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
When It Rains Pennies
From Heaven-Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly’s “Singing In The
Rain” (1954)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
Singing in the Rain,
Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly, 1954
An old associate of mine
in this wacky journalism business once told me that when writers, meaning in
that case reporters but here commentators and reviewers, start airing “their
dirty linen in public” that usually means some problems are congealing up the
ladder, up in the administrative offices, when decisions such as assignments
and plum pieces get decided. That old associate also pointed out that when
things get dicey it is much easier to put one administrator under the bus than
fire a whole raft of writers who make the whole thing hum. We shall see, we
shall see. Here is my gripe. I seem to be getting a whole raft of these silly
feel good musicals, song and dance ones a specialty. I just got this one, this
silly Singing In The Rain, which is
so corny it could not possibly be made today and not just because song and
dance films are passe, quite passe, but because would try the patience of an
eight year old if an eight year could be wrestled into the theater something in
my day which could be done since there was nowhere else to put us if Grandma
had other business to attend to and we were force fed this stuff which we
couldn’t understand then, or now. These musicals other than endless songs and
dances at the drop of a hat, and maybe you didn’t even need to do that with a
song bursting at the seams or some guy dancing up the walls to show his
prowess. With that in mind this thing is a loser despite its future
post-release iconic status which must have been led by those poor wrestled kids
brainwashed into sitting through this turkey. One of these days I will kindly
refuse to swallow yet more pride and say no.
For now though as Laura
Perkins, who got the saying from Sam Lowell who used to be the head honcho in
the film room here, and who said it was okay for me to use when I mentioned
that I would not because she had it “patented” “here is the skinny.” Don, Gene
Kelly’s role, is former vaudeville duo with Cosmo, played by Donald O’Connor,
who have played every venue without coming up roses. Hard times indeed in the
1920s when vaudeville was losing it grip to surging Hollywood. They, mainly
Don, once they hit Tinsel Town tried everything to get into the movie business
from go-for to stuntman. Finally he got and finally he got his
Big chance with a big
star, Lina, who made all the men weep for her hand-in the “silent film” era.
Don made it big on Lina’s say so and both rode the stardom trail until the
advent of “talkies.”
That is where Lina had a
little problem. Her low-rent Brooklyn-Bronx-Yonkers someplace in urban New York
anyway accent and manner were zero when The
Jazz Singer ruined many a lucrative career by making actors more than mimes
and forced then to talk the King’s English. Don and Lina had been touted by the
studios and egged on by Lina as a Hollywood star pair but that was strictly for
show. Strictly PR stuff but Don had Lina tagged as from nowhere in his dream
girl nights. What did get Don in a dither was meeting Kathy, played by all-American
“girl next door” Debbie Reynolds who was star-struck and stage-struck but before
some big break was getting by as a chorus girl showing her gams for the
nightclub set. Strictly second-rate stuff but better than being beaten back to
Boise or Omaha on some one-way Greyhound bus. For a while as is almost standard
in these older films she gives Don the big chill but only for a while, made him
burn like a firecracker but eventually she defrosted after he rushed her.
The first time I heard that Seth Garth was going to preempt political aficionado Frank Jackman and do the 200th anniversary of the birth of Communist Manifesto writer Karl Marx was upon publication under the former’s name. Which pisses me off since I have been squeezed out apparently of getting any assignments around the incredible number of 1968 events which are having their 50th anniversary commemorations. (The Marx 200th birthday anniversary thing intersects 1968 via a then growing interest in his theories among students and young radicals once the old tactics and strategy around Democratic Party takeover politics went asunder.) Upon privately complaining to site manager Greg Green he gave me this assignment to make a few comments of the 50th anniversary of the musical Hair, on Broadway at least although it had been off-Broadway the year before, one of the few musicals that could have possibly captured some of the pathos, bathos and essence of what was going on in all its messy splendor in that year.
Hair represented that trend away from goodie two shoes formula entertainment like song and dance musicals and thinly pitched family dramatic productions. That represented what the audiences of the 1950s were interested in and still had, have a place in the Great White Way scheme of things. But the unacknowledged (at the time not so now once the cultural critics took their long look at the subject) effect of the vanguard work that was being done in little theaters for little money for little audiences finally took root. Artaud’s Theater of the Absurd, Brecht’s didactic efforts and the like finally found a more receptive general audience. So Hair in 1967-68 did not raise as many hairs (no pun intended among the theater going public as it might have earlier in the decade when it would have been treated as an end of run “beat” saga. That is no to say the subject of intense profanity, vivid sexual reference, an interracial cast and endless paeans to drugs of all sorts didn’t raise hackles, didn’t have members of the audience walking out shaking their heads but as word got out that this was a generational sage for the agents of the Age of Aquarius the thing couldn’t be stopped. And as one voice in the above-mentioned link noted she was still playing in, albeit in Vermont one of the last real refuses of the survivors of the Generation of ’68 along with the Oregon woods and maybe Seattle now that nobody with any left-over hippie aspiration could afford to live in any part of San Francisco except maybe the streets, is still being produced someplace in this wild wicked old land.
In a funny sort of way the saga of Hair almost accidently traced the line of the 1960s explosion but more importantly in one place stamped “youth nation” as a tribal village like it had never been before, although you could have seen around the edges of it all the way back to the wild boys of the West Coast in their souped up jalopies and hot rods with a “don’t give fuck” about the golden age of American prosperity aborning, the bad boys offspring of the Okie migration that said the more menacing “fuck you up” of the outlaw bikers with their big “hogs” and larcenous hearts, the alienated teen angst misunderstood “please don’t fuck with my head” rebel without a cause types who cooled on James Dean, and the “fuck, fuck, fuck” beat boys talking a blue streak about junkies, negro streets and jailbreaks. And you wonder why youth nation jumped right in the middle of all this when the social situation ran up against racial segregation, sexual uptightness, the fucking war in Vietnam which formed on the corners that Hair hung its hat on since every single guy, and it was all guys then, from the most gung ho Green Beret film watcher to the most ardent draft resister had to deal with the draft and the generational question-go or resist-and the weird queer drag queen fag baiting and women’s liberation.
That draft issue, that each and every guy and by extension their lovers, caught between a rock and a hard place was no joke. Was centrally why Hair spoke to a generation struggling with that very issue-to go or resist- a question that the parents’ generation had almost no conception of since they had fought, or waited anxiously at the door, in their “good war” and could not understand their kids and their idea that maybe going off to kill people, poor people, who they had no quarrel had to be thought about. Claude, a lead character had plenty to think about doped up to the gills or not. The other stuff about race, sex, dope, the signs of the Zodiac, karma, mediation, oneness with the world flow from that central concern.
It wasn’t all beautiful by any means and the threads that hung “youth nation” together came asunder readily enough once the counter-offensive by the night-takers began in earnest (and as Seth Garth and Frank Jackman have said we have been fighting a forty plus year cultural rearguard action against the bastards ever since with no letup in sight). Even in the halcyon days of the Summer of Love in 1967 which is the framework a lot of us had from my town under the guidance of the one and only Scribe, the late Peter Paul Markin who in the end fell under the bus himself, there was plenty of bad stuff going with people ripping people off for drugs, food, anything that was not nailed down. But that was a side issue like many things when something new is trying to breakout and not everybody is as pure as the driven snow and who knows who will show up.
The Captain Crunch-led converted yellow brick road bus we ran up and down the Pacific Coast Highway on picking up vagrant travelers and the wanderers of the youth nation world mostly were seekers, ranters, good people to have on your side when you are trying create a newer world out of what late capitalism and its social norms had left us to pick up the pieces with.
Like I said not everybody, not the Scribe in the end, could go the distance and once that critical mass which sustained the youth nation lost it love of plainsong, of seeking for the mysteries of the universe in a million different ways from tarot cards to LSD and everything in between, and the sense that we could win the drift went against us as people headed back to the confines of late capitalist bourgeois society. Headed back from that youthful detour, except of course those small enclaves mentioned earlier still existing in places like Vermont and Oregon if you ever get up that way. Everybody has some timeline for when the whole thing ebbed, after the hellish 1968 year of events being the prime candidate but that was/is for academics to ferret out. As Frank Jackman has said repeating what the Scribe said before he fell off the world-Wasn’t that a time, yeah, wasn’t that a time.
"America, Where Are You Now...."- Steppenwolf’s The Monster-Take Three
A YouTube Film Clip Of Steppenwolf Performing Monster. Ah,
Those Were The Days
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Steppenwolf: 16 Greatest Hits, Steppenwolf, Digital Sound, 1990
America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster
Chorus Line From The Monster
The heavy rock band Steppenwolf (maybe acid rock is better signifying that the band started in the American dream gone awry 1960s night when the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Byrds and groups like the transformed Beatles and Stones held forth, rather than in the ebb-tide 1970s when the harder sounds of groups like Aerosmith and Black Sabbath were needed to drown out the fact that we were in decisive retreat), one of many that was thrown up by the musical counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay.
That musical counter-culture not only put a premium on band-written materials, as against the old Tin Pan Alley somebody wrote the lyrics, somebody else sang the song division before Bob Dylan and the Beatles made singer-songwriters fashionable) but also was a serious reaction to the vanilla-ization of rock and popular music in the earlier part of the decade that drove many of us from the AM radio dials and into “exotic” stuff like electric blues from Chicago with mad monks Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf jumping (country too from whence they all came in the great World War II to the factories migration leaving the old-timers like Son House, Skip James,John Hurt back in the woods to carry on that tradition, come to think of it) and the various strands of folk music from hard rain falling, times are changing, blowing in the wind protest fuss to rediscovery of old time traditional music from the mountains (think the original Carters) to the hollows with Hobart Smith and Buell Kazee.
Some bands played, consciously played, to the “drop out” notion popular at the times. “Drop out” of rat-race bourgeois society and it money imperative, its “white picket fence with little white house attached” visions. That the place where many of the young, the post-World War II baby-boomer young, now sadly older, had grown up and were in the process of repudiating for a grander vision of the world, the “world turned upside down” as an old time British folk tune had it (and reflecting an earlier turned upside down world around the 17th century English revolution. Drop out and create a niche somewhere (a commune maybe out away from the rat-race places which did spring up in the likes of Taos, Oregon, and the hills of old Vermont which if you care to see what happened to that old vision once the seekers got older you can go to and witness first hand these days but take your heart medicine along cause it ain’t pretty), so some physical somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music reflected that disenchantment.
That mental somewhere involved liberal use of drugs to induce, well, who knows what it induced but it felt like a new state of consciousness so make of that what you. The drugs used, in retrospect, to make you less “uptight” not a bad thing then, or today. The whole underlying premise though whether well thought out or not was that music, the music of the shamans of the youth tribe, mimicking recently learned Native American traditions was the revolution. An idea that for a short while before all hell broke loose with the criminal antics of Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon, all hell broke loose with Tet 1968, with May 1968, with Chicago 1968, with the “days of rage,” with Altamont and with a hundred other lesser downers I subscribed to (hence the expression “generation of ’68” to signify that portion of youth always a minority that took the plunge to the “newer world.” That before those events and a draft notice made me get “religion” on the need for “in-their-face” political struggle. And every other young man and not a few young women have to decide to cooperate or seek that second road.
Musically much of that stuff was ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely YouTube cyberspace). Yeah, Neal Young, the Airplane, the Doors, the Byrds still sound good but a lot of it is wha-wha music now you know Ten Years After, a lot of Rod Stewart, even the acid-etched albums by the Beatles and Stones, it is no wonder that the latter do not have any tunes from Their Satanic Majesties on their playlists).[CL1] Others, flash pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us. That music too, except for gems like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely ensconced in vast cyberspace.
Steppenwolf was different, was political from the get-go taking on the deadliness of bourgeois culture, worse the chewing up of their young in unwinnable wars with no apologies or second thoughts, the pusher man, the draft resister and lots of other subjects (and a few traditional songs too about the love that got away, things like that which hadn’t, hasn’t change much whatever the new vision and dreams). Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. (See below for some that do). Not all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every song is written with some current audience in mind, and notions of immortality as the fate of most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have acknowledged, or worried about. But know this- when you think today about trying to escape from the rat-race of daily living then you have an enduring anthem Born To Be Wild that still stirs the young (and not so young). If Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.
And if you needed (or need) a quick history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly still is as we seek to finish up the endless Afghan wars and the war signals for deep intervention into the Syria civil war or another war in Iraq get louder, or both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title "The Monster" (the chorus which I have posted above and lyrics below) said it all.
Then there were songs like The Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and moving on with their lives and others then more topical songs like Draft Resister to fill out their playlist. The group did not have the staying power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately, what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard political edge together give a listen to the group sometime.
Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom
(Monster)
Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope
Like good Christians, some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches
But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man
But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
The blue and grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war over
They stuffed it just like a hog
And though the past has it's share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey
(Suicide)
The spirit was freedom and justice
And it's keepers seem generous and kind
It's leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won't pay it no mind
'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what they've been told
It Wasn’t Always The Trail Of Tears That Told The Tale-Or The Cigar Store Indian Either-The Art Of T.C. Cannon At The Peabody-Essex Museum
By Frank Jackman
Every red-blooded kid, boy kid anyway and don’t ask me about girl kids because frankly I couldn’t tell you since we were not on speaking terms-then- back in the day, back in the golden age of television longed to fight the “injuns.” Fight the “injuns” depicted on one thousand television screens and the unworthy opponent of the “avenging angel” white man. Except for maybe Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick and philosophical brethren and even he was suspect when the actually fighting began ad he might return to the well-known savagery his race was known for. Of course those were simpler days, so-called, when at least in America, at least among the knowledgeable everything thing was black and white (beyond the television set as well). The Americans were the good guys against the red hordes that were ready to descend on Western Civilization and make us their robotic slaves and the good guys in the ubiquitous Westerns that sated our reading hours, our evening T.V fare and our Saturday afternoon double feature matinee imaginations wore white hats and the bad guys black. And to quote a term of the time if only metaphorically from Zane Grey or Louis Lamour “the only good injun was a dead one.”
That is quite a psychic barrier to overcome, no question if you were not an Indian, what now are more familiarly called Native Americans or better indigenous peoples since that term has a too anthropomorphic look on the page. (Although as late as the 1970s when many identity groups began to assert their identities the most famous name from such struggles led-by still unjustly imprisoned Leonard Peltier after the shoot-out at Wounded Knee was the American Indian Movement, AIM.) So delving into the book, the real history of the West book (neglecting the very real native presence right at the Eastern door forgetting that this is all sacred land if not to the white intruder then to those who were here already) and not some dime store novels the ragings of the white man for the land, for the water, for the destruction of the many cultural gradients that have made up the in native experience we, some of us anyway, began to see some serious justice in those cries from the trail of tears. Began to admire those warrior-kings, those ghost-dancers mourning the lost night and began to create a different look, the proud warrior look from some deep place in the imagination.
Then along came an artist, one T.C. Cannon, a gringo name, but deepest die Native American who did not give a flying fuck about what image the white man had of the “injun.” Did not care whether the white man thought he was a cigar store Indian on some dusty road to the Petrified Forest or thought Sitting Bull was right or thought that Ira Hayes got another raw deal after all. Didn’t care. He was making art, too short a lifespan making art killed in the inevitable car accident before his time, for his people to look at, for his people to respond to, for the sake of the song, for ten thousand years of warrior-kings. (Like Ira Hayes another warrior from out West famed at Iwo Jima he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Served like a disproportionate number of young Native American in all this country’s war). Painted them, beautiful, sad, depressed, silly, dandified, every which way, warts and all. And now we whom he did not paint for, whom he did not care whether we liked his art or not can appreciate what he had wrought at the Peabody-Essex.
Next Monday, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will launch a season of nonviolent moral fusion direct action in Massachusetts, and we need you to join us. In communities across America—black, white, brown and Native—we have built a Poor People’s Campaign to become what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
By engaging in highly publicized, nonviolent moral fusion direct action, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will force a serious national examination of the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative.
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Thank you for supporting an apology to the Iranian people. We will publicize the letter on social media and inside Iranian publications. We commit ourselves to doing everything we can to stop the our government from dragging us into another disastrous war. Please forward this email on to others who may want to sign:
Here's the full petition:
An apology to the people of Iran
Open Letter to the People of Iran from the American People
Dear Friends,
We, the undersigned, apologize for Donald Trump’s reckless, baseless, and dangerous decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement and we pledge to do everything we can to reverse that decision.
We are ashamed that our government has broken an agreement that was already signed not just by the United States and Iran, but also by France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China, and then approved by the entire UN Security Council in a unanimous vote. We are ashamed that our government has broken a deal that was working, a deal with which Iran was complying, a deal that was making our entire world safer and could have moved our nations closer towards the path of friendship.
Unlike our president, we believe that a deal is a deal. Unlike our president, we want to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East, not escalate them. Unlike our president, we want our nation’s resources to be dedicated to enriching people’s lives, not enriching the weapons makers. Unlike our president, we want to live in peace and harmony with the people of Iran.
We understand that our nation already has a dreadful history of meddling in the internal affairs of your country. The 1953 coup that overthrew your democratically elected government was unconscionable. So was US support for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran in 1980, including selling him material for making chemical weapons that were used against you. The 1988 shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers and crew, was unconscionable. So, too, are the decades of covert actions to overthrow your government and the decades of sanctions that have brought such needless suffering to ordinary Iranians.
We understand that the US government has no business interfering in your internal affairs or in the Middle East in general. We should not be selling weapons to nations guilty of gross human rights violations or sending our military to fight in faraway lands. With all the flaws in our own society--from massive inequality and racism to a political system corrupted by monetary influences--we should clean up our own house instead of telling others how to govern themselves.
We will do everything in our power to stop Donald Trump from strangling your economy and taking us to war with you. We will ask the UN to sanction the United States for violating the nuclear agreement. We will urge the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese to keep the deal alive and increase their trade relations. And we will work to rid ourselves of this unscrupulous president and replace him with someone who is trustworthy, moral, and committed to diplomacy.
Please accept our hand in friendship. May the peacemakers prevail over those who sow hatred and discord.
This email was sent to dstuart698@aol.com. To stop receiving updates on this page, unsubscribe here. CODEPINK · 2010 Linden Ave, Venice, CA 90291, United States
This Monday, May 14, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will launch a season of nonviolent moral fusion direct action in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts Peace Action needs you to join us there.
In communities across America—black, white, brown and Native—poor people, people of faith, and their supporters have built a Poor People’s Campaign to become what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
By engaging in highly publicized, nonviolent moral fusion direct action, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will force a serious national examination of the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and our distorted moral narrative.
Monday marks the opening of 40 days of moral direct action in Boston and across the United States. Stay tuned for details of actions focusing on racism and immigration May 21; the war economy, militarism, and gun violence May 28-29; health of the planet and of the people June 4; economic injustice June 11; and the need for a new moral narrative on June 23, when we will travel to Washington.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, co-coordinator of the Poor People's Campaign, spoke out forcefully on the necessity of moral resistance in the face of militarism in his sermon last Sunday. Click here to watch this important presentation.
