From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Honor The Women Of The Paris Commune

Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for the Paris Commune.

March Is Women’s History Month

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1984 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps, and new recruits not familiar with this important event in out common working class history. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

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International Women's Day 1984
In Honor of the Women of the Paris Commune

This year on International Women's Day, March 8, we salute the revolutionary women of the 1871 Paris Commune, whose fierce dedication to fighting for the workers' Commune inspired Marx to propose creating women's sections of the First International. At the 19September 1871 session of the First International Conference a motion, made by Marx, was passed stating: "The Conference recommends the formation of female branches among the working class. It is, however, understood that this resolution does not at all interfere with the existence or formation of branches composed of both sexes" (The General Council of the First International 1870-1871, Minutes).

e Paris Commune was the first modern workers revolution in history, because in Paris for the first time in the world the proletariat not only demonstrated its unquenchable determination to "storm the heavens" and wipe out its exploitation, but proved that it was capable of seizing power, creating new organs of power and ruling society in its own interests. Though they were ultimately crushed after holding out heroically for ten weeks against the counterrevolutionary forces of all Europe, the Paris Communards have inspired generations of revolutionaries. And it was the proletarian women of Paris who were among the most fiery and determined fighters for the new world they were creating, as the following excerpts from contemporary reports demonstrate (taken from a collection of documents titled The Communards of Paris, 1871, edited by Stewart Edwards):

Meeting of a women's club: About two hundred women and girls were present; most of the latter were smoking cigarettes, and the reader will guess to what social class they belonged. The Chairwoman, whose name we could not find out, was about twenty-five and still quite pretty; she wore a wide red belt to which two pistols were attached. The other women on the committee also sported the inevitable red belt but with only one pistol....

The following point was on the agenda: "How is society to be reformed?"... Next came a mattress-maker of the Rue Saint-Lazare who undertook to demonstrate that God did not exist and that the education of children should be reformed.

"What silly women we are to send our children to catechism classes! Why bother, since religion is a comedy staged by man and God does not exist? If he did he would not let me talk like this. Either that or he's a coward!"...

Her place was taken by a little old woman....

"My dear children," she said in a wavering voice, "all this is so much hot air. What we need today is action. You have men—well then, make them follow the right track, get them to do their duty. What we must do is put our backs into it. We must strike mercilessly at those who are undermining the Commune. All men must be made to co-operate or be shot. Make a start and you will see!"

—Report of a meeting in the women's club of the Trinite Church, 12 May 1871, abridged.

The Times [of London] describes a [Paris] women's club: We entered the building without knocking, and found ourselves in a filthy room reeking with evil odours and crowded with women and children of every age. Most of them appeared to belong to the lowest order of society, and wore loose untidy jackets, with white frilled caps upon their heads.... None took much notice of us at first, being too much occupied with the oratory of a fine-looking young woman with streaming black hair and flashing eyes, who dilated upon the rights of women amid ejaculations, and shakings of the head, and approving pinches of snuff from the occupants of the benches near us. "Men are laches [cowardly bastards]," she cried; "they call themselves the masters of creation, and are a set of dolts. They complain of being made to fight, and are always grumbling over their woes—let them go and join the craven band at Versailles, and we will defend the city ourselves. We have petroleum, and we have hatchets and strong hearts, and are as capable of bearing fatigue as they. We will man the barricades, and show them that we will be no longer trodden down by them. Such as still wish to fight may do so side by side with us. Women of Paris, to the front!"... The next speaker seemed tolerably respectable, wearing a decent black gown and bonnet, but her discourse was as rambling and inconsistent as that of her predecessor at the tribune. "We are simple women," she began, "but not made of weaker stuff than our grandmothers of '93. Let us not cause their shades to blush for us, but be up and doing, as they would be were they living now. We have duties to perform. If necessary we will fight with the best of them and defend the barricades...." Encouraged by the applause which had followed her thus far, she now degenerated into rant, attacking the priesthood generally and the confessional, mimicking the actions used at mass amid the laughter and bravoes of the throng. One old lady became ecstatic, and continued digging me violently in the back with her elbow..,. "Ah, the priests!" murmured another from under the heavy frills of her cap, a lady of a serious turn of mind.... "Those priests! I have seen them too closely, la canaille [rabble]!"

—Report by the Paris correspondent of The Times of London of a women's meeting: The
Times, 6 May 1871, abridged.

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Those sharp jabs in the back that so discomfited the bourgeois gentlemen of The Times were but one small token of the throwing off of centuries of subjugation by the awakened women workers, who knew themselves to be for the first time actually making history. Of all the measures the Commune took in its ten weeks of existence—including getting rid of the hated police and standing army and keeping the citizenry in arms, opening education to all and forcing the State-enriched Church back into a purely private role, establishing that all the members of the Commune government would be paid only working men's wage; and be subject to recall at anytime, beginning plans foiworkers' cooperatives to run the factories—its most signal achievement was its own existence, the world's first working-class government; as Marx said, "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour" (The Civil War in France).

In summing up the fundamental lessons of the Paris Commune 20 years later, Frederick Engels emphasized the key question of the state: "From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine—

"The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.

"Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentle¬men, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (Introduction to The Civil War in France, 1891).

The embattled Parisian workers, men and women alike, threw their whole hearts into the work of creating the new workers' society—many have commented on the exhilarating, almost festive, air the Commune had as it prepared for its battle to the death with reaction. Against the old world at Versailles of "antiquated shams and accumulated lies," was counterposed, as Marx noted, "fighting, working, thinking Paris, electrified by the enthusiasm of historical initiative, full of heroic reality." The Parisian paper Pere Duchene (originally the paper of the left Jacobins), in its slangy fashion
-here are some excerpts caught this indomitable spirit-from Edwards.

Pere Duchene editorial on girls' education dated "20 germinal, an 79" (19 April 1871): Yes, it's a true fact, Pere Duchene has become the father of a daughter and a healthy one at that, who will turn into a right strapping wench with ruddy cheeks and a twinkle in her eye!

He's as proud as a fucking peacock! And as he starts to write his rag today he calls on all good citizens to bring up their children properly, like Pere Duchene's daughter. It's not as if he's gone all toffee-nosed, but Pere Duchene is sure of one thing: the girl is going to get a bloody good education and God knows that's important!

If you only knew, citizens, how much the Revolution depends on women, then you'd really open your eyes to girls' education. And you wouldn't leave them like they've been up to now, in ignorance!

Fuck it! In a good Republic maybe we ought to be even more careful of girls' education than of boys'!...

Christ! The cops of Versailles who are busy bombard¬ing Paris and firing their bloody shells right the way up the Champs-Elysees—they must have had a hell of a bad upbringing! Their mothers can't have been Citizens, that's for sure!

As for Pere Duchene's daughter, she'll see to it her children are better brought up than that; when she's grown up Pere Duchene will have got lots of dough together selling his furnaces so he can let her have a bloody nice dowry and give her away to a good bugger, a worker and a patriot, before the citizens of the Commune!

Long live the Social Revolution!

********

Yes, long live the Social Revolution! And we, when it comes, intend to be no less worthy of our revolutionary grandmothers and great-grandmothers than were the women of the Paris Commune. •

“All The News That’s Fit To Print"-And Then Some-The Film Adaptation of Ben Hecht And Charles MacArthur’s “The Front Page” (1931)

“All The News That’s Fit To Print"-And Then Some-The Film Adaptation of Ben Hecht And Charles MacArthur’s “The Front Page” (1931)

DVD Review

By Josh Breslin

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Allan Jackson was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

The Front Page, starring Adophe Menjou, Pat O’Brian, produced by Howard Hughes, from the play by Ben Hecht and Charles Mac Arthur, 1931

[Greg Green, the new site administrator here who I knew by reputation over at the on-line American Film Gazette where he made that website a major source of current and old-time film reviews and related stories, has given the writers in this space, the old guard, Allan Jackson the previous administrator’s base of support, and the so-called Young Turks who called for a vote of no confidence in his leadership alike, the opportunity to express their sentiments about this recent rather quick change-over in management. I have been busy finishing up a major story about a young guy, a guy named Steve McQueen but who at the time went by the name Eric Holden for reasons known only to himself, and who many years ago looked like he would be a world-beater at stud poker, a game he had been a natural at. When he came up though against the wily reigning king of the hill he let his hubris (and his dick) get the best of him in  a big game in the Big Easy, in old time New Orleans, and sent him all the way back to cheap street, back to playing in gin mills in dink towns for milk money.

Thus I have not been on the inside of the controversy although I am ready to say a few words about the now, according to Zack James who should know, disappeared Allan whom I have known for many, many years going back to our first meeting days out West in the San Francisco Summer of Love, 1967 night. If we were in Cold War Russia Stalin 1950s time or even in our youthful radical ideologically pure 1960s time when we banished, maybe shunned is a better word I would be worried about Allan’s whereabouts but I am confident that he is just licking his wounds in some out of the way gin mill where they don’t ask questions and don’t take credit cards and has not been badly handled by the Young Turks as Fritz Taylor has insinuated on the basis of no facts.

Let’s get something straight first which may be, may have been confusing to casual readers, the Peter Paul Markin the now deposed site administrator is not the same Markin forever known as Scribe by his high school friends and by everybody else afterward when we all had monikers to reflect our desire to “reinvent” ourselves in those turbulent 1960s when we thought it safe to do so. The real Markin, let’s call him Scribe for reference is a guy I met out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967 when right after high school up in Maine I was kind of footloose and headed west to see what the whole thing was about. I went up to this psychedelically-painted bus parked in a small park on Russian Hill and asked this guy with long hair and longish unkempt beard for a “joint,” a marijuana cigarette. Without saying another word he passed me the biggest joint I had ever seen and then told me “don’t Bogart that joint” when you are done. We became, despite a few years age difference which probably didn’t matter as much then as now, fast and close friends, we had each other’s back in the working class lingo of the time.               

We both wound up travelling on the same Captain Crunch converted yellow school bus that I had seen on Russian Hill that day for the next two years until the Scribe got his draft notice and headed home, went into the Army, was a grunt in Vietnam, came back and was never the same. There is a lot more than that to what happened to him but if you check the archives here you will get plenty of stories about Scribe and how he fell down, how he couldn’t in the end relate to the “real” world, got so high on cocaine when that became the drug of choice amongst the brethren that he started dealing. Got big ideas about breaking out, making some serious easy street money but got nothing but two slugs to the head and an unmarked potter’s grave down in Sonora, Mexico.

Got missed every day since by me the last guy who saw him when we were living in Oakland together before he headed to Mexico and got missed by every guy he grew up with including a few writers here. Including Allan Jackson, whom I can now tell without revealing anything was, is the real name of the Peter Paul Markin who was the site administrator her for the past decade or more. He took that moniker to honor his, our fallen friend who whatever his short-comings and they were many taught us all a lot of stuff about living when he was in his prime.    

I see I have talked more about Scribe Markin than Allan and spent more space than it will take to do this review so I will leave off until some other time but know this whatever short-comings old Allan had, and they were many, even if he did in the end go crazy to go back to those 1960s which formed us older guys it was only because he, we got old, got old and that is all.  

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The Fourth Estate, you know the press, the free and unfettered press as they like to call themselves, has been on a bumpy ride of late. Has taken flak from goofs at the top of the pyramid like that guy Trump who may be trumped long before his tenure is over down to the man on the street who can’t understand why facts should matter in an argument and are more than willing to cry to the heavens about “fake news” to solve every doubt, to back up every prejudice in their sainted brethren souls (or is it soles). But if art either imitates or reflects life, and I think the latter is true then this muddle of a free press and its detractors has a long genesis. And gets a heavy workout in this 1930s original male cinematic version of the classic Hecht-MacArthur play The Front Page. (That by the way is the Ben Hecht of the dramatic poster art work in defense of the martyred Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti whom he fought desperately to save from the executioner’s chair in 1927).       

As Pete Markin always encouraged us to do when he was around taking a cue from his old his school friend and fellow contributor to this space Sam Lowell let’s see how this one played out as a good example of the tension between free press and license to lie. Hildy Johnson, played by Pat O’Brian, ace reporter for a big Chi town paper, fictional paper so names don’t matter but call it Everypaper if you like) was both fed up with the hours working the police blotter for little scraps of vicious news to circulate to a hungry audience that needed some entertainment after their own long factory shifts and in love with some twist who wants him to settle down and get a real job. Walter Burns, played rather strangely for a Midwest Everypaper editor by Frenchman Adophe Menjou, wants him to slave away at the new news story for him. That tension will run the gamut of the film as an expression of the “buddy” aspect of this film.

Here is the newspaper end. Everybody in Chi town is waiting eagerly for one smuck and loser, Earl Williams, to take the big step-off, to get a jolt in the state’s electric chair after having allegedly killing a Chi town copper. Of course the smuck didn’t do it and in any case the Governor has sent down a reprieve. That however doesn’t stop the presses. No, not at all because once loser Earl Williams escapes from that Chi town jail and every city official  has egg on his face from the mayor down to the warden is scrambling like hell to find the bastard and mess him up good. Of course every newspaper in town in the times in this country when every hamlet and village had a least one hard copy newspaper and big Chi-type towns had plenty to fit whatever readership niche they were aiming for from high-brow Tribune efforts to police gazettes. Nevertheless high- brow or low newspaper, newspaper editor and cub reporter dreams of an exclusive. Hildy Johnson, maybe reluctantly, remembered that bride-to-be waiting for him, and Walter Burns are no exceptions. Even better they have one escapee Earl Williams in their clutches and if they can figure a way to get him out of the police blotter detail room and to a place where they can put even more egg on every city officials face so much the better. Watch this one to see in a funny way what was what in the days when newspapers, now under heavy assault from the Internet and social media, ruled the roost and gave out the news, fake or not.

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Quantum Of Solace”(2008)-A Film Review

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Quantum Of Solace”(2008)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Quantum of Solace, starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, based on a character created by mad monk Ian Fleming, 2008

It probably does no good to moan and groan but here goes anyway since it is on my dime and moreover there is no need for a long summary of this 2008 007 film Quantum of Solace because the overall pattern was established long ago in the very first cinematic run through with ruggedly handsome Sean Connery’s initially offering in Doctor No with non-stop individual heroic action, a fistful of eye candy and every imaginable high tech and low way to off the bad guys-for a while. In a recent review of another Daniel Craig as Bond, James Bond vehicle Spectre from 2015 I casually mentioned that this film criticism profession was worse that the academy in terms of back-biting and one-ups-man-ship. That elicited a firestorm of criticism not from the academy who as least had the sense to duck their heads when the truth is thrown at them. Either that or they are collectively too busy looking for the main chance to one up in their own fellow competitors to not bother about a marginally intellectual pursuit.

No, I have now taken a second ration of grief from my fellow film critics Phil Larkin and young Will Bradley who have taken umbrage that I have sullied the reputation of the profession by publically lambasting their petty little squabble over who is the better personification of James Bond Sean Connery Phil’s contender and Pierce Brosnan Will’s entry. Compared to this the little academic disputes over, for example, who Shakespeare who writing those flowery sonnets for back in the day which has caused so much ink and blood to be spilled in academic circles seems world-historic by comparison.  

For those who did not get a chance to see my little review I was taking Will and Phil to task for making a mountain out of a molehill when I casually had mentioned in a previous review of earlier 007 Timmy Dalton’s The Living Daylights that while I would like Pontius Pilot wash my hands in the dispute, would abstain from any partisanship that Sean and Pierce did seem the only real contenders. That was all either party needed to believe against all reason that I was a partisan of one or the other when I characterized Sean as ruggedly handsome and Pierce as a pretty boy. They went on and on for pages running the rack on my “real position” worthy of any even half-baked academic. All they needed to do was to set up a conference complete with panels and learned papers and they would truly emulate the academics.

That was not the worst of it though. In that Spectre review I made the fatal mistake, although I didn’t know it at the time, of mentioning that I would not say anything about Daniel Craig’s take on the 007 character for fear of setting off another firestorm. Silly me. That only inflamed each party more in their respective championships. Phil took the “no notice” to mean that Craig had the rugged no non-sense “take no prisoners” dash that Sean brought to the character. Will, in his turn, touted my non-characterization as proof positive that the guile and charm that Pierce brought to the role was bestowed on Craig. At this point I will just say what I have to say and be done with since any way I look at it both men are looking at me merely as a foil for whatever each holy goof is after. To tarnish my reputation by indirection and inference. Just like the guys and gals in the academy do with their brethren.         

As I mentioned we can run through the storyline without much ado. As usual in the post-Soviet demise world where it is hard to give a name to a symbol of hard-boiled badness once the international red menace stopped being a bogeyman what Craig’s 007 is up against is an unnamed international cartel that has it fingers in everything, in every important spy organization including MI6. To find out what is what M, the MI6 chief, dispatches Jimmy to see what he can do to uncover the myriad destructive deals these bad boys are up to. Since control of the world’s basic resources oil, water, rare metals and minerals is always up for grabs that is where the threads lead him. This time it is about a criminal enterprise front organization posing as an environment saving entity run by bad guy Dominic Green which is buying up land rights and by extension whatever is found there from lots of places. This one revolves around a deal to overthrow the Bolivian government and replace it with a handpicked bastard General as dictator. In return they get a vast swath of desert and control of water rights. Nice.    

Needless to say this is easy picking for James to roll up. Despite the combined efforts of the corrupt Bolivian national police and Green’s own security apparatus James wastes the whole operation-puts it down easily. (It continues to amaze that one man, one pretty faced, ruggedly handsome man is able to survive full fire fields of the opponent’s fury. These mercenaries aren’t like they used to be-seem to be something out of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight apparently.) James does have a little help downing that general since Camille, played by fetching Olga Kurylenko, a Bolivian intelligence agent not on the take, has a personal vendetta against him for the rape and murder of her mother and sister when she was a little girl. Overall easy pickings like I say although this one seems to have outdone itself with poor fragile Craig busting up everything in sight for more periods that usual in a Bond flick. Make of this what you will Phil and Will.           

Out By That Old San Francisco Bay-Kay Francis And George Brent’s “Stranded” (1935)-A Film Review

Out By That Old San Francisco Bay-Kay Francis And George Brent’s “Stranded” (1935)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont     

Stranded, starring Kay Francis, George Brent, Barton MacLane

The Golden Gate Bridge will forever in my mind (my heart too maybe) be connected with San Francisco. Forever starting the first time I went to California with my companion then and still fellow writer here Josh Breslin and saw the majestic rust red bridge in the gleaning daylight (on one of those fogless days of which there are sometimes too few of out in the Bay Area). Josh and I had been leisurely travelling up the Pacific Coast Highway along the ocean until we hit the Seal Point section of San Francisco out by Ocean Beach. We parked the car and Josh said let’s take a walk along the paths at the Sutro Baths. As we turned the corner at one point there was the bridge some freighters passing under heading out to the Japan seas, warning fog horns blaring periodically and all the thoughts in my head associated with land’s end in America. Breathe-taking.  (Josh influenced by the jazz-infested “beat” generation guys in the 1950s when Frisco was one of the nodal points on that map would always say that he could hear the high white note from some sexy sax player in North Beach floating out to those Japan seas. I wonder how he would write the lead to his version of this film review.)         

The bridge actually plays an important part as a backdrop in the film under review Stranded (or if you take the point of view of the main male character for much of the film the centerpiece). Or rather the construction of the bridge back in the Great Depression 1930s (making an important short-cut across the bay which previously you had to traverse either by ferry or go all around the bay to get north or south from what I understand). This was one of Warner Brothers’ social dramas which they were well known for in those days and although there is some woodenness to the dialogue and some “filler” in this short film it makes a few points worthy of mention in the plot.   

Mack, played by a younger 1930s heartthrob George Brent (pre-mustache which made him look a bit more dashing), is the construction boss on the big bridge project. No one can deny the social usefulness of that project. Lynn, played by Kay Francis, is basically a private charity social worker in the days before the government took its rightful place in providing services for those in need of help working for the Travelers Aid (an organization that previously mentioned “beat” generation took advantage of in their travels as did Josh and his friends in the 1960s when they were all crazy to get to San Francisco in the Summer of Love days).

They “met” when Mack was looking for a stray worker who had left town (although they had actually met in Pasadena some years before when she was 15 and too young for him). They hit it off fine and things were looking like wedding bells in the not distance future. Along the way though they hit a snag, a very modern snag if you think about it. Mack is one of those old-fashioned take charge guys who thinks he should be the sole bread-winner and let the little woman stay at home and vegetate. Lynn is a thoroughly modern Millie who sees her career, unlike Mack who see the whole social work thing as servicing losers, as socially important and part of her persona. So the old two career conundrum which pulls them apart for a while. Needless say they, deeply in love but thwarted by Mack’s Neanderthal approach, will in the end sit by the moonlit bay together.

The other dramatic tension in the piece is provided by a conflict between Mack and a labor contractor, a shark, who wants hush money to keep the bridge project going on schedule or else he will pull the guys off the job. This was a union job (in the aftermath of the General Strike out there along the waterfront which made Frisco a labor-friendly town then) in a time when jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth and so there was definitely a conflict brewing. This shark, Sharkey played by well-known character actor Barton MacLane last seen here as a Frisco cop taking a drubbing from Sam Spade after accusing Sam of murder in The Maltese Falcon, stirs things up enough to have the men ready to walk out on Mack. Guess who is instrumental in saving the day. Yes, Lynn and therefore that moonlit bay finale.    

The Girl With The Betty Davis Eyes-Well Bette Herself-Bette Davis And Franchot Tone’s “Dangerous” (1935)-A Film Review

The Girl With The Betty Davis Eyes-Well Bette Herself-Bette Davis And Franchot Tone’s “Dangerous” (1935)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Dangerous, starring Bette Davis, Franchot Tone, 1935  

  

Sam Lowell hates Bette Davis, Bette with the Bette Davis eyes as he was always fond of titling his film reviews when she was in play. Hates her despite his generally positive reviews of her films in her long career. Did a paean to her growing up in working class Lowell in Massachusetts as a companion piece about another Lowell native Jack Kerouac. Called her a channeling influence on Jean Bon out along the factory town on the Merrimack River. Sam’s gripe which I don’t particularly share is that after watching together (Sam and I are longtime companions) the film under review Dangerous he yelled out “What the hell she is playing the same theme as she in Jezebel and about twelve other movies.” Playing the untamed shrew, the bitch, the catty man grabber, the coquettish schoolgirl with a heart of stone, the vampish working class slut driving poor Leslie Howard crazy in Of Human Bondage and lots of stuff along that line. Even in films where she is playing a positive role like in All About Eve (in comparison to the gatecrasher Eve) and gullible Gabby in The Petrified Forest he says you are always waiting for her to pull the trigger and walk away without the slightest qualms. So says Sam. 

I think something else is going on though. Something that has nothing to do with Bette Davis as such but everything to do with his place in the dog eat dog film criticism world. Looking over his reviews here in the archives (and those from long ago when he was a free-lancer for American Film Gazette when he was younger and had just divorced his first wife and needed some serious alimony money) he certainly has changed his tune from calling her one of the great actresses of the American cinema. Called her role as Gabby plying her Petrified Forest naivete with her break out desires and Francois Villon poetic dreams electrifying.

What gives. Well what gives is something like one-ups-man-ship among “the boys.” The fraternity of film critics-who as Seth Garth pointed out in a recent review of one of the endless James Bond 007 flicks are worse than even the back-biters in the academy who have made a science of jockeying for position, of climbing up the food chain over the literary dead bodies, who knows maybe literal too, of their colleagues. So it is about staking “turf” in that milieu of not being seen as too obliging when taking swipes at the film being reviewed- or another reviewer’s take on that same film. Add in that Sam has “retired” from the day to day grind of reviewing films and has become the occasional contributor and probably feels he needs to make each contribution stick out against the rest of the fraternity.        

As far as I can tell the whole business started when David Stein from American Film Gazette lambasted Phil Larkin for fawning over one of the Marvel Comics cinematic productions like a twelve year old. (Don’t ask me which one but I think it was one where all the Marvel characters ganged up on the bad guys.) That stiffened Phil’s back when he started doing reviews of the James Bond 007 series and came out swinging in defense of original screen Bond Sean Connery as the ultimate expression of the role. Did that in reaction to Will Bradley’s partisanship of what Phil called Pierce Brosnan’s pretty boy take. Even got staid Seth Garth who likes to think he is taking the intellectual high road in his reviews down in the mud for being wishy-washy. They are still duking it out with no holds barred.

Along that same line, and maybe something that has also egged on all these boys, is Bruce Conan’s attempts to rip up the Sherlock Holmes legend. Bruce Conan not his real name but a pseudonym since he claims that his torrid exposes have made him and his family vulnerable to some international criminal cartel called either the Kit Kat Club or the Baker Street Irregulars I am never sure which is threatening him and his which is totally dedicated to keeping Holmes memory unsullied. I can see why he feels the need of an on-line moniker since not only has he raked Holmes (whose real name is Lanny Lamont according to Bruce) and his companion Doc Watson of being total amateurs and frauds but has done the very politically incorrect thing these days of “outing” the pair as closet homosexuals. That is the kind of stuff the boys are creating gathering storms over. Who knows where it will end but more than one reputation will fall under the bus.         

But enough of that since the average reader probably now knows infinitely more than they need to know about the inner workings of the catfight aura of the profession. As I mentioned I did not, do not share Sam’s estimation of Bette Davis, certainly not in the role here which won her an Oscar, of a high-strung faded falling down drunk actress Joyce Heath who is nothing but poison to anyone she touches (stage actress of course in the days they called that the legitimate theater to distinguish it from the muck coming out of Hollywood). The victim on screen this time is Don Bellows, played by Franchot Tone, an up and coming New York architect with plenty of promise and a certain amount of naivete or need for living dangerously on the edge-take your pick. Also very engaged to a scion of a Mayfair swell family.    

After picking Joyce up from a gin mill the action that will seemingly seal his fallen fate begins as he starts to fall for her after she has used every trick in her playbook to hook him. It is always touch and go about whether she loves him or just sees him as a plaything. Most of the time it seem she has outsmarted herself and really does love him. Especially as Don is the key agent for her return to Broadway and fame in a big time role. Things get tricky though when after throwing over that Mayfair swell dame he, square guy that he is, insists that they get married right away. Monkey wrench, big monkey wrench, our Joyce is already unhappily married to a still smitten holy goof (Sam’s term). Things come to an impasse when her hubby refuses to let her go and she thereafter crashes them into a tree in a suicide attempt. They both recover but the bloom is off the rose when Don finds out what is what. Here is where I don’t get Sam’s ire. Joyce seeing that she has been selfish and self-serving accepts her fate and lets Don go (in her head, he was already gone in his, gone to his old Mayfair swell dish) and goes on to her bright stage career and caring for her husband who was severely injured in that crash. What’s wrong with that.     

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman” (1943)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman” (1943)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

[Well I am still standing although it has been a close thing of late, a very close thing. But even if I don’t make it to the end, the end being finishing up the twelve, no fourteen, damn films that were made about the fraudulent so-called deductive reasoning amateur private detective Sherlock Holmes’ legend, then I will at least have gotten this very important review out to the previously fawning public. Despite endless harassment and threats to me and my family who I have now twice had to move for their own protection from a nefarious organization, a cult really, calling itself the Baker Street Irregulars I finally have the proof I need to debunk an important aspect of the legend. The film under review, The Spider Woman, will put paid to my important contention that Sherlock Holmes, aka as Basil Rathbone but whose real name is Lanny Lamont which is the name I will use for the rest of this review and his boon companion Doc, Doc Watson, were lovers, were to use a word from the time “light on their feet,” committed “the love that dare not speak its name” for then obvious reasons that it was a high crime in Merry Olde England. If you don’t believe me just ask famed playwright Oscar Wilde or more recently code-cracker Allan Turing. 

A lot of the charges which I have hurled at the Lamont legend (remember aka Sherlock) about his abilities as a private detective can be considered somewhat inconsequential. For example, Lanny’s inability to shoot and hit the side of a barn when pursuing dead ass criminals, his letting the bodies pile up due to his inane bone-headed adherent to deductive reasoning when even a rank kid P.I. knows for dead certain that murder, murder one, murder most foul has no such rhyme or reason and his inevitably letting others face danger and grab the miscreants. But for private detectives of his era the failure to pursue and bed the most hardened femme fatale due to his preference for men, for bumbling Doc Watson is fatal to his legend. Proves beyond a doubt that he is a fake and a fraud. I have used the examples of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade who went down on the pillows with one of the most gun-simple femmes around, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe to make my case. Enough said.       

I have been accused, mercilessly accused, of being anti-gay, homophobic, a Neanderthal, politically incorrect and a million other things in a smear campaign which I believe has been orchestrated by the denizens of the Kit Kat Club, a homosexual club that has been around since the days of King George III and my discovery that Lanny and Doc were member was one of the first pieces of hard evidence for my decisive claims. These men are also part and parcel of the more broad based Irregulars, a band of bandits and desperadoes who have been plaguing the citizenry of London with their criminal activities from robbery to dope, maybe murder if we ever find out the facts about a lot of bodies that have washed up from the Thames over the years are committed to claiming Lanny and Doc publically to the Homintern. These cultists have gone out of their way to malign me and my discoveries by those simple anti-gay charges. That despite my well-known, this space’s well-known early support for LBGTQ rights, support for same-sex marriage when that was nothing but a dream over a decade ago (although being on marriage number three I am not sure if that will work out any better than in my case but good luck), and a stellar defense of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower and Trans advocate Chelsea Manning.   

If say one of today’s famous private detectives Lance Lawton came out of the closet and said he was gay or Tran or whatever I, and I hope everybody and their sister would agree we would yawn, could care less and good luck. But back in the day, back in the heroic age of the private detective a right of passage was to go mano a mano with some dangerous woman, better women, hit the sack (real or implied as was the case on the screen), and personally sent them over to the law a la Sam Spade or forget them and move on to the next dangerous woman. Simple, case closed]  

*****

Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again a cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1943 

I first mentioned publically my suspicions about fraudulent Lanny’s preference (after much research especially that decisive membership in the Kit Kat Club) in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon where Lanny and this good-looking young woman were trapped together in a room after Lanny had been captured by a bad guy and the young woman had been kidnapped since she probably had the formula to the secret weapon of the title. Lanny made no play, didn’t even look at her the whole time they were captivity. Proof positive he was sailing under a false flag. This Spider Woman saga is the definitive proof.          

The story sets up that an unnaturally large number of prominent and wealthy men in London are committing suicide with no explanation for the spike. Lanny faking as usual his disdain for what is happening while on vacation up in Scotland fakes his death after having a tiff with Doc causing the good doctor in an unmanly manner to bubble over in tears and head back to London to settle Lanny’s estate. Suddenly Lanny comes back to life and all is forgiven by Doc who is glad as hell to see him. Lanny’s ruse was allegedly so he could smoke out the murderer of that pile of wealthy guys, a murderer who could only be a woman by Lanny’s lights (and just another example of his contempt for women). The hounding and pursuit of some woman to take the fall against all other possibilities drives the rest of the disgusting story.     

Naturally Lanny has to set a trap, a trap involving himself at first once he figured out that this woman, this good-looking femme gang leader is using a life policy scam to kill these guys who may have been wealthy at one time but whose gambling had led them down the primrose path (although you know in the end that he will fall down, will let the real coppers of the corruption-filled Scotland Yard, coppers these days who have bungled the investigation of the whole Baker Street Irregulars crime spree). Further investigation shows that the method used dastardly for sure was to use an immune pygmy to set a deadly spider on each victims’ premises. Nice right. Sherlock temporarily falls into the femme hands but escapes in terror and let’s Scotland Yard as expected close the operation down. I can’t let this one go without mentioning Sam or Phillip would have bedded her, would have headed toward the danger and then dropped her like a hot potato.      

The Clarinet Is Not The Only Instrument That Goes Rooty-Toot-Toot-With Myna Loy And William Powell’s “The Song Of The Thin Man” Based On The Dashiell Hammett Characters In Mind

The Clarinet Is Not The Only Instrument That Goes Rooty-Toot-Toot-With Myna Loy And William Powell’s “The Song Of The Thin Man” Based On The Dashiell Hammett Characters In Mind

DVD Review

By Bruce Conan

The Song Of The Thin Man, starring Myrna Loy, William Powell, Keenan Wynn, based on the characters Nick and Nora Charles created by Dashiell Hammett in the crime novel The Thin Man,

The general reader is probably not familiar with the name of the reviewer, Bruce Conan, in this publication because unfortunately it is an alias as has been a previous one used by the same person, Danny Moriarty. The reason that I have had to use these pseudonyms is to protect myself and my family, mostly my family as it turns out, against the wrath and vengeance of a nefarious criminal enterprise based out of London but apparently with tentacles internationally called the Baker Street Irregulars. This nasty band of cutthroats, pimps, con men, whores, bandits, petty thieves and murderers was formed in the distant past to venerate one Lanny Lamont, real name Lanny Lamont after exhaustive investigation, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes and who knows how many other names. They are said to practice blood rituals, have serious drug addiction problems just like their so-called deductive reasoning guru Lanny, and to be responsible for half the robberies and unsolved murders in London town over the last few decades.   

One might wonder why a notorious gang of dangerous felons and there hangers-on and wannbes would be harassing and threatening murder and mayhem toward a placid film reviewer and his precious family across a big ocean in America. Fair question. And the fair answer is that I have been on a steady, unswerving recent campaign to unmask their idol, their homeboy Lanny as a fraud and a two bit amateur parlor pink fairy tale detective. (I refuse to call him their preferred name of Sherlock and that has even further inflamed them although they know as well as I do that is his real name and that he was brought up in the slums of West London despite all that fake highbrow pronunciation and blather talk he carried on with when he was alive.) Worse, worse in their collective books I “outed” him and his paramour Doc Watson as a pair of diddling agents of the Homintern, closet homosexuals in a day when detectives with that predilection were not allowed into the profession under penalty of expulsion (now they can be same-sex married for all anybody cares including me) and longtime devotees of the utterly corrupt and venal Kit Kat Club where all those with frankly weird sexual proclivities ply their wares.

With that burdensome background in mind I begged our current site manager Greg Green to let me do a review of the epitome of a real detective from that same cinematic time period who did not have Lanny’s nasty and counter-productive habits (really perverted habits but I am being kind). A guy who could figure two and two makes four while lapping up some high shelf booze and running his eyes suggestively up and down every stray dame he saw, and some not so stray. Of course that is our beloved Nick Charles and his lovely wife Nora along with that irrepressible mutt Asta in one of the series of films that William Powell and Myra Loy did together to light up the private detection firmament back in the day. Wrap up a case so it stays wrapped without help from incompetent coppers who would rather sit around with coffee and crullers. Not as Lanny always did hand the messy details over to the “on the take” boys at Scotland Yard.             

Take the Tommy Drake case as featured in the film under review The Song of the Thin Man. Nick was smooth as silk on that one, a be-bop daddy who took down the tooting town in the edge of the cool jazz age when the Duke and Count roamed the cities bopping the bop. Yeah, no question half the world, the male world, the gambling world had reason to do Tommy boy in no matter that he was the cat’s meow fronting for the band in the cream of big band era time. He was going to blow the gambling boat scene run by Phil Brant, you remember him the famous jazz aficionado who showcased a lot of new talent like Fran Page, Peggy Davis, Cindy Lowe and a host of other young torch-singers, the customers drank up his overpriced liquor and lost their shirts at the gaming tables when he had his latest gig for the big time provided by a big band jazz promoter, Mitchell Talbin. Yes, that Talbin who had all of New York café society crying jeepers-creeper for Charlie, Dizzy, the Monk and who saw in Tommy some of that glitter and gold-solid, man, solid.        

This is where it all falls apart for dear Tommy though. He is in hock up to his ears to a gambler for 12 K, big money then. Tommy puts the bite on that Talbin for an advance to pay off the debt and leave for greener pastures. No soap (no soap for a reason though not the one given by Talbin about chancy band acts and maybe it will snow in July). In any case Tommy winds up dead, very dead trying to jimmy the safe of his current boss Brant. Brant and his society bride married on the fly down in nowhere Atlantic show up at Nick and Nora’s the next morning looking for help.  Tommy death had Brant’s frame all over it. He is going down, going down for the big step off, the juice if the truth be known if Nick can’t save the day.

After a few drinks, couple of dances with Nora and a swift few look sat the belles on the side just to keep thinks interesting he cracks the case wide open one night when Brant’s gambling ship reopens for business. (In one of the great cinematic private eye moves ever recorded Nick by sleight of hand is able to get a key clue, a piece of music with exonerating information for Brant right over in front of the town coppers who also are happy with coffee and crullers just like their Scotland Yard brethren. Sherlock would still be sitting in that rundown rooming house apartment he and Doc shared sucking on the old opium pipe wondering what to do next. Brant and his lovely bride that high society dame, the guy who Tommy owed the gambling debt to and his wife decked out in diamonds and that Talmin and his wife all prance in for the turkey shoot.

You know Brant and his bride are off the hook since they went looking for Nick and Nora’s help. So it settles on the gambling guru and the jazz promoter. What if I tell you that dear sweet Tommy beside that gambling jones was sex-addled, was a skirt-chaser without limits on who he might get his claws into. Yeah Tommy would be too bright a boy to fool with a mobster’s wife, no percentage there. But a holy goof jazz aficionado no problem. So jealous jazz man Talmin bonked the now departed jazz band leader after his wife and Tommy’s lover covered Tommy’s gambling debt. In response after the jazz agent man confessed in open dance hall that he did the deed out of jealousy his dear wife plugged him rooty-toot-toot. Nice clean job for Nick and time for booze and bedtime. Touche Lanny.        

Coming of Age In A Fractured World-The Film Adaptation Of Katherine Patterson’s “The Great Gilly Hopkins” (2015)-A Film Review

Coming of Age In A Fractured World-The Film Adaptation Of Katherine Patterson’s “The Great Gilly Hopkins” (2015)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

The Great Gilly Hopkins, starring Kathy Bates, Sophia Nelisse, Glenn Close, 2015

I usually don’t do as my long-time companion and fellow writer in this space Sam Lowell is fond of doing of late and go chapter and verse on how or why he took or was given a particular assignment but this review of The Great Gilly Hopkins is a bit different. I wanted the review after viewing the film with Sam who was originally assigned to review it under current site manager Greg Green’s policy of having us “broaden our horizons.” Sam was more than glad to “trade” with me since broadening horizons or not he was not interested in yet another “coming of age” story-this time of a troubled young female as well although he did like the film on other grounds. But that “troubled young female” angle appealed to me. Appealed to me although I was not a foster child as the main character Gilly is but rather had a troubled youth growing up on a farm in upstate New York outside Albany and could relate to the way she struggled to gain some self-identity and self-worth against pretty big odds. In a movie, in this movie, those issues got pretty well resolved in Gilly’s favor unlike mine that never did get resolved short of leaving that farm environment and a few years of therapy, more than a few years actually.                     

Gilly Hopkins, played by Sophia Nelisse, has a well-placed, and to my mind a well thought through, chip on her shoulder for a coming of age thirteen year old girl. A girl who has been shunted to and fro through a series of foster homes having been abandoned by her birth mother whom she nevertheless believes will come for her one day. Or she will get to Frisco, her mother’s last known address, come hell or high water. Kids will think dreams like that and good luck to them. Back in the real world though Gilly is facing yet another foster home after having screwed up at the last one. This new one run by Trotter, played by Kathy Bates, looks to be about the same as all the others. A place to display her chip and the hell with the rest of it until she can blow the town.        

But this mad monk Trotter woman has her own ideas about taking in foster kids and seeing them through the tough spots and so there is a battle royal brewing between them over who will break whom. (Another battle at school where she is the brightest kid in the room but purposefully rebellious against the black teacher who tries to understand her is a sub-plot as well.) In the end, well not the end, but close the love that Trotter has for her charges outweighs those incredible hurts inside of Gilly.  

Before that can happen though Gilly screws up big time and writes a letter to the social agency claiming all kinds of mistreatment to get out from under Trotter’s influence. Just when things seemed to be breaking her way, she is adjusting to being cared about, she is snatched from the Trotter home by her wealthy unknown grandmother, Nonnie played by Glenn Close, a good woman but rather distant. That tension between going with Noonie or staying with Trotter is resolved in Nonnie’s favor when all parties realize that “in the best interest of the child” Gilly should be placed there for all the reasonable reasons except that love business. The mother? All those dreams of being together got blown up when she showed up through Nonnie’s efforts and it turned out she could have cared less for Gilly. Tough break. Still Gilly landed in a good spot and things look they might go her way a bit. I wish they had gone as well in my own case.         

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- With The Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- With The Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four In Mind

A YouTube film clip of the Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four from the animated movie Yellow Submarine.

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

Many of my fellows from the tail end of the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.

[You know I am not a religious man, haven’t’ been since I was a kid in the days before I went to the 8 o’clock Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church for the sole purpose of sitting a few rows behind Chrissie McNamara and watch her ass (as did the late Peter Paul Markin unbeknownst to me until many years later). Of course I can say that now since Chrissie and I have been together through thick and thin since high school days. But despite my infidel ways today I rejoice. Today I say praise be or whatever they say when glad tidings are upon us. Greg Green, the current site manager and Sam Lowell, an old friend of Allan’s as I am, have finally worked out an arrangement concerning the question of true and full attribution for this series. As of the next installment the old site manager none other than the previously exiled to who knows where Allan Jackson who played midwife to this series over several years and will be forever linked to the ideas behind the theme will have both full attribution (a by-line) and the ability to create new introductions to each sketch if he is so inclined. The only limitation which all agreed makes sense is not to restart the civil war over last year’s internal fight and stick to whatever the theme of the sketch is.   

The “praise be” stems from the fact that after this final third party introduction I can go back to what I do best which is to sell cars, sell Toyotas, where I have built myself  up to be Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts (and Chrissie Mrs. Toyota don’t forget). Which means that I can go back to raising funds to keep this venture afloat which I do better that the occasional writings that I have done in the past and which I have been forced-marched into doing too frequently of late in defense of old friend Allan against an impossible stream of rumors since he was “purged” from his position early last year after losing a vote of no confidence and Greg was brought in full-time. With this last intro I will have done the best I could to sort out the rumors from the reality. This last defense may be the strangest of all having to defend a straight-up guy like Allan from the rumor that he was in San Francisco dating a “drag queen” posing as Judy Garland and living high off the hog on Russian Hill bonking the opium pipe and stoned all the time.    

Along the same lines was the rumor that he was running a high-class international whorehouse in Argentina with his old lover Madame La Rue catering to the strange whims of Asian businessmen. There were others, mostly along those silly same lines, but this one last one will suffice to give an idea of what was essentially a smear campaign against the man. Supposedly he was in Frisco dating a transvestite who was connected with the opium trade and he was living high off the hog on Russian Hill stoned to the gills all the time. What are you kidding.

Although I am a lapsed, very lapsed Catholic (just don’t tell Chrissie that since she is still a true believer and refuses to believe that the only reason I went to those endless Sunday Masses was to “sit behind her and watch her ass” even as she could believe that same fact about old Markin) I don’t swear much leaving that to my old friend and now “liberator” Sam Lowell but WTF on this drag queen Judy Garland opium den mandarin madness. Here is what I thought first when I heard this one thinking back to our high school days in the 1960s in hard scrabble macho “take no prisoners” days. Remember this is fifty years ago when every mothers, mothers like mine warned their sons to stay away from a place like Captain Kidd’s, an abandoned cruise ship down on Nantasket Beach where the “fags,” homos, drag queens and the like did their disgusting stuff” (even if we were not quite sure what they did or didn’t do until much later all we knew that it was guys with guys and guys acting like girls to put the most innocent spin on it).

One episode down in Provincetown, then as now a haven for all kinds of sexual proclivities will tell the tale, ashamedly now, but a true tale. The summer after high school graduation a bunch of us from North Adamsville, all guys, including Allan, decided that we would go to “P” town and roust the “fags” or whatever name we called them at any particular time (certainly not gays that was for, ah, gay people, happy). Of course we fortified ourselves with drink, mostly hard stuff, on the long trip down. Somebody knew where the drag queens performed and we went there with the idea of isolating one of them and beating the hell out of whoever we could entice. I think Markin who had a certain boyish look before he lost it all after a year in Vietnam which knocked the soul out of him was the “decoy” as things went as planned. Some guy came by and asked him if he wanted to go out in the back of the bar for something. He left with the guy and we followed. You know what happened next and like I say Allan and I, Sam too never really got over it even if we believed for a long time “fags” were less than human.

And that is kind of the point I want to make about this rumor. You can actually learn something in life, take a surprise or two also. Who would have thought that off of that youthful track record we were among the first to call for same-sex marriage equality in this publication and for a range of rights for the LGBTQ community in general. Who would have thought that we tried to move might and main to get Tran heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower and fellow soldier Chelsea (starting out as Bradley) Manning her freedom for several years before former President Obama did the right thing and pardoned her. Yeah, and we didn’t think anything of it.

Oh yeah, here is the real deal about Allan and that drag queen. Before Allan headed back east to Maine he stopped off at San Francisco to see an old friend from the neighborhood, one of the corner boys who as it turned out had a secret we never even suspected at the time. Only found out long after when I think Jimmy Jenkins was out in North Beach watching a drag queen show for kicks and somebody dressed like Judy Garland approached him and called his name. Jimmy, embarrassed to be seen there with his wife, couldn’t believe it was Timmy Riley. Jimmy brought back the news. So Allan’s visit was to our old friend Timmy Riley aka “Judy Garland” from the neighborhood who had had such a tough life not being who he/she was until San Francisco many years and bruises later. Allan had been slipping money her way for years. He was just looking in on his, our friend. Rumors, fucking rumors. Allan you are on your own now. Jack Callahan]     

************        

Many of my fellows from the tail end of the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.

When I'm Sixty-Four - The Beatles

When I get older, losing my hair,

Many years from now

Will you still be sending me the Valentine,

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine

If I stay out till quarter to three

Would you lock the door

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I'm sixty-four.

You'll be older too,

And if you say the word I could stay with you.

I could be handy mending a fuse

When your lights have gone

You can knit a sweater by the fireside

Sunday morning go for a ride

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,

Who could ask for more

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I'm sixty-four.

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight,

if it's not too dear

We shall scrimp and save

Grandchildren on your knee

Vera, Chuck & Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line

Stating point of view

Indicate precisely what you mean to say

Yours sincerely, wasting away

Give me your answer, fill in a form,

Mine for evermore,

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I'm sixty-four.

*******

Ancient dreams, dreamed.

Yeah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde, frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled through the womb or some toddler’s crib maybe, at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.

Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window “the projects” wait on better times, get a leg up, don’t get left behind in the dawning American streets paved with gold dream but for now just hang your hat dwelling, small, too small for three growing boys with hearty appetites and desires to match even then, warm, free-flow oil spigot warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching, relentlessly marching as he, that older brother, went off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time for the time of his time, in this red scare (but what knows he of red scare only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles floating aimlessly in the clogging still air night.

A cloudless day, a cloudless blasted eternal, infernal Korean War day, talk of peace, merciless truce peace and uncles coming home in the air, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball fields the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits of wildly-maned horses, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too, that nose-flattened brother, has been to foreign places, strange boxed rooms filled with the wax and wane of learning, simple learning, in the time of his time, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.

Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb aimed right at my head unnamed shelter blast fears, named, vaguely named, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hated stalinite jews killed fears, jews killed our catholic lord fears, and what did they do wrong to get the chair anyway fears against the cubed glass glistening flagless flag-pole rattling dark asphalt school yard night. Alone, and, and, alone with fears, and avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, sailors’ homes AND deaths in barely readable fine- marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards looking out on ocean homelands and lost booty. Dead, and the idea of dead, the mystery of dead, and of sea sailor dead on mains, later stream thoughts of bitch proctoresses, some unnamed faraway crush teacher who crossed my path and such, in lonely what did he do wrong anyway prison cells, smoking, reading, writing of dinosaurs die and other laments. Dead.

Endless walks, endless one way sea street water rat-infested fear seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells, swaying grasses in light breezes to the right, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat stinks to the left making hard the way, the path, the symbolic life path okay, to uptown drug stores, some forgotten chain-name drug store, passing perfumes, lacquers, counter drugs, ailments cured, hurts fixed and all under a dollar, trinkets ten cents baubles, gee-gads, strictly gee-gads, grabbing, two-handed grabbing, heist-stolen valentines, a metaphor in the making, ribbon and bow ruby-red valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet. Man emerging out of the ooze, and hope.

Walks, endless waiting bus stop, old late, forever late, story of a young boy’s life late, diesel-fueled, choking fumed non-stop bus stop walks, no golden age car for jet moves in American Dream wide-fin , high tech automatic drive nights, walks, walks up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year no fix rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles, you get the picture, pass trees are green, coded, secretly coded even fifty street rutted years later, endless trees are green super-secret-coded except for face blush waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now. For what? For one look, one look, and not a quick no-nonsense, no dice look, no time for ragamuffin boys either that would elude him, elude him forever. Such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance, no coded trees are green dance, either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school either, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name trees are green brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?

City square, no trespass, no standing, standing, low-slung granite buildings everywhere, granite steps leading to granite doors leading to granite gee-gad counters, hated, no name hated, low-head hated, waiting slyly, standing back on heels, going in furtively, coming out ditto, presto coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no russkie Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped-up crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.

A bridge too far, an unarched, unsteeled, unspanned, unnerved bridge too far. One speed bicycle boy, dungarees rolled up against dog bites and geared meshes, churning through endless heated, sweated, no handkerchief streets, names, all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, hard against the unnamed angst, hard against those changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing

Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I, too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-borning but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path

Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Stopped short. Who would have figured that one?

Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets. Diana, blonde Diana, cashmere-sweatered, white tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out; nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, a small-time after school soda split sit at the counter Doc’s drugstore date, or slice of pizza and a coke date at Balducci’s with a few nickels juke boxed in playing our song, our future song, a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall song, and dreams of I Want To Wanted sifting the hot afternoon air, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of local lore car parked submarine races and mysteries unfurled, ah, to dream, no more than to dream, walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no known even forty years later. Wow.

Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small-filtered, natch, no romantic Bogie tobacco-lipped unfiltered, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh-mown streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.

Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish, although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, hubert, tricky dick war-circus all hell broke loose thing then, or wanted to.

Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.

The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not for ancient robert frost to guide you… Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.

Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.

Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monktons, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas’ flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarcaderos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam tricky dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.

He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.

Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored antic newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.

A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggared time, right.

Lashed against the high end double seawall, bearded, slightly graying against the forlorn time, a vision in white not enough to keep the wolves of time away, the wolves of feckless petty larceny times reappear, reappear with a vengeance against the super-rational night sky and big globs of ancient hurts fester against some unknown enemy, unnamed, or hiding out in a canyon under an assumed name. Then night, the promise of night, a night run up some seawall laden streets, some Grenada night or maybe Lebanon sky boom night, and thoughts of finite, sweet flinty finite haunt his dreams, haunt his sleep. Wrong number, brother. Ya, wrong number, as usual.

White truce flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against Persian gulf oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.

Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.

One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.