Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell - From The 1960s Archives-Woodstock's 40th Anniversary- You Can't Go Home Again!

Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell - From The 1960s Archives-Woodstock's 40th Anniversary- You Can't Go Home Again!


A link to YouTube's film clip on "Woodstock 1969". Some of the footage brings back pleasant memories. Others are, frankly, bizarre. Ah, those were the days though when to be alive was very heaven.

COMMENTARY 2009

Below is a repost of a commentary from 2007 about the continuing cultural wars centered on events like Woodstock from the 1960s and their lingering political effects.

The Cultural Wars-Part 247- Woodstock 2007 October 30, 2007

COMMENTARY

As a political writer who stands well outside the traditional political parties in this country I do not generally comment on specific politicians or candidates, unless they make themselves into moving target. Come on now, this IS politics after all. How can I justify not taking a poke at someone who has a sign on his chest saying –Hit Me? Lately Republican presidential hopeful Arizona Senator John McCain has fallen all over himself to meet that requirement.


And what is the fuss about. Studied differences about how to withdraw from Iraq? No. Finding ways to rein in the out of control budgets deficits? No. A user friendly universal health care program? No. What has sent the good Senator McCain into spasms is a little one million dollar funding proposal (since killed in the Senate) that would have partially funded a museum at Woodstock, site of the famous 1969 counter-cultural festival. His view is that the federal government should not be funding projects that commemorate drug, sex and rock and roll. Well so be it. However, the topper is this. In order to sharply draw the cultural war line in the sand he mentioned (just in passing, I’m sure) to the Republican audience that he was speaking to that he did not attend that event as he was ‘tied up’ elsewhere.

Unlike his draft dodging fellows, like Bush Cheney, Wolfowitz, et. al in the Bush Administration McCain saw action in Vietnam. Of course that action was as a naval pilot whose job it was to attempt to bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, a task in which they very nearly succeeded. Through the fortunes of war he was shot down and spent several years in a POW camp. That comes with the territory. In the summer of 1969 this writer also had other commitments. He was under orders to report to Fort Lewis, Washington in order to head to Vietnam as a foot soldier. That too comes with the territory. The point is why rain on someone else’s parade just because you want to be a hero. Moreover, it is somewhat less than candid to almost forty years later belly ache about it.


A note on Woodstock as an icon of the 1960’s. The slogan- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. We liked that idea then, even those of us who were rank and file soldiers. Not everyone made it through that experience . Others recoiled in horror later, including some of those today on the right wing of the culture wars. And others who did not 'inhale' or hang around with people who did formed another reaction to those events. Those experiments and others like communal living, alternative lifestyles and ‘dropping out’, however, were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And creative. Even the most political among us felt those cultural winds and counted those who espoused this vision as part of the chosen. Those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change without a fundamental political change in society proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Note this well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and today by John McCain spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of ‘cultural wars’ in revenge by them and their protégés is a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

Woodstock lyrics-Joni Mitchell

I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
Im going on down to yasgurs farm
Im going to join in a rock n roll band
Im going to camp out on the land
Im going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I dont know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- *In Pete Seeger's House- "Rainbow Quest"-Cousin Emmy

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger's now famous 1960s (black and white, that's the give-away)"Rainbow Quest" for the performer in this entry's headline.

Markin comment:

This series, featuring Pete Seeger and virtually most of the key performers in the 1960s folk scene is a worthy entry into the folk archival traditions for future revivalists to seek out. There were thirty plus episodes (some contained more than one performer of note, as well as Pete solo performances). I have placed the YouTube film clips here one spot over four days, November 10-13, 2009 for the reader's convenience.

If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren

If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren  

After The Fall-Humphrey Bogart’s “Sirocco” (1951)-A Film Review

After The Fall-Humphrey Bogart’s “Sirocco” (1951)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Special Guest Commentator Frank Jackman

Sirocco, starring Humphrey Bogart, Lee J. Cobb, Columbia Pictures, 1951

[This review to the extent that it is a film review is based on a five DVD package of films that the legendary craggy-faced actor Humphrey Bogart did for Columbia Pictures mainly in the late 1940s and early 1950s-Frank Jackman]

I do not normally do film reviews in this space but recently Pete Markin, the administrator on this site, asked me if I would be interested in reviewing Humphrey Bogart’s Sirocco since it involved two things that he knew I was interested in-Bogart and the in many ways decisive results of World War I for today’s world troubles, the ‘war to end all wars” which I/we are in the midst of commemorating the final bloody 100^th anniversary year of here and elsewhere. I accepted mainly on the latter premise but as it turned out also because although I have seen a ton of Bogart films this 1951 effort for Columbia Pictures had escaped my attention and while I am bound to do the review for other reasons I don’t think this one measures up as a prime Bogie flick.      

As to the other reasons as just mentioned we are in the midst of the 100^th anniversary of the bloody seemingly endless butchery of World War I. As I have pointed out elsewhere some of the results of that war were the various stages of the Russian Revolution which brought down the Czarist regime, the defeat of German and its lesser ally Austria bringing down two more empires and most importantly for us here also the fall of the German-allied Ottoman Empire. I have described the first three falls in great detail as to the their contribution to the world we face today elsewhere but the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath are still very much with us as even slight perusal of the daily news will confirm in places like Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Syria all lands formerly part of that decayed empire.          

   

Of course we all know, or should know, that ever since wars have been started that “to the victor belongs the spoils” and that was exactly the situation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The British and French decided to carve up the old territories of the Middle East to suit their conveniences, or the conveniences of their emissaries. Maybe conveniences is too strong a word and whim would be more appropriate. During this time we have the Balfour Declaration proclaiming British commitment to creating a Jewish state in that area, the division, the quite arbitrary decision, to carve up the area not by traditional boundaries or allegiances but colonial convenience under the well-trodden colonialist “divide and conquer” stratagem. Those conveniences (whims) which would come back to haunt them especially after World War II when the colonial masses were struggling for liberation from their respective colonial powers after World War I included giving the French a mandate in what was then and now Syria. Today just to mention the name of that benighted country tells much about how little has changed in the post-colonial period.               

What does all this have to do with Bogie and this film. Well the story line here is set in Damascus in 1926 when the French Army was in deep trying to put down a national liberation struggle by the indigenous people led by an Emir who was ready, win or lose, to get the French all the grief they could handle. Bogie, last seen in this space I believe as one of the lead actors in the classic film Casablanca which is commemorating the 75^th anniversary of its opening this year as well, is nothing but an opportunist businessman of sorts selling guns and ammo to the colonials, to the liberation fighters for a pretty profit. (I am willing to bet as will be detailed a bit below that Bogie, or rather Bogie’s character here Harry Smith, wished as Rick of Rick’s Café Americian he had never left old Casablanca where running a gin joint and being the conduit for some letters of transport which helped one Victor Lazlo, the famous Czech liberation fighter against the Nazi night-takers, get out of that stinking hole and on to fight another day. Even though that meant giving up lovely Ilsa, his “we will always have Paris” flame. There is a lot in this film which has the feel of the earlier film but lacks energy, plotline and even scenes to match that epic.)

Naturally the French Army commander General LaSalle, played by Everett Sloane, wants this traffic stopped and the uprising suppressed by any means necessary. His strong inclination is to level Damascus to the ground and execute everyone that his troops can round up if necessary to suppress the rebels. Periodically though he gives into the ideas of his chief of intelligence Colonel Feroud, played by Lee J. Cobb, last seen in this space playing the corrupt union leader in On The Waterfront and snitching on every fellow actor he could before the 1950s red scare House Un-American Activities Committee, who thinks that he can buy time and maybe peace by negotiating with that Emir and his underlings.      

The story line goes back and forth based on that idea. Where things get dicey for Bogie, like I said the Harry Smith in this film, is when the good Colonel through snitches is able to grab Bogie before he can leave town. Ready to face the firing squad he makes a deal with Harry to get him out of town if he can lead him to the Emir rather than face a messy death. Done. Done except in trying to save the Colonel’s life by coming up with the idea to the General of paying ransom he forfeits his own since the rebels no longer trust him. So all Harry gets for his troubles is a big step-off, a summary execution.  

[A little romance on the side is always the order of the day in these type films. Here there is an underlying tension between the good Colonel and Harry over the Colonel’s bored and flirty mistress, Violette, whom the Colonel loves to distraction. Nothing comes of her using Harry to get out of town and Feroud’s life since he bought the big step-off by trying to do right once in his ruthless life.]

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-Out In The Be-Bop Night-In The Time Of The Time Of Classic Rock ‘n’ Roll-A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Beatles covering Doctor Feelgood and the Interns classic, Mr. Moonlight.



In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-Out In The Be-Bop Night-In The Time Of The Time Of Classic Rock ‘n’ Roll-A CD Review

CD Review


Rock Classics: The Originals, The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, Time-Life, 1991

As I have noted in reviewing The ‘60s: Last Dance and the 1957 parts of this Time-Life Roll ‘n’ Roll Era series I have spent tons of time and reams of cyberspace “paper” in this space reviewing the teenage culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, especially the inevitable school dance and the also equally inevitable trauma of the last dance. That event, the last dance that is, was the last chance for even shy boys like me to prove that we were not wallflowers, or worst. The last chance to rise (or fall) in the torrid and relentless pecking order of the social scene at school. And moreover to prove to that certain she that you were made of some sort of heroic stuff, the stuff of dreams, of her dreams, thank you very much. Moreover, to make use of that social capital you invested in by learning to dance, or the “shadow” of learning to dance.

Hey, I have already filled this space with enough prattle about the old time school dances, middle school and high school, so I need not repeat that stuff here. Moreover, whatever physical description I could conger up would be just so much eye wash anyway. Those dances could have been held in an airplane hangar and we all could have been wearing paper bags for all we really cared. What mattered, and maybe will always matter, is the hes looking at those certain shes, and vis-a-versa. The endless, small, meaningful looks (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) except for those wallflowers who are permanently looking down at the ground. And that was the real struggle that went on in those events, for the stags. The struggle against wallflower-dom. The struggle for at least some room in the social standing, even if near the bottom, rather than outcast-dom. That struggle was as fierce as any class struggle old Karl Marx might have projected. The straight, upfront calculation (and not infrequently miscalculation), the maneuvering, the averting of eyes, the not averting of eyes, the reading of silence signals, the uncomphrehended "no", the gratuitous "yes." Need I go on? I don’t think so, except, if you had the energy, or even if you didn’t, then you dragged yourself to that last dance. And hoped, hoped to high heaven that it was a slow one.

Ah, memory. So what is the demographic that this CD compilation is being pitched to, aside from the obvious usual suspects, the AARP crowd. Well that’s simple. Any one who has been wounded in love’s young battles; any one who has longed for that he or she to come through the door, even if late; anyone that has been on a date that did not work out, been stranded on a date that has not worked out; anyone who has had to submit to being pieced off with car hop drive-in food; anyone who has gotten a “Dear John” letter or its equivalent; anyone who has been jilted by that certain he or she; anyone who has been turned down for that last school dance from that certain he or she that you counted on to make your lame evening; anyone who has waited endlessly for the telephone (now iphone, etc., okay for the younger set who may read this) to ring to hear that certain voice; and, especially those hes and she who has shed those midnight tears for youth’s lost love. In short, everybody except those few “most popular “types who the rest of us will not shed one tear over, or the nerds who didn’t count (or care) anyway.

Stick outs on this one that include both 50s and 60s material include: Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby by the underrated Carl Perkins who had all the making to be a big time rockabilly cross-over except Elvis got in the way; You’re No Good by Betty Everett who bopped the bop; I’m Leaving It All Up To You, by the one-hit wonders Don and Dewey, Time Is On My Side by the legendary blues rocker, Irma Thomas (a song, by the way, covered by the Stones; I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You, a country-type cross-over Don Gibson. Needless to say John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom rates as well but I take that as a blues classic rather than a rock classic. And for that last dance, that one that you hoped for, prayed against all odds for, and sweated blood for, Doctor Feelgood and the Interns on Mr. Moonlight. Natch, a slow one. You’re on your own now for the after dance arrangements.

You Don’t Need An Easter Bonnet To Know Which Way The Wind Blew-And It Ain’t Toward Fifth Avenue-Judy Garland And Fred Astaire’s “Easter Parade” (1948)-A Film Review

You Don’t Need An Easter Bonnet To Know Which Way The Wind Blew-And It Ain’t Toward Fifth Avenue-Judy Garland And Fred Astaire’s “Easter Parade” (1948)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Easter Parade, starring Judy Garland the envy of every drag queen in the world including writer Seth Garth’s old neighborhood corner boy Timmy Riley who perfected his Judy Garland act into the biggest draw in North Beach once he got out of the closet of the Acre in North Adamsville, Fred Astaire, and assorted dancers and hoofers to make a man weep, with Peter Lawford before his stint as Nick Charles in the television version of the Thin Man and male escort to one of the Kennedy fortune women, the Jack Kennedy generation women so there is no confusion, 1948     

Easter, Easter parades via the television with the Mayfair swells, a term totally unknown to me at the time, strutting up and down Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan, meant nothing to me, nothing at all. The simple fact was from an early age I, my family, and especially my four older brothers shunned that so-called holiday since rather than a time to strut our stuff I, we tried to bury the occasion. (I won’t go into the meaning of the holiday to us then, the Christian holiday, where Jesus arose from the dead and went heaven-bound since this screed is about more earthly, plebian and mundane things, rough-hewed sociology if you like not theology.) Bury it for the simple reason that the day represented one of the two times in the year that we received new clothes via my hard-pressed father’s always inadequate paychecks (that “inadequate” something I also didn’t know at the time but probably would not have mattered in the social sense which is what this is all about). The other time of course the start of the school year.         

What is the big deal lots of people, working people, back in the 1970s were hard -pressed to provide their kids and themselves adequate and varied clothing. Half the writers at this publication, for instance, faced the same situation or something roughly approximate which is probably why these many years they are still writing stuff about those times in this space. The big deal is what those clothes were like, what made other kids laugh at me, us when we went to Easter Mass or the next day when we went to school an occasion when everybody, everybody who celebrated Easter which meant just about everybody in the Heights section of Troy in upstate New York. 

See, my, our mother, besides being a bad cook which led me more times than I can count over to my grandmother’s house where she always had something on the old-time cast iron stove that in itself made the food that much tastier, had no taste in clothes. No sense of what growing young boys would want to wear. To emulate whoever were the male fashion-plates or just cool.

Part of her lacks was the lack of money to clothe five strapping boys but part of it was where she shopped. These were the days before Wal-Mart expanded a lot from the South and so what she went to shop was the local equivalent of that type of store called the Bargain Center. The place, a one store operation, was the graveyard for last year’s or maybe the year before’s styles which in the fast changing fashion world of youth meant not cool, not cool at all. Moreover, if it wasn’t outdated fashion it was overstocked or unsaleable goods. I will give my forever classic example. One year, a year when pin-striped shirts were out of fashion and the color purple never in fashion she bought each of us matching shirts like that. I could hear the titter in the pews as the five of us cam marching down the church aisle. The next day was worse, much worse. Thinking back on it I would have had no trouble with one of the lines that I believe the late rapper Biggie Small put out-“birthdays were the worse days, Christmas kind of missed us.” Easter, sad sack Easter too, brother. But enough. 

Now onto a review of high society Fifth Avenue Easter Parade which has nothing to do with what I just mentioned above but which new site manager Greg Green has encouraged us to mention as we go about our reviewing chores to let the reader know more about us and here why Easter stuff makes me blue even now. Of course, it may be a good luck sign, despite the blues, that this musical hit of 1948 is only marginally about Easter, or Easter Parades. Rather the film as to be expected when names like Judy Garland and Fred Astaire are atop the marque is about song and dance. Here is the play by play or rather the Irving Berlin playlist which is really what every musical is about. Well that and the inevitable happy ending to the eternal boy meets girl trope that has not only saved many a Hollywood film, not necessary on this one, but has been the bane of the Western literary canon and hard to topple as mightily as we have tried to wean the damn idea from the list of story-line idea.          

Fred, let’s use their real names since nobody cares about the various stage names because the music and dance are their real calling cards, had been partnered up with Nadine in a dance team around 1912. Did pretty well, career-wise and between themselves, maybe even lovers. But Nadine wanted to go solo, go to the “bigs” alone making me, and maybe others, wonder about that love stuff between them. After pouting for a while, really after being in his cups Fred figures he can make a star out of any hoofer and to experiment he picks up Judy out of nowhere. Teaches her plenty, makes her okay, just okay because what he did was teach her to be a Nadine wannabe. No good.  

Once he lets Judy go through her paces though they also are ready for the “bigs” figure to be in one of Nadine’s shows. Not a good idea because if Nadine does not want Fred she also does not want what she sees as rival Judy’s growing love for Fred. Wants him pining for his thwarted love. Figures. Not to worry though before this thing is over, before Judy and Fred promenade down, or is it up, Fifth Avenue in their beautiful clothes (not a pin-stripe or purple shirt in sight) to not give lie to the title of the film Fred realizes that he is not pounding his heart for bitch Nadine but love for Miss Judy Garland. Some great but probably now not well-known songs except by serious American songbook aficionados from Irving Berlin. Except as well you can bet your Easter bonnet or top hat people still know Easter Parade. Still doesn’t take that childhood sting away, probably never will.     

The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-With Lowell’s Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac In Mind

The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-With Lowell’s Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac In Mind

By Special Guest Writer Greg Green   

  

[Greg Green, a writer well known to me in this space for his articles on his and others experiences in the devil’s war, the Vietnam War, that carved a nation in two, maybe more and from which at least culturally it has never recovered mentioned to me one day when he was getting ready to review an old time black and white movie Of Human Bondage for the American Film Gazette for which he writes occasionally that the female star Bette Davis had been born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Something that he did not know although he grew up a few towns over in leafy suburban Westford. Greg has been a longtime admirer of another Lowell native Jack Kerouac who torched a placid post-World War II world with his On The Road some sixty years ago (and which we have as Seth Garth mentioned “seemingly endlessly” and he may be right commemorated in this space recently on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication). That got Greg thinking that there must be some connection that he could draw between two such iconic celebrities from an old dying mill-town (dying even back then as the mills headed cheap textile labor south and then cheaper foreign shorts worldwide-in their respective birth times 1908 and 1922) that had seen better days beside the inevitable “there must be something in the water” theory. So he asked me to let him do a little piece trying to make some cosmic connection between the two icons and the town. Pete Markin]             

A river runs through it. The great rushing from the New Hampshire mountains, at least that is what I have been told is source ground zero of the broken down millwheel towns to the seas and unto the great cold wash Atlantic and there to homeland (homeland before Lowell migration and Quebec flee failing farms up north looking for factory river work) Europe left behind from desolation days Merrimack. Merrimack some potent Indian signifier (excuse me Indian when Indian was the name spoken and not the correct Native American or even better indigenous peoples who can  stake serious and legitimate claim to sacred ground now ill-trodden over by umpteen generations and no reparations in sight) long before the devils came in their blasted wooden hull ships from across that briny North Atlantic no high note in sight unlike the great big blow out in Frisco town when a skinny black kid blew that one to perdition. Great rushing river dividing the town between the remember “fake natives” and the on-coming foreigners come to pick up the slack in the bottomless spinning wheel pits (the noise drowning out sing-song voices and whiskey hoarse alike and maybe that is where the sober siren sought his Jack strange mystifying voice and he his throbbing pace that in the end wound up like whiskey breath).        

River, two forked river come flowing from the great ices of New Hampshire hills laying down sediments (and sentiments) along a path unto the great turn and rock formation by Pawtucketville Bridge-dividing that town even further (or is it farther) pushing out Highland visions of august majesty. Then a poor besotted girl emerges, emerges out of the dust hitting the high trail west landing forlorn and mystified in some fallen angel diner and a gas station town near the Petrified Forest (trees so ancient, think about it, that they have turned to stone some kind of metaphor there-something about staying in one place too long) in the Arizonas, out off of Route 66 heavy-travelled in the next generation by hungry guys tired of diner and gas stations at home drift to the cities but need to catch some dust and grit although what they thought of benighted stone trees who  knows in between those expansive cities). There some Papa generation before her came out looking for El Dorado or gold something different and landed in two bit desert stretches and kind of got stuck, got good and stuck there. (Not everybody made it as the skeletons along the way of cattle, horse, and human set among the bramble and down some aching arroyo tell every daredevil passer-by and every sensational dime store penny a word novelist in the days when that “contract” ruled writers on “spec” too.)

And there abandoned by a big city dream mother and an ill-defined no account wimp father she came of age dreaming the dreams, funny city girl dreams of faraway places away from the dust and those fucking stoned trees when the wind howls through the crevices (making one think of other social howls and wolves and Molochs and white-dressed nurses in mental wards and of cool jazz man hipsters and Times Square con artists working the rubes), her father the king of the species all dressed up and cowardly when it came right down to it. Dreaming book dreams, small printed page books sent from far away by those who could not take the dust, the heat, those howls and once again those fucking night-blinding stone trees which tourists would pay a pretty penny for a clip, a sliver. Jesus. Dreamed fourteenth century or was fifteenth dreams of mad man con man rabble Villon out of some Balzac French novel but real enough speaking about how he could not stay with civil people but sought solace among the petty thieves, the cut throats, the man murderers (little did she know who would come through door to marvel at her bug-eyes and blinkers making sorry Villon nothing but a second-rate Time Square hustler, hey, pacifist even) , the flotsam and jetsam among the people who lived outside the moat, who did not dream but planned.         

          

“Hey there stranger” she spoke quickly to that stranger with the strange pale voice and the paler skin despite walking the sun-drenched walk of the tramp no better than Villon’s men outside the moat and who looked like he had not had three squares in many a moon so that is what she thought when he first came in, came in and recognized in that small book, that funny thought poem by mad monk gone astray Villon and thus was kindred against the Papa silliness and some gas station jockey who tried to make love to her before her time. So they talked, he called it conversation, and told her that the night-takers descending on the flat land earth, out even in the freaking (his term not hers) stone tree desert filled with arroyo-seized skeletons that the day for conversation was quickly coming to froth, was dangerous beyond whatever small thoughts she had ever had out in that vast night sky thunder-blazed desert. She thought him the new Messiah come that she has heard about over the blaring radio that made the diner hours go by more quickly so she could retreat into Villon’s manly dreams without distraction. He, the stranger he, laughed and said no vagabond who was out filching (cadging in what he meant she thought) free eats in dust-bitten rocks could claim Messiah-hood, could survive the new age coming and coming quickly right through her door. Her bug-eyes blinkered at that, at her silly illusions when she thought about it later after he was gone, gone to who knows what savior-driven place.          

No sooner had the stranger taken his filched food (she still insisted it was cadged and would whenever anybody asked her if she had actually seen the savior, had maybe slept with him for good measure) when the night-takers stormed in (stormed in more than one way bringing half the desert hell with them as boon companion) and made her savior stranger sit on his ass on the floor. Made hell come to pass before the night was through. (He, the stranger, would comment that the night-takers took their sweet-ass time whenever they descended and that those descended on took their sweet-ass time figuring out how to get rid of the bastards). Sweet manna. Then that forlorn stranger had an idea, a good one if somebody beside her thought about it later that he would go mano a mano with the night-takers, would play the gallant when all was said and done (giving lie to the idea that he didn’t have any ideas about the night-takers except their time had come). Naturally he lost, better won/lost and left her with her book, her small Villon book, a guy from the fourteenth century or was it the fifteenth and her dreams kind of intact. A few years later some guys in a 1949 Hudson (or was it Studebaker) tired of the Route 66 road came by looking for grub, looking for free eats and some whiskey but by then she was long gone to some city that Papa and father could not fathom            

[On in the frozen Western night the no longer girlish girl hung up on old time French bandit-poets, con men, desolation angels, and holy fools, and lost in thought time of the intellectuals far from the blessed stone trees, as far away as she could get to Southern California and so “frozen” ironic she picks up a book, a paperback left on the counter by a forgetful customer who after paying for his Woolworth-quality lunch must have given up all hope. She flips it into her pocketbook to either wait on his owner’s return or for something to read that night, that lonesome stone tree wilderness night that never left her thoughts. That guy, or whoever it was, never returned and so that night she read, read until the early morning hours and then read some more.          

Read about a guy, although in her mind it could have be a girl, who had the same wanderlust that drove her west, drove her to the great blue-pink American western night he called it looking for some father that he had never known, looking forlornly, for that father from some oil-spilled New Jersey shore river to the wind-swept China seas before the Golden Gate Bridge. Looked high and low for the missing brethren who long ago had crossed her path out in the hard stone tree night when everything was possible but the intellectuals then flabby and ill-disposed to fight the night-takers even to a draw abandoned all hope, decided that primitive man would take the day and crush any free spirits. This guy though flush with the expectations of many new adventures once the night-takers were put to the sword took to the road, took a chance that he could find that father some fucking place-maybe Latimer Street in Denver, maybe Neola, Grand Island, Reno, Winnemucca, Tulsa, Fargo (although give up all hope if you wind up in that locale). She wondered that maybe he had stolen her dreams. Maybe he had stared at the same rivers that drove her desires, yes, just maybe that was the case.]    

A young boy only spoke patois until he went to school played hooky one day and sat in the lost souls library hoping to find something that would challenge his fevered brain and slip-slopped over to the poetry section and found this guy Villon, a poet of the fourteenth or was it the fifteenth century, who spoke of dreams and crashing out (spoke too of ruffian petty larcenies outside the moat but the boy let it pass because he knew all about that, knew that poet kings only spoke of such to work up a sweat, to deal better with hipsters, con men, sullen fallen women, junkies and assorted felons riding on the railroad jungle tracks. Knew he had kindred in that long ago poet king and sought out fellows who could understand such dreams, could understand too the patois that he thought in. Would find plenty of hipsters, cons, con men, Molochs, holy goofs, cowboy angels, a teenage Adonis is spar with his brethren soul. Find Moloch, insanity, the clap, jungle fever, whiskey shakes, penniless forsaken highways, lost boys, sullen youth, Zen, chicken shit and on some days, but only some days, he wished he never left that fucking river, that holy of holies Merrimack and those wistful eyes that he remembered out in cold Winnemucca, Neola, Grand Island, Big Sur nights          

[Weird thoughts along the Merrimack lifeline (remember like bodies make-up filled with arteries and canals) a fervent solemnly disciplined fourteen year old boy armed with Woolworth’s ten cent notepads and chewed raw No. 2 pencils, sits arms akimbo, strange gangling not yet athletic fourteen year old position like some latter day saint Buddha seeing all knowing all with hashish pipe tucked into some secret place sitting out with cans of beans and rat shit on desolation row waiting for fires and damnation, in a silent black back row orchestra seat (no red dress girl singing swinging Benny Goodman songs that night to come hither him to perdition and have to ask the eternal boy-girl question-orchestra or balcony-and he would know the answer always know the answer balcony of course she silly why else would I come into the shadows with you) of the of long gone to condos or cute shops Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street staring intensely at the big white screen suddenly turned to magic motion pictures with a dust storm brewing out in some fucking petrified forest and some girl not his holding off some ragged sweater gas jockey, and dreams too.   

Waiting, eternally waiting like that fervent fourteen year old boy for something to happen, for some kicks, for something better than listening to the average swill the customers brought in the door, waiting she thought for culture, or her idea or culture anyway. What grabbed that poor boy boy though was that scene out of some latter day great American West night when he thought he would be able to choke the Eastern dust from off his shoes and live-and write, always write. So kindred, kindred too when some holy goof hobo, tramp, bum angel Buddha comes traipsing down the road looking for hand-outs and God Jesus that would be the life. He, she, they make small kindred talk and speak of that damn poet, that Villon who knew more than he should about the human condition, more than any fourteen year old boy anyway. 

But before long the dream shattered, the night-takers released from their caves come swooping down like hell’s avenging angels, avenging the lost paradise that he had read a guy by the name of Milton, half-blind had gone on and on about in some heaven’s battle and they the losers-and what of it. But when you take on the night-takers you better realize that you will take some casualties, take some holy sacred blood from the holy earth returned and that ain’t fair, ain’t fair at all but who knows maybe Buddha, Rama. Zoroaster, Jehovah, the unnamed one, planned it out that way. Out the door of that no longer silent black back row orchestra seat he was glad that he had not had some red dress come hither girl to bother him. For he wondered, wondered as he sank his eyes into the white froth of the mighty Merrimack below whether she, that Western tableau girl would ever acknowledge him, ever read his mind like he read hers.]  

Ha, as he tried to climb Bear Mountain with a dollar and a quarter in his stained dungarees (not called jeans then, not around him anyway) splattered flannel shirt and broken toe boots looking for that father he never knew (although his own father had passed on before he knew that he was looking for another father somewhere along the wino camp tracks, some arroyo bush or in some county jail working out a scheme). Had Route 66 cold because if he could search that highway he would miss some connection, some angst the shrinks called it among the hot rod car, surf board, motorcycle lost winding in stir and some rough trade honey to some beast, boys he would meet out in the great blue-pink American Western night. As he pulled his thumb out of his back pocket he finally relaxed and dug the scene. Hit long rides and short, mostly lonely truckers looking for company and searching for the sons they had never known, tramp diner stops, railroad stews on nights so cold his broken toe boots seized up on him, grabbed a couple of big rides with big blondes looking for some max daddy to be-bop with and leave in Doc’s drugstore while they waited to be “found” by some Hollywood agent. Took tokay swigs with the best of them, met up with rabid New Jersey poets, New York City Times Square gangster dope peddlers and sainted poets (funny always the poets driving him forward he would have to write that down, Ivy League junkies on the nod, and finally the Adonis of the western night whom he would be-bop with unto the San Francisco Bay dropped that high white note out in the China seas. Yeah, he had it all except maybe those bug eyes from childhood lost in some flophouse. Still on some days, and only on some days, he wished he never had left that fucking river, never that sacred ground river. He wondered if she though that same thought.               

In Defense Of What Now Figures To Be “Premature” Anti-Fascist Fighters-Cary Grant And Ingrid Bergman in Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946)-A Film Review

In Defense Of What Now Figures To Be “Premature” Anti-Fascist Fighters-Cary Grant And Ingrid Bergman in Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Notorious, starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Raines, directed by the late Sir Alfred Hitchcock ( I was not sure whether when somebody had the honorific “sir” before his name and it is not hereditary whether it sticks for eternity and nobody else around the publication knew either so lacking somebody connected with the College of Heraldry I will keep it and let the bloody queen and her minions figure it out), 1946

The regular reader may wonder why I, Fritz, Taylor, who usually does commentary on wars and military affairs and not film reviews drew this assignment. That can be answered with two remarks. First, sort of strangely given the casualty numbers I was the only one on the staff, regular or contributing as is my status, who had lost a relative, actually two relatives, my uncle on my mother’s side and a cousin on my father’s side in World War II. Specifically, in the European Theater where the Soviet-led and American-assisted struggle was against the Nazi, fascist scourge. The anti-fascist sentiment runs very deeply in my family, my Southern-roots family who take such things seriously, take the military seriously. The second was that of all the people associated with this publication who are actively, meaning not just writing about it but out on the streets, opposing the current wave of fascist expression in social media and out on those very same streets which goes under several names Nazi, White Nationalist, Alt-Right but they are birds of a feather it has been determined around the water cooler that I am the most vociferous and involved. Sam Lowell, who under normal circumstances would hit a home run on the subject matter of the film under review, Notorious, is not only in a running battle with a young up and coming colleague but has sensed that I can do greater justice to the subject and so persuaded Greg Green to let me take a stab at it.

I was not familiar with this film although as a kid I saw several Sir Alfred Hitchcock films, mostly in color like Vertigo, The Bird, and his re-make of his original The Man Who Knew Too Much so I was a bit shocked by the premise that the American government in 1946, in the person of Dev a federal agent of some sort, played by suave and solid Cary Grant, was gung-ho about tracing down some recalcitrant and nasty exiled Nazis and their agents down in Rio. More so since the reality was that the American government was, except for the hardened Nazis at Nuremburg and such were trying to rehabilitate this ramble in the struggle against the Soviet Union in the ice-cold Cold War. But what really galled me was the idea then, today too in the age of Trump, that the anti-fascist struggle was to be left in the hands of governmental agents. My every instinct rebelled against that false idea, those “alternative facts” knowing what has been happening in the past several years. 

But to the film on its own premises. We already know about Dev, about the federal agent part but that would get the agency he worked for now nowhere since the guys who they were dealing with, those rats down in Rio were hooked into what was going on, were wise to the idea that the feds were on to them. Dev and friends needed a “lure,” needed a stoolie and who better that the party girl daughter of a guy who was sentenced in federal court in Miami for treason against the United States and who subsequently took his own poison pill just like in the movies. Enter one Alicia, played but off-handedly, ah, beautiful to fall down and cry for Ingrid Bergman, she last seen in this space according to Seth Garth who keeps tabs on such things as Victor Lazlo’s wife and rock in Casablanca leaving Rick of Rick’s Café and Louie to form a beautiful friendship. After lots of hemming and hawing and a little off-hand romancing Alicia buys into the project although what role she will play is not yet determined. So off to Rio but don’t blame that torrid town for harboring rats and their ilk.

Enter the plan once Dev and Alicia get settled in. The “mark” one Alex, played by Claude Rains last seen in this space according to Seth Garth who as I have already mentioned keeps tabs on such things as Rick of Rick’s Café out of Casablanca that’s in Morocco next beautiful friend after Victor Lazlo and Ingrid take off on the last plane to Lisbon to lead the anti-fascist resistance in sunken Europe, who with an overbearing mother is central to the financing of what they plan will be the 4th Reich (and no mistakes this time letting a bum like Hitler grind things down to nothing). That is where the “lure” literally comes in. Somehow Alex and Alicia knew each other, and Alex had been smitten -and would still be smitten. 

Of course, that would complicate the Alicia-Dev budding romance but the fight against the rats and the closing down of their rathole had to come first. The thing got so carried away though that smitten Alex actually married Alicia as a test of whether she was sincerely smitten by him. Sorry Alex she only has eyes for Dev whatever eye wash both try to put out to the public. The trouble, big trouble for Alex, is that Alicia is not only beautiful, hey lets’ call it by its right name, drop dead beautiful, but smart and worms some secret info out of him in passing before he realizes that she is a freaking American agent. Alex tries to slowly poison Alicia to get out from under what is in store for him but ready Dev comes to the rescue and Alex has to play along. Play along to his doom once his confederates figure out Alicia knew too much via the Alex pipeline. The last scene is great at some level when one of the Nazi confederates calls Alex to come hither and the dreaded door closes behind him. Gone.               

If assuming the American government gave enough of a rat’s ass about crushing a fascist revival in the bud in 1946, which we now know was hooey, to put an agency on the task it is also wrong to assume that we can let the cretins, and here I mean today’s progeny of those cretins, take care of their own like that last scene mentioned above. That said maybe the best way to really look at this film in order to get my blood pressure down is to see it as yet another variation on old Hollywood chestnut-boy meets girl- that has saved a million films and we will deal with the political conclusions ourselves. Yeah, Sam was right to tag me for this review. Enough said.    

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50^th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

By Lance Lawrence

[In the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late daughter (she died in 1996)  whom he never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very young-then)

We had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows. Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.    

I also knew Allan Ginsberg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young to have appreciated his Howl which along with the elegant Kaddish (for his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.) 

This piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsberg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat, the family pet.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsberg and his Peter although they were in friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and maybe in some older sets still in use  Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope, the new religion for the lonely and the lonesome. All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsberg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBERG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance Lawrence]

*(We have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50^th anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac.) 

***********

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.

Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell -Songs For Aging Children- The Songs of Tom Rush- An Encore

Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell -Songs For Aging Children- The Songs of Tom Rush- An Encore

A link to a YouTube film clip of a more mature Tom Rush performing Joni Mitchell's Urge For Going.

CD Review

The Very Best Of Tom Rush: No Regrets, Tom Rush, Sony, 1999

If I were to ask someone, in the year 2010 as I have done in previous years, to name a male folk singer from the 1960’s I would assume that if I were to get an answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. And that would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be) the voice of the Generation of ’68 but in terms of longevity and productivity he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.

The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960’s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time. This was period when he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by then (1968).

As for the songs themselves I mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. That is represented here by a very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian home. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Scmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing. Unfortunately it is not on YouTube). Finally a more recent very mellow River Song (1999) to round out the tracks. This is the classic Tom Rush play list. Get It.

Urge For Going Lyrics
Joni Mitchell Lyrics

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go

I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin
And not another girl in town
My darling's heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground, and
Bully winds came around, pushed them face down in the snow
He got the urge for going
And I had to let him go

He got the urge for going
When the meadow grass was turning brown
Summertime was falling down and winter was closing in

Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight flapping and a-racing on before the snow
They've got the urge for going, and they've got the wings so they can go

They get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I'll ply the fire with kindling now, I'll pull the blankets up to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she's got the urge for going and I guess she'll have to go

She gets the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
And all her empire's falling down

Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell-The Cultural Wars-Part 247- Woodstock 2007

Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell-The Cultural Wars-Part 247- Woodstock 2007

COMMENTARY

As a political writer who stands well outside the traditional political parties in this country I do not generally comment on specific politicians or candidates, unless they make themselves into moving target. Come on now, this IS politics after all. How can I justify not taking a poke at someone who has a sign on his chest saying –Hit Me? Lately Republican presidential hopeful Arizona Senator John McCain has fallen all over himself to meet that requirement.


And what is the fuss about. Studied differences about how to withdraw from Iraq? No. Finding ways to rein in the out of control budgets deficits? No. A user friendly universal health care program? No. What has sent the good Senator McCain into spasms is a little one million dollar funding proposal (since killed in the Senate) that would have partially funded a museum at Woodstock, site of the famous 1969 counter-cultural festival. His view is that the federal government should not be funding projects that commemorate drug, sex and rock and roll. Well so be it. However, the topper is this. In order to sharply draw the cultural war line in the sand he mentioned (just in passing, I’m sure) to the Republican audience that he was speaking to that he did not attend that event as he was ‘tied up’ elsewhere.

Unlike his draft dodging fellows, like Bush Cheney, Wolfowitz, et. al in the Bush Administration McCain saw action in Vietnam. Of course that action was as a naval pilot whose job it was to attempt to bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, a task in which they very nearly succeeded. Through the fortunes of war he was shot down and spent several years in a POW camp. That comes with the territory. In the summer of 1969 this writer also had other commitments. He was under orders to report to Fort Lewis, Washington in order to head to Vietnam as a foot soldier. That too comes with the territory. The point is why rain on someone else’s parade just because you want to be a hero. Moreover, it is somewhat less than candid to almost forty years later belly ache about it.


A note on Woodstock as an icon of the 1960’s. The slogan- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. We liked that idea then, even those of us who were rank and file soldiers. Not everyone made it through that experience . Others recoiled in horror later, including some of those today on the right wing of the culture wars. And others who did not 'inhale' or hang around with people who did formed another reaction to those events. Those experiments and others like communal living, alternative lifestyles and ‘dropping out’, however, were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And creative. Even the most political among us felt those cultural winds and counted those who espoused this vision as part of the chosen. Those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change without a fundamental political change in society proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Note this well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and today by John McCain spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of ‘cultural wars’ in revenge by them and their protégés is a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- *In Pete Seeger's House- "Rainbow Quest"-Martha Schlamme

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger's now famous 1960s (black and white, that's the give-away)"Rainbow Quest" for the performer in this entry's headline.

Markin comment:

This series, featuring Pete Seeger and virtually most of the key performers in the 1960s folk scene is a worthy entry into the folk archival traditions for future revivalists to seek out. There were thirty plus episodes (some contained more than one performer of note, as well as Pete solo performances). I have placed the YouTube film clips here one spot over four days, November 10-13, 2009 for the reader's convenience.