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
Follow The Money-Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkin’s “Misconduct” (2016)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley
[Upon the retirement from the day to day duties of film review in this space of Sam Lowell (he called it drudgery not duty) and his replacement by his old friend and competitor from the American Film Gazette Sandy Salmon there was an understanding that Sandy would cover the old time movies and his associate Alden Riley would cover the modern current efforts. This is Alden’s second such effort. Pete Markin]
Misconduct, starring Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Alice Eve, Malin Ackerman, 2016
Ever since the Watergate revelations of the 1970s which did one American President, Richard Nixon, in and fouled up the political atmosphere for years whenever dirty tricks and cutthroat tactics have been employed the mantra has been to “follow the money.” That is the case with the plotline of the film under review, Misconduct, an apt title on several levels. Although the action is done by private parties rather than governmental that same following the bouncing ball applies to the plotline here as well.
Arthur Denning, played by now ancient Anthony Hopkins who seems to be chasing Michael Caine for the title of appearing in the most films in a lifetime, a billionaire Big Pharma magnate is on the carpet for doctoring up drug test results which proved fatal on a serious number of trial patients. He certainly wanted to get out from under that heavy legal problem especially the criminal liability part. Moreover he had a younger mentally unstable employee mistress Emily, played by Malin Ackeman, who had her own agenda and wanted to get out from under. She had conjured up documentary proof of Denning’s extensive knowing wrong-doings and figured to cash in on that knowledge.
Enter young “take no prisoners” big time New Orleans law firm lawyer Ben Cahill, played by Josh Duhamel, who just happened to be an old flame of Emily’s and who is the key to Emily getting out from under via a serious class action suit against Denning using her information as the lynchpin. Of course Emily used her obvious feminine wiles in her attempt to get the eager beaver young lawyer to do her bidding-to take on the case. Problem in that romance department was that Ben was married, very married, to Charlotte, a nurse played by Alice Eve and he passed on that part. He did however approach the senior partner, Abrams, played by Al Pacino, who after a lot of hemming and hawing decided to let Ben go ahead with the suit.
Then all hell broke loose. First Emily staged her own kidnapping to grab some dough from Denning. As far as the lawsuit went Ben was a winner after Denning “settled” out of court for a big sum but also was protected from criminal liability as part of the agreement. Then before Ben could even celebrate his victory with Charlotte Emily wound up dead, very dead, from an apparent suicide. Ben found her body and just left it there in her apartment only to have it show up in his apartment and he had to go on the run. Go on the run to find out why he was being framed although he suspected that nefarious Denning was behind the deed. Figured the “deep pockets” guy was looking for further protection against whatever fall-out might come from Emily’s distraught mind.
He would be wrong though. Wrong because the villain of the piece is none other than Abrams his boss who despite public appearances had been Denning’s lawyer for years. Yeah, follow the money, follow it closely. But there are other agendas, other kinds of misconduct, as well. See Charlotte was miffed at the idea that Emily and Ben might be rekindling that old flame and she went to Emily’s apartment to confront her. Had an argument and Emily fell. Charlotte coldly did not help her and staged the fake suicide scene. As for Ben and Charlotte they just moved on with their lives. And so it goes.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In The 1960s North Adamsville Corner Boy Night-The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery
By Allan Jackson
[I mentioned in my last introduction that I would no longer use this precious space to scotch the many rumors that flew around my name after I was “purged” from the leadership of this site. And I won’t but use this reprieve on this series which I was instrumental in creating to make comment about the genesis of the idea in sketch where I feel I have something to add since these first appeared several years ago. I mentioned in the last sketch dated dealing with Frankie Riley’s carnival experience back in the early 1960s that the totally false rumor of my trying to put together a drug deal with some notorious Mexican drug cartel to make some money to get out from under my debts that such a plan would have been stopped in its tracks by the memory of my, our fallen comrade the late Peter Paul Markin. The Scribe as we always called him went off the rails in the mid-1970s when after seeing all his dreams of a newer world evaporate with the evaporation of the 1960s energy and whatever troubles had had coming back to what we Vietnam veterans called the real world and developed a serious cocaine addiction when led him to a fatal decision to try to do some kind of major drug deal down in Sonora, Mexico. All he got for his efforts when the thing went bad was a couple of slugs to the head in some back and a potter’s field grave down there. That and plenty of unanswered questions about what exactly happened which we were warned off of by everybody from the American consulate to some nasty “representative” of some intermediate drug dealers connected with whatever went off down there.
If there was a spirit that animated this long seven hundred plus page series including some seventy some sketches it was the memory, the wild and wooly spirit and demeanor of the Scribe back in the 1950s and 1960s when we in the poorest of the poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville were coming of age in the great rock and roll night which formed us more that we would have ever believed. The Scribe, Peter Paul Markin, a name that I used for years on this site as my on-line moniker was the guru, the guy who guided us through a lot of it. I swear I have never found another guy, gal either for that matter, who combined a truly larcenous heart, some kind of dream newer world coming that he was the herald of around our way, and a sullen bookish guy who under other circumstances would been beaten up by Frankie Riley, hell maybe me too, the minute he tried to bust into our corner boy world with of our fistful of dreams about “boss” cars and willing girls. Frankie took him under his wing and the rest of us followed suit. Yeah, and each and every guy who is still standing all these years later misses the bastard, misses him and brings and unashamed tear to the most hardened heart.
A lot of stuff that the Scribe talked about beyond that seeking the newer world he would drive us crazy about when all we cared about was whether we could get into some girl’s pants was what I now was literary stuff-stuff he learned in books and put his own spin on it, made it make some sense. As in the sketch below it could have been something as simple as the night, must have been a lonesome no money, no car, no date Friday night, when he started going on and on about childhood memory smells. The whole Ida’s Bakery question. And a few years ago as I describe below I could still remember past those freaking dope-etched days, those horrible Vietnam sweats, those lonely Friday nights to my own memories of those childhood smells. That was the Scribe’s influence to a tee. Allan Jackson]
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In memory of Peter Paul Markin, 1946-1976?, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964:
This is the way the late Peter Paul Markin, although he never stood on ceremony and everybody in the corner boy night at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys down near Adamsville Beach called him plain old ordinary vanilla Scribe, would have wanted to put his response to the question of what smell most distinctly came to his mind from the old neighborhoods if he were still around. Many a night, a late night around midnight usually, in the days and weeks after we got out of high school but before we went on to other stuff, maybe some of those nights having had trouble with some girl, either one of us, since we both came from all boy families and didn’t understand girls, or maybe were afraid of them, unlike guys who had sisters, who maybe didn’t understand them either but were around them enough to have figured a few things out about them we would stand holding up the wall in front of Jack Slack’s and talk our talk, talk truth as we saw it although we never really dignified the jive with the word truth. Or maybe dateless some nights like happened a lot more than either of us, hell, any of us if it came right down to it, would admit to (I won’t even discuss the shroud we placed over the truth when talking, big talking, about “making it” when we were lucky to get a freaking kiss on the cheek from a girl half the time) we would talk. Sometimes with several guys around but mainly Markin and me, since we were the closest of the half dozen or ten guys who considered themselves Frankie Riley-led Slack’s corner boys we would talk about lots of things.
Goofy stuff when you think about it but one night I don’t know if it was me or him that came up with the question about what smell did we remember from the old days, the old days being when we were in school, from around the neighborhood but I do remember we both automatically and with just a couple of minutes thought came up with our common choice- Ida’s Bakery. Ida’s over on Sagamore Street, just up the street from the old ball field and adjacent to the Parks and Recreations sheds where the stuff for the summer programs, you know, archery equipment, paints, sports equipment, craft-making stuff, how-to magazines and all were kept during the summer and after that, between seasons. Since both Markin and I when we went to Josiah Adams Elementary up the next block (named after some guy related to guys who ran the town way back when) would each summer participate in the program and as we grew older (and presumably more reliable) were put in charge of the daily storage of those materials during the summer and so got a preternatural whiff of whatever Ida was baking for sale for the next day. So yeah, we knew the smell of Ida’s place. And so too I can “speak” for old Markin just like if he was here today some fifty years later telling you his story himself.
Unfortunately Markin laid down his head in a dusty back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac we never did really find out which with two slugs in his heart and nobody, not even his family, certainly not me and I loved the guy, wanted to go there to claim the body, worse, to start an investigation into what happened that day back in 1976 down Sonora way, that is in Mexico, for fear of being murdered in some back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac ourselves.
See Markin had huge corner boy, “from hunger,” wanting habits back then, going back in the Jack Slack days. Hell I came up with him and had them too. But he also had a nose for drugs, had been among the first in our town as far as I know although I won’t swear to that now since some kids up the Point, some biker guys who always were on the cutting edge of some new kicks may have been doing smoke well before him to do, publicly do right out on Adamsville Common in broad daylight with some old beat cop sitting about two benches away, marijuana in the mid-1960s. That at a time, despite what we had heard was going on in the Boston Common and over in high Harvard Square, when the rest of us were still getting our underage highs from illicit liquor (Southern Comfort, cheap gin, cheaper wine, Ripple, more than a few times, Thunderbird, when we were short on dough, nobody, including our hobo knight in shining armor who “bought” for us as long as he got a bottle for his work, wanted to bother lugging cases of cheapjack beer, say Knickerbocker or Narragansett, out of a liquor store and pass it on to obviously under-aged kids so we all developed a taste for some kind of hard liquor or wine).
Markin did too, liked his white wine. But he was always heading over to Harvard Square, early on sometimes with me but I didn’t really “get” the scene that he was so hopped up about and kind of dropped away when he wanted to go over, so later he would go alone late at night taking the all night Redline subway over, late at night after things had exploded around his house with his mother, or occasionally, his three brother (and very, very rarely his father since he had to work like seven bandits to make ends meet for the grim reaper bill collectors, which they, the ends never did as far as I could tell and from what I knew about such activity from my own house, so he was left out of it except to back up Ma).
One night, one night some guy, Markin said some folk singer, Eric somebody, who made a name for himself around the Square, made a name around his “headquarters,” the Hayes-Bickford just a jump up from the subway entrance where all the night owl wanna-be hipsters, dead ass junkies, stoned out winos, wizened con men and budding poets and songwriters hung out, turned him on to a joint, and he liked it, liked the feeling of how it settled him down he said (after that first hit, as he was trying to look cool, look like he had been doing joints since he was a baby, almost blew him away with the coughing that erupted from inhaling the harsh which he could never figure out (nor could I when my mary jane coughing spurt came) since he, like all of us, was a serious cigarette smoker, practically chain-smoking to while away the dead time and, oh yeah, to look cool to any passing chicks while we were hanging out in front of Jack Slack’s.
Of course that first few puffs stuff meant nothing really, was strictly for smooth-end kicks, and before long he had turned me, Frankie Riley, our corner boy leader, and Sam Lowell, another good guy, on and it was no big deal. And when the time came for us to do our “youth nation,” hippie, Jack Kerouac On The Road treks west the five of us, at one time or another, had grabbed all kinds of different dope, grabbed each new drug in turn like they were the flavor of the month, which they usually were. And nobody worried much about any consequences either since we all had studiously avoid acid in our drug cocktail mix. Until Markin got stuck on cocaine, you know, snow, girl, cousin any of those names you might know that drug by where you live. No, that is not right, exactly right anyway. It wasn’t so much that Markin got stuck on cocaine as that his nose candy problem heightened his real needs, his huge wanting habits, needs that he had been grasping at since his ‘po boy childhood. And so to make some serious dough, and still have something left to “taste” the product as he used to call it when he offered some to me with the obligatory dollar bill as sniffing tool he began some low-level dealing, to friends and acquaintances mainly and then to their friends and acquaintances and on and on.
Markin when he lived the West Coast, I think when he was in Oakland with Moon-Glow (don’t laugh we all had names, aliases, monikers like that back then to bury our crazy pasts, mine was Flash Dash for a while, and also don’t laugh because she had been my girlfriend before I headed back east to go to school after the high tide of the 1960s ebbed out around 1971 or so. And also don’t laugh because Moon-Glow liked to “curl my toes,” Markin’s too, and she did, did just fine), stepped up a notch, started “muling” product back and forth from Mexico for one of the early cartels. He didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to know much but for a while he was sending plane tickets for me to come visit him out there.
Quite a step up from our hitchhike in all weathers heading west days. And of course join him in imbibing some product testing. That went on for a while, a couple of years, the last year or so I didn’t see him, didn’t go west because I was starting a job. Then one day I got a letter in the mail from him all Markiny about his future plans, about how he was going to finally make a “big score,” with a case full of product that he had brought up norte (he always said Norte like he was some hermano or something rather than just paid labor, cheap paid labor probably, and was too much the gringo to ever get far in the cartel when the deal went down). Maybe he sensed that and that ate at him with so much dough to be made, so much easy dough. Yeah, easy dough with those two slugs that Spanish Johnny, a guy who knew Markin in the Oakland days, had heard about when he was muling and passed on the information to us. RIP-Markin
No RIP though for the old days, the old smells that I started telling you about before I got waylaid in my head about the fate of my missed old corner boy comrade poor old Markin. Here’s how he, we, no he, let’s let him take a bow on this one, figured it out one night when the world was new, when our dreams were still fresh:
“There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Tonight though I am in thrall to smells, if one can be in thrall to smells and when I get a chance I will ask one of the guys about whether that is possible. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while before, passed a neighborhood bakery on the St. Brendan Street in a Boston neighborhood, a Boston Irish neighborhood to be clear, that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house like a lot of such operations by single old maid, widowed, divorced or abandoned women left for whatever reason to their own devises trying to make a living baking, sewing, tailoring, maybe running a beauty parlor, small change but enough to keep the wolves from the door, with living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.
Of course one could not dismiss, or could dismiss at one’s peril just ask Frank, that invigorating smell of the salt-crusted air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up hitting us in front of Jack Slack’s bowling lanes and making us long to walk that few blocks to the beach with some honey who would help us pass the night. A wind too once you took girls out of the picture, although you did that at your peril as well, that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at the far end of North Adamsville Beach, near the fetid swamps and mephitic marshes in the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. [Sorry I put those smelly adjectives in, Markin would have cringed.] Or evade the funky smell [A Markin word.] of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts with their broods of children in tow.
Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously and the space between the yacht clubs was the only “cool” place to hang with some honey. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo “submarine race” expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.
Or the smell sound of the ocean floor at twilight (or dawn, if you got lucky) on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora or turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell you guys, the crowd that will know what I am talking about, to speak about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.
That’s good enough for the Markin part, the close up memory part. Here I am for the distant memory part:
You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set one foot in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you had grown up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (before or beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young Field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.
Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as in North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her to when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.
Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by Markin’s reference to that sour-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics like my family going back to the “famine ships,” and probably before, were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, but fish, really tuna fish had that on Ida’s oatmeal bread. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a tuna fish desecration of holy bread. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s Grape, also of course) on oatmeal and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.
And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I have drawn blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredients she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able now but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back then that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor.
The So-Called Unmasking Of The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IX-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Dressed To Kill” (1946)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Seth Garth
Sherlock Holmes: Dressed To Kill, starring Basil Rathbone which is the well-known screen name for the actor who played Holmes in this British series, Nigel Bruce who did have his medical license suspended for a time for prescribing too many opium-laced drugs but who was given a suspended sentence and never saw the inside of Dartmoor Prison unlike the congenital thief in this film, 1946
[I have mentioned more times than I care to remember that not everybody who starts out in the film review, film criticism if you have an academic bent and want to upscale the profession, makes it to the end. The profession eats its own, has more treachery per square inch that the denizens of academy with all their conferences and learned papers and incessant back-biting ever thought off. A professor, let’s say a professor of cinematic studies, would last about two minutes in this dog eat dog business. That is why a lot of them spent their two minutes and then headed fast to the groves of academia.
Like I was telling somebody recently in dealing with a bunch of fellow reviewers who work at this publication it was a lot easier in the old days when the studios would pass out their so-called press releases. You just rewrote from there or if you were drunk and hungover just signed your name on top either way mercifully you did not have to actually watch the stinker. Which many of them, too many to count, were. (My estimate of the ratio is that about one in ten even rates a review and that might be too high of late.)
All this intro talk to say that something has happened to Bruce Conan, or whatever name he was using in this Sherlock Holmes debunking mania he got himself caught up in. The last review of his I had seen maybe Part Four (I think I saw that his last one was Part VIII Greg Green supplied the Part IX in the title so assume I was correct) he was using the name Danny Moriarty so it could have been any name-except his real one which I will not divulge out of fear for his safety or his wrath if he resurfaces anytime soon.
When I say the vague “something has happened to Bruce” that is exactly what I mean. He did not show up at the Ed Board meeting last week to turn in and have his latest review worked over. Greg Green asked me to pinch-hit for him. All I know is that Bruce was setting himself a very tall task trying to bump old Sherlock Holmes down a peg or two. How many times have I, you, we uttered “elementary, my dear Watson” to some rattled-brained holy goof who was clueless about everything including which was his or her left hand. Yes, a tough task indeed. I think the job might very well have driven him over the edge, he was certainly kind of paranoid when I would ask him how his crusade was going. Didn’t want to talk about it much and although he said he trusted me what about the “others” they could be working for those “damn Irregulars” (his term).
Before the reader goes off the deep end along with Bruce in conspiracy theory speculation I very much doubt that the crew known as the Baker Street Irregulars according to him but who I found out after a little investigation is actually called the Sherlock Holmes Preservation Society (SHPS) had anything to do with his disappearance. The SHPS is NOT a group of nefarious criminals, pimps, whores and dope fiends but well-respected Holmes (and Conan Doyle) scholars. They are very perturbed I guess would be the word that Bruce has denigrated Holmes and Watson as bullshit amateur parlor pink private detectives. Incensed that he had “outed” them from their homosexual closets, something that a spokesperson told me the Society was well aware of but was keeping private out of respect for their respective relatives and for the hard fact that it was irrelevant to their adventures in sleuthing. But that spokesperson also assured me that they would take care of Bruce in the public prints not in some dark alley like they were agents of the dastardly Professor Moriarty or like in the old days a group of Stalinist thugs. I believe them because I think now that I am armed with that information poor Bruce got caught up in something that was too big for him, something that drove him over the edge.
That is where the treachery of the business comes into play. As some readers may know there was a big internal power struggle inside this publication last year which resulted in a dramatic change of site leadership and the addition of a watchdog Editorial Board. The new leadership wanted livelier coverage of, well, of everything from politics, culture to reviews and that after the rather lax atmosphere toward the end of the last regime’s time meant to get a bit more edgy. One form of that edgy feel I am very familiar with and may be the reason that I was assigned this review is a continuing “battle” between two reviewers here over who is more representative of the 007 James Bond cinematic character Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan. Another manifestation is old time reviewer Sam Lowell’s reported change of heart about the virtues of Bette Davis as an actress from Oscar-worthy to nothing but a repetitive same old untamed shrew and hack actress.
I think fellow film reviewer Laura Perkins was on to something when she mentioned in that Bette Davis business that the “boys” were trying to one up each other like in the old neighborhood where some of them grew up (even if not the same neighborhood the same ethos, mostly working class). What I called, not her, please, a “pissing contest.” Bruce a less stable character than the ones that I have mentioned got himself up in lather as well when he decided to pick on poor misbegotten Holmes. That unseen pressure and the yardstick that he used to declare who was a real private detective from the 1930s and 1940s got him in too deep. His standard, a good one but hardly universal, for a private eye were guys like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe two tough as nails guys who weren’t afraid to throw a punch, take a slug, take a few whiskey shots from the bottom of a hacked up desk drawer and bed an off-hand dangerous femme before hand-delivering the villains personally to the clueless public coppers. Of course the bloodless Holmes and the hapless and laughable Watson pale by comparison but that was hardly after all this time a reason to go on the warpath.
A few examples should close this introduction out until we find out the fate of insecure and frantic Mr. Conan. He was on fairly safe grounds when he left his “critique” of Sherlock (whom he called Lanny Lamont after a while which I will get to in a minute) when he noted that the guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a gun, let the bodies pile up sky high before his vaunted deductive reasoning kicked in and when he let the public coppers grab the bad guys instead of handling the task himself. (Bruce went crazy and maybe rightly so when Holmes let some innocent fourteen year old girl get wasted for no reason except his own sloth.) Where he went off the track was when he started “investigating” Holmes’ background, started looking at records and such which led him into that Baker Street Irregular trap.
First off was the not really surprising fact that Sherlock Holmes was not his real name, nor was Basil Rathbone a name he used on occasion to keep the bad guys guessing. Bruce claimed to uncover proof that the guy’s real name was Lanny Lamont who was born in the slums of the West End of London of an unwed mother who shunted him off to a charity orphanage. This is where Bruce really started breaking down. The first crack may have been his “discovery” that nobody named Holmes had ever lived on Baker Street in London. That suspicious fact led him astray though. See everybody in London knew that Holmes was an alias but also knew that his real name was Lytton Strachey, a gentleman born and bred. Bruce was so crazed to “get the goods” that he traced the trail the wrong way working on that Rathbone lead. Tough break.
The worst thing though and here I agree with the Sherlock Holmes Preservation Society’s take on the matter even if as was obvious to even the most naïve Holmes and Watson were more than just roommates, were homosexual lovers, today gay, in a time that was socially and legally dangerous what of it. Pulling this rather cold and unattractive pair out of the closet just because they didn’t take a run as Sam did with Brigid or Phillip with some thumb-sucking Candy and a few other dishes in their professional work. Strangely as well since he admitted openly that if this was the situation today nobody, including him, would think anything of it. Would yawn it off. I know Greg Green and a couple of others were concerned with the allegations and worried about law suits from their respective estates. Worried too about image having taken early stands in favor of gay rights and self-sex marriage. Bruce can sort it out if and when he surfaces. For now here is a straight review of Sherlock Holmes: Dress to Kill without conspiracy theories and Irregular goblins.
Willie Sutton the legendary bank robbery cowboy angel rides was often quoted as having been asked by the coppers after he was caught why he robbed banks. Easy answer when you think about it-that’s where the money is, or was before all sorts of things made bank robbing kind of old-fashioned in the brave new world of white collar fingerless crime. That same premise at one remove is where this Holmes adventure leads. Why steal bank note plates from the Chancellery of the Exchequer (Treasury in America)-that’s how to make the money. That is the logic behind a congenital thief in Dartmoor prison. (Remember neither Holmes nor Watson spent time there unlike Bruce’s contention that that was where the pair met and became lovers and partners in crime solutions.)
That thief got them out of the jail via some three music boxes-not a bad decoy but the damn things wound up in an auction and sold to highest bidders. The race then becomes between the clueless Sherlock and the brains of the criminal enterprise that wants those boxes to unlock a secret code necessary to go into the printing business in a very profitable way with very low overhead and that criminal . Of course the idea that the villain, the brains of the operation, is a female would have had Bruce apoplectic, would have had him beside himself when Sherlock didn’t make play number one for her before he sent her over. Like I said a private detective’s love life, of whatever preference, is not germane to the solution of the crimes. Now this Hilda who ran the operation, played by Patricia Morison really was a 1940s-style femme and Sam and Phillip would have a field day with her but she still had to go down, had to take the big step for her actions, including a fistful of murders along the. Sherlock was able to snag the last music box and keep the Bank of England from going under in a bale of counterfeit pounds. The only knock I have on Sherlock’s efforts is that as Bruce pointed out he lets the bodies pile up before he can figure stuff out. That and why the hell he has a holy goof like Watson dragging him down.
Huffington Post: “This isn’t just a fight between the CIW and a fast food restaurant. This is at the very heart of what corporate responsibility looks like in the 21st century…”
The last two weeks have gone by in a blur. Between recovering from the exhausting, five-day Freedom Fast and navigating the flood of media that ensued when the Wendy’s Boycott unexpectedly went viral last week (thanks to Wendy’s outrageous claim that farmworker women were “exploiting” the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements), we’ve hardly had a chance to catch our breath here at CIW headquarters since returning from New York City. Among the many things lost in the post-fast flood: the Freedom Fast Media Round-Up, our effort to capture and convey the full breadth of coverage of the five-day protest at the heart of the country’s largest city. And the coverage was indeed impressive. With stories in major national outlets like Newsweek, reports in New York’s own local powerhouses like the Village Voice, and even a video recap of the huge culminating march in Mexico’s leading progressive news outlet, La Jornada (below), the farmworkers’ week of action in New York made national and international headlines:
Today, we bring you some of the highlights from that coverage, reflecting the three principal themes that defined the unique action: the deeply troubling stories of sexual violence faced by farmworker women in the fields; the powerful and growing movement for change spearheaded by the CIW through the Fair Food Program and the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model; and the increasingly desperate public relations strategies deployed by Wendy’s when forced to defend its unconscionable decision to stand against justice and dignity for farmworker women...
Inside Iran: the Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic
Thursday, April 5, 7-9pm
University Lutheran Church
66 Winthrop St, Cambridge (Two Blocks from Harvard Square)
On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 9:38 AM, Dan Higgins <deh43@comcast.net> wrote:
Medea Benjamin http://masspeaceaction.org/event/medea-benjamin-inside-iran-the-real-history-and-politics-of-the-islamic-republic/ On April 2, 2018 at 9:14 AM Nate Goldshlag <nateg@pobox.com> wrote: Where and when? Nate Sent from my iPhone On Apr 2, 2018, at 9:01 AM, VFP Smedley <vfpsmedley@gmail.…
The First Lady Of The Mountains-The Late Hazel Dickens
By Si Landon
The Hills Of Home, Hazel Dickens
Jack Callahan caught the folk minute bug when he was in high school in his hometown of Carver after having heard some songs that held him in thrall over a fugitive radio station from Rhode Island, a college station, that every Sunday night would have a two hour show called Bill Marlowe’s Hootenanny where he, Bill Marlowe, would play all kinds of songs from the latest protest songs of the likes of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs to old country blues to Western Swing and everything in between, a fast paced glance at a very different part of the American songbook. What got to Jack, what caused him to pay attention though was the mountain music that he heard, things like East Virginia, Pretty Polly and his favorite the mournful Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies sung by Linda Lane, a forgotten treasure of a singer from deep in the Tennessee hills now.
Now this adhesion to folk minute was quite by accident since most Sunday nights if Jack was listening to anything it was Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of WNAC in Chicago. Usually in those days something had gone awry or some ghost was in the air in radio wave land and he had caught that station and then the Rhode Island Station, WAFJ. Although he was becoming something of an aficionado of blues just then and would become something of a folk one as well his real love then was the be-bop classic rock and roll music that was a signature genre for his generation. He never lost the love of rock or the blues but he never went all out to discover material he had never heard before like he did with mountain music.
One summer while he was in college he had decided rather than a summer job he would head south down to mountain country, you know West Virginia, Kentucky maybe rural Virginia and see if he could find some tunes that he had not heard before. (That “no job” decision did not set well with his parents, his poor parents who both worked in the local industry, the cranberry bogs, when that staple was the town’s claim to fame so he could go to college but that is a story for another day). Now it was not strange in those days for all kinds of people, mostly college students with time on their hands, archivists, or musicians to travel down to the southern mountains and elsewhere in search of authentic American music by the “folk.” Not professional archivists like Pete Seeger’s father, Charles, or the Lomaxes, father and son, or inspired amateurs like Harry Smith but young people looking for roots which was a great occupation of the generation that came of age in the 1960s in reaction to their parents’ generation trying might and main to favor vanilla Americanization.
A lot of the young, and that included Jack who read the book in high school, had first been tuned into Appalachia through Michael Harrington’s The Other America which prompted them to volunteer to help their poor brethren. Jack was somewhat animated by that desire to help but his real purpose was to be a gadfly who found some hidden trove of music that others had not found. In this he was following the trail started by the Lally Brothers, a local Boston folk group who were dedicated to the preservation of mountain music and having headed south had “discovered” Buell Hobart, the lonesome fiddler and had brought him north to do shows and be acclaimed as the “max daddy” of the mountain world.
Jack had spent a couple of weeks down in Kentucky after having spent a couple of weeks striking out West Virginia where, for a fact, most of the rural folk were either rude or suspicious of his motives when he inquired about the whereabouts of some old-time red barn musicians he had read about from outside Wheeling. Then one night, one Saturday night he found himself in Prestonsburg, down in southeast Kentucky, down in coal country where the hills and hollows extent for miles around. He had been brought to that town by a girl, a cousin of Sam Lowell’s on his father’s side from back home in Carver. Sam had told Jack to look her up if he ever got to Hazard where his father had hailed from and had lived before World War had driven him to the Marines and later to love of his mother from Carver.
This girl, a pretty girl to boot, Nadine, had told Jack that mountain music had been played out in Hazard, that whatever legends about the coal wars and about the music had long gone from that town. She suggested that he accompany her to an old-fashioned red barn dance that was being held weekly at Fred Brown’s place on Saturday nights on the outskirts of Prestonsburg if he wanted to hear the “real deal” (Jack’s term). That night when they arrived and paid their dollar apiece jack saw a motley crew of fiddlers, guitar player, and a few what Nadine called mountain harps.
The first half of the dance went uneventfully enough but the second half, after he had been fortified with what the locals called white lightning, illegal whiskey, this woman came up to the stage after being introduced although he did not for some reason, maybe the sting of the booze and began to play the mountain harp and sing a song, The Hills of Home, that had everybody mesmerized. She sang a few other songs that night and Jack marveled at her style. When Jack asked Nadine who that woman singer was she told him a gal from “around those parts” (her expression) Hazel Dickens and wasn’t she good. When Jack got back to Boston a few weeks later (after spending more time with friendly Nadine that searching for mountain music he contacted the Lally Brothers to see if they could coax her north for college audiences to hear. And that was Jack Callahan’s small contribution to keeping the mountain music tradition alive. For her part Hazel Dickens did before she dies several years ago did much, much more to keep the flame burning.
