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
People being represented by anti-choice Democrats deserve competitive primaries without the DCCC putting its thumb on the scale of democracy. Having a (D) next to your name does nothing to protect the rights of women whose constitutional right to an abortion is under attack.
Last month, Our Revolution Illinois hand-delivered tens of thousands of your signatures directly to Rep. Cheri Bustos in Chicago to protest the DCCC Blacklist. She promised us a follow-up meeting to discuss reforming this undemocratic policy which favors incumbents over progressive challengers.
Clem Balanoff (left), leader of Our Revolution Chicago, with Richard Rodriguez, National Board Member of Our Revolution delivering petitions to DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos in Chicago.
But here’s the problem – Rep. Bustos just backed out the meeting with Our Revolution leaders. Not only did she cancel our meeting, Rep. Bustos also announced that the DCCC was going to continue to throw big dollar fundraisers for incumbents like Rep. Dan Lipinski, an anti-choice member of Congress who opposes Medicare for All – even though there are real progressive champions running to oppose him.
This week, after we announced we were going to protest the fundraiser, Bustos withdrew her involvement – this is a victory, but crucially, she maintained that the DCCC could offer Lipinski financial support to defeat primary challengers.
Living in a shipbuilding state, I’ve often wondered if Bath Iron Works could build one less warship and use the money to feed Maine’s hungry families. Turns out it would be a good idea, based on a story by Staff Writer Peter McGuire in last Saturday’s Press Herald.
In a stunning story that may have been missed by many, the General Accounting Office said two Zumwalt ships built at the shipyard at a cost of $8 billion each – seven times more than expected – do not have functioning weapons systems or a clear role in the Navy.
Inspectors found hundreds of “serious deficiencies” in the two ships in 2016 and last year, the GAO said. For one thing, the Navy has not found replacement ammunition for the ships’ main gun after deciding that the original ammo, at $800,000 per round, would be too expensive. “As a result, the guns will remain inoperable on the ships for the foreseeable future,” the report said.
The GAO says the problems were not BIW’s fault but the Navy’s for numerous design changes.
Did Sen. Susan Collins, a relentless champion of BIW, know about this when she grilled Navy officials recently on whether the Navy had enough ships in the Atlantic fleet? Of course she did. She mentioned design problems but didn’t say we have $18 billion worth of nonfunctioning ships sitting in Bath.
Meanwhile, one in six Maine children lives in poverty, one in 13 in extreme poverty, living on less than $840 a month for a family of three. And it’s getting worse.
Sen. Collins obviously didn’t create the BIW problem, and she can’t fix it. But she can, if she chooses, divert some of her attention to Maine’s hungry children. They truly need a champion.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- Ancient Dreams, Dreamed- With Diana Talbot In Mind
Introduction by Allan Jackson
[A lot of what the now locally legendary corner boys from the brick front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in the woe begotten working poor Acre section of North Adamsville talked about on lonely Friday nights was about the opposite sex (even Timmy Riley now known in Frisco town among the drag queen connoisseurs at his very successful Kit Kat Club as Miss Judy Garland). About what to do about, how to get close to them (after clearing the Scribe’s intelligence to see if they were “spoken for” meaning “going steady” or some other such arrangement), and, frankly how to get into their pants (a lot harder in some cases than you might think and easier in others you might not think of). By the way that locally legendary part no misstatement for those from high school who stayed in town, not many but enough in the wandering generation, passed on the lore to their kids, (and now the kids to theirs). So that it would not be uncommon for kids today, those who still get their pizza from still-standing Tonio’s although minus Tonio to speak in reverent terms about the guys who went wild in the 1960s. At some point I am sure mall-dom will erase even though few remaining memories (although nothing will erase Richard Rizzo, 1946-66 and David White, 1946-67 KIA in Vietnam and remembered by Tonio with a plague in the front of the building etched in the brick wall.
That might be true, the girl part, which to those who have passed the age of 64 mentioned below probably don’t have the same testosterone ardor of their youth but recent trips back to the Acre to get some “color” for the series made me realize that there were plenty of other things that preoccupied our minds, or maybe best said Scribe, Seth Garth, Sam Lowell and my mind. Things about family and the few good times we had in my household when we went, even in high school to day time Squaw Rock for barbecues (night time Squaw Rock was another thing, the local lovers’ lane thing and best not be mentioned here just in case some ancient mother gets wind of what I have to say here. In any case no self-respecting parent would be caught dead with impressible youth within five hundred yards of the place as sunstroke turned to dusk). Things about the various projects we got involved in some of them like getting books for school kids in Jim Crow Alabama which almost got us skinned alive. Things like the Fourth of July festival which the local fathers and uncles put together in the days when pre-Vietnam we guys were as patriotic as any kids out in heartland America and could have gone toe to toe with any Norman Rockwell or Grant Wood pictorial take on the matter. Those precious although no not obvious memories are what drove this sketch. You can fill in your own memoires as well. Allan Jackson]
YouTube film clip of the Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four from the animated movie Yellow Submarine.
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Many of my fellows from the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.
Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair, go to the big step-off kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde, frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled through the womb or some toddler’s crib maybe, at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.
Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window “the projects” wait on better times, get a leg up, don’t get left behind in the dawning American streets paved with gold dream but for now just hang your hat dwelling, small, too small for three growing boys with hearty appetites and desires to match even then, warm, free-flow oil spigot warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching, relentlessly marching as he, that older brother, went off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time for the time of his time, in this red scare (but what knows he of red scare only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles floating aimlessly in the clogging still air night.
A cloudless day, a cloudless blasted eternal, infernal Korean War day, talk of peace, merciless truce peace and uncles coming home in the air, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball fields the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits of wildly-maned horses, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too, that nose-flattened brother, has been to foreign places, strange boxed rooms filled with the wax and wane of learning, simple learning, in the time of his time, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.
Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb aimed right at my head unnamed shelter blast fears, named, vaguely named, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hated stalinite jews killed fears, jews killed our catholic lord fears, and what did they do wrong to get the chair anyway fears against the cubed glass glistening flagless flag-pole rattling dark asphalt school yard night. Alone, and, and, alone with fears, and avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, sailors’ homes AND deaths in barely readable fine- marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards looking out on ocean homelands and lost booty. Dead, and the idea of dead, the mystery of dead, and of sea sailor dead on mains, later stream thoughts of bitch proctoresses, some unnamed faraway crush teacher who crossed my path and such, in lonely what did he do wrong anyway prison cells, smoking, reading, writing of dinosaurs die and other laments. Dead.
Endless walks, endless one way sea street water rat-infested fear seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells, swaying grasses in light breezes to the right, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat stinks to the left making hard the way, the path, the symbolic life path okay, to uptown drug stores, some forgotten chain-name drug store, passing perfumes, lacquers, counter drugs, ailments cured, hurts fixed and all under a dollar, trinkets ten cents baubles, gee-gads, strictly gee-gads, grabbing, two-handed grabbing, heist-stolen valentines, a metaphor in the making, ribbon and bow ruby-red valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet. Man emerging out of the ooze, and hope.
Walks, endless waiting bus stop, old late, forever late, story of a young boy’s life late, diesel-fueled, choking fumed non-stop bus stop walks, no golden age car for jet moves in American Dream wide-fin , high tech automatic drive nights, walks, walks up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year no fix rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles, you get the picture, pass trees are green, coded, secretly coded even fifty street rutted years later, endless trees are green super-secret-coded except for face blush waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now. For what? For one look, one look, and not a quick no-nonsense, no dice look, no time for ragamuffin boys either that would elude him, elude him forever. Such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance, no coded trees are green dance, either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school either, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name trees are green brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?
City square, no trespass, no standing, standing, low-slung granite buildings everywhere, granite steps leading to granite doors leading to granite gee-gad counters, hated, no name hated, low-head hated, waiting slyly, standing back on heels, going in furtively, coming out ditto, presto coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no russkie Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped-up crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.
A bridge too far, an unarched, unsteeled, unspanned, unnerved bridge too far. One speed bicycle boy, dungarees rolled up against dog bites and geared meshes, churning through endless heated, sweated, no handkerchief streets, names, all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, hard against the unnamed angst, hard against those changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing
Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I, too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-borning but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path
Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Stopped short. Who would have figured that one?
Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets. Diana, blonde Diana, cashmere-sweatered, white tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out; nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, a small-time after school soda split sit at the counter Doc’s drugstore date, or slice of pizza and a coke date at Balducci’s with a few nickels juke boxed in playing our song, our future song, a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall song, and dreams of I Want To Wanted sifting the hot afternoon air, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of local lore car parked submarine races and mysteries unfurled, ah, to dream, no more than to dream, walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no known even forty years later. Wow.
Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small-filtered, natch, no romantic Bogie tobacco-lipped unfiltered, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh-mown streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.
Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish, although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, hubert, tricky dick war-circus all hell broke loose thing then, or wanted to.
Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.
The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not for ancient robert frost to guide you… Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.
Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.
Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monktons, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas’ flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarcaderos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam tricky dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.
He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.
Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored antic newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.
A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggared time, right.
Lashed against the high end double seawall, bearded, slightly graying against the forlorn time, a vision in white not enough to keep the wolves of time away, the wolves of feckless petty larceny times reappear, reappear with a vengeance against the super-rational night sky and big globs of ancient hurts fester against some unknown enemy, unnamed, or hiding out in a canyon under an assumed name. Then night, the promise of night, a night run up some seawall laden streets, some Grenada night or maybe Lebanon sky boom night, and thoughts of finite, sweet flinty finite haunt his dreams, haunt his sleep. Wrong number, brother. Ya, wrong number, as usual.
White truce flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against Persian gulf oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands.
The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.
Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.
One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- With Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is In Mind
A YouTube film clip of Hank Williams performing minute back in the You Win Again to set the mood for this piece.
Introduction by Allan Jackson
[We never fucking, excuse my English but I am suddenly hot under the collar thinking about it now after having damned it up for a while, not fifty years like a lot of things mentioned in this series, talked about what the hell our parents did, or did not, do to us in the privacy of our family life. Sure some of it was the old time religion, acting like a religious tenet anyway, of not airing one’s dirty linen in public a staple of Irish Catholic tradition a couple of generations back (and still around, still around damn it from what some of the younger crowd has conveyed to me. But mainly it was about not talking about what hurt us so deeply that we could not utter anything even to close brothers until death corner boys. The late Peter Paul Markin who was more screwed in his family life, his living hell family life, mainly through his mother, his father too beaten down to raise his voice except under extremity set the parameters. And if a guy like the Scribe was closed-mouthed about his family affairs none of us lesser mortals were going to weep in public about our plights. Scribe’s “solution” was to be the running kind like in the Merle Haggard song, and sneak out the back door, or front if he could, in the middle of the night and take the all-night subway to Harvard Square and hang around Hayes-Bickford, or some such place where kindred spirits dwelled. Surprising that got him through a lot of things when he and that mother were in almost daily combat about what a bad son he was. Most of the stuff about Scribe’s home life came out later in dribs and drabs after he had passed away way too young by guys like Seth Garth and Sam Lowell. But I wonder how much what happened to Scribe beside Vietnam was hell-bent on that family blood tribute altar.
Over the last several years a bunch of us have gotten together either through our work here or joining each other someplace and talk about the old days which is really what this rock and roll series is about as filtered through North Adamsville’s Acre neighborhood. What we seldom talk about although it probably weighs on each of us is that private family part of our young existences. And that after all we went through in Summer of Love new consciousness, radical politics, social wisdom accumulated through age and the like. What would be good to know though, and Josh Breslin’s remembrances of his father here is part of that knowledge, is how extensive this closed family circle was. By Josh’s lights it extended to the working class neighborhood of Olde Saco up in Maine. I wonder where else. Allan Jackson ]
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Josh Breslin had been since he retired a couple of years ago as a journalist writing for half the alternative and special interest newspapers and journals in the country, make that half the unread, mostly, newspapers and journals in those categories sitting on some glassy coffee table showing that the residents therein had been a part of that vaunted minute in the 1960s when they had collectively tried to turn the world upside down, in something of a reflective mood. Not every day, certainly not on golf days with his golfing associates over at Dunegrass, when reflection over some missed chip or putt on the previous hole spelled the kiss of death for the round. Much better to keep an empty mind on those days and just hope enough muscle memory kicks in to survive the round. But enough of golf, enough of unread journals, hell, enough of retirement except as the cushion that Josh’s thoughts fell on one day when passing through his old home town of Olde Saco, a town farther north in Maine than the one where he now lived, on some family business.
While in Olde Saco he passed by his old growing up house, as was almost always the case since it was located near a main town road which he would have to cross to get on to the main highway and not always in some fit of nostalgia. Or rather he passed the plot of land where the old home was situated, an old house that had been little better than a shack, a cabin maybe then, maybe especially when his three sisters came of age and hogged the single bathroom and stuff like that. A place which left little room for a single growing boy to attend to his own toilet, his own sense of space, to any sense at all. The house may have been a shack, no, he thought better say a cabin but it had been located on about two acres of land and in the intervening years, years well after his parents had passed on and his sisters like him had left the dust of Olde Saco behind the land had become valuable and now had been developed into an eight-unit condominium complex. Not that his parents, not that his father Prescott Breslin derived any real financial benefit from that development since the house had been sold when he needed to go into a nursing home after Josh’s mother, Delores, passed away. Had been sold well before there was a resurgence in the Olde Saco economy which had taken a beating when the MacAdams Textile Mills shut down and moved south to North Carolina in the early 1950s and had only recovered with some “high tech” start-ups using the old factory space well after Prescott passed on. The sale of that old house had broken his father’s heart despite its shanty condition at the end. The damn sale of the cabin in any case had not brought enough money. Not enough to cover all Prescott’s increasing medical expenses which Josh and his sisters wound up subsiding.
So the passing of that lot got Josh to thinking about how Prescott Breslin never drew a blessed break in his hard-scrabble life. Never drew a break although he was a hard-working man of the old school-“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”-when he had work. Got Josh to thinking about the early 1950s when he was coming of age, when he started even if unconsciously, or maybe semi-consciously, to feel that some new breeze was coming, some new breeze that was going to break through and unfreeze that red scare Cold War time. And while Josh’s horizons in those days centered on the emerging rock and roll, coming from some “new” Memphis hillbilly sources, some black as night rhythm and blues sources, some down and out urban blues sources, again black as night, that was leading the jail-break out then his father’s fate was being sealed in another way. See Prescott Breslin was an employee, a machine tender and mechanic at the MacAdams Textile factory that was heading south and he had no other resources to fall back on. That last thought was pure Josh though, pure Josh remembering back to those hard days. Prescott Breslin, as he would be the first to say, and had probably said it a thousand times, with a wife and four children had no time to worry about whether he had resources to fall back or not. Josh chuckled to himself over that one, yeah, that was pure Dad.
As Josh travelled further along Main Street (really Route One but everybody called it Main Street since they had no real such street in the town) he passed by what in the old days was Millie’s Diner, now re-opened as Mildred’s, the one right across the street from the old textile plant where guys would go before their shift and grab a coffee and crullers, maybe grab a quick dinner if they were single, or maybe meet some sweetheart and talk before going off to work. He did not know this from personal experience but his father had once told him that right after World War II the plant was working three shifts and guys, and gals, were catching as much overtime as they wanted.
Millie’s did not long survived the shutdown of the mill and had been abandoned for a number of years (like a lot of other businesses in that section of the town that were dependent on the mill-workers) but had re-opened about a decade ago with the same “feel” as Millie’s including a jukebox which played current stuff but also stuff from back then, stuff that hard-working guys and gals would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in to listen to whatever was “hot” in those days. Josh knew all of this because a couple of years before he had been contacted by an old high school classmate, Melinda, Melinda Dubois (the place, Olde Saco, was crawling with French-Canadians including his mother, nee LeBlanc), who had read some old article of his and got in touch to invite his up for a class reunion. During that previous time in town Melinda had taken him around town and showed him what had changed and told him the story of Millie’s resurrection as Mildred’s.
Something that day, probably the sight of the old homestead, maybe just the thought of Millie’s where sometimes when his father had been making good money he would take the family for an out of house dinner and where Josh on occasion had stopped in to play the jukebox and have a Coke while looking furtively around for any stray girls, prompted him to stop and go into Mildred’s for a coffee and maybe a piece of pie (that pie an iffy thing what with him and his new weight problem but he thought why go into a diner if you are not going to have something that is “bad “ for you). As a single he sat at the Formica-top counter complete with red vinyl-cushioned swivel stool to sit on and a paper placemat and utensils in front of him waiting for the smiling waitress to take his order (a career waitress as is usual in diners, middle-aged, her white uniform a little tight trying to look younger, pencil in her hair for ease of taking orders, chewing gum but friendly until you placed your order and then either still smiling or a frown if you only ordered coffee and, not the young college girls and guys you find in better restaurants marking time with a job to help defray college expenses or for “walking around” money). He placed his frowning order, coffee, black, and a piece of apple crumb pie with, yes, with ice cream (bad, indeed).
While Josh waited for his order he thumbed through the panels on the jukebox machine that was placed between him and the next placemat. And as if by some strange osmosis Josh came upon Hank Williams’ You Win Again, his father’s favorite song when he was young back in Kentucky, back in rugged cross heartbreak legendary Hazard. (His father had been in a pick-up band for a while working a circuit and along the Ohio River.) Josh put his quarter in to play that one selection (yeah, times have changed even in jukebox land, no more three for a quarter ) and as Hank moan’s his lovesick blues that triggered Josh to start thinking about his father and where he had come from, where he would have picked up those country tunes in his DNA. And then Josh thought of that hard time when his father was so discouraged about his prospects when the mill had closed down temporarily and then when the final word had come that it would be closing for good and would play that song repeatedly as if to try and ward off some evil spirits. He could remember his father’s voice like it was yesterday as he sat beside him in Millie’s:
“Jesus, it’s been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill keeps screaming at us. And also telling us not to trespass under penalty of arrest, Christ, after all the sweat we have given the damn MacAdams family. I still haven’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I don’t even have a high school diploma, not even close since I only went to eight grade and then to the mines, to do anything but some logging work up North when they need extra crews,”
That is what Prescott Breslin, Josh sitting silently beside him, had half-muttered to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between the two, and by many previous parties on those self-same stools, took place, of course, right at Millie’s Diner right across the street from the closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.
Just then Prescott, hey, no Pres, or PB, or any such thing, not if you didn’t want an argument on one of his few vanities, fell silent, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as he thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that came creeping through his brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, first told him the plant was shutting down for good and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from his eastern Kentucky roots. Then it was just a second of self-doubt but now the thoughts started ringing incessantly in his brain.
Why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that he had worked in his youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, girls and one boy with Delores. Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.
The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and played Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that his late, long-gone mother sang to him on her knee when he was just a tow-headed young boy. That got him to thinking about home, the Hazard hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when eight kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on the table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-downs, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girl’s stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.
Then Prescott thought about the Saturday night barn dances where he cut quite a figure with the girls when he was in his teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. He was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Uncle Eddie’s just-brewed “white lightning.” And he heard, just like now on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances.
As Millie asked him for the third time, “More coffee” he came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, he said no to himself with that same kind of December resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again he let out his breathe and said to himself one more time- “Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, Jesus, but Delores, the four kids, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.”
And as if to put paid to that resolve, as Josh made a funny face in recognition, Prescott had put a coin into the jukebox and played You Will Again, which he always said brought him good tidings, or at least made him feel better. A few minute after the song was completed and he and his father were ready to leave after saying good-bye to Jack Johnny Dubois came through the door and yelled, “Hey, Prescott, Jack, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up North for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, he was going too.”
Traipsing Through The
Arts-All 20th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You
Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock
Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Number 31” (1950) Without
Wings
Jackson Pollack, Number 5
By Laura Perkins
Mercifully Sam Lowell
has my back. The merciful part first. Recently I, with Sam as my sparring
partner then, made my first big group of enemies at this publication when I had
the audacity to suggest that late 19th painter John Singer
Sargent’s Madame X’s birdlike nose was maybe a sign of profession beauty in her
day but was strictly Bride of Frankenstein these days (with no disrespect to
Mary Shelley and her divine fictional creation Frankenstein which we paid
homage to on the 200th anniversary of its publication in 2018).
I added a few off-hand remarks that professional beauties, and Madame X was no
exception, in French high society then, maybe now too, slept their way to the
top. That in turn was Sam’s central thesis which I thought was a little rough
on the much- maligned woman.
Then Sam, who has spent
his career as a film review editor and writer and thus keen to find the back
story, told me about the memoir of Madame X’s personal maid who gave details
about her role as the one who let the “guests” up the back stairway, sometimes
when her husband was down below. The maid had originally no ax to grind, would
probably not have “told all” except Monsieur LeBlanc, Sargent’s paint supplier
in Paris (and who would sent the paints over to London when Sargent
fled there since the finicky artist could find nobody else who could mix
blacks, browns and greys like him) had been much maligned when he let on that
he had shared Madame’s bed when she was “slumming” among the plebeians and
Parisian high society bared their daggers at such impertinence and she wanted
to set the record straight. So Sam at least was not far off in his
understanding of this, his term modern day Whore of Babylon although I would
have held back on her personal life since she took enough of a beating from
that same self-satisfied Parisian crowd.
I, we, on that occasion
went hammer and tong on the substance of John White Alexander’s (another three-
name guy which I have noted elsewhere is so bourgeois, started out of some need
to distinguish themselves from the two-name Joe Jones common man or to show
their descent from some Mayflower stowaways or more likely to
cover up their tracks around questions about their births) Isabella and
the Pot of Basil (so-called) which was merely a cover for a kinky
drug-induced (opium) erotic severed head cult which goes back to antiquity. As
it turned out we were right, or I should say Sam a 1960s Summer of Love veteran
and an Army veteran as well so very well-versed in the drug milieu while I
choked the first time I even whiffed marijuana was right, that the pot
contained the crucial poppies needed for the opium dreams. Sam the minute we
entered the Museum of Fine Arts room in Boston where the painting hung sensed
even before he went close to the painting that the basil, so-called symbol of
love or something was the normal Victorian hogwash covering up not only
Isabella’s, or rather the model who posed for Alexander, junkie drug addiction
but the artist’s as well.
Again, back story Sam
pointed out that you never saw Alexander in short sleeves even on the hottest
days the better to cover up the tell-tale tracks on his arms. Moreover along
the way we found out that there had been an international modern-day crack-down
on the devotees of this bizarre cult and even the Italian authorities back in
the Renaissance were on Isabella’s trail once they got suspicious of all the
well-bred young women who were hanging around when the well-paid executioners
were doing their work.
I won’t even go into the
hell broth we suffered from yahoos and high-brows alike when we exposed
Whistler’s The White Girl as essentially an ad for a modern
day Whore of Babylon (which I agree with Sam is what is true here although I
still differ on that characterization for Madame X), the key being the symbolic
wolf’s head and fur the model is standing on. This woman was allegedly
four-name Whistler’s girlfriend, mistress, paramour so it makes sense, high
Victorian hypocritical sense that he would not just put a big “A” or something
on her head but something more symbolic although also making it clear she was
“available.” Nice guy “pimping” his girlfriend just to prove he could do “art
for art’s sake.” Yes, Whistler was hard, very hard on his women. The high brows
defending their own, in this case a three-named guy Doyle who was in deep
denial about the real stuff going on among his forebears. Worse though and even
Sam who always says he is beyond surprises at his age is that strangely, or
maybe not given the times we live in, we got most of our deep-freeze blasts
from troll evangelicals worried about their kids maybe reading about sex and eroticism
in art. Yes, I know, weird. We have already kicked that around and the good
folk seem to have backed off once we got to 20th century art
which to them must have seemed a cesspool of filth and vulgar sex but no
self-respecting kid would be caught dead reading some old fogey take on the
meaning of modern art. Yes, weird indeed.
Those storms passed by
and Sam and I took the whole experience as the overhead of doing something a
little on the tangent side, a little off-beat but well with the parameters of
art work analysis even if we are not as this Doyle thought was his biggest
contention professional art critics. What solidified us though was our firm
contention that all serious 20th century art all the way up to
Pop and Op Art are centrally about sex, eroticism and sensuality. (We both
agree the jury is still out on 21st art especially Minimalism
although I have noted that Matty Gove’s works reek of pure sex, rough sex to
boot and that Dan Blake’s later works are nothing but almost pornographic
depictions of various sexual acts. Matty when he read the piece sent me a
message mentioning how perceptive I was to see that his signature paint, Three
Intertwined Shapes, was his homage to S&M culture.)
As with many of our
joint projects we are solid on the central point and disagree over particulars.
(Sam has been an advisor to me since the first Singer piece although in the
background where he remains since he refused to take the on-going self-selected
art works assignment when first offered by site manager Greg Green.) That was
the case when we put our first painting, the famous one by Edward Hopper from
1942 Nighthawks under the microscope. I basically took that
narrative as a busted romance which tottered on the woman being ticked off at
her guy for being drunk (note the glassy unfocused distracted eyes of the
classic midnight drunk) and not bed-ready. See my take was that Hopper was
pissed off at his wife Jo who was the female model for not letting him use a
younger woman he had contacted (and was sexually interested in and very
interested in painting in the nude except Jo nixed that idea, a non-starter as
long as she still breathed). Sam I thought was crasser in his narrative that
this scene was a classic late-night diner prostitute pick-up spot and the guy was
a John deciding whether to go for paradise or not.
Sam finally agreed with
my contention that Hopper was pissed off at his wife for being a prude but as
usual had a little back story to lay on me that the young thing he was
interested in painting he was seeing her and painting her nude. She would be
the young model in the roadside whorehouse painting where she was sunning
herself while the old madame was counting the nightly take. You can now see we
have different takes on occasion within the context of the broader thesis.
I hope nobody laughs but
I almost wish those troll evangelicals were still yapping at my heels. Reason:
one Clarence Dewar, art critic for Art Today who somehow saw
that Hopper piece and flipped out. Naturally Mr. Dewar had to sharpen his knife
with the fact that I am not an art critic (and neither by extension is Sam
Lowell). I have repeatedly mentioned that hard fact which is a great deal of
the reason that Greg Green gave me the project and has supported my work all
along against all-comers. A fresh quirky look is what he has called it and has
said so to his various fellow editor drinking buddies when they question the
wisdom of letting a quirky dame run amuck with the crazies and the paid
professionals hugging their respective turfs.
Here is the dagger
through the heart though-the so-called fatal blow. The one that will send me
back to the cheap seats. Mr. Dewar is of the theory that since the
Impressionists, and that grouping is an important divide in modern art all art
has been a search for the, get this, sublime. His argument is that with the
invention of the camera artists have moved away from representational art, away
from the line, color combo that drove most previous art. Apparently the further
away from line-color coordination the purer the art form and hence the closer
to the, get this, sublime. Where Sam and I saw a classic 20th century
sex scene one way or another Mr. Dewar sees Hopper say as making a big splash
statement about the isolation of modern society and the decline of the
individual. Individuals being afloat in a lost world which I guess can be cured
by looking at some painting not with lust in their hearts but seeing a
“terrible beauty is born” as the poet Yeats would have it. This to place this so-called “search” for the
sublime to use the Nighthawks example
to place that search in some midnight Joe and Nemo’s diner with a bunch of
besotted drunks and a rum-dum short order cook who overcooked the hamburgers
and recycled the coffee beans for the fifth time that evening is the epitome
of, get this, sublime.
Sam and I had a good
laugh about that one although Sam says we have not heard the last of Mr. Dewar
since he carries some weight, no, what did Sam call it, some water, in art
circles in New York and in the old days he was a student of Clement Greenberg
who practically invented that silly sublime theory that has kept more lame art
curators, art collectors, art directors, and so-called high-toned gallery
owners looking in the wrong places than you can shake a stick at, maybe a brush
too. One night Sam and I did get into a discussion about the place of the
sublime in art history and how it has choked off more serious discussion than
it has provoked. After a couple of hours, we were worn out by the place where
the discussion was heading and reaffirmed our commitment to our own thesis
about sex and sensuality (read eroticism, okay) as the driving force in modern
art (and don’t forget maybe post-modern art too).
A couple of days later
we saw Jackson Pollock’s Number 31 done in the late 1940s when
he was the max daddy of what Greenberg called action painters and more
generally the key figure to boost Abstract Expressionism, the so-called
Greenberg search for the perfect break from line to pure form. Almost at the
same time we both blurred out (to the annoyance of a couple of matronly art
devotees at the next painting) “the thing reeks of sex” and I think I said
primordial sex, trying to be polite with those old biddies present. Originally
Sam and I were going to play off each other insights about Pollock’s place in
the great sex and sensuality search presented by his drip paintings (although a
serious argument can be made that during the early 1940s Jackson went amuck
with the brush and in an earlier age would have been stoned to death by the sex
police or at a minimum has his works burned at the stake).
Since then through
internal meetings with Greg Green we have decided to give Sam an upcoming
“unchained” space to run off his mouth about the genesis of his various takes
on art before we put him back in the bottle. Basically, I agree with Sam that
Pollock was doing some very weird sexual things out there in Long Island in
that shed, with or without Lee Krasner around. That recent testing has found
some foreign materials which are not paint, which are some kind of human fluids,
mixed into the brew. I will leave it there for now and let Sam give his own
take which will only confirm what those old biddies didn’t want to hear-
Sublime terrible beauty sublime not old Dewar’s silly sublime but earthy tones
down in the human grind and mud erotically charged.
