This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Usually I just post material like this for informational purposes, If I want to comment I do separately. Right now though we are in a cold civil in America and we need to seriously think and DO actions like a general strike just to keep the monsters at bay. Build the Resistance-Build A General Strike For May Day the International Worker' Holiday- Frank Jackman
Since Inauguration Day, millions of people have taken to the streets to fight against Donald Trump’s right-wing agenda. Yet the president is continuing his attacks.
In the last week alone more than six hundred immigrants have been rounded up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Here in Seattle, the administration appears to be using their illegal detention of a twenty-three-year-old father, Daniel Ramirez Medina, as some sort of bigoted “test” of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
This is only a small taste of what’s likely to come with Trump promising to deport millions. ICE is likely at some stage to start full-scale workplace raids.
It will not be enough to play defense. As millions ask “what will it take to stop Trump?”, a discussion about strike action has been rapidly developing. The “chaos” we created at the nation’s airports gives a hint of what’s possible. In spite of the protests being rapidly pulled together protesters won the immediate release of detained immigrants and even pushed sections of big business into coming out against Trump and his Muslim ban.
But we need to think deeply about where our strength lies and how to create disruption on an even greater scale. Working people have enormous potential power to shut down the profits of big business by taking action in their workplaces like slowdowns, sickouts, and strikes.
Last week, many organizers of the January women’s marches, joined by Angela Davis and others, called for a women’s strike on March 8 (International Women’s Day), to escalate the fight against Trump and build on the massive January 21 marches.
If the big women’s organizations, like Planned Parenthood, were to join in this call it could have a profound impact by bringing hundreds of thousands again on the streets and this time tapping into the strategic potential of mass workplace action. Unfortunately, the leadership of many of these organizations are often too timid due to their political outlook and ties to the Democratic Party establishment. In many cases it will take serious pressure from below to overcome this barrier.
March 8 can be a springboard to even larger protests and strike action across the country on May 1, International Workers’ Day. Historically “May Day” has been a global day of mass working class action. Immigrants restored the tradition of May Day to the United States in 2006, when they organized rallies of millions and hundreds of thousands went on strike as part of the “Day Without an Immigrant” in response to brutal Republican attacks.
The rapid pace of events may make May 1 seem a long way off, but we will need that time to organize a huge nationwide action which unites immigrants, women, union members, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmentalists, and all those threatened by Trump.
Let’s use the coming weeks to begin planning for workplace actions as well a mass peaceful civil disobedience that shuts down highways, airports, and other key infrastructure. Students can organize walkouts in their schools to send a powerful message that youth reject Trump’s racism and misogyny.
The participation of the labor movement would need to be central to this effort. With a clear lead from the union leadership millions of workers would eagerly respond. One day public-sector general strikes in key urban centers around the nation would be possible. Unfortunately, despite the attacks Trump is preparing against unions including national “right to work” (for less) legislation, some labor leaders believe they can try and appease Trump rather than going all out to build resistance. Other union and progressive leaders hope to be saved by the 2018 or 2020 elections, but we cannot wait two years to defend ourselves. Others will point to the undemocratic restrictions in American labor law.
But rank-and-file pressure can drive home the idea that May Day actions have more potential to change the parameters of US politics than decades of insider lobbying. Talk of strike action is already bubbling up within the labor movement. Last week, the Seattle Education Association passed a resolution for the Washington Education Association, the National Education Association, and other AFL-CIO unions to call on their affiliates for a one-day nationwide strike on May 1.
Two days later, the board of directors of the Minnesota Nurses Association passed a similar resolution, this one calling for “an intense discussion about workplace education and information meetings and protest action on May Day, May 1st 2017, including a discussion within the AFL-CIO about a call for a nationwide strike that day.”
Rank-and-file union members and left labor leaders should rapidly move to bring resolutions and make the case within their own unions for May 1 strike action.
Without a union it is of course much harder for workers to strike. We should appeal to everybody to support this strike and join in where it is possible to do so. We want the largest possible show of force, while keeping in mind that such actions would be too risky for some workers to take part in.
This is a long battle and we are just starting to get organized. Let’s use March 8 and May 1 to build our strength and lay the basis for even stronger actions that allow for larger numbers of workers to strike.
Our strength is in numbers and organization. We can protect each other best against retaliation from our bosses by organizing our co-workers to join with us and building widespread support in our communities.
Where there is no formal strike or any union, other forms of workplace action can include using individual sick days or vacation days, organizing for a lunch-time meeting of your co-workers, or possibly leaving work early to join protests (as happened in Poland last October).
We will not defeat Trump in one day alone. But a nationwide strike on May Day would, without a doubt, represent an enormous step forward for our movement.
Let’s seize the time and make this May Day a turning point in the struggle to bring down this dangerous administration and put forward the type of politics than can challenge the rule of the billionaire class.
Like Some French Girls That He Knew-With The Musee D’ Orsay In Mind
By Zack James
He didn’t know exactly when he first noticed her in her short mini-skirt showing well-turned legs, her slender body always a plus with him, those eyes which from that distance he was not sure of but he would have predicted (giving hope to the answer) blue and that long ravishing hair, black and shiny sheen. It might have been as he left the Metro stop at the Musee D’ Orsay and headed toward the museum entrance and he had noticed that by the swish of her hips that she was that kind of sexy girl that if he had been America, his homeland, he would have gone up to and began some kind of half-clumsy school-boyish conversation and hoped for the best but that on foreign territory, sweet beloved Paris, he found that he wanted to be more circumspect.
That notice business might have been when she turned around and looked across the street toward the Seine wistfully to notice that storm clouds were forming that warm September day and that she probably rued the fact that she had not brought her umbrella (at least from hi vantage point then no umbrella against the day’s storms as noticed by him. Probably the first real connection though it was at the ticket counter when he, a couple of lines over from her as she turned to get her wallet out of her pocket book to get her Euros for admission, noticed that she looked in his direction and gave him a semi-Mona Lisa smile which he took for an interest of some sort. Of course under the influence of museum Paris and the Mona Lisa home across the river Louvre he very well could have imagined that smile designation. In any case that last quizzical smile was all he needed to make his plans for that afternoon. He would “stalk” her, discreetly of course until he could find some obvious reason to make a comment to her about some painting and see what played out.
An old trick, that sublime “what does that painting do for you” line that he had learned long ago when somebody in Cambridge after he had suffered through his first divorce told him that spicy, spunky, sexy, intellectual young women, and older women too in that same category but then he was like now hung on the younger female set, would “troll” the bookstores then plentiful in the Square looking to be “picked up” to use a term of art of the times by guy who were looking for fetching intelligent company. One of those bookstore “pick-ups” had after a few dates told him that his friend’s intelligence was right but that the “real” pick up locale was the museums because while most guys would be willing to troll the bookshops that would probably balk at hanging around museums so anybody willing to go through that ordeal to meet interesting women must have something going for him.
So he had his game plan ready. He noticed that after paying her admission fee she went directly to the mezzanine to view the Gauguins and Van Goghs which then had a special section. Along her way around that section though he noticed that she had stopped at a painting of a secondary Expressionist painter who had been grouped with the “boys,” you know the “school of” artists, the subject matter which was of the fallen revolutionaries of the Paris Commune from May 1871 when the Thiers government unleased a bloodbath on working-class Paris. She stood before that painting for several minutes before he realized that this event was his was his big chance. Big chance on the off-chance that she might have some knowledge or connection with the events of the Commune which if she was French, and he was not sure if that was the case although everything about her “spoke” French to him, a lot of people he had met had some connection with even over hundred years later. In any case he had plenty of knowledge about the Paris Commune because when he was younger he had been devoted to that event as an example of working class solidarity and the possibilities of left-wing rule in those heady Commune days when if a couple of things had gone right they might have survived longer (he was not sure the thing could have survived in Paris alone then over the long haul)
He boldly, boldly for him seeing that he was probably twice her age and not sure of her nationality just then, slide up beside her and commented that those fallen brethren deserved all the pictorial commemoration any true artist could have given them. Back then when choosing sides counted-and could cost you your head. She turns around and after a confused moment gave that same semi-Mona Lisa smile that she had thrown his way earlier. Then she said, “My great-grandfather Dubois on my mother’s side suffered transportation to Tasmania for his devotion to the “cause.” Bingo. Then he went into a short spiel about how when he was younger he was devoted to the memory of the Communards, used to commemorate March 18th every year with fellow radicals and reds in Cambridge when after the failure of bourgeois politics to change anything, to stop the Vietnam War particularly, everybody headed to start reading Marx and the others and in that pursuit came across the Marxist defense of the Communards.
Second bingo-the male model for one of the fallen Communards represented in the painting was great-grandfather Dubois’ son, her great- grand uncle who had passed away when she was very young but who was always spoken of in hushed terms both for the modeling job and for surviving the bloodbath of 1871 when he was only fourteen and on the barricades. They found that conversation required more attention and so sat down on the marble seats that are scattered around that great big train station of a museum. After talking about the Communards and those sorrowful beautiful memories of such heroic action for the benefit of working people they got around to their respective professions. He told her that while he tried for a very long time, longer than most of his friends, that he had eventually broken from his active radical past and gone back to law school and so had practiced law for a number of years (he, and probably every older guy trying to relate to younger women was vague of dates and number of year issues to avoid the generation whipsaw of non-recognition of events, personalities, and fads by the later).
She startled him when she told him, making him laugh when she said it must run in the family, referring to that long ago relative used as a model for the painting that drew them together, that she was a cam model. A cam model being then the new Internet come hither sex site novelty where a woman, presumably a young woman although nothing would have precluded an older woman from doing the same thing then, maybe now too on a sex site catered to a taste for older women, acted provocatively on camera and “lured” guys in with texted sex talk…and more. For a price she laughed. Meaning she told him to get to see or hear anything of real sexual interest required the usual joining the site at so much a month on the credit card (with small print telling you that unless you opted out you would continue to be charged monthly even if you signed up only for say a month and didn’t expect to go further with the pursuit). She made him laugh at that last part since he had on occasion pursued such sex sites.
Now that cam model stuff then was pretty tame, almost a public service for shy or inhibited men with big sex dreams and appetites (and credit cards0, compared to the anything goes stuff today but it still kind of made him a little fearful to go forward. But she had that winning smile and those nice bodily features that got his thinking up a bit of bedrooms and wild sex. Moreover she seemed to have no particular desire to leave his company when he asked her if she would join him for lunch. She smiled and said yes that she was hungry and that she liked the way the conversation was going.
Initially there had been some family help, the mother worked and she juggled school and playing “mother” to the three younger boys while the mother was at work. Then her mother developed lots of unclear to her health issues and from there circumstances spiraled downward. She admitted that by the age of fourteen she had already had very quietly in another part of the town she had grown up in had sex with a boy a little older. She blushed when she said that saying that even now if anybody knew it would have been quite a family scandal. She also said that she had liked it, still did (which he noted with a wink at her when she said that), and that the boy had taught her a few things about what turned a guy on, and what a guy liked.
Sometime when she was sixteen she decided on her own to take her interest in sex to another level. To help with the family financial stresses and help the younger boys in their studies toward entering college. Even now the priority in poor French families was toward making sure that the boys, or at least one boy got ahead. So she would come to Paris from her suburban home and on weekends “work the streets.” Not literally but she would go to places, hotels, swanky bars, always well made-up and with a set of nice clothes on after a while, and allow herself to be picked up by guys who were looking for a “good time.” (Her expression). By hook or by crook she made some serious money because she was good at her job (he thinking job, good blow job, and she probably was good at that from a look at those big ruby red lips, when she said that) and because she always acted like a sullen mistress who needed to be sexually satisfied she had built up a good clientage after.
After a while the weekend night life turned into four or five nights a week and so she quit school nobody then much minding that action since she was bringing in many Euros. As a cover she told her family she had made the money working as a waitperson at one of Paris’ finest hotels. She laughed at that thought since she had been taken there a number of times, mostly by American men, and so knew everything about the place, had stories to tell so nobody suspected her real “career.” At eighteen though she left her home after she got into trouble for “soliciting” (which was fixed by a client, a Paris judge) and knew that she had to leave home before anything else got exposed about her real life. So she worked the streets for a while, had been a short term mistress to an Englishman until his wife shut off the funds after finding out about the affair (she laughed about those stuffy English women and their cheap ways where a rich French woman would write the whole thing off and have an affair of her own), had worked in a couple of brothels and then tiring of being on her back some much (and “playing the flute,” which she told him later was just her term for a blow job that she had learned from that first boy lover who said for her to “play the flute for me” and she didn’t know what he meant until he pulled her head toward his cock and took her to put it in her mouth she would figure it out from there) made a connection which landed her the cam modelling job. She laughed when she said it was easier on the back-and the mouth too.
Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP
By Frank Jackman
Recently I wrote a comment in this space about “street cred,” anti-war street cred in that case placing the anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out directly in the front line of those who have earned that honor, earned it big time as those of us, even many veterans like myself could expect out in those mean sullen anti-war streets. In that comment I had placed Military Families in the same company as those from my generation, my war generation, the Vietnam War, who too “got religion” on the questions of war and peace and who ran into the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s to put muscle into that understanding. I noted that there was no more stirring sight in those days than to see a bunch of bedraggled, wounded, scarred, ex-warriors march in uniform or part uniform as the spirit moved them, many times in silent or to a one person cadence, in places like Miami and Washington with the crowds on the sidelines dropping their jaws as they passed by. Even the most ardent draft-dodging chicken hawk in those days held his or her thoughts in silence in the face of such a powerful demonstration.
That was then and now is now. Now that spirit of military-borne resistance resides a greying, aging, illness gathering relatively small group of veterans who have formed up under the dove-tailed banner of Veterans for Peace (VFP). While that organization is open to all who adhere to the actively non-violent principles stated below who are veterans and supporters the vast bulk of members are from the Vietnam era still putting up the good fight some forty plus years later. Still out on the streets with their dove-tailed banners flailing away in some off-hand ill-disposed wind stirring those crowds on the sidewalk once again. Still having that very special “street cred” of those who had have to confront the face of war in a very personal way. Listen up.
From NPR-Chronicling
Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some -
CIA archivist Nicholas Reynolds discusses his new book,Writer,
Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures.It describes Hemingway's relationship
with Soviet intelligence.
link for a
piece of Papa Hemingway’s link with the Soviets during World War II
The Garden Of Eden, Ernest Hemingway, Collier Books, New York, 1986 Recently, in a review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first published novel, “This Side of Paradise” (1920), I mentioned that I thought his contemporary, friend, expatriate and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway had definitively won the battle for “number one” writer of their generation, variously named the post -World War I, “lost”, or “Jazz Age” generation. Paying due respect to the greater literary merit of Fitzgerald ‘s “The Great Gatsby” as, perhaps, the best of the individual novels (or short stories) each produced the respective collective bodies of work of each gave the nod to the “Old Man”. That conclusion, however, was premised on such Hemingway masterpieces as “Farewell To Arms”, “The Sun Also Rises”, and “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, and his sparse, knife-like skill with descriptive language. It did not, could not and, unfortunately, does not, include the present book under review, “The Garden Of Eden”. Of course, as the Publisher’s Note makes clear, this post-mortem find (Hemingway committed suicide in 1961), brought forth in a shopping bag (along with other manuscripts) to the publisher’s office by Hemingway’s widow, Mary, is certainly the stuff of legend, and a compelling reason for publication. However, beyond the seemingly modern trend to publish every bit of paper that a famous writer every put to pen, the hoopla seems entirely misplaced. I will chalk this one up to mere publishing “trade-puffing”. Why? Well, this is material, basically another tale from the vaults of that “lost” generation mentioned above, that was covered by Hemingway brilliantly at the time in such works as “The Sun Also Rises”, his masterly effort to define that generation and it malaise (and perhaps, incidentally, his own). This book, or rather rolling “travelogue” from one European “hot spot” to another (in the off-season no less), complete with descriptions of an enormous amount of drinking, early and late, eating in that same condition, and going for the occasional swim should make bells ring in the heads of Hemingway aficionados that something very familiar is being reworked here. Oh, the plot. Newlyweds, David and Catherine, he a writer and she a… well, whatever she is, are off on a seemingly endless trip around Europe after his recent completion of a successfully received book. After endless bouts of lovemaking, and the aforementioned eating and drinking, David itches to get back in harness and write again. Catherine, formally, at least, encourages that desire, and moves on to other pursuits in the sexual field, a girlfriend (Marita) for herself… and for David. The story line pushes along from there around this central entanglement and stalwart David’s pressing need to write some tales of his youth in Africa as well as another novel. Needless to say, the wheels come off the cart in a somewhat unexpected way. Despite various reviews of this book upon publication commenting on Hemingway's character development of Catherine to the contrary, he never really got his woman characters to be anything more than objects, beautiful, crazy or smart. That is certainly the case with the shallow, demonic Catherine, whatever charms she possessed for David, and Marita as well. As I read along I kept on saying Catherine why don't you go write a novel yourself. But apparently this sensible notion is too modern a conceit for those times. Still there is more than enough good, strong use of language that first attracted me to Hemingway to keep him up in that valued number one position. Just not off of this work though.
***Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of
The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four
From The Pen
Of Frank Jackman
He wrote of
small-voiced people, mostly people who had started out in the world with small
voices, small voices which never got louder, never were heard over the rumble
of the subway, working stiffs and their women, sometimes their kids, their kids
growing up like weeds, who turned out to be disappointments but what could
expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, guys who sat around gin
mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille
in my old hometown of North Adamsville, another town filled with small-voice
people). Never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people who tumbled down
to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors, people who fell off the
rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions,
their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall (not some edenic
fall but just a worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and
ignored). Wrote of the desperately lonely, a man talking to himself on some
forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be
reckoned with, of the stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to him
move on, or else, a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar,
sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the
corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and
meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, no more. Yeah, a big old
world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other
heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did Eliot call it, oh yeah,
measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Wrote of alienated people too, not
the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization
of man, about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but
the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling
subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. Wrote of the
night people, of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police
precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the
midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was
subject to the grill. Wrote of the people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner
(artist Edward Hopper’s all shape angles, all dim lights outside, bright
fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating
their midnight hamburgers fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn
hooker knew well, or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers
looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the
sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the
late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the
dark alleyways and sullen doorways.
He wrote big
time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke
in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only
of the moment, the eternal moment. The next fix, how to get it, the next drink,
how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet,
the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who
after all had time for anything beyond that one moment. Waiting eternally
waiting to get well, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get
you well, well beyond what any doctor could prescript, better than any priest
could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far
down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf
whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for
the fixer man to fix what ailed them. Not for him the small voice pleasant
Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about
prices of wheat and corn, the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling
official drug prescriptions and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine or whatever
the traffic would bear, or of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired
ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair
with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred who of course they
would never tell do when the whole thing goes public (although one suspects
that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent)who
in the pull and push of the writing profession they had (have) their muses. Nor
was he inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger
voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking
to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their
own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard (although again one
suspects he could have, if so inclined, shilled for that set). No, he, Nelson
Algren, he, to give him a name took dead aim at the refuge of society, the
lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim
of the world.
And he did
good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside
of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that
separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not
short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he,
secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to
a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was
not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must
that he, maybe secretly maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious
interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in
fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as
we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or
others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of
Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to
balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they
could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad
trestle, in some dime flop house, other to sort of amble along in the urban
wilderness purgatory.
Brother
Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly
desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to
work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave
us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, the misbegotten Frankie Machine,
the man with the golden arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the
mid-century(20th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at
ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that
mid-century parlance, and, two, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great
white trash night, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that
mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come
up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban
swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie
golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills
and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to
get attention.
I remember
reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that
Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece
on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century
America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the
jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name,
the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I
went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where
the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first
crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves,
cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist call
them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be
tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly
picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.
The
population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such
types, the feckless “hot rod” boys, boys mostly too young to have been though
the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of
baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked
highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like
those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters.
Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and
who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns
they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good
citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed
robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out
of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold
nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent
hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of
the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into
was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.
He spoke of
cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the
bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is
a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They,
the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell rider, the shiftless corner boy, had
no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets
for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were
looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat,
the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle,
any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties,
and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves,
always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They
identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon
lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the
take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins,
reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers, all night diners (see it always
comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early
editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of
that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.
He spoke of
jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held
off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the
rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the
river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy
summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or
maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of
white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character
blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble
In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping,
made absolutely no sense, and so it went.
He spoke of
love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless
romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon,
maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to
feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man
through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man
when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all
wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old
world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get
the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and
sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you
want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give
voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.
In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-Once Again-Out In The Be-Bop Night-The School Dance- A CD Review
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The ‘50s: Last Dance, Time-Life, 1990 I have spent tons of time and reams of cyberspace “paper” in this space reviewing the teenage culture of the 1950s, especially the inevitable school dance and the also inevitable last dance. That event was the last chance for even shy boys like me to prove that we were not wallflowers, or worst. Below is a an excerpt from a commentary that I did in reviewing the film American Graffiti that captures, I think, what this compilation is also reaching for: “Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been anyplace U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet anytime U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica. Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, it's much too early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well. Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie) Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you? And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?” That said, the sticks outs here include: the legendary Chuck Berry’s Back In The U.S.A. (fast); Tommy Edwards’ It’s All In The Game (slow, ouch); the late Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love? (fast and sassy); and, The Flamingos I’ll Be Home (slow). How is that for dee-jaying even-handedness?
In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-Out In The Be-Bop Night-In The Time Of The Time Of Classic Rock ‘n’ Roll-A CD Review
CD Review
Rock Classics: The Originals, The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, Time-Life, 1991 As I have noted in reviewing The ‘60s: Last Dance and the 1957 parts of this Time-Life Roll ‘n’ Roll Era series I have spent tons of time and reams of cyberspace “paper” in this space reviewing the teenage culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, especially the inevitable school dance and the also equally inevitable trauma of the last dance. That event, the last dance that is, was the last chance for even shy boys like me to prove that we were not wallflowers, or worst. The last chance to rise (or fall) in the torrid and relentless pecking order of the social scene at school. And moreover to prove to that certain she that you were made of some sort of heroic stuff, the stuff of dreams, of her dreams, thank you very much. Moreover, to make use of that social capital you invested in by learning to dance, or the “shadow” of learning to dance. Hey, I have already filled this space with enough prattle about the old time school dances, middle school and high school, so I need not repeat that stuff here. Moreover, whatever physical description I could conger up would be just so much eye wash anyway. Those dances could have been held in an airplane hangar and we all could have been wearing paper bags for all we really cared. What mattered, and maybe will always matter, is the hes looking at those certain shes, and vis-a-versa. The endless, small, meaningful looks (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) except for those wallflowers who are permanently looking down at the ground. And that was the real struggle that went on in those events, for the stags. The struggle against wallflower-dom. The struggle for at least some room in the social standing, even if near the bottom, rather than outcast-dom. That struggle was as fierce as any class struggle old Karl Marx might have projected. The straight, upfront calculation (and not infrequently miscalculation), the maneuvering, the averting of eyes, the not averting of eyes, the reading of silence signals, the uncomphrehended "no", the gratuitous "yes." Need I go on? I don’t think so, except, if you had the energy, or even if you didn’t, then you dragged yourself to that last dance. And hoped, hoped to high heaven that it was a slow one. Ah, memory. So what is the demographic that this CD compilation is being pitched to, aside from the obvious usual suspects, the AARP crowd. Well that’s simple. Any one who has been wounded in love’s young battles; any one who has longed for that he or she to come through the door, even if late; anyone that has been on a date that did not work out, been stranded on a date that has not worked out; anyone who has had to submit to being pieced off with car hop drive-in food; anyone who has gotten a “Dear John” letter or its equivalent; anyone who has been jilted by that certain he or she; anyone who has been turned down for that last school dance from that certain he or she that you counted on to make your lame evening; anyone who has waited endlessly for the telephone (now iphone, etc., okay for the younger set who may read this) to ring to hear that certain voice; and, especially those hes and she who has shed those midnight tears for youth’s lost love. In short, everybody except those few “most popular “types who the rest of us will not shed one tear over, or the nerds who didn’t count (or care) anyway. Stick outs on this one that include both 50s and 60s material include: Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby by the underrated Carl Perkins who had all the making to be a big time rockabilly cross-over except Elvis got in the way; You’re No Good by Betty Everett who bopped the bop; I’m Leaving It All Up To You, by the one-hit wonders Don and Dewey, Time Is On My Side by the legendary blues rocker, Irma Thomas (a song, by the way, covered by the Stones; I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You, a country-type cross-over Don Gibson. Needless to say John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom rates as well but I take that as a blues classic rather than a rock classic. And for that last dance, that one that you hoped for, prayed against all odds for, and sweated blood for, Doctor Feelgood and the Interns on Mr. Moonlight. Natch, a slow one. You’re on your own now for the after dance arrangements.
