights without “getting in the family way,” having to go to Aunt Ella’s for the duration.

We moreover are concerned not so much with Laura and Fiona’s high school days except to note that is where their huddled friendship started and to note some of the highlights that strengthened their friendship, not always in good ways but who knows maybe in not so bad ways. You know getting through that first few months of freshman year in one piece in an anonymous big high school environment after the incubator closeness of junior high school, preparing for that first school dance, that first high school dance where they got all dressed up, bought new shoes and all, and doubled-dated two older guys from the school, two seniors who were known around school as nothing but skirt-chasers but who had a car and both girls decided to fling caution to the wind if it came to that (it did and they did although keep that to yourself since they both had reputations in freshman year of being “unapproachable,” meaning in the language of the times virginal), latter getting caught up with each other’s single date sexual escapades what with little trysts down at the secluded end of old Adamsville Beach (the Squaw Rock end where only teenagers trended, no nosey cops, no ill-disposed families with children to spoil the mood), then senior year after both got accepted to the state university the few wild parties they attended before graduation where when drunk they got carried away with some unusual behavior, for them, which maybe foretold what might happen in the future. That last set of escapades included an exchange of boyfriends, not those long gone seniors from freshman year but fellow seniors, for the night on a lark (those boyfriend who were more than willing to go along, did not have to be coaxed into doing that task).

Both later said nothing had happened with the other’s boyfriend, noting sexual anyway, and maybe nothing did, but a very slight wariness set in between them after that night, especially on Laura’s part who was somewhat possessive of her men. (Later Ben one of the boyfriends, Laura’s, bragged about how he could hardly keep up with Fiona’s urges  once he got her into bed but that was in the Monday morning jock locker room talkfest and could be discounted as so much bravado, and has been since Socrates’ time, maybe before.) But that was a mere bump in the road for both were excited about finally graduating and heading away from home and on their own (this getting away from home was epidemic among the early 1960s young including the writer so he knows how important learning to fly on their own was to Fiona and Laura). Moreover having both grown up on the “wrong side of the tracks” (although in different sections of that wrong side) with tough family lives including drunken fathers they were more than ready to move on.      

Duly noting those high school experiences, for good or evil, we are rather more concerned with their young adulthood, the time when in 1964 and later they came of age, came to able to carry on their own affairs after leaving home for college, the state university at Amherst with all its possibilities and with all its anonymousness. One thing that both Fiona and Laura had agreed on after graduation from high school was that they would start college unattached. And they did so shedding their boyfriends, their lukewarm boyfriends by August when they went up to freshman orientation and dorm selection (they had already signed up as roommates). (Those boyfriends, Ben and Alex,  by the way who maybe were or maybe were not sorry for the break-ups but one wonders whether they were left unhappy about that future of no prospects of being exchanged on a lark. We will never know since we are following Laura and Fiona and the boys’ whereabouts were unknown when this story unfolded.) When the big day came they were both excited, excited to be on their own, excited that that subtle fear that both felt, felt as every, well almost every, freshman, has felt since, well, since about Socrates’ time, if not before would find them with a known kindred spirit when the hugeness and anonymousness of the place got to them.

        

This tale however is not about surviving in an alien environment with a cluster of friends or some sociological study about the mores of 1960s youth and their reactions to the jailbreak wave that was cresting over them with newfound liberties and freedoms (for a while anyway) that earlier generations could not dream of but rather about how a firm female friendship got blown to the four winds when one of the friends got her wanting habits on. As one might figure with young women away from home (or men, for that matter), consciously unattached, and with broods of males everywhere one looked that two good-looking, smart, adventuresome young women would have no trouble finding male company. They didn’t lack for company or invitations to frat parties and other bashes. Didn’t suffer that lack from that first Freshman Mixer when they again like some high school deja vu double-dated two fellow freshman from one of their classes (College Math) whom they met after class in the dorm cafeteria where the guys worked behind the counter and they “hit” on the two most beautiful girls in any of their classes they said through to a couple of serious affairs, one by Fiona with a married man, until the time of this part of the story junior year.

Fiona tended to be flirty and, well, not monogamous. Laura somewhat the opposite, although that usually depended on whether she had a steady boyfriend or not. At the time we are talking about, junior year, Laura did have a steady boyfriend, Lance Taylor, a senior at Williams, located some miles up the road, who planned to go to graduate school, and who had plans, sketchy plans, that involved marriage to Laura at some future point. Laura having met Lance at the Art Museum out in Williamstown while doing a project for her graphic arts design class, assumed that same thing, except hungrier for security, her plans were far from sketchy as she practically had them in that proverbial white house with picket fence, three kids, and two dogs. And so she dreamed. Now this Lance, naturally, as with all guys named Lance or so it seemed was good-looking, smart, came from some money (important to working-class town Laura) and was a go-getter. Just the things that Fiona found appealing as well. So anytime Lance showed up at their dorm room and she was around she would get very flirty with old Lance. Laura had to warn her off a couple of times but Fiona dismissed her concerns as nonsense that she was just having fun with her new “brother-in-law.”

Things settled down for a while until toward the end of junior year Laura took a trip to Boston in order to interview for a senior year internship with an advertising company to spice up her graphic arts resume. She had expected (and Fiona had too) to take three days for the trip but the firm after the first interview decided to take her on as an intern and she headed back early. (People who know knew she was an exceptional up-and-coming graphic artist and that proved true later before she gave it up for marriage and kids.)

Well, you already know the rest, and if you don’t you really haven’t been paying attention, Laura caught Lance and Fiona in flagrante in their dorm room. You also know that was the end of the long friendship between Fiona Sims and Laura Simpson. What you don’t know is this-ten years, ten long years later at their high school class reunion, Laura Taylor, Lance in tow (the details of their after dorm reconciliation need not concern us here except that somehow Lance convinced Laura that Fiona had “made” him do it which for her own white picket fence reasons Laura was willing to accept)not even drunk but cold stone sober, tossed a drink, a whiskey sour, down the length of Fiona Sims shiny shimmy dress and then walked out of the hall. Jesus.                         

At The Dawn Of The Modern Age-William Manchester’s “A World Lit Only By Fire”-A Book Review

At The Dawn Of The Modern Age-William Manchester’s “A World Lit Only By Fire”-A Book Review 

Book Review

By Leslie Dumont

A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester, 

When I was in elementary school, fifth grade I think, we studied the Middle Ages, what then was called the Dark Ages. I was thinking about that phrase when I was called upon by Greg Green to review a book about that time, the time when not much seemed to be happening in the world, the Western European world anyway, and the time immediately after the break-through times of the Renaissance in William Manchester’s general history of the period A World Lit Only By Fire. Thinking how historical charactizations give way to later interpretations although after reading this book I still believe what were called the Dark Ages, an age dominated by feudal relations on the land and more importantly the champ-down of the Catholic Church which truly was universal, Western European universal, a major landowner in its own right, and which kept tight reins on this overall static society.      

The biggest idea that I took away from this reading was how very different those societies were organized and what must have animated the minds of even the best of them. Writers like Dante whose Divine Comedy is a major literary masterpiece of the time must have such a different set of assumptions about the world than ours that it is hard to see how we can relate to the times and his thoughts except as benchmarks toward the “progress” of history going forward. A world where the vast bulk of the population lived “short, nasty brutish lives” as the old time philosopher Hobbes would comment later, lived in the village or town and did not venture further. A world where darkness was a time of fear and disquiet. A world at the top levels of society, the levels we know about since they left written records in Latin and in the vernacular against the fates of the unlettered and illiterate where intrigue, sabotage, murder and mayhem were the order of the day just like today but without the public relations flaks to filter out the real deal and the fluff.

The most interesting part of the book deals with that point around 1400 give or take a few decades when things started to burst through the logjam of the old world order. Of course the Renaissance which we know mainly through the incredible artistic revival of the times, above all Leonardo, and the literature too also included some very sharp political controversies between the secular and religious authorities, essentially the beginning of the end of the massive Catholic Church centered in Rome and led by a long succession of Popes, Anti-Popes, Co-Popes and the like. Machiavelli a big name from the time had it down pretty well about where things were headed and how princes could get there. Although the bulk of the art was still drawing from the Old Testament tales of and seemingly endless number of painting concerning the death of Jesus Christ a small nudge toward more secular themes was growing which would flower when the Dutch and Flemish ruled the trade routes.

Probably with the liberating efforts, the new thinking, the new emphasis on the vernacular, the opening up of the world of ideas after the dead end of Scholasticism took a tumble the Renaissance influence led to the big controversy of the times between a corrupt Catholic Church and the zeal for reform led by Martin Luther in the early 1500s. There had been scattered reformers and reform movements before that time but they mainly had been finished off at the stake. There was a new breeze blowing not against religion but against the old religious practices, that breeze including plenty of wars to see who would win the hearts of the peoples. A very important time and Manchester spent a good deal of time highlighting Luther’s efforts.     

Of course this is also a time when at least a small segment of society was ready to break out of Europe, explore the world and this really was breakthrough in the age of discovery. I am not sure I agree with Manchester’s spending so much time on Magellan as the epitome of the spirit of the times but no question this period of trade, commerce, new inventions and such is that edge of the modern world whose ideas and trends have still not been fully played out even today.

A good read with plenty of gossipy stuff about people like the Borgias, the corrupt Popes and their progeny, and the place of the extraordinary artists from these times. From Botticelli’s Venus to all the good works Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. (Although perhaps reflecting the times he wrote the book in nothing about the possible homosexuality of guys like Leonardo and Michelangelo so how things have changed in the last few decades on that score.)           

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Billie’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame-With Bill Haley And The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Billie’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame-With Bill Haley And The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock In Mind

Rock Around The Clock
recorded by Bill Haley
written by Jimmy DeKnight and Max Freedman 

G
One two three o'clock four o'clock rock

Five six seven o'clock eight o'clock rock

Nine ten eleven o'clock twelve o'clock rock
                 
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight


Put your glad rags on and join me hon
           G7
We'll have fun when the clock strikes one
            C
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight
            G
We're gonna rock rock rock 'til broad daylight
            D7                               G
We're gonna rock gonna rock around the clock tonight


When the clock strikes two three and four
If the band slows down we'll yell for more
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight
We're gonna rock rock rock 'til broad daylight
We're gonna rock gonna rock around the clock tonight

When the chimes ring five six and seven
We'll be right in seventh heaven
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight
We're gonna rock rock rock 'til broad daylight
We're gonna rock gonna rock around the clock tonight

When it's eight nine ten eleven too
I'll be going strong and so will you
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight
We're gonna rock rock rock 'til broad daylight
We're gonna rock gonna rock around the clock tonight

When the clock strikes twelve we'll cool off then
Start a rocking round the clock again
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight
We're gonna rock rock rock 'til broad daylight
We're gonna rock gonna rock around the clock tonight

I, seemingly, had endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing a commercially- produced classic rock series over the past few years. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.

And we, we small time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kids’ stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billie who I will talk about later, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.

Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Yeah right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob Crosby and The Bobcats (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.

In many ways 1956 was the key year, at least to my recollection. And here is why. Elvis may have been burning up the stages, making all the teenage girls down South sweat, making slightly older women sweat and throw undergarments too, and every guy over about eight years old start growing sideburns before then but that was the year that I actually saw him on television and started be-bopping off his records. Whoa. And the same with Bill Haley and the Comets, even though in the rock pantheon they were old, almost has-been guys, by then. And Chuck Berry. And for the purposes of this particular flash back, James Brown, ah, sweet, please, please, please James Brown (and the Flames, of course) with that different black, black as the night, beat that my mother (and others too) would not even let in the house, and maybe not even in our whole white working- class neighborhood. But remember that transistor radio and remember when rock rocked.

Of course all of this remembrance is just so much lead up to a Billie story. You know Billie, Billie from “the projects” hills. William James Bradley to be exact. I told you about him once when I was reviewing a 30th anniversary of rock film concert segment by Bo Diddley. I told the story of how he, and we, learned first-hand down at the base, the nasty face of white racism in this society. No even music, and maybe particularly not even music, was exempted then from that dead of night racial divide, North or South if you really want to know. Yes, that Billie, who also happened to be my best friend, or maybe almost best friend we never did get it straight, in elementary school. Billie was crazy for the music, crazy to impress the tender young girls that he was very aware of, much more aware of than I was and earlier, with his knowledge, his love, and his respect for the music (which is where the innocent Bo Diddley imitation thing just mentioned came from although that story was later than the story I want to tell you now).

But see we were “projects kids,” and that meant, and meant seriously, no dough kids. No dough to make one look, a little anyway, like one of the hot male teen rock stars such as Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. Now this “projects” idea started out okay, I guess, the idea being that returning veterans from World War II, at least some vets like my father, needed a leg up in order to provide for their families. And low-rent public housing was the answer. Even if that answer was four-family unit apartment buildings really fit for one family, one growing three boy family anyway, and no space, no space at all for private, quiet dreams. Of course by 1955, ‘56 during the “golden age” of working- class getting ahead (or at least to many it must seem so now) there was a certain separation between those who had moved on to the great suburban ranch house dream land and those who were seemingly fated to end up as “the projects” fixtures, and who developed along the way a very identifiable projects ethos, a dog-eat-dog ethos if you want to know the truth. It ain’t pretty down at the base, down at the place where the thugs, drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters feed off the rough-edged working poor.

That didn’t stop Billie, or me for that matter, from having our like everybody else dreams, quiet spaced or not. In fact, Billie had during his long time there probably developed the finest honed-edge of “projects” ethos of anyone I knew, but that came later. For now, for the rock minute I want to speak of, Billie was distractedly, no beyond distraction as you will see, trying to make his big break through as a rock performer. See Billie knew, probably knew in his soul, but anyway from some fan magazine that he was forever reading that old Elvis and Jerry Lee (and many of the rockers of the day, black and white alike) were dirt poor just like us. Rough dirt poor too. Farm land, country, rural, shack, white trash, dirt poor which we with our “high style” city ways could barely comprehend.

And there was Elvis, for one, up in big lights. With all the cars, and not junkie old fin-tailed Plymouths or chromed Fords but Cadillacs, and half the girls in the world, and all of them “hot” (although we did not use that word then), or so it seemed. Billie was hooked and hooked hard on that rock star performer fantasy. It consumed his young passions. And for what purpose? If you answered to impress the girls, “the projects” girls right in front of him, hey, now you are starting to get it. And this is what this little story is about.

This was late 1956, maybe early 1957, anyway it’s winter, a cold hard winter in the projects, meaning all extra dough was needed for heat, or some serious stuff like that. But see here old Billie and I (as his assistant, or manager, it was never clear which but I was to be riding his star, no question) had no time for cold, for snow or for the no dough to get those things because what was inflaming our minds was that a teen caravan was coming to town in a few weeks. No, not to the projects, Christ no, but downtown at the high school auditorium. And what this teen caravan thing was (even though we were not officially teens and would not be so for a while) was a talent show, a big time talent show, like a junior American Bandstand television show, looking for guys and girls who could be the next teen heartthrobs. There were a lot of them in those days, those kinds of backwater talent shows and maybe now too.

This news is where two Billie things came into play so you get an idea of the kind of guy he was back then. First, one night, one dark, snowy night Billie had the bright idea than he and I should go around town and take down all the teen caravan announcement advertisements from the telephone poles and other spots where they were posted. We did, and I need say no more on the matter. Oh, except that a couple of days later, and for a week or so after that, there was a big full-page ad in the local newspaper and ads on the local radio. That’s one Billie thing and the other, well, let me back up.

When Billie got wind of the contest he went into one of his rants, a don’t mess with Billie or his idea of the moment rant and usually it was better if you didn’t, and that rant was directed first to no one else but his mother. He needed dough to get an outfit worthy of a “prince of rock” so that he could stand out for the judges. Moreover the song he was going to do was Bill Haley and The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock. I will say he knew that song cold, and the way I could tell was that at school one day he sang it and the girls went crazy. And some of the guys too. Hell, girls started following old Billie around. He was in heaven (honest, I on the other hand, was indifferent to them, or their charms just then). So the thought that he might win the contest was driving him mad (that same energy would be used later with less purpose but that story is for another day)

Hell, denim jeans, sneakers, and some old hand-down ragamuffin shirt from an older brother ain’t going to get anyone noticed, except maybe to be laughed at. Now, like I said, we were no dough projects boys. And in 1956 that meant serious problems, serious problems even without a damn cold winter. See, like I said before the projects were for those who were on the down escalator in the golden age of post-World War II affluence. In short, as much as he begged, bothered and bewildered his mother there was no dough, no dough at all for the kind of sparkly suit (or at least jacket) that Billie was desperate for. Hell, he even badgered his dad, old Billie, Senior, and if you badgered old Billie then you had better be ready for some hard knocks and learn how to pick yourself up off the ground, sometimes more than once. Except this time, this time something hit Old Billie, something more than that bottle of booze or six, hard stinky-smelling booze, that he used to keep his courage and television-watching up. He told Mrs. Billie (real name, Iris) that he would spring for the cloth if she would make the suit. Whoopee! We are saved and even Billie, my Billie, had a kind word for his father on this one.

I won’t bore you with the details of Mrs. Billie’s (there you have me calling her that, I always called her Mrs. Bradley, or ma’am) efforts on behalf of Billie’s career. Of course the material for the suit came from the Bargain Center located downtown near the bus terminal. You don’t know the Bargain Center? Sure you do, except it had a different name where you lived maybe and it has names like Wal-Mart and K-Mart, etc. now. Haven’t you been paying attention? Where do you think the material came from? Brooks Brothers? Please. Now this Bargain Center was the early low- rent place where I, and about half the project kids got their first day of school and Easter outfits (the mandatory twice yearly periods for new outfits in those days). You know the white shirts with odd-colored pin-stripes, a size or two too large, the black chinos with cuffs, christ with cuffs like some hayseed, and other items that nobody wanted someplace else and got a second life at the “Bargie.” At least you didn’t have to worry about hand-me-downs because most of the time the stuff didn’t wear that long.

I will say that Mrs. B. did pretty good with what she had to work with and that when the coat was ready it looked good, even if it was done only an hour before the show. Christ, Billie almost flipped me out with his ranting that day. And I had seen some bad scenes before. In any case it was ready. Billie went to change clothes upstairs and when he came down everybody, even me, hell, even Old Billie was ooh-ing and ah-ing. Now Billie, to be truthful, didn’t look anything like Bill Haley. I think he actually looked more like Jerry Lee. Kind of thin and wiry, lanky maybe, with brown hair and blue eyes and a pretty good chin and face. I would say now a face that girls would go for; although I am not sure they would all swoon over him, except maybe the giggly ones.

So off we go on the never on time bus, a bus worthy of its own stories, to downtown and the auditorium, even my mother and father who thought Billie was the cat’s meow when I brought him around. Billie’s father, Old Billie of the small dreams, took a pass on going. He had a Friday night boxing match that he couldn’t miss and the couch beckoned (an argument could be made that Old Billie was a man before his time in the couch potato department). However all is forgiven him this night for his big idea, and his savior dough. We got to the school auditorium okay and Billie left us for stardom as we got in our rooting section seats. A few minutes later Billie ran up to us to tell us that he was fifth on the list so don’t go anywhere, like out for a cigarette or something.

We sat through the first four acts, a couple of guys doing Elvis stuff (so-so) and a couple of girls (or rather trios of girls) who did some serious be-bop stuff and had great harmonies. Billie, I sensed, was going to have his work cut out for him this night. Finally Billie came out, prompted the four-piece backup band to his song, and he started for the mike. He started out pretty good, in good voice and a couple of nice juke moves, but then about half way through; as he was wiggling and swiggling through his Rock Around The Clock all of a sudden one of the arms of his jacket fell off and landed in the front row. Billie didn’t miss a beat. This guy was a showman. Then the other jacket arm fell off and also went into the first row. Except this time a couple of swoony girls, girls from our school were tussling, seriously tussling, each other for it. See, they thought it was part of Billie’s act. And what they didn’t know as Billie finished up was that Mrs. Billie (I will be kind to her and not call her what Billie called her) in her rush to finish up didn’t sew the arms onto the body of the jacket securely so they were just held together by some temporary stitches.

Well, needless to say Billie didn’t win (one of those girl trios did, and rightly so, although I didn’t tell Billie that). But next day, and many next days after that, Billie had more girls hanging off his arms than he could shake a stick at. And you know maybe Billie was on to something after all because I started to notice those used-to-been scrawny, spindly-legged, pigeon-toed giggling girls, their new found bumps and curves, and their previously unremarkable winsome girlish charms, especially when Billie would give me his “castoffs.” So his losing was for the best. My “for the best.”

Strangers On A Train- New Style-Timing Is Everything- Ethan Hawke And Julie Delpy’s Before Sunrise (1995)-Before Sunset (2004)-Before Midnight (2013)-Film Review

Strangers On A Train- New Style-Timing Is Everything- Ethan Hawke And Julie Delpy’s Before Sunrise (1995)-Before Sunset (2004)-Before Midnight (2013)-Film Review 

DVD Review

By Alden Riley

Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013), starring Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawkes, directed by master filmmaker of the long story line Richard Linklater

Finally I get an assignment that at least has some relevance to me this trifecta-trilogy under the banner of Before Midnight, Sunrise, Sunset it does not matter which goes first although Sunrise in 1995 when the star-crossed saga begins and set the stage for the sequels it is all the same story of mostly thwarted love between the same two characters and the same two actors, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke playing those characters. I will get to the relatively simple, if any human relationships which depend on time ever are simple but let me relate what has been going on to make me make the initial sentence to this piece.

This reprieve after a slew of turkeys blowing smoke over the remains of the sexploitation of the James Bond 007 series under either the Sean Connery regime or the Pierce Brosnan regime where Sandy Salmon and I had to stage a mock “fight” over who was more Bond-ish of the two contestants. Leslie Dumont who now is writing in this space after a long absence would call it the “good old boys” covering up for the bam-bam and eye candy of those mercilessly misanthropic films. Which both Sandy Salmon and I were lambasted for mercilessly by name-and maybe rightly. Then there was that unspeakable craziness around new site manager Greg Green’s ill-begotten attempts to be relevant to the younger crowd by digging down in the mud and going crazy over popcorn-drenched and soda-addled kids with a bunch of reviews on puffed up super-heroes like Batman, Superman, Ironman, Wonder Women and that clot of mutants. I barely made that assignment out alive. Made me wish for the days not so long ago when I was force-fed into an assignment, a documentary about Janis Joplin whom I had never heard of, and which at least did not leave me brain-dead although I still don’t know what the big deal was about her and her admittedly too short live. (That was before Greg’s time, a time when the previous site manager went crazy over his, and half the writers here, youthful excesses in commemorating the Summer of Love, 1967, and I, clueless made the mistake of publicly saying I didn’t know who Janis Joplin was and drew a biopic assignment over Sandy’s head from that guy. That event thereafter started the whole process of regime chance which we are just starting to stabilize now-not without blips like super-secret agents and mutant super-heroes.   

Back to the future now though, hopefully. These three films are really a departure since they start on a wicked premise. The two parties meet in Vienna on a train and before you know after hours of intense, witty and arch conversation they are bedded, well, not bedded but rolling in the grass before parting their separate ways. A one night stand when all was said and done with no regrets, a least not enough that they were not so sexually-frenzied that they “forgot” to get each other telephone numbers if not addresses. Frankly I was embarrassed, I blushed when that happened.  Even a holy goof of a high school student would know that was stupid and unheard of. Yeah, a strictly high school sophomore mistake, and maybe really a middle school mistake, which would put you on the dungheap of the school social pecking order.     

Story over, done. Well not quite since they just so happen to meet in New York City nine years later. Not by accident but because the guy had written a thinly-veiled account of their one night of love, one night of sin, shades of Elvis but even he had a hotter version of one night of sin which is the star this one should go under and she meets him at a book signing. They have had separate married lives and he a kid so this one day is fraught with all kinds of missed opportunities.

But there is hope. That wife of his is a bitch and so in the end they will be able to unite. The saga ends with them united but in a “normal” straight-laced “modern marriage” living together with two kids like everybody else in the world. Maybe they are happy, maybe not but throughout all three efforts they try to make all kinds of existential, witty, arch intellectual conversation which saves the story-line which at least has the virtue of making things interesting. The third part of the trilogy maybe did not have to be made but Linklatter (and Hawkes and Deply who co-write) liked to grab the long view. Well worth seeing, seeing in order so you want to view the next one, and the next one even if that last one didn’t have to be made.    

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind   

Link to Partisan Defense Committee 

http://www.partisandefense.org/

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sam Eaton had to laugh when he heard the news, the news live and in person on cable news by the current Attorney-General of the United States (no names needed since this is the position of every one of those guys, and now gals when primed by curious reporters who if they have done their homework already know the answer) that there are “no political prisoners in the United States prison systems, certainly not the federal systems and as far as is known not in the states either.” And on some level, not on the level of candid truth but some level lower than that, the A-G in question (and all previous A-Gs) is right since every prisoner, every political prisoner is behind bars for some “crime” against society’s norms. Take the case of Chelsea Manning (known until her thirty-five year sentencing to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for multiple conviction against military and federal law as Bradley Manning thereafter as Chelsea in case there is any confusion about who we are talking about) which was the case the A-G in question was referring to in that newspeak commentary. Private Manning, is the heroic Army soldier who blew the whistle to Wiki-leaks on the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the duplicity of the Hillary Clinton-run State Department even before Benghazi. The charges against Chelsea  were “crimes,” you know “stealing” government files and “committing” acts of espionage but her motivation had nothing to do with crime, at least crimes that working people and leftists need worry about. Her leaks were a breath of fresh air in counter-point to the “slam-dunk’ mentality that has pervaded both the Bush II and Obama administrations. But Chelsea is nevertheless a political prisoner with a capital “P.”        

Sam had to laugh again about the nefarious and spurious doing of the American justice machine (thoughts on that “machine” bringing to Sam’s mind the words of sardonic comic Lenny Bruce, a man not unfamiliar with that system and in his own way a political prisoner as well about how “in the hall of justice the only justice is in the halls-nicely said, Brother, nicely said) when a few nights after this newscast he was sitting in Jack’s, the long-time radical hang-out bar in Harvard Square which he frequented, talking to Ralph Morris who had come to town on one of his periodic visits from his home in Troy, New York about what he had heard that other night. And this was not mere idle talk between that pair because the whole Easton-Morris friendship had its start when they were political prisoners of a sort back on May Day 1971 when they had met on the floor of RFK Stadium in Washington for the “crime” of disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance when they and thousands of others tried to shut down the American government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War which they were desperately for their own reasons trying to stop. So, yes, they were “criminals,” maybe just petty criminals by the standards of the charges but no way in hell had they hitchhiked from Cambridge and Albany, New York respectively (and wherever else those thousands came from and how they got there) to “walk in the streets” of D.C. for the hell of it, to litter the boulevards with leaflets let, to thumb their noses at the government, or the like. Sam and Ralph that day had been political prisoners with a small “P” nevertheless. (They would later do some actions in solidarity with the Black Panthers, with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and with the African National Congress in South Africa which would “win” them their capital “Ps.”)      

All of this old-timey bar talk had a purpose though (they by the way were no strangers to strong drink as part of their political camaraderie from early on in their working-class lives but now they drank high-shelf stuff delivered by Jimmy the bartender rather than that rotgut low-shelf, no-shelf Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort which got them through their no dough youths). Or rather two purposes. First, Ralph had come to town to join Sam in the annual Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration in honor of the two anarchist political prisoners who had been railroaded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to their executions on August 23, 1927. Troy and most other places in the nation and the world paid have paid no particular attention to such events but in Boston the scene of the crimes against the two immigrant anarchists there had been a generally on-going commemoration since the 1920s, although not always on in the streets like the past several years. Over their long and hard fought battles around prisoners’ rights which formed a majority of the work they had done over the years, in good times and bad, Sam and Ralph made sure that they attended this commemoration.

The second event that brought Ralph to town was a conference to be held in Boston to see about reviving the old International Labor Defense (ILD), the 1920s Communist International (CI)-initiated political prisoner defense organization which coincidentally had cut its teeth when founded in 1925 on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Under the circumstances over the past quarter of a century plus for the international working class not so much reviving it exactly as in the old days since the organization had gone out of business in 1946 a few years after Joe Stalin over in Russia had liquidated the Communist International as part of some Soviet foreign policy sop to his allies in World War II (the CI had pretty much gone out of the business of directing international revolution well before than anyway) but reviving the spirit that drove it in its best days around the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Angelo Herndon case, a bunch of other lesser well known labor cases like that of Tom Mooney and assorted IWWers (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) and most famously the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s.

In those days as Sam had mentioned while talking to Ralph at Jack’s since he had been looking up information about the old ILD, what it did and how it was organized (and how much the old American Communist Party/CI controlled the operation in its sunnier days) the ILD had had no problem living up to the idea of a non-sectarian labor defense organization that took on the tough cases, the political cases and tried to garner union and progressive support in America and internationally through the CI to free the class-war prisoners behind the walls. Sam and Ralph had been involved in many cases of political prisoners on the seemingly endlessly dwindling left, especially black liberation fighters and labor organizers but those operations usually concerned a specific political prisoner (like the Manning case) or were run as campaigns by particular organizations which tended to “protect” their turf, protect their unique relationship with their poster child political prisoner.

While both Sam and Ralph had been snake-bitten a few times when somebody called a conference only to find out that the operation was being built to “protect turf” or using the campaign as an organizational recruiting tool (Sam mentioned that someone should tell such organizations and individuals with ideas like that to give pause since the recruitment rate, or better the retention rate of such projects after a while is abysmal) they liked the call for this one which included a bunch of small leftist organizations and some independent labor organizers and unions. Whether absent an international organization with the resources of the old CI a new ILD could catch fire is problematic. There in any case with the downward pressure of social flare-ups likely in the near future certainly is a need for such an organization. Ralph made Sam laugh as they finished their last high-shelf whisky that night by saying –“Hell there aren’t any political prisoners, I have it on the authority of the U.S. A-G.” But just in case those A-Gs were being less than candid they agreed that they would show up bright and early for the meeting the next morning.