Shut Down Creech! Apr 23-29, 2017 - Stop the Drone Wars
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Saturday, April 22, 2017
Shut Down Creech! Apr 23-29, 2017 - Stop the Drone Wars
Friday, April 21, 2017
Yeah, Put Out That Fire In Your Head-With Patti Griffin’s Words From “You Are Not Alone” In Mind
Yeah, Put Out That Fire In Your Head-With Patti Griffin’s Words
From “You Are Not Alone” In Mind
By Fritz Taylor
Sam Lowell was a queer duck, an odd-ball kind of guy who
couldn’t stop keeping his head from exploding with about seventeen ideas at
once and the determination to do all seventeen come hell or high water. And not
seventeen things like mowing the lawn or taking out the rubbish but what he
called “projects” which in Sam’s case meant political projects and writings and
other things along that line. Yeah, couldn’t put out “the fire in his head” the
way he told it to his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, one night at supper
after she had confronted him with the fact, and not for the first time, that he
was getting more irritable, was more often short with her of late, had seemed
distant, had seemed to be drifting into some bad place, a place where he was
not at peace with himself. That not “at peace” with himself an expression that
Laura had coined that night to express the way that she saw his current
demeanor. That would be the expression he would use in his group therapy group
to describe his condition when it met later that week.
He would almost shout out
the words in despair when the moderator-psychologist asked him pointedly
whether he felt at peace with himself at that moment and he pointed responded
immediately that he was not. Maybe it was at that point, more probably though
that night when Laura confronted him with his own mirror-self that told Sam his
was one troubled man.
Yea, it was that seventeen things in order and full steam
ahead that got him in trouble on more than on occasion. The need to do so the
real villain of the piece. See Sam had just turned seventy and so he should
have been trying to slow down, slow down enough to not try to keep doing those
seventeen things like he had when he was twenty or thirty but no he was not
organically capable of doing so , at least until the other shoe dropped.
Dropped hard.
It was that “other shoe” dropping that made him take stock
of his situation, although it had been too little too late. One afternoon a few
days after that stormy group therapy session he laid down on his bed to just
think through what was driving him to distraction, driving that fury inside him
that would not let him be, as he tried to put out the fire in his head. That
laying down itself might have been its own breakthrough since he had expected,
had fiercely desired to finish up an article that he was writing on behalf a
peace walk that was to take place shortly up in Maine, a walk that was
dedicated to stopping the wars, mostly of the military-type but also of the environmental
degradation against Mother Nature.
Sam, not normally introspective about his past, about the
events growing up that had formed him, events that had as he had told Laura on
more than one occasion almost destroyed him. So that was where he started,
started to try to find out why he could not relax, had to be “doing and making”
as Laura called it under happier circumstances, had to be fueling that fire in
his head. Realized that afternoon that as kid in order to survive he had
learned at a very young age that in order to placate (and avoid) his
overweening mother he had to keep his own counsel, had to go deep inside his
head to find solace from the storms around his house. For years he had thought
the driving force was because he was a middle child and thus had to fend for
himself while his parents (and grandparents) doted respectively his younger and
older brothers. But no it had been deeper than that, had been driven by feelings
of inadequacy before his mother’s onslaught against his fragile head.
As Sam traced how at three score and ten he could point to
various incidents that had driven him on, had almost made him organically
incapable of having a not ever active brain, of going off to some dark places
where the devils would not let him relax, that kept him going around and around
he realized that he was not able to relax on his own, would need something
greater than himself if he was to unwind. Laura had emphatically told him that
he would have to take that journey on his own, would have to settle himself
down if he was to gain any peace in his whole damn world. Sam suddenly noticed
after Laura had expressed her opinion that she had always been the picture of calm,
had been his rock when he was in his furies. Funny he had always
underestimated, always undervalued that calmness, that solid rock. He, in
frustration, at his own situation asked Laura how she had maintained the calm
that seemed to follow her around her world.
Laura, after stating that she too had her inner demons, had
to struggle with the same kind of demons that Sam had faced as a child and that
she still had difficulties maintaining an inner calm, told Sam that her daily
Buddha-like meditations had carried her to a better place. Sam was shocked at
her answer. He had always known that Laura was drawn to the spiritual trends
around their milieu, the “New Age stuff” he called her interest since it seemed
that she had taken tidbits from every new way to salvation outside of formal
religion (although she had had bouts with that as well discarding her Methodist
high heavens Jehovah you are on your own in this wicked old world upbringing
for the communal comfort of the Universalist-Unitarian brethren). He had
respected her various attempts to survive in the world the best way she could
but those roads were not for him, smacked too much of some new religion, some
new road that he could not travel on. But he was also desperate to be at peace,
a mantra that he was increasing using to describe his plight.
Then Laura suggested that they attend a de-stress program
that was being held at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as part of what
was billed as HUB-week, a week of medical, therapeutic, technological and
social events and programs started by a number of well-known institutions in
the Boston area like MGH, Harvard, MIT and others. Sam admitted to being
clueless about what a de-stress program would be about and had never heard of a
Doctor Benson who a million years before had written a best-selling book about
the knot the West had put itself in trying to get ahead and offered mediation
as a way out of the impasse. Sam was skeptical but agreed to go.
At the event which lasted about two hours various forms of
meditative practice were offered including music and laughter yoga. Sam in his mind
passed on those efforts. The one segment that drew his attention, the first
segment headed by this Doctor Benson had been centered on a simple technique to
reduce stress, to relax in fact was called the relax response. Best of all the
Doctor had invited each member of the audience to sample his wares. Pick a word
or short phrase to focus on, close your eyes, put your hands on your lap and
consecrate, really try to concentrate, on that picked term for five minutes
(the optimum is closer to ten plus minutes in an actual situation).
Sam admitted candidly to Laura that while attempting
fitfully focusing on one thing, in his case the phrase “at peace,” he had suffered
many distractions but that he was very interested in pursuing the practice
since he had actually felt that he was getting somewhere before time was
called. Laura laughed at Sam’s response, so Sam-like expecting to master in
five minutes a technique that she had spent years trying to pursue and had not
been anywhere near totally focused yet. He asked her to help him to get started
and they did until Sam felt he could do the procedure on his own.
We now have to get back to that “other shoe” dropping though.
Although Sam had expressed his good intentions, had felt better after a while
Laura had felt that he needed to go on his journey without her. She too now
felt that she had to seek what she was looking for alone in this wicked world
despite how long they had been together. So Laura called it quits, moved out of
the house that she and Sam had lived in for years. Sam is alone on his journey
now, committed to trying to find some peace inside despite his heartbreak over
the loss of Laura. Every once in a while though in a non-meditative moment he
curses that fire in his head. Yeah, he wished he could have put out that fire
in his head long ago.
In Boston- Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!--Join The Resistance
In Boston- Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!--Join The Resistance
- Q
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- Q
An Encore -In The Time Of Elvis' Time-One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane
An Encore -In The Time Of Elvis' Time-One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane
Sam Lowell, considered himself a corner boy from the time in the early 1960s when in the working-class neighborhoods of America were filled to the brim with such guys hanging out on the corners, in his case North Adamsville not far from urban Boston. Here is the progression not too atypical of corner boys with too little money and too much time on their hands which underscored the corner boy 1960s night plight (and which still plagues corner boys even though they no longer for the most part hang on corners but malls and other places where there are not any “No trespassing, police take notice” signs to harass young men still with not enough dough and too much time on their hands). If you grew up in the Acre, Sam’s growing up section of town you progressed from one place in elementary school, another in junior high school when corners and who was on what corner started to get sorted out in earnest, and high school where the corners were doled out hard as steel in high school.
Places like South Boston (an all Irish enclave then where even those who like Sam’s maternal grandparents had moved out of the enclave to an Irish neighborhood in North Adamsville were considered suspect, were looked at with jaundiced eye even by the relatives left behind), Main Street in Nashua (at the time a dying city what with the mills heading south to cheaper labor and eventually overseas and so a tough place to dream in), New Hampshire, 125th Street in high Harlem< New York City (with all the excitement of jazz and be-bop but with all the high segregation of the South except for the formality of Mister James Crow’s laws), any of a million spots on Six Mile Road in Detroit (never a place of dreams but of steady work in the golden age of the American automobile for those from Delta Mister James Crow black refugees to the Okie/Arkie white rabble coming out of the hills and dustbowls), the same on Division Street in Chi town (the beat street divide of many of Nelson Algren’s tales of drugs, urban lost-ness, and sullen back streets disappointments), the lower end of North Beach beyond where the “beats” of a few years before did their beat thing (the places where the longshoremen and waterfront workers did their heavy drinking after work and where the sailors off their Pacific ocean ships fought all- comers from the Artic to the Japan seas).
Jack Slack’s was the last port of call for the Acre crowd, for that motley collection of corner boys picked up and discarded along the way although the core of Frankie , Jack, Jimmy, Allan, Markin and Five-Fingers held throughout which had started at Doc’s Drugstore complete with sofa fountain and shiny glass penny candy-case to draw selections from after school to energize up for the real world activities of kid-dom in elementary school, Miller’s Diner for the jukebox in junior high when they were just becoming aware of girls, maybe having to dance with them, and maybe trying to figure out, the eternal trying to figure out how to approach them without them giggling back and Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in early high school before the new owners decided that unlike Tonio, the previous owner who sold out to go back to Italy from when he came as a boy they did not want colorful rough-necked boys standing one knee against the wall in front of their family friendly establishment scaring the bejesus out of the important Friday and Saturday give Mom a break family trade.
That time, those early 1960s times for some reason known only to them, was time that you had best have had corner boy comrades when you hung out on date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights to have your back if trouble brewed (that “comrade” not a word to be used then in the tail end of the height of the red scare Cold War night not if you wanted knuckle sandwiches from the unthinking patriotic guys but that does convey the sense of “having your back” critical to your place in those woe begotten streets).
That corner boy business extended through the 1960s after high school for a couple of years when in addition to being a corner boy Sam became a “flower child” along with his long mourned and lamented friend the late Peter Paul Markin heading out west on the hitchhike roads when the world turned upside down later in the decade. (Markin who met a horrible end down in sunny Mexico after the fresh breeze of the 1960s turned in on itself and he got flat-footed by the backlash ebb tide riptide and could no longer hold back his “from hunger” wanting habits held in check through summers of love and a tight tour of Vietnam and made the fatal, very fatal, mistake of trying to broker an independent drug deal and got two slugs to the back of his head for the attempt.) Sam, now a sedate grandfatherly semi-retired lawyer filled with respectability and memories had to laugh about how much he of late had been thinking about the 1950s, about not just those corner boy days but about the music that drove every corner boy, including Markin, make that perhaps most of all Markin, to distraction as they tried to eke out a sound that they could call their own. A jailbreak sound that was not something their parents would approve of at a time when titanic generational battles were foaming at the mouth.
Thinking about the 1950s the times when he came of age, came of musical age, an age very mixed up with that corner boy comradery, that hanging at Doc’s and Miller’s Diner when he started noticing girls and their charms (amid the first blush of giggles which he soon figured out was their rational response to whatever was going on inside their bodies just like guys like Sam were going through in their bodies). Those first noticings started his life-long journey of trying to figure out what made them tick, what they wanted, wanted of him, from a girl-less family making everything that much harder. Noticing that they too hung around Miller’s in order to play that fantastic jukebox which had all the latest tunes and plenty of oldies too (oldies being let’s say we are talking about 1958 then maybe 1955 hits like Eddie, My Love, Rock Around The Clock, and Bo Diddley showing that teen time, youth time anyway is measured differently from old man lawyerly time, measured in days, weeks, months at the most-years were beyond the pale) drawing away from the music on his parents’ family living room radio and their cranky old record player music.
Music in the teen households emphatically not on Miller’s jukebox or there would have been a civil war no question, a civil war avoided in his own home after his parents had bought, to insure domestic peace and tranquility if he remembered correctly, his first transistor radio down at the now long gone Radio Shack store and he could sit up in his room and dream of whatever coming of age boys dreamed about, mainly how those last year’s bothersome girls became this year’s interesting objects of discussion (by the way in that small crowded upstairs bedroom, shared with his two brothers, he found out he could discover the beauty of the “hold up to your ear” transistor radio and drown out the world of brotherly scuffings).
More than that though, more than just thinking about the old days like every old guy probably does, even guys who had not been lawyers as a professional career, guys who you see sitting on park benches, a little disheveled, maybe some crumbs in their unkempt beards, feeding the birds and half-muttering to themselves about how when FDR was around everybody stood tall, every country bent it knees in homage to America, or else, or old bag ladies rummaging through trash barrels looking for long lost lovers or their faded beauty Sam had been purchasing compilations of what are commercially called “oldies but goodies” CDs. Doing so via the user-friendly confines of the Internet, at Amazon if you need a name like today anybody, except maybe three people up in heathen Alaska or the Artic, doesn’t know that is the site to get such material these days instead of traipsing over half the East Coast trying to cadge a few examples from the dwindling oldies and used records emporia, and purchasing several record compilations of the “best of” that period from a commercial distributor (and also keeping up to date on various versions of the songs on YouTube) and through his friend and old corner boy Frankie Riley been spilling plenty of cyber-ink on Frankie’s blog, In The Be-Bop ‘50s Night, going back to the now classic age of rock and roll.
Sam had to laugh about that situation back in the day as well since he had been well known back on the corner, back holding up the wall in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, on many of those date-less, date-less because although he might have been an all “hail fellow, well met” hard-assed corner boy full of bluster and blah he was sister-less and hence baffled by girls and their ways and very shy around the question of asking for dates although he was quite willing to tell each and every girl who would listen to him about ten thousand fact on any of sixteen subjects, not excluding science, philosophy, and the poor fate of the Red Sox then. Although those ten thousand facts would come in handy when he got to college a couple of years later and he had girls hanging off the walls in debate class waiting for him to ask them out then those precious facts did not add up to a date by osmosis but rather incomprehension even by girls like Patty Lewis and Mary Shea who liked him and would have be glad if he asked them for a date without the ten thousand facts, thank you.
Here though is something about the mores of the time that young people today might not comprehend girls just waited for guys to make a move, or moved on to the next guy who would, especially if he had a boss ’55 Chevy, like Patty and Mary did. Also girl-less (already explained but here the question is having a serious girl and the just mentioned facts will hold here as well), and dough-less (self-explanatory in working-class North Adamsville, the sorry fate of the working poor, the marginally employed like his father, no money when the rent was due and Ma had not money for the damn rent collector much less discretionary money for dates with girls) on Friday and Saturday nights when he proclaimed to all who would listen (mainly Frankie, Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Kenny Hogan and Johnny “Thunder” Thornton and an occasional girl who all wondered what he was talking about) that “rock and roll will never die.”
Mainly, through the archival marvels of modern technology, pay-per-song, look on YouTube, check out Amazon Sam had been right, rock and roll had not died although it clearly no longer provided the same fuel for later generations more into hip-hop-ish, techno music, or edge city rock. But Sam always though it funny when kids, his grandkids, for example, heard (and saw) Elvis, all steamy, smoldering and swiveling in some film clip to make the older almost teenage girls among them almost react like the girls in his time did when they saw him on the Ed Sullivan Show and had half-formed girlish dreams about personally erasing that snarl from his face. Especially that flip clip of the prison number in Jailhouse Rock. Bo Diddley proclaiming to the whole wide world that he in fact had put the rock in rock and roll and who could dispute that claim when he went bonkers in some Afro-Carib number with that rectangular guitar. Say too Chuck Berry telling a candid world, a candid teenage world which after all was all that counted then, now too from what Sam had heard from his grandchildren, that Mister Beethoven from the old fogy music museum had better take himself and his cronies and move over because a new be-bop daddy, a new high sheriff was in town, was taking the reins, making the kids jump on jump street. Ditto curl-in-hair Buddy Holly pining away for his Peggy Sue.
Better, mad monk swamp rat Jerry Lee Lewis sitting, maybe standing for all Sam knew telling that same candid world that Chuck was putting on fire everybody had to do the high school hop bop, confidentially. And how about Wanda Jackson proclaiming that it was party time and an endless host of one hit wonders and wanna-bes they went crazy over. Yeah, those kids, those for example grandkids jumping around just like the young Sam who could not believe his ears when he had come of age and, yeah, jumping around for those same guys who formed his musical tastes back in the 1950s when he had come of age, musical age anyway. Jesus, Jesus too when he came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation something no generation seems to be able to escape since the world had no less dangerous, no less incomprehensible today.
Sam had thought recently about going back to those various commercially-produced compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies that he had purchased on Amazon to cull out the better songs, some which he had on the tip of his tongue almost continuously since the 1950s (the Dubs Could This Be Magic the great last chance dance song that bailed him out of being shut out of more than one dance night although his partner’s feet borne the brunt of the battle, and the Teen Queens Eddie My Love, where Eddie took advantage of the girl and she was wondering, maybe still is, when he is coming back, a great love ‘em and leave ‘em song and the answer is still he’s never coming back, are two examples that quickly came to his mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee though needed some coaxing by listening to the compilations to be remembered.
But Sam, old lawyerly Sam, had finally found a sure-fire method to aid in that memory coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play). But even using that method Sam believed that he was cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When he (or anybody familiar with the times) looked at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations one could not help but notice the excellent artwork that highlights various institutions illustrated back then. The infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when that “youth nation” cohort gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn, or fizzled out sodas, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing was in play, and that scene had always been associated in Sam’s mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.
That is how Sam played the game. Two (or more) can play so he said he would just set the scenes and others could fill in their own musical selections. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours’ or father-borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she said they would be there, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no more explanation needed, right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss” Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when you were younger and at night when older. Okay, Sam has given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Five
In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Five
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January
Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.
I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.
I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.
This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.
****
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January
Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.
I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.
I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.
This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.
Below is a fifth sketch written as part of a series posted over several days before Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16th (see archives) of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19th century and early 20th century which will help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and the ones that Lenin had to get a handle on.
****
Ivan Smilga did not know the first moment when he resolved to go after his lover Elena Kassova who was being prepared for deportation to Siberia and either aid her escape or share her fate. Ivan found that he needed to deal with the question of Elena’s fate after returning to Saint Petersburg shortly after New Year’s Day 1900 and finding that his “engaged” Elena Kassova had been arrested for political crimes and was being held for trial prior to deportation to Siberia. She had organized, or had attempted to organize since it never got off the ground, a demonstration on New Year’s Day calling for political rights from the Tsar in front of the Winter Palace. The minute the fifty or so students and workers stepped off onto the street they were arrested and thus there had to have been a Tsarist agent who had infiltrated the organization a problem inherent in the revolutionary movement. Ivan had, as a result of his own transportation to Siberia and some reflection on what was possible under the Tsar, totally opposed Elena’s project and had left Saint Petersburg in a furious state when she said that she was going ahead with the demonstration. All Ivan knew was that he was ashamed that he had left the city in a huff after several quarrels about Elena’s leadership role in that political demonstration proposed for that New Year’s Day. A day when the bloody sabre-wielding Cossacks had wreaked havoc on the small demonstration before it even stepped off before the Winter Palace. He was ashamed first that he had not been there to share her fate and secondly that Elena had been right, right all along that, something more than getting better wages and working conditions needed to be done to bring Mother Russia into the new century.
Ivan reddened as he thought about how he had constantly belittled Elena (and her friends and associates, mostly sparsely-bearded radical students from Saint Petersburg University and a smattering of young workers, some from his own Putilov Works) around what Mother Russia did or did not need. Mainly that the fight for wages, for shorter hours and for a union was enough to carry the day. He could begin to see that even those demands could not be met without more political organization than that necessary for shop floor issues. Ivan wasn’t sure what that might be but he knew he had been wrong to rattle Elena’s confidence by dismissing her notion that a political party, a revolutionary party from the looks of the situation, was necessary to fight the Tsar and his minions. He cringed when he thought about how he had laughed out loud and said that Russia had too many political parties already.
But politics, or finding out what politics would serve the ends desired, was not really what drove Ivan to distraction. Ivan loved Elena in the old-fashioned way like a wayward backward peasant boy. He had wronged her and therefore it was his responsibility to right that wrong and hence his resolve. Maybe by going to Siberia he would win back her respect. Maybe even join her and her comrades in their quixotic fight against the massive Tsarist repression. He was not looking forward to going back to Siberia after his prior tour there a few years back when he had served his own two year sentence for political crimes (a scatterbrain scheme involving holding responsible governmental officials hostage in return for some political action which had been betrayed by one of the workers in the cell) but he needed to go. Who knows what the future held but all Ivan knew was that whatever Elena’s fate that was his as well.
The Trail Of Tears, Again- On The Osage Nation-David Grann’s Book: "Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI."
The Trail Of Tears,
Again- On The Osage Nation-David Grann’s Book: "Killers Of The
Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI."
Click on link below for
a detailed interview with author David Grann on NPR’s “Fresh Air” hosted by
Terry Gross
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/524348264/largely-forgotten-osage-murders-reveal-a-conspiracy-against-wealthy-native-ameri
Frank Jackman comment:
The veil of tears, again
is just about right for a headline dealing with a book "Killers
Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI." by New
Yorker staff writer David Grann where we yet again hear of another atrocity
by whites against Native Americans. This
time a grand conspiracy not to grab land but dough from the wealth provided by
the discovery of oil on Osage Nation land. You know someday if there ever is
some kind of socialist government one of the big plans will entail making some
kind of reparations to the descendants of all those who were here when the first
whites arrived. That is for damn sure.
A Year Or Two With Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review
A Year Or Two With
Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy
Salmon
[As long-time readers
know I have recently taken over the day to day chores of film review for this
site from my old friend and competitor from the American Film Gazette days Sam Lowell (that old friend and
competitor by the way Sam’s designation not mine). He has on occasion like
recently in reviewing a couple of rock and roll tribute-type films which I did
not feel were worthy of coverage taken advantage of his privilege to write
something here if the “spirit moves him” (his expression “stolen” from the
Quakers I believe).
That was well and good
when it came to those rock and roll films where madmen DJs run a pirate radio
station off the coast of England when they are thwarted by the appropriate
authorities concerned about the corrupting of the morals of the youth who were
gravitating toward the seductive lure of rock music or when a slumming grunge
band type mad monk put together a rock band composed of fourth-graders but when
Sam tried to horn in a review of a movie connected to a serious literary figure
like Ernest Hemingway I had to put my foot down. We had both viewed the film
together and he had tried to invoke some seniority baloney to grab this one. I
had to take the exceptional step and go to the site administrator Pete Markin
and have him explain the “what for” to the recalcitrant Mister Lowell. You see
whose name is on the byline so you know how Pete decided “what for.” Sandy
Salmon]
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba,
starring Giovanni Ribisi, Joely Richardson, Adrian Sparks, filmed in Cuba,
2015
No question young men,
maybe women too but Ernest Hemingway by subject matter and by reputation seemed
to be the quintessential man’s man writer for good or evil, of the generation
before mine and of my own generation who had a taste for the literary life saw him
(along with Scott Fitzgerald on his good days, his The Great Gatsby good days) as the paragon of solid sparse writing
that drew us in. As a kid anything to do with Hemingway was grabbed up by me
and devoured on many a late night lights out read (and re-devoured many times if
such a thing can happen with the written word). So when a colleague and I, a
man of my generation, saw this film under review together, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, we almost came to blows about who would
review the thing. That emotional response despite the fact that both of us
agreed that the film itself seemed kind of maudlin and less than informative as
a slice of life semi-biopic.
Naturally since the film
is not an actual biopic about either Hemingway or the young writer, Denn Bart
Petticlerc, whose memoir the film is based on the producers used plenty of
cinematic license in translating that story to the screen (just as any
self-respecting writer would use a great deal of literary license to the same
effect). But they got the main thrust of the memoir right-the story of how a
young writer (Ed Myers in the film played by Giovanni Ribisi) caught the
attention of Ernest Hemingway (played by Adrian Spark who looked the very image
of Papa when I looked at some old photographs) and developed a mentor-kind of
surrogate son relationship late in Papa’s life a couple of years before he put
an end to his saga with a shotgun blast to his head.
Of course Hemingway
seemingly spent half of his life in some kind of exile or out of America anyway
and Cuba was his home along with his fourth wife, the well-known foreign
correspondent Mary Welsh, played by Joely Richardson, for a good portion of the
last twenty or so years of his life. Of course like some kind of fateful muse
the period when Papa and Ed were friendly also happened to be a time when the
Cuban Revolution, Castro’s guerilla fighters, were coming down from the hills
to confront Batista and his forces in the cities. At that point you know that
regime’s days were short, extremely short. So between adventure and writing
tips they developed a short term bond.
And an odd sort of ménage with Mary (although Ed had a real love
interest back at his newspaper in Miami in the days before it became Little
Havana).
As already noted this
film suffered from some overwrought emotional scenes of Hemingway in decline,
in a love-hate relationship with Mary which seemed cruelty itself on both their
parts at time. The real shocker for any writer watching though was Hemingway’s
frustration that he could no longer write, had “writer’s block” the dreaded
words that every writer, pro or amateur, wakes up in the midnight hour sweating
about. Papa had the shakes that way too. Maybe he had lost it at the end but go
read The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The
Bells Toll, and The Old Man and The
Sea if you want to know what it was like when Papa had the words, when he
wrote those sparse clean words for keeps.
Boston Socialist Unity Project Conference 2017, 4/21-22
Boston Socialist Unity Project Conference 2017
The 2nd annual Boston Socialist Unity Project Conference (BSUP2) is a powerhouse of ideas and organizing!
The opening night event features Barbara Madeloni (Union President, Massachusetts Teachers Association) and Eugene Puryear (Millions for Prisoners). Boston’s own Foundation Movement, conscious hip hop artists, open the evening and Swiss-based Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore bring Irish revolutionary songs to the closing. [Friday, April 21, 2017 @ 7:00 p.m., MIT Building 34-101, 50 Vassar Street]
On Saturday (9-5 pm) Sherri Mitchell (Land Peace Foundation) and Fred Magdoff (University of Vermont) connect indigenous organizing and environmental movements with the struggles to get beyond capitalism and build socialist movements. Our lunchtime plenary presents political strategies for challenging the system: it features the Democratic Socialists of America, the Green-Rainbow Party,Our Revolution, and the Socialist Party (list in formation).
With recent US armed action in Syria, Vijay Prashad’s closing plenary speech on Imperialism could not be more important and timely!
Two sessions of five to six participatory workshops will showcase movement-building work and feature many of our plenary speakers (Mitchell, Magdoff, Prashad, and Puryear). It will also draw in some of the most important and exemplary movement work being performed by City Life/Vida Urbana, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Boston Institute for Non-Profit Journalism, MIT’s Student Activist Coalition, and Socialists on Single-Payer. Their topics include indigenous organizing and solidarity, housing and the city, education, media organizing, building movements for racial justice, the peace movement, and imperialism.
Breakfast and lunch options available with MIT vendors, Food for Activists, and Food Not Bombs.
Everyone is welcome, $10 suggested donation (online); nobody turned away for lack of funds.
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