Sunday, December 27, 2015

In Cambridge- "This Changes Everything": Screening, Potluck, and Discussion


This Changes Everything: Screening, Potluck, and Discussion

Sunday, January 10, 2016 @ 5:00 pm - 8:30 pm

First Church in Cambridge, 11 Garden St

Join Massachusetts Peace Action, Earth Stewardship at First Church Cambridge, and our co-hosts  for a screening and discussion of “This Changes Everything,” the new documentary based on the Naomi Klein book of the same name that weaves together threads of climate, racial and economic injustice and the movement of movements already rising for a new, non-extractive economy.
Co-Hosts include 350 Massachusetts, Grassroots International and Boston Downwinders.  A representative from each co-host will facilitate discussions at a thematic table, to take the issues raised by the film into our work and lives.
RegisterButton300Please register so we know you’re coming, and if possible make a donation!  Pre-registration is NOT required, but will help us plan food and discussion. Renting the film cost us $232.
5:00 pm: Potluck and conversation in thematic tables
6:00 pm: Watch the film
7:30 pm: Small group discussions
8:30 pm: Close
Snow Date: January 24.  If in doubt, call 617-354-2169.
Download a Printable Flyer
About the Film:
“This Changes Everything” presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines of climate injustice, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing.
Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Naomi Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.
Upcoming Events: 

Veterans For Peace Weekly E-Letter-Agent Orange



  


Friday, December 18, 2015

40 Years On, the Vietnam War Continues for Victims of Agent Orange

This week, VFP Executive Director, Michael T. McPhearson and VFP Agent Orange Coordinator, Paul Cox and others are in Washington D.C. to stand with families of Agent Orange victims.  Advisory board member, Marjorie Cohn, wrote about the victims and the introduction of H.R. 2114 bill in an article entitled, 40 Years on, the Vietnam War Continues for Victims of Agent Orange.
Representatives of the Vietnam Association for the Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) have arrived in the U.S. to mark the official launch of H.R. 2114 on Thursday. VAVA is an organization of more than 365,000 Agent Orange victims and activists that works to achieve justice for the victims throughout the world.
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VFP Delegation Returns From Jeju-Okinawa


The delegation traveled to Jeju Island, Korea and Okinawa, Japan to stand with local movements opposing U.S. bases in their communities.  A party was given in their honor with beer, food, traditional music and dancing.  Some of the younger ones got up and showed how they've contemporized the traditional culture.
Photo Albums (courtesy of Ellen Davidson):
Jeju Island 12-3-15               Okinawa 12-11-15
Jeju Island 12-4-15               Okinawal 12-13-15
Jeju Island 12-5-15               Okinawa 12-14-15
Jeju Island 12-6-15
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Memorial - Father Thomas Weise, Jr.




Veteran Member
VFP Alaska Chapter 100

Obituary






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Federal Budget Update!

The House and Senate have passed the budget bill and the President is expected to sign it soon.  We gained a few important wins, much remains that puts billions into unnecessary military spending. 

Here is a summary:

Thanks in large part to grassroots pressure, the bill does NOT include:
  • anti-refugee riders
  • defunding Planned Parenthood
  • taking the teeth out of Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform
  • dismantling environmental regulations
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Travel Opportunities for Activists


Female Roommate Needed for January Cuba Trip
A respected Peace Activist and VFP member is seeking a Female roommate for our Jan 22-29 tour of Cuba. http://cubaexplorer.com/tours/jrjan/

If interested, please contact Jim Ryerson Immediately.

jim@travelingman.net
323-436-5223

We will lead one final tour to the island in March 2016.

Here is the March itinerary. http://cubaexplorer.com/tours/jrv/
We take just 15 people, providing an intimate chance to get to know the Cuban people and our fellow veterans Our tours are led by VFP member and Cuban documentary film maker Jim Ryerson, who has been to the island more than 25 times.

jim@travelingman.net
323-436-5223

Location Sponsored by Dates Contact
Cuba Code Pink
Feb 2016
Visit the Code Pink website
Việt Nam Việt Nam's  Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160
Mar 14- 30, 2016
For more information, please email Nadya Williams
Cuba Code Pink
May 2016
Visit the Code Pink website
Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders
May 21 - Jun 1 2016
For more information email esiegel@ifpb.org
Columbia Witness for Peace
Jul 20-30, 2016
For more information email or call:  Patrick Bonner:  323-563-7940  pkbonner@earthlink.net
Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders
Jul
16- 29 2016
For more information email esiegel@ifpb.org
Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders
Oct   24-Nov     6
2016
For more information email esiegel@ifpb.org

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In This Issue:

40 Years on, the Vietnam War Continues for Victims of Agent Orange

VFP Delegation Returns From Jeju-Okininwa

Memorial - Father Thomas Weise, Jr.

Federal Budget Update!

Travel Opportunities for Activists

Female roommate needed for January Cuba trip

Consider a Lifetime Membership in VFP

We Need Your Story of Why You Are a Veteran For Peace!

Breaking Bread in Kabul

VFP 2016 Annual Spring Tour to Viet Nam

Last E-news of 2015!

Save the Dates:  Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events


Consider a VFP Lifetime Membership

If you are not a LIFETIME member, please consider becoming one. Perhaps you have a deserving member in your chapter, a family member, or a veteran who is not yet a member whom you would like to honor with a LIFETIME membership. As LIFETIME members we are bound together with the 30-year history of VFP and to LIFETIME members who have gone before us and those yet to come.
Signup Online for a Lifetime Membership
If you need additional information, contact Doug Zachary by email doug@veteransforpeace.org or by phone (Home 512-549-3530 or Cell 512-629-3812) for more information.

We Need Your Story of Why You Are a Veteran For Peace!

The personal story of a Veterans For Peace member is the most powerful tool we have to educate others on the reality of war.
If you are a current member, help us by sending:
  • Why you are part of VFP, written in first person
  • About 200 words
  • A photo of yourself (minimum 200 pixels)

Breaking Bread in Kabul

Reflections from Kathy Kelly:
Here in Kabul, over breakfast with Afghan Peace Volunteers, (APVs), we easily recalled key elements of the conflict resolution and peer mediation “train the trainers” workshops that Ellis Brooks, with Voices for Creative Nonviolence-UK, had facilitated a week ago.
Peer mediators make “promises” before beginning a session: We won’t tell you what to do, we won’t take sides, and we won’t talk about this session with anyone outside of our room. While pouring tea and breaking bread, we recalled the hand signals Ellis gave us to help remember each promise.  <More>

VFP 2016 Annual Spring Tour to Viet Nam

Dates of travel:  March 14 -30, 2016
Each year since 2012, members of Việt Nam's Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160 of Veterans For Peace invite up to 20 veterans, non-veterans, spouses & peace activists to come to Việt Nam for an insider's 2-week tour. The Hoa Binh chapter is the first & only overseas VFP chapter of American veterans living in Việt Nam!

The mission of the tour is to address the legacies of America’s war, as well as visit a beautiful country & form lasting ties of friendship & peace. 

For more information, email Nadya Williams @ nadyanomad@gmail.com

Last E-news of 2015!

The next scheduled E-news will be sent on Friday, January 8, 2016.  Watch your mailbox, for other exciting updates from the national office.

Save the Dates:  Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events

Dec 24 - Anniversary of Christmas Truce of 1914
Jan 18, 2016 - MLK Day
Mar 27- April 2, 2016 - Shut Down Creech AFB
Apr 15 - GDAMS (Global Day Against Military Spending)

Apr 22 - Earth Day

May 14-21, 2016 - Sam's 5th Annual Ride for Peace, Raleigh, NC to Washington, DC
May 30 — Memorial Day (Observed)
Aug 11-15, 2016 - VFP Annual Convention at Clark Kerr campus of University of California Berkeley, CA
Sep 21—International Day of Peace

Nov 11 - Armistice Day


Did you know?

In 2010,  VFP  participated  at  U.S. Social  Forum  in  Detriot  with  10,000+  activists.    A group  of  VFP  members  and  supporters  hung  a  large  banner  on  the  abandoned  Eddystone  Hotel  to  highlight  the effect of war spending on American cities.


























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Before The Age of The Internet There Was…Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey’s Desk Set


Before The Age of The Internet There Was…Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey’s Desk Set

 
 
DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 Desk Set, starring Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracey, 1957  

 

Yes, to answer the question posed by the title of this sketch, before the Internet, before the whole web of now baffling sets of social networking and media outlets to while away the hours there was, well, a love story involving computers, and their uses back in the day, back in the 1950s days when one computer was housed in a whole room of some dimensions. Hard as it is to believe now that you can get a million times more information off of your smart phone than the humongous machines were capable of producing back in the 1950s this whole modern “information superhighway” superstructure posed certain questions then continue to haunt us today. That is the subtext to the film under review, Desk Set, the sophisticated romantic comedy starring the famous Hollywood acting couple Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey.     

Ironically the story line of this film is set in the New York network broadcasting industry at a time when that medium, when conventional television, was “king of the hill” and which is now embattled with about six million other ways of getting information available at the click of a button. But like all business enterprises then and now, the bottom line was, and is, to get the biggest profits the most effective and cost-productive way possible. Enter automation, enter the replacement of the human factor with the efficiencies of the machine. Sound familiar? The way this one plays out is that Sam (played by Tracey), a crackerjack engineer who helped create the then first word in computers, was hired by the broadcast company to streamline its operations with the new machines (then mainly produced when they were of monstrous size by IBM) and one of the first targets was the research department headed by crackerjack head researcher Bunny (played by Hepburn and where the scriptwriters got the name Bunny for the very proper Miss H can only be accounted for by the old Wasp network of Sunnys, Bunnys, Muffys in horse country places or at institutions like Bryn Mawr). Thus the battle is joined.               

Sam and Bunny do their dance, the dance around the subtext message at first about the uses of computers to streamline the research work process which had Bunny and her co-workers (three very smart women who nevertheless in the 1950s wound up as clerks in the research department rather than upstairs running things in the executive suites) worried about their jobs, and rightly so. That worry gets resolved rather simply when the obvious truth about information machines (then, now it might be a bit more problematic)-they are only as good as the humans who put the information in and analyze it meant they would  have more work to do rather than less and would have a higher rate of productivity to satisfy that bottom line. (That same condition applies today although on a global basis begging the question of who will be doing that more productive work-some Seven Sisters graduate or some up and coming smart woman in Mumbai.)     

Nice theme but let’s get back to reality for after all whether using computers or books as the subtext Hollywood is looking for a romantic resolution to a romantic comedy and while we can love our modern technology the fate of the computer is not going to fill seats in a movie theater. But the love triangle pitch certainly will. Bunny was, well, hung up on this guy, Mike, who was on his way up in the company but who couldn’t commit to a serious relationship (a serious relationship meaning one that ended in marriage) until Sam came on the scene and started making Bunny think twice about her status as Mike’s easy thing, as his dishrag. Naturally despite all the travails with the computers gumming up the works and the situation with Mike Bunny and Sam wound up as an “item” of gossip for the water cooler break crowd. See 1950s Hollywood didn’t let us down.  

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

 
 
 

Joshua Breslin, Carver down in the wilds of Southeastern Massachusetts cranberry bog country born, had certainly not been the only one who had recently taken a nose-dive turn back in time to that unique moment from the very late 1950s, say 1958, 1959 when be-bop jazz (you know Dizzy, the late Bird, the mad man Monk the guys who bopped swing-a-ling for “cool” high white note searches on the instruments) “beatnik” complete with beret and bop-a-long banter and everybody from suburban land was clad in black, who knows maybe black underwear too something the corner boys in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner salaciously contemplated about the female side, was giving way to earnest “folkie” (and no alluring black but flannel shirts, unisex blue jeans and unisex sandals leaving nothing in particular to the fervent corner boy imagination) in the clubs that mattered around the Village (the Gaslight, Geddes Folk City, half the joints on Bleecker Street), Harvard Square (Club Blue, the place for serious cheap dates since for the price of coffees and pastries for two you could linger on, Café Blanc, the place for serious dates since they had a five dollar minimum, Club 47, the latter a place where serious folkies and serious folk musicians hung out) and North Beach (Club Ernie’s, The Hungry Eye, all a step behind the folk surge since you would still find a jazz-poetry mix longer than in the Eastern towns) to the mid-1960s when folk music had its minute as a popular genre. Even guys like Sam Eaton, Sam Lowell, Jack Callahan and Bart Webber, who only abided the music back in the day, now too, because the other guys droned on and on about it under the influence of Peter Markin a guy Josh had met  in the summer of love, 1967 were diving in too. Diving into the music which beside first love rock and roll got them through the teenage night.

The best way to describe that turn from b-bop beat to earnest folkie, is by way of a short comment by the late folk historian Dave Von Ronk which summed up the turn nicely. Earlier in that period, especially the period after Allen Ginsburg’s Howl out in the Frisco poetry slam blew the roof off modernist poetry with his talk of melted modern minds, hipsters, negro streets, the fight against Moloch and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in a fruitless search for the father he and Neal Cassady never knew had the Army-Navy surplus stores cleaning out their rucksack inventories, when “beat poets” held sway and folkies were hired to clear the room between readings he would have been thrown in the streets to beg for his supper if his graven voice and quirky folk songs did not empty the place, and he did (any serious look at some of his earliest compositions will tell in a moment why, and why the cross-over from beat to folkie by the former crowd never really happened. But then the sea-change happened, tastes changed and the search for roots was on, and Von Ronk would be doing three full sets a night and checking every folk anthology he could lay his hands on (including naturally Harry Smith’s legendary efforts and the Lomaxes and Seegers too) and misty musty record store recordings to get enough material.

People may dispute the end-point of that folk minute like they do about the question of when the turn the world upside down counter-cultural 1960s ended as a “youth nation” phenomenon but clearly with the advent of acid-etched rock (acid as in LSD, blotter, electric kool aid acid test not some battery stuff ) by 1967-68 the searching for and reviving of the folk roots that had driven many aficionados to the obscure archives like Harry Smith’s anthology, the recording of the Lomaxes, Seegers and that crowd had passed.

As an anecdote, one that Josh would use whenever the subject of his own sea-change back to rock and roll came up, in support of that acid-etched dateline that is the period when Josh stopped taking his “dates” to the formerly ubiquitous home away from home coffeehouses which had sustained him through many a dark home life night in high school and later when he escaped home in college, cheap poor boy college student dates to the Harvard Square coffeehouses where for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, expresso then a favorite since you could sip it slowly and make it last for the duration and rather exotic since it was percolated in a strange copper-plated coffee-maker, a shared pastry of unknown quality, and maybe a couple of dollars admission charge or for the “basket” that was the life-support of the performers you could hear up and coming talent working out their kinks, and took them instead to the open-air fashion statement rock concerts that were abounding around the town. The shift also entailed a certain change in fashion from those earnest flannel shirts, denims, lacy blouses and sandals to day-glo tie-dye shirts, bell-bottomed denims, granny dresses, and mountain boots or Chuck Taylor sneakers. Oh yeah, and the decibel level of the music got higher, much higher and the lyrics talked not of ancient mountain sorrows, thwarted triangle love, or down-hearted blues over something that was on your mind but to alice-in-wonderland and white rabbit dreams, carnal nightmares, yellow submarines, satanic majesties, and wooden ships on the water.             

 

Some fifty years out others in Josh-like fits of nostalgia and maybe to sum up a life’s work there have been two recent documentaries concerning the most famous Harvard Square coffeehouse of them all, the Club 47 (which still exists under the name of the non-profit Club Passim which traces its genealogy to that legendary Mount Auburn Street spot in a similar small venue near the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore off of Church Street).

 

One of the documentaries put out a few years ago (see above) traces the general evolution of that club in its prime when the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt, the members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (the forming of jug bands, a popular musical form including a seemingly infinite number of bands with the name Sheik in them, going back to the early 20th century itself a part of the roots revival guys like Josh were in thrall to), and many others sharpened up their acts there. The other documentary, No Regrets (title taken from one of his most famous songs) which Josh reviewed for one of the blogs, The American Folk Minute, to which he has contributed to over the years is a biopic centered on the fifty plus years in folk music of Tom Rush. Both those visual references got Josh thinking about how that folk scene, or better, the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene kept Josh from going off the rails, although that was a close thing.        

 

Like about a billion kids before and after Josh in his coming of age in the early 1960s went through the usual bouts of teenage angst and alienation aided and abetted by growing up “from hunger” among the very lowest rung of the working poor with all the pathologies associated with survival down at the base of society where the bonds of human solidarity are often times very attenuated. All of this “wisdom” complete with appropriate “learned” jargon, of course figured out, told about, made many mistakes to gain, came later, much later because at the time Josh was just feeling rotten about his life and how the hell he got placed in a world which he had not created (re-enforced when questioned by one Delores Breslin with Prescott Breslin as a behind-the scenes back-up about his various doings) and no likely possibilities of having a say what with the world stacked against him, his place in the sun (and not that “safe” white collar civil service job that Delores saw as the epitome of upward mobility for her brood), and how he didn’t have a say in what was going on. Then through one source or another mainly by the accident of tuning in his life-saver transistor radio, which for once he successfully badgered to get from Delores and Prescott one Christmas by threatening murder and mayhem if he didn’t when all his corner boys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner had them, on one Sunday night to listen to a favorite rock and roll DJ that he could receive on that night from Chicago he found a folk music program that sounded interesting (it turned out to be the Dick Summer show on WBZ, a DJ who is featured in the Tom Rush documentary) and he was hooked by the different songs played, some mountain music, some jug, some country blues, some protest songs. Each week Dick Summer would announce who was playing where for the week and he kept mentioning various locations, including the Club 47, in Harvard Square. Josh was intrigued, wanted to go if only he could find a kindred for a date and if he could scratch up some dough. Neither easy tasks for a guy in high teen alienation mode.           

 

One Saturday afternoon Josh made connections to get to a Red Line subway stop which was the quickest way for him to get to Harvard Square (and was also the last stop on that line then) and walked around the Square looking into the various clubs and coffeehouses that had been mentioned by Summer and a few more as well. You could hardly walk a block without running into one or the other. Of course during the day all people were doing was sitting around drinking coffee and reading, maybe playing chess, or as he found out later huddled in small group corners working on their music (or poetry which also still had some sway as a tail end of the “beat” scene) so he didn’t that day get the full sense of what was going on. A few weeks later, having been “hipped” to the way things worked, meaning that as long as you had coffee or something in front of you in most places you were cool Josh always chronically low on funds took a date, a cheap date naturally, to the Club Blue where you did not pay admission but where Eric Von Schmidt was to play. Josh had heard his Joshua Gone Barbados covered by Tom Rush on Dick Summer’s show and he had flipped out so he was eager to hear him. So for the price of, Josh thought, two coffees each, a stretched-out shared brownie and two subway fares they had a good time, an excellent time (although that particular young woman and Josh would not go on much beyond that first date since she was looking for a guy who had more dough to spend on her, and maybe a “boss” car too).

 

Josh would go over to Harvard Square many weekend nights in those days, including sneaking out of the house a few time late at night and heading over since in those days the Red Line subway ran all night. That was his home away from home not only for cheap date nights depending on the girl he was interested in but when the storms gathered at the house about his doing, or not doing, this or that, stuff like that when his mother pulled the hammer down. If Josh had a few dollars make by caddying for the Mayfair swells at the Carver Country Club, a private club a few miles from his house he would pony up the admission, or two admissions if he was lucky, to hear Joan Baez or her sister Mimi with her husband Richard Farina, maybe Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Paxton when he was in town at the 47. If he was broke he would do his alternative, take the subway but rather than go to a club he would hang out all night at the famous Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford just up the steps from the subway stop exit. That was a wild scene made up of winos, grifters, con men, guys and gals working off barroom drunks, crazies, and… almost every time out there would be folk-singers or poets, some known to him, others from cheap street who soon faded into the dust, in little clusters, coffee mugs filled, singing or speaking low, keeping the folk tradition alive, keeping the faith that a new wind was coming across the land and they, Josh, wanted to catch it. Wasn’t that a time.