Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, 2011, Marvel Productions

[Now it is my turn to say WFT, although I could have probably gotten what the initials stood for long before my fellow reviewer on this site long time contributor Phil Larkin decoded the latest shorten terms in modern text-twitter-Internet world. His WTF reason, Phil’s, was that he went here on this site publicly to grouse about having to do another film in this so-far Captain America trilogy rather than what he considered should have been his plum assignment doing a review of his hero actor Humphrey Bogart’s  in one of his lesser later films from the 1950s Deadline-USA. A film about the even then declining (against television) newspaper racket’s struggle for the big story and how to beat off the stiff competition of the other news sources in the big cities.     

Under the new regime, manager Greg Green and the newly instilled Editorial Board, which Phil showed great disrespect for by calling that panel toadies of Greg’s, each writer has the option of airing his or her grievances in the introduction to their articles. With no particular role for either Greg or the board except as something like “gatekeepers” to avoid letting any personal obscure animosities spill into cyberspace. New as I am to this site I have no quarrel with that policy which seems right after what other writers have told me the previous manager Allan Jackson’s never-ending attempts to sweep any writerly controversies under a very deep rug. I have no quarrel either with Phil grousing in public about how he was short-shifted on what he expected to be his assignment. What I do object to and feel a need to mention if only in passing is my “cred” to do the Bogart review.        

Phil seems to believe that if you were not at least alive, as neither I nor my parents were, to have seen the film you are reviewing then that mere fact disqualifies you from reviewing the damn thing. He probably got that idea, an old idea in any case, from his buddy-buddy relationship with Allan Jackson and the coterie of older writers he surrounded himself with until a few years ago. Jackson  seeing the writing on the wall that the older writers were either running out of creative steam or were so hung up on the 1960s when most of them came of age, including Jackson, that they needed younger writers to stop the drainage of younger reader away from the site. While, in general, we younger writers will write material reflecting our coming of age experiences I reject the idea in this specific case that Phil was the only one who could do justice to the Bogart piece.

As I mentioned in my review, and either Phil missed or consciously ignored, I was spoon-fed on Bogie movies as a kid because my parents who met in the 1980s in Ann Arbor were crazy for Bogie (and for the four films with his honey Laruen Bacall especially) after having gone to the campus film department’s periodic retrospectives on the age of black and white films. Later too when they had their version of nostalgic for Bogie they would traipse me along with them to some commercial retro-theater like the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts when they were graduate students. So I will special plead my “cred” on that film. In any case Greg, to placate Phil I guess although that era was supposed to be over with the departure and what some writers have called the exile of Allan Jackson, has assigned me what was supposed to be Phil’s second review in the Captain America trilogy. Truth is I know and care less about that whole Marvel comic book operation than Phil could ever know but being a good sport and also able to feast off of his first review to avoid any heavy lifting I consented. I am, unlike the apparently more paranoid Phil, confident that this introduction will see the light of day. Kenny Jacobs]          

********

Phil Larkin in his review of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War made the appropriate point that these basically mutant creations of humankind’s off-beat fantasies who squared off in that film pale in comparison with a guy like hard-boiled no nonsense private eye Phillip Marlowe, sea-worthy Captain Harry Morgan, closet anti-fascist resistance fighter Rick of Rick’s Café Americian out in the Kasbah, or for that matter unjustly convicted for murder escapee Vincent Parry Bogie. See I am stealing Phil’s stuff already. I won’t deal with the other mutants here since they, except for bad guy Winter Soldier, played by Sebastian Stan and a cameo by youthful inventor Stark aka Ironman, play no role here in The First Avenger saga but this Captain America specimen aka Steve Rogers out of Brooklyn, played by hulky Chris Evans, is a good example of why I shunned such matter when I was a kid. Phil was beautiful in noting that the idea of taking a ninety-eight pound weakling right out of a matchbook cover Charles Atlas “kick sand in your face” advertisement and turning him in 1945, or anytime, in a humanoid monster and then conveniently deep freezing him is kind of a hoot. Filling him up with a ton of what were, are, probably toxics did wonders for his ability to leap, do the 400 meters fast, and collide into people with his trusty shield but left his short on the brains side. Strictly a bronzed beauty-male version in a tight outfit for all the girls, young women, regular women in the theater audience to ogle over.      

Well enough of bursting the bubble and let’s take what we are given for a plotline which Greg Green, the managing editor, now rather irritatingly,  has again insisted that I make sure to outline to give the reader a leg up on what the thing is about. So using the “present at the creation” 1945 motif from the headline let’s get to how this whole mess started when the kid who used to have sand kicked in his face by girls or get his ass whipped by guys got to be on humanity’s short-list of saviors. First off blame it on some screwy doctor who convinces the scrawny weakling to be a trial balloon in one of his experiments to make super-human fighters by the bushel load to fight the bad guys, real bad guys the Nazis and their friends and hangers-on. Bingo he is in although not knowing he was not the first to go into the program. A Frankenstein, who will go by the name Red Skull once he arrives on the scene, is running amok trying to seize some advanced technology which will make him the numero uno bad guy pulling guys like Hitler and Mussolini off their pedestals.

So the quest for the golden fleece, for the fountain of youth, or whatever they are searching for is on. In this case a super-powerful energy source to do the do with Red Skull’s mad scientist colleague’s mad world-controlling inventions. Red Skull has it but not for long as the newly minted Captain America chaffing under the bit doing war bond drives instead of off-handedly saving the world (and creating as Phil noted many more innocent casualties than lowering the count on bad guys). So he moves off dead center and goes mano a mano with Red Skull finally grabbing the valuable energy elixir in a big air fight in which Red Skull comes up with the short end of the stick. Problem is our good Captain is left to guide the plane to safe harbors but can’t avoid crashing into big cities if he does so he “falls on his sword” taking the plane down in the Artic to wake up some seventy years later a stranger in a strange land-New York City. To continue saving a world even wackier than when he wound up in that deep freeze. End of story.

No, not quite, because comic he-man adventures or not there has to be a love interest here his Peggy, a British intelligence agent and all around whizz which naturally fizzles out when duty calls. As well we have a preview of what will come up in future episodes when his high school buddy, Barnes, who is presumed dead, will give his old buddy the masked man more trouble than he could shake a stick at. Yeah, I am with Phil, WTF, yawn.     

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind

By Sam Lowell 

Recently I did a review of Bob Dylan’s CD, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley Frank Sinatra. (No, not as part of the never-ending and getting weird for material bootleg series which I believe is up to volume thirteen or some such number with outtakes and such overriding any real music certainly nothing that hasn’t been done better on the long list of classic album CDs like Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home) I noted that such an effort was bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins’ and so on. That proposition though seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he with Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, whether he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.

What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. Just like Frank when he was in high tide. What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back with him doing Hank Williams’ Lost Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes with everything for Williams to Johnny Cash to some old stuff he must have heard coming up in growing up Hibbing, Minnesota). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now his hero is Frank Sinatra as well.

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

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Captain America: Civil War, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johannsson, 2016

[WTF and anybody who is ready this freaking review will know exactly what I am saying and not worry about the kids, since kids don’t come anywhere near this site because they are way too busy texting each other or doing some unearthly social media vamping. Yes, WTF am I, a guy who has shaded three score and ten doing reviewing a Marvel Comic film production about some silly guy who had been frozen since about 1945 and ever since being defrosted has been running his ass off (remember it is okay-no kids will see this) trying to save every American city that he can from various evil parties, parties from a place which bear a striking affinity to the late USSR, the Soviet Union today’s just plan Russia-and Crimea. And now in a brawl with other super-heroes over turf and policy Yeah, what the hell. 

Here is my take and it burns me up because a film that I should have naturally reviewed, Deadline-USA, a late effort by legendary actor Humphrey Bogart which while not his best or most classic work (Casablanca, To Have And Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo are in my book) should have been mine by right. I, who spent many a Saturday afternoon double film matinee with one stretched out bag of popcorn in the second-run Strand Theater in North Adamsville about forty miles south of Boston watching and many times more than once to get out of the chaotic household I grew in at least am old enough to have seen the films before the dust settle on them. Unlike the kid, the young man, this Jacobs kid, who new site manager Greg Green had assigned to do the review, his first, and who came right out and said that he went to the re-run theaters in Michigan with his parents, his parents for God’s sake, when he was nothing but a kid, Didn’t even understand half of what was going on. 

   

No. This coup has all the earmarks of new site manager Greg Green’s work although I am sure he will deny this simple truth as will this new toady Editorial Board who has bowed to his every wish getting even with me for supporting one hundred per cent, and still supporting, the recently deposed long-time site manager and a childhood friend Allan Jackson. I don’t expect this comment to see the light of day. Probably I will be pieced off with one of those not enough space excuses and told I can have it to introduce my next article when again space limitations will be cited and I will be pieced off until infinity or the end days come around. Bullshit (don’t worry even a stray curious kid has long ago stopped reading this screed as some meanderings of an old three score and ten guy if they know how much that is and that is not a given). But onto the review. Phil Larkin] 

Frank Jackman who writes here now on anything as per the new so-called Editorial Board rule but who used to be the senior political commentator under Jackson and a good one has spent most of the last year proclaiming to everybody who will listen or read that we are in the age of Trump in a cold civil war situation for real. And there is plenty if not definitive proof of that escalating this year rather than as Trump publicity hounds would have it become a dead issue. Compare that real not “fake” storyline with the stuff that this film is throwing your way as Captain America yet again bounces of buildings and people with maybe a scratch or two since they took him out to defrost a few years back comes firing at you (having been in deep freeze since 1945 if you can believe that therefore unlike three score and ten me looking like about twenty-five or whatever graphic the studios are shooting for).   

That said and I hope you can hold your ability to suspend your disbelief long enough for me to give you what my old friend Sam Lowell calls the “skinny” here  (a guy who nevertheless stabbed his old friend Alan in the back by voting with the kids to send him packing).  I will grant no question the super-hero grift is a tough racket. Even with a motley of those with some specialized skills like speed, iron, being good with a bow and arrow, spidery, flame-throwers, robotic, double- flip artists who have the ability to fend off the bad guys they are too few in number to keep the world save from the creeps for long. Moreover for every action they, these so-called avengers, take against the creeps, usually not many at least in the leading cadre  there is “collateral damage” as they say, innocents by the scores, hundred, thousands,  get wasted through no fault of their own.

The question becomes, ever for those running kinds who make up the avenger herd, a moral one. Against cutting off a few bad guys who will just be replaced by another crop how many innocents must die. That is the premise behind the duel to the death here not only against the bad guys but with a falling out among the good guys when push comes to shove between the immoral rogues and the guilty accommodators. And it will be push come to shove when the various super-heroes pick up sides. Those who are willing to come under some international control commission to become essentially a super elite special forces operation working under instructions and those who want to roam free and kill whatever they can and let the devil take the hinter-post.       

Leading the rogue element, the don’t give a fuck about casualties, is this former ninety-eight pound weakling out of an old matchbook Charles Atlas kick sand in your face advertisement who gets boosted up like crazy so he can run, fight and bounce off walls is the aforementioned Captain America played by bean-head Chris Evans. This is the third film in the series so we already know his bio-and his trail of destruction. He can do everything but think beyond the killing fields he has created. Leading the civilized avengers, a brainy guy who can actually think before he acts Stark aka Ironman, played by Robert Downey, Jr. who is, catching on about that collateral damage outweighs whatever bad guys get wasted argument, willing to take himself and some others into that elite unit under international control. That is how the good guys divide up and since they all have checkered pasts the line-up splits down the middle. Of course the joker is the bad guys led by the totally berserk Winter Solider, played by Sebastian Stan, who is really an old buddy of the Captain’s who has been brain-washed by the Russians to do their dirty work. A little Cold War I scenario familiar from Le Carre novels and James Bond films.      

So the so-called tensions between the two factions mount especially when Winter Soldier allegedly blows an international conference building to smithereens with heavy causalitie. Wrong fall guy as it turned out and when he is captured miraculously he goes over the Captain’s side just like the old days once he is out of range of his handlers and their nefarious skills. But there are still those government toady avengers to deal with and so the two sides go mano a mano until, well, until it is discovered that some over-the top nefarious fourth party, a Doctor Zemo has been manipulating the whole controversy for his own sense of revenge. So all the old gang get back together after waylaying each other in such a manner that mere mortals would have gone beyond the pale long ago-or held some serious long-standing grudges. Yeah, now you know why I said WTF. Give me a hard-boiled rough-edged private detective, a salty sea captain ready to do his bit for the cause, ditto a nightclub/café owner in the Kasbah, or another private detective who sends a gun-simple femme fatale over for the big step-off Bogie just regular anti-hero any day.        

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-From Some People Who Know About Endless Wars

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of  ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-From Some People Who Know About Endless Wars

Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review

Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Deadline-USA, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, directed by Richard Brooks, 1952 

I am thrilled to be doing my first review, first film review, in this space of a film, Deadline-USA, starring Humphry Bogart an actor whom my parents would forever be quoting lines from one of his films like “Play it again, Sam,” “We will always have Paris” stuff like that since they had “discovered” him at a second-run artsy theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they met and went to school back in the 1980s. Of course Bogie (and his sweetie wife Lauren Bacall) was, is a legend, somebody to watch go through his paces whatever your age. Whenever they got nostalgic for their youth my parents would find some re-run retrospective theater and they would take me in tow to see things like The Big Sleep (which would make me hungry later for everything crime detective novelist Raymond Chandler ever wrote), Dark Passage (a film I never understood what with the face change and all in some back alley with a doctor who looked and acted more like a barber), and To Have And Have Not (where he and Bacall steam up the screen with some of the sexiest stuff with clothes on you will ever see but that observation was not made until much later-post puberty later having seen the film a few more times). Although Deadline is nowhere in the same category as the aforementioned films it nevertheless has a plotline about the fate of the modern newspaper business and freedom of the press that interests me.    

Now freedom of the press as my father, Lester, an editor of the famous These Times when he was in college said the best lesson he ever learned about press freedom  was given to him by an old English professor who had been through the red scare of the 1950s (the time frame of this film although none of those press self-censorship and acting on governmental directives issues were addressed by this film), had been something of a radical and had suffered the fate of plenty of people in those day not being able to find work in newspapers. That professor, I forget his name, told my father that freedom of the press was important to those who owned the presses the rest of us want to defend the freedom of expression part wherever we land. For a long time I thought that myself but this film brought out something else that professor had not mentioned and that was the death of the presses was the death of democracy. Although non-linear social and commercial on-line media is now a primary and growing place for people to get their news and that has dramatically portended the ellipse of the hard-copy versions that point is still worth thinking through.          

Some film critic when I was doing background for this piece, Roger Evans from the American Film Gazette I think, has called Deadline the best film about the inner workings of the hard copy newsprint industry ever made. Maybe he is right although every filmed newspaper story, and that includes sent-ups of front page sensationalism like The Front Page, serious investigative journalism like the Watergate expose All The President’s Men, and the recent The Post about the fight to publish Daniel Ellsberg’s The Pentagon Papers has extolled the notion of the big story which motivates the newsrooms and makes careers driving the plotline to culmination. Deadline is no different in that regard and so maybe that critical remark should be the beginning of further research rather than the last word on this film.

Greg Green, the site manager here, knowing this is my maiden effort has asked me especially when reviewing older films, in this case a film when I wasn’t even born and my parents weren’t  either to give a few details about the film. This is truer still of Deadline which in the great Bogie list of film credits had almost disappeared from sight until last year when it was released on Blu-Ray. A little against type considering such roles as the hard-boiled private detective Phillip Marlowe, the old salt Captain Harry Morgan and the framed-up escaped con Victor Parry Bogie plays the idealistic, if heavy-handed, crusading editor, Hutchison, of a major daily newspaper in what is New York City in the days when there were many newspaper for every taste and readership competing dog eat dog for the public’s acceptance. As stated in one of the dialogues between Hutchison and the hard-pressed owner, played by Ethel Barrymore, he was all newspaperman and would have as she said “married the paper if it had legs” (which is true since he was estranged from his actual wife until late in the film).    

      

That hard-pressed publisher had trouble keeping up with what was needed and so a lot of the story revolves around that aspect of the business and her decision to sell the paper which would be sold to parties who would close it down tight. The other big part, the part that sells newspapers by drawing the public to the headlines created is “the big story.” Here the big story is not the red scare effects like I mentioned above or the world going to hell in a hand-basket but your “bread and butter” crime and corruption story. The crime. A young woman who turns out to be connected to a known mobster, a bad guy to mess with, is found murdered after she would not reveal where the money he had given her to hold to pay off some crooked politicians in her apartment. Hutchison sends out his investigative reporters to sniff around. They make the connections, dot the i’s and cross the t’s and come up with a big story connecting that mobster to the murder and the corruption. That despite all kinds of threats against hard guy Hutchison by him who keeps spouting Fourth of July picnic oratory about the beauties and hard-fought struggles to keep that free press intact against all the pressures to fold up shop and run. A story that seemed very appropriate today what with all the talk about the press being “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Yeah, very much a film for these times.            

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

As told to Alex Radley

Who knows how it happened maybe somebody in the band looked up some songs in the album archives, or found some gem in some record store, an institution now on the ropes what with Amazon and every other on-line music site to tear into the very marginal profits of record store brick and mortar operations, that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and you could find some gems if you searched long enough. That is where Si Lannon found Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something by Miss Patti Page or Tennessee Ernie Ford stared you in the face and you got pissed off that those selections were even in a record store). From there they found, maybe Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, saw they could prosper going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, and that was that.

See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand. And that search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence, from Si Lannon in this case, having grown up with rock and roll and restless for something new, found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music and found some grizzled old geezers who had made a small name for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin and Cole Porter got a hearing), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area. (That Bay Area a few years later a hub for all kinds of rock but also saved space for the Kweskin Band as a number of poster art concerts now considered high art would testify even in that Summer of Love craze, maybe because of it.)  And for a while they did, picking up chimes, kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even standard guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night out in the hinterlands. Yeah, in the beginning was the jug…    

In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

As told to Si Lannon

A YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads, Charles Seeger, and the Lomaxes, father and son when they headed south and west to fink the “people’s music”)"discovered" the song in 1916 in Kentucky. Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, or so I though at the time but was heard the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston hosted by Dick Summer (who is featured on the 2012 Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene) and hearing the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk like some latter-day Jehovah doing his version of the song. I know the next day I rushed over to the now exiled out in Utah somewhere Allan Jackson’s house and asked him if he had heard the song the previous night. He said hell no. This before he became a serious folk aficionado and was still hung up on some lollipop music that all the neighborhood high school girls were going crazy over, a bunch of Bobbies, I forget the last names, and so required some attention if he was to get anywhere with Diana Nelson. 

But that was high school dream stuff so I let it go then. A couple of years later when he was in college at Boston University he took a date to the long gone Club Nana over in Harvard Square to hear Dave Von Ronk play and where he did the song. He called me the next saying that he finally got it. By the way the way that Club Nana date came about was that his date was crazy for Dave Von Ronk. Some things never changed. In all quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.

[By the way that “or so I thought” about mountain music later turned out to be not quite true. My father from coal country Hazard, Kentucky out by the hills and hollows (I refuse to write “hollas”) and my mother left Boston for a time to go back to his growing up home to see if they could make a go of it there after World War II. They could not but that was a separate story while they were there I was conceived and being carried in my mothers’ womb so it turned out the damn stuff was in my DNA. Go figure, right.]     

COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
(A.P. Carter)

The Carter Family - 1932

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning

They will first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

To make you think that they love you true

Straightway they'll go and court some other

Oh that's the love that they have for you

Do you remember our days of courting

When your head lay upon my breast

You could make me believe with the falling of your arm

That the sun rose in the West

I wish I were some little sparrow

And I had wings and I could fly

I would fly away to my false true lover

And while he'll talk I would sit and cry

But I am not some little sparrow

I have no wings nor can I fly

So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow

And try to pass my troubles by

I wish I had known before I courted

That love had been so hard to gain

I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden

And fastened it down with a silver chain

Young men never cast your eye on beauty

For beauty is a thing that will decay

For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden

How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away

******

ALTERNATE VERSION:

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a star on summer morning

They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

And make you think they love you so well

Then away they'll go and court some other

And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain

Where the ivy rocks are black as ink

I'd write a letter to my lost true lover

Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

For love is handsome, love is charming

And love is pretty while it's new

But love grows cold as love grows old

And fades away like the mornin' dew

And fades away like the mornin' dew

Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Lead Belly's "Bourgeois Blues"-A Song For Our Times-Build The Resistance

Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Lead Belly's "Bourgeois Blues"-A Song For Our Times-Build The Resistance   

A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject from Leadbelly who may have sang the song seventy or eighty years ago but is not that far off now-except now it is more than just black people.


Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. And those songs provide our movement with that combination entertainment/political message that is an art form that we use to draw the interested around us. Even though today those interested may be counted rather than countless and the class struggle to be whiled away is rather one-sidedly going against us at present. The bosses are using every means from firing to targeting union organizing to their paid propagandists complaining that the masses are not happy with having their plight groveled in their faces like they should be while the rich, well, while away in luxury and comfort.  

But not all life is political, or rather not all music lends itself to some kind of explicit political meaning yet speaks to, let’s say, the poor sharecropper at the juke joint on Saturday listening to the country blues, unplugged, kids at the jukebox listening to high be-bop swing, other kids listening, maybe at that same jukebox now worn with play and coins listening to some guys from some Memphis record company rocking and rolling, or adults spending some dough to hear the latest from Tin Pan Alley or the Broadway musical. And so they too while away to the various aspects of the American songbook and that rich tradition is which in honored here.   

This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up. 

These  are the lyrics-take the "n" word part as you will but that is what he wrote.

The Bourgeois Blues

Lead Belly

Lord, in a bourgeois town
It's a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

Home of the brave, land of the free
I don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs
We heard the white man say "I don't want no niggers up there"
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Uhm, bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

Well, them white folks in Washington they know how
To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow
Lord, it's a bourgeois town

Uhm, the…  

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of  ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Don’t Believe All That Alexandre Dumas Nonsense About “One For All, All For One”- Leonardo DeCaprio, Jeremy Iron, Gerard Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne’s “The Man In The Iron Mask” (1998)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Don’t Believe All That Alexandre Dumas Nonsense About “One For All, All For One”- Leonardo DeCaprio, Jeremy Iron, Gerard Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne’s “The Man In The Iron Mask” (1998)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

By Will Bradley

Recently I started back on my now seemingly etched in stone niche of slaying undeserved, false or overblown legends like Robin Hood, Don Juan, early aviator Johnny Cielo and what I consider my greatest achievement, taking down the stinking rank Old West’s desperado bank robber and stone-cold killer Link Jones,  although it still remains to be seen if I can break the spell that the Old West has on the American imagination. I have admitted that I while I have made significant inroads into breaking my following, breaking the general public a little too from the responses our site manager has received, from most of these fakes I have been stalled, have been bush-whacked to use a term I used in the Link Jones piece in the case of Johnny Cielo, the so-called early aviation innovator and test pilot, whose spell still lingers.

The Cielo legend still lingers over the crowd that believe that Johnny hustled guns and supplies to Fidel and his band of hermanos in the hills of Cuba when it counted in the late 1950s and refuse to believe that he was nothing but a two-bit bush pilot and tourist guide. Maybe it is because the demographic of this publication, the now hallowed (and fading) generation of ’68 as Sam Lowell calls his brethren cut its teeth on Johnny’s legend linked together with their starry-eyed admiration for Fidel and Che in the old days watching according to that same ancient Sam Lowell on black and white television those guys riding into Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. I am far too young to have even heard of Johnny Cielo until a free-lance reporter friend of mine who having been stood up by some people on another story found some guy who knew Johnny in Key West and bought his bull hook, line and sinker. Took the Johnny exploits whole based on some rummy’s DTs story that had so many holes in it that I almost didn’t have to do research on it. For example, I was able to grab the still extant copy of Johnny’s manifest on his last flight which showed him attempting to fly well-heeled passengers from Key West to Naples in Florida before the plane, a Piper Club, fell down in the Gulf of Mexico). Case closed if not the legend.

Now I have I found addition information that part of my problem for not making any inroads in the Cielo legend is that the rummy, Billy Bradley, had been interviewed by Mike Thomas, yes, that Mike Thomas who has interviewed everybody who is anybody somehow read either my reporter friend’s fluff piece on Johnny or my slash and burn on the Cielo legend and decided to investigate (or really have his people do the legwork as far I know he hasn’t done any such work for years since his ratings went from zero to a million when he exposed the famous actor Lenny Grove as a two-bit ex-convict who hustled his ass on the street to make his coffee and cakes before he hit Hollywood ). The problem for me is that letting that rummy spout his bull on the Mike Thomas Show put things up in the air, put “may or maybe not” in play rather than what really happened with documentary proof. It would not be the first time such things have obscured the truth.   

I will keep at it although I have been asked by more than one colleague why I am so intent, other than that holding on to that niche which in this cutthroat business of “you are only as good as your last piece” is not unimportant as even they recognize, on breaking myths, legends and alternative facts. Fortunately, I have another assignment today busting up an old legend that also has refused to die, the baloney about the three musketeers and their supposed exploits and their admittedly clever slogan “one for all, all for one.” Their press agent or publicity people hit pay-dirt on that gem making it that much harder to legend-bust.  That “supposed exploits ” though should alert the reader to more revelations about this crowd of fakers although as usual with this business some people will gladly keep to their silly illusions and believe the legends until the bitter end.    

This musketeer stuff is beautiful, is tailor-made to be busted. I don’t know about the reader but in high school we were required to read this Dumas stuff, The Man In The Iron Mask stuff although it had a different name and was not so unbelievable as the actual legend that has grown since that time. All the musketeers, all four, D’ Artangan (not his real name which would have conveyed the idea that he was some kind of noble, of the sword or of blood, but Jean Rous, a farmer's son in Brittany, plus three other drunks and rowdies, Artemis, Arthos, Porthos which were apparently their real names according to the records of what then was the Ministry of Interior, the cops, were sworn to serve the King of France, and not just any king in their time but the well-known autocrat Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, philander, despot and grinder of the peasantry whose work kept him in over the top lavish luxury.  And for a long time this quaded (sic)brethren feasted off the crumbs from the king’s larder, his wine cellar mainly. This is the king, this is the crowd in a more democratic time we are supposed to root for, supposed to pay homage to their stellar defense of king, country and wine cellar with a few tavern wenches and off-hand ladies-in-waiting thrown in. Give me a break.   

Apparently though the three underling musketeers had a falling out with Lou, had been cut off from access to the wine cellar and milady’s palace bedrooms and so began the long process of staging something like a palace revolt against the monarch under a banner of “free wine, free wenches” although they masked this in some plebeian “give alms to the people and be nice.” Usual plot, and usual trick up to create that legend. That in this case “all for one, one for all,” which became the exclusive copyright of the three underlings when D’Artagnan decided to stick with the king for his own purposes. For as it turned out filial duties but more on that in a moment.

We all know what a bastard Louis XIV was, how his policies and appetites started the long train wreck that would wind up in the glorious French Revolution later in the next century. How could you possibly defend that bum of the month. That is where the iron mask deal comes in. According to legend Louis’ mother had twins one dying in childbirth leaving only bastard, bastard in more ways than one, ugly Lou. What these musketeers, Artois mainly, figured was to get a guy who looked like Lou and do a bait and switch. As it turned out Lou did have a brother Phil who looked enough like him to pass in the dark although they were not twins. Not satisfied that Phil would play along he found a guy from Brittany who was the spitting image of Lou and so after a little off-hand swash-buckling with Lou’s loyal personal guard the switch was made.

The kingdom prospered, or rather the king and his courtesans prospered, although the new Lou was as much a son of a bitch and as nasty as old Lou. The main thing is that the three musketeers took at the credit for the coup, D’Artangan stuck with the king almost to the end then realizing what a bastard Lou was switched sides. Here is the funny part, Lou was his son as it turned out since he has been going under the sheets with the Queen Mother back in the day and took a hard thrust to the heart for his majesty, his new his majesty, Phil, the rest of the guys had full access to the wine and women under the new monster. Yeah, one for all, all for one. Bullshit.      

Communism and Religion (Quote of the Week) Friedrich Engels, in his 1878 book Anti-Dühring, observed that religion serves both as solace for the miseries produced by class society and as an ideology justifying class domination.

Workers Vanguard No. 1146	14 December 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Communism and Religion

(Quote of the Week)

Friedrich Engels, in his 1878 book Anti-Dühring, observed that religion serves both as solace for the miseries produced by class society and as an ideology justifying class domination. Marxists counterpose a materialist view of the world to religious obscurantism and other forms of idealism. Against the notion that religious belief could be dispelled simply through rational argumentation, Engels explained that religion will only disappear with the realization of a classless communist society in which scarcity has been eliminated.

All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces….

We have seen repeatedly that in existing bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois political economy has given a certain insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, this makes no essential difference. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in general, nor protect the individual capitalists from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual workers against unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production) disposes. Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the domination of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force; when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes—only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

Maybe Not Fit For The Primetime Hallmark Channel- Gary Cooper’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935)-A Short Film Review

Maybe Not Fit For The Primetime Hallmark Channel- Gary Cooper’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935)-A Short Film Review    

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Peter Ibbetson, starring Ann Harding, Gary Cooper, 1935

Hasn’t the Hallmark Channel except this time of year add in some Christmas carols and a few decorated trees, etc. already done the plotline to this film, this 1935 film Peter Ibbetson, starring a mustachioed Gary Cooper in the title role and Ann Harding as his flame Mary. (He last seen in this publication in a review, a debunking expose of the legendary American Old West outlaw Link Jones who must have had a pretty press agent to beat the rap as a bad guy by self-proclaimed legend-slayer young Will Bradley). I know of whence I speak since Laura Perkins, yes, the Laura Perkins who writes here and my long-time companion is “addicted” to this channel’s television products this holiday time of year and some days I heard the plot-line as background when I am working or reading.

Let me outline, with Laura’s key input and approval, the plot and see if except the last almost surreal end minutes this couldn’t have been one of the long line of similar Hallmark presentations and saved the channel some money for screenwriters (although they probably only spent about six dollars on that expense from the dialogue and stories that I have overheard but please don’t tell Laura that). Some young professional woman returns home (for Christmas but any holiday would do) having either dumped or been dumped by some unworthy guy who didn’t see her positive qualities, or he didn’t have any as the case may be. During that home stay, and this is the important connector to the film under review, she runs into, one way or another “the boy next door,” some guy from her youth growing up in splendid small-town America. Either she had a crush on him or him her when they were young and that sets the “drama” for the rest of the production. Until that last clinching kiss after one or the other, or both have tried to avoid destiny call.            

Fast forward, no, fast backward. Peter and Mary are the children of English ex-pats in the 19^th century who live in some splendor in Paris-and are next door neighbors. And are fast friends despite their childhood predilections. Young Peter’s mother though dies of what probably was consumption then, tuberculous now and he is shipped back to England with some ne’er-do-well uncle. Before parting they swear undying devotion to each other. (Interestingly we see neither Peter or Mary’s father so maybe that ex-pat business had to do with their mothers as we called it in the old Acre working class section of North Adamsville where I grew up “going to see Aunt Emma,” leaving town or in this case country to have a child out of wedlock, to be pregnant, to bear illegitimate children no big deal now but very big then.)      

That promise to reunite is what drives the second part of the film when Peter as an adult has taken up the profession of architect and Mary has landed on her feet very nicely by marrying an older man, an English Duke of the realm and loaded with dough and love of horses if not of Mary. And she him, the not in love part. The reunion, the dragged out reunion, between the pair gets resolved when up and coming architect Peter is commissioned by the Duke and Duchess to build a new stable for the horses, a job he will supervise for a couple of months without either him or Mary figuring out the basis of the growing attraction between them. Naturally the relationship between the two former neighbors grows putting everything in doubt once the Duke, who may have loved horses and not loved Mary, still was no fool and saw what was going on between them. Saw and had enough jealous rage to plot their murders. Except in the melee the Duke was killed by Peter. No good could come of that.

Frankly, Peter should have gotten himself a better lawyer because what was clearly a case of self-defense got him convicted of a murder rap in very protective of nobility England. Here is where things veer off from a Hallmark script. Essentially Peter and Mary are so much in love that they have a mystical bond between them which lasts for the rest of their lives despite being apart. Peter in some hell-hole Dickens Dartmoor dungeon and her in tortured splendor at her estate (she always seems to land on her feet unlike Peter who takes it on the chin always). I suspected they like Thomas de Quincy and Sam Coleridge were doing some very strong drugs but that is mere speculation. In any case when Mary dies Peter passes away as well although they will be united for eternity wherever they wind up. You know maybe I am wrong, maybe this one has too much drama, too much melodrama to pass muster on the Hallmark Channel. Laura agrees.   

        

The National Review is nervous about Socialist Alternative

Socialist Alternative

12/19/2017 3:09 PM

  

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The National Review is nervous about Socialist Alternative Friends, Did you see? One of the most important mouthpieces of US conservatism attacked Socialist Alternative. After the historic vote for Ginger Jentzen in Minneapolis, the right-wing media is feeling the pressure to push back against the rising popularity of socialist ideas, and Socialist Alternative specifically. Subscribe to Socialist Alternative today to support independent socialist media? They posted a hit piece where they claim we’re timid “because they know [socialism] can’t succeed in America,” and that we put “way too much emphasis on cultural issues, which would be irrelevant to a strictly [sic] economic theory.” Is it timid to fight for rent control? Is it timid to call out the whole system for enabling and hiding sexual predators? We need affordable housing to aid women escaping domestic abuse! Socialism and Marxism has always asserted that culture, society and the economy are intertwined. The fight for women’s rights, racial justice, and other “cultural issues”, are linked to the fight against capitalism which sustains this inequality. National Review is clearly nervous about socialism’s rising popularity. “For young liberals disillusioned by capitalism and by both parties’ failure to achieve the political ends they desire, it is all pain and no gain.” And they’re right! A majority of US youth today say they do not support the system of capitalism. Socialist ideas, like Medicare for All, are only becoming more popular. With a predator and landlord like Donald Trump at the head of US capitalism, can we really be surprised? Unfortunately, National Review reaches millions of people. With the repeal of net neutrality, and the growing consolidation of corporate media, the crucial role of independent media is becoming more clear than ever. That’s why we need YOU to support people-powered, anti-corporate and socialist news and media, and subscribe to Socialist Alternative today. -Your friends in struggle at Socialist Alternative  You can also help by Donating to Socialist Alternative Subscribe To Socialist Alternative Socialist Alternative October 2017 Archives Subscribe Today! Socialist Alternative November 2017 Archives Subscribe Today! 2017 Socialist Alternative Our mailing address is: info@SocialistAlternative.org Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.