When The Capitalist World Was On The Rise-Vermeer and Friends at the National Gallery-2017

When The Capitalist World Was On The Rise-Vermeer and Friends at the National Gallery-2017   

By William Bradley

Frank Jackman, a fellow writer in this space and I believe in the on-line edition of Progressive Nation when he was the senior political commentator here under the old regime, a time before I came on board, according to the archives loved to talk about the days when capitalist was a progressive force in the world.* He liked to write about the proud beginnings when the rising bourgeoisie was going mano a mano (his words from a piece I saw in the archives) against the old stagnant feudal society that depended on the static-and hard core universal church Catholic religion which promised the good life not now but in the great by and by.

Frank did a whole series of articles under the title When The Capitalist World Was Young to be found in the archives making the connection between the artistic sensibilities of the rising bourgeoisie and their clamoring for paintings which showed that they were on the rise, that they were the new sheriffs in town and could afford like the nobles and high clergy in the ancient regime to show their new-found prosperity by paying for portraits, collective and singular, and displays of their domestic prosperity. Of course Frank, an old radical from the 1960s a period that he and the older writers here have spent an incredible amount of time writing about some of it interesting and informative and others written seemingly since they had nothing else to write about and figured a nostalgia trip, trips would get them space in a blog dedicated to bygone history and culture, was coming at his view from something that he called a Marxist prospective. A prospective which not knowing much about it except it had a lot to do with the demise of the old Soviet Union now Putin’s Russia and why it had failed I asked him about since I was clueless about how that artwork had anything to do with politics. What he told me, and I don’t want to get into a big discussion about it is that Marxism, Marx saw capitalism as a progressive force against the feudal society and that would get reflected in lots of things like art and social arrangements.      

Under that set of ideas Frank was able to give a positive spin on a lot of the art from the 16^th and 17^th century, especially Dutch and Flemish art in the days when those grouping were leading the capitalist charge via their position in the shipping, transport and the emerging banking world. In one part of that above mentioned series Frank highlighted the connection between art and economics by referring to a famous painting in the National Gallery down in Washington, D.C. where some very self-satisfied burghers and civil officials were feasting and showing off their new found emergence at trend-setters. I took his point once I saw the painting he was referring to and noted that these guys and it was all guys except the hard-pressed wait staff even though I am still not sure that you can draw that close a connection between art and economics.    

That discussion with Frank was in the back of my mind when I was assigned by Greg Green, since I was down in Washington for another reason, to check out the Vermeer and friend retrospective at the National Gallery (that Frank referred painting of the burghers was nowhere in sight and I wound up viewing it on-line while we were discussing it). I took a different view of what I saw there since I am not very political and certainly would not draw the same line as Frank did. What struck me, and I am willing to bet many others who viewed the exhibit as well, was the extreme attention to detail in almost all the paintings observed. The sense that the artists had to whether it was portraiture, domestic scenes, or landscape, including those famous frozen lakes and canal winter activity scenes, show in extreme detail and shadowing exactly what they were observing. I admit I am more interested in let’s say abstract expressionism that this kind of  imagery but my hat is off to those who were able to do such detailed and exact work. Whether or not they were rising with the high tide of capitalist expansion.      

*[I am not sure I am supposed to address this issue but I will write my comment and let the editors blue-pencil the thing if it is beyond the pale but under the old regime Frank was given the official title of Senior Political Commentator after the old site manager brought in a few others to assist in that work who were dubbed Associates. Under the new more democratic regime everybody is just identified by their names as was the case when this publication was hard copy and in its early on-line days.]           

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-***From The Atmosphere- Not Class Struggle, But Kali Ma- What?

Click on the headline to link to a Kali Ma entry culled from Boston Indymedia  Web site that has the class struggle approach to reality beat six ways to Sunday.

Markin comment:

I, and not I alone, have spilled much cyber-ink over the last several years bemoaning the low level of class struggle in America (by our side, the other side has gone full throttle) in the face of permanent war, bloated military budgets, rampant unemployment, housing foreclosures, social welfare budget cuts and general social ugliness from questions of race, sex, and ethnicity to public mores. Of course, that bemoaning has been done under the rubric of trying, desperately trying, to organize the laboring masses to rise up and smite the oppressor. The real, namable, oppressor- the mad imperialist-driven capitalist bourgeoisie.

Apparently those efforts have been nothing but a fool’s errand as the linked entry culled from the Boston Indymedia Web site testifies to. All that is necessary to smite that oppressor is to chant to Kali Ma, and, someone, someone from California, naturally, has come up with the idea to do just that. On the old grounds of People’s Park in Berkeley where some very real, and bloody, battles against that self-same oppressor and its local agents were fought in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Be still my heart though. I am as willing as the next guy to evoke the shades of om-master, mad beat poet Allen Ginsberg in order to change society- if it works. Unfortunately, for all the chanting, for the bell-ringing, for all the mantra-evoking it took the Vietnamese liberation armed forces to end the Vietnam War. It took plant occupations and picket line street battles to gain trade union recognition in America. It took taking to the streets and the taking of many casualties to gain black civil rights. And all those battles, as today’s social scene bears witness to, were only partial and reversal gains. So, no thank you, I will continue the “old-fashioned” way, the old fashioned chanting- fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. Let old evil Kali Ma take her chances against that.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-The Long Sixties Indeed-My encounter with Owsley-By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

My encounter with Owsley

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

[Owsley Stanley, an iconic figure from the Sixties who gained fame as a producer of LSD and as a sound man for the Grateful Dead, died March 13, 2011, in an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia. Stanley supplied what Rolling Stone Magazine once called "the best LSD in the world" to Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, and, through his work with the Dead, revolutionized the art of rock and roll sound engineering. See The Guardian's obituary after Paul Krassner's article below.]

In 1967, there was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, and me, playing the part of a stand-up satirist.

There were two shows, both completely sold out, and this was the first time anybody had realized how many hippies actually lived in Pittsburgh.

Backstage between shows, a man sidled up to me. “Call me ‘Bear,’” he said.

“Okay, you're ‘Bear.’”

“Don't you recognize me?”

“You look familiar, but--”

“I'm Owsley.”

“Of course – Owsley acid!”

Fun fact: His nickname, “Bear,” was originally inspired by his prematurely hairy chest.

Now he presented me with a tab of Monterey Purple LSD. Not wishing to carry around an illegal drug in my pocket, I swallowed it instead.

Soon I found myself in the front lobby, talking with Jerry Garcia. As people from the audience wandered past us, he whimsically stuck out his hand, palm up.

“Got any spare change?”

Somebody passing by gave him a dime, and Garcia said thanks.

“He didn't recognize you,” I said.

“See, we all look alike.”

In the course of our conversation, I used the word “evil” to describe someone.

“There are no evil people,” Garcia said, just as the LSD was settling into my psyche. “There are only victims.”

“What does that mean? If a rapist is a victim, you should have compassion when you kick 'im in the balls?”

I did the second show while the Dead were setting up behind me. Then they began to play, softly, and as they built up their riff, I faded out and left the stage.

Later, some local folks brought me to a restaurant which, they told me, catered to a Mafia clientele. They pointed out a woman sitting at a table. The legend was that her fingers had once been chopped off, and she’d go to a theater, walk straight up to the ticket-taker, hold up her hand and say, “I have my stubs.”

With my long brown curly hair underneath my Mexican cowboy hat, I didn't quite fit in. The manager came over and asked me to kindly remove my hat. I was still tripping. I hardly ate any of my spaghetti after I noticed how it was wiggling on my plate.

I glanced around at the various Mafia figures sitting at their tables, wondering if they had killed anybody. Then I remembered what Jerry Garcia had said about evil. So these guys might be executioners, but they were also victims.

The spaghetti was still wiggling on my plate, but then I realized it wasn't really spaghetti, it was actually worms in tomato sauce. The other people at my table were all pretending not to notice.

It was, after all, the Summer of Love.

“Thanks for enhancing it, ‘Bear.’”

[For years, Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America's premier satirical rag. He was also a founder of the Yippies. The above was excerpted from the expanded edition of his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture -- not sold in any bookstores; available only at paulkrassner.com and as a Kindle e-book.]


Owsley Stanley at his 1967 arraignment for LSD possession. Photo from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Owsley Stanley, 1935-2011:
Prolific LSD producer and
icon of the 1960s counterculture

By Michael Carlson / The Guardian / March 15, 2011

The American psychologist Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out" changed a generation. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley Stanley who provided the means to do just that. Stanley, who has died at age 76, produced millions of doses of "acid", the psychedelic drug LSD, which fueled the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and spread around the world.

Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze was the consequence of Stanley's Monterey Purple acid; his varieties included White Lightning and Blue Cheer and aficionados called the best acid simply "Owsley". He supplied the Beatles at the time of their Magical Mystery Tour television film (1967), and provided the acid to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest novelist Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters", whose 1964 bus trip across America was chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Stanley's acid turned hippies on and he also tuned them in. The band on Kesey's bus was the Grateful Dead, with whom Owsley began an instantly synergistic relationship. The Dead took to his acid with such enthusiasm that Jerry Garcia became "Captain Trips", while Stanley funded their career and became their sound engineer, creating their unique live sound and, by recording each concert, providing the most complete archive of any band of the era. Along with Bob Thomas, he designed the band's "Steal Your Face" lightning bolt and skull logo, originally so his masses of sound equipment could be identified easily.

Stanley was also the quintessential drop-out. Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, his grandfather of the same name had been governor of Kentucky, a US senator and congressman. His father, a state's attorney, was pushed by wartime experiences into alcoholism. After his parents separated, he lived first with his mother in Los Angeles, then returned to his father and was sent to military school.

Nicknamed "Bear" when he began sprouting body hair, he was expelled from school for getting his ninth-grade classmates drunk. He spent more than a year as a patient at St Elizabeth's, the Washington psychiatric hospital that also housed Ezra Pound, and tried college, but eventually joined the air force. His electronics training there led to work on radio stations in Los Angeles, while studying ballet and working as a dancer.

In 1963 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began smoking marijuana and selling fellow students morning-glory seeds for a legal high. The next year, he encountered LSD. He spent three weeks studying the then-legal drug's chemistry, and began producing it himself. Quitting college and working at a local radio station, he set up the "Bear Research Group" to make acid. By the time he met Kesey in September 1965, he had become the first private producer of LSD on a grand scale.

Along with Tim Scully he set up a massive lab in Port Richmond, at the northern end of San Francisco Bay; when LSD became illegal in California in 1966, Scully moved to a location opposite the Denver zoo. Stanley stayed ahead of the law by keeping his acid in a small trunk which he shipped between bus stations, but after a 1967 raid his defence was that the 350,000 acid tabs police confiscated were for his personal use. He fought the case for two years, but his bail was revoked when he and the Dead were busted in New Orleans in 1970, and he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Once released, he resumed working for the Dead. His mentoring of the band had floundered in 1966, because while sharing his house in Los Angeles's Watts ghetto they also had to share his carnivorous life-style. Stanley believed that carbohydrates poisoned the body and vegetables interfered with nutrition. Arguing with his fierce but erratic intelligence was challenging: "There's nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn't cure," said Garcia.

On a practical level, Stanley's perfectionism meant that sound systems took too long to set up and take down, and he feuded with the business-first approach of Lenny Hart, the band's manager and father of drummer Mickey. But in 1973 he delved into his archive to release Bear's Choice, a tribute to the recently deceased Dead co-founder, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and in 1974, at a concert in San Francisco's Cow Palace, he inaugurated the 604-speaker Wall of Sound.

Owsley later organised sound for Jefferson Starship and Dead bassist Phil Lesh's solo projects, and scraped a living selling marijuana and making jewelery, a trade he learned in prison. In 1985 he met his third wife, Sheilah, and they moved to the Australian outback, squatting on 120 acres of remote land outside Cairns, convinced there was an oncoming Ice Age which would be best survived there. He believed that global warming was part of a natural cycle, rather than man-made.

In 2005, Stanley contracted throat cancer, attributing his survival to starving the tumour of glucose through diet. He died and his wife was injured when his car ran off a road in Queensland, and crashed into a tree. He is survived by Sheilah; by two sons, Pete and Starfinder; by two daughters, Nina and Redbird; and is remembered in the Dead's song Alice D Millionaire and Steely Dan's Kid Charlemagne.

[Michael Carlson is a sportswriter (and former tight end at Wesleyan University). He also writes obituaries for the British daily, The Guardian, where this article first appeared.]

On The 100th Anniversary Of The World War I Armistice-Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman” (2017)- A Film Review

On The 100^th Anniversary Of The World War I Armistice-Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman” (2017)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

[If the name Laura Perkins seems familiar to the readers of this space that is right since she has been the subject of several pieces by Sam Lowell, her long-time companion, who before his retirement was the Senior Film Critic when the blog gave its personnel job title under the previous regime. Sam has always called Laura his muse and now the tables are turned as Laura has decided with this first review to take a stab at writing pieces on her own. She has told me that she did not feel any particular encouragement from the previous management to act as anything but Sam’s muse in this space but the combination of the issue of war and a potentially feminist icon motivated her when I asked her to take on the assignment. Greg Green]

 

Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, from the DC comic characters stable, 2017 

An essentially blanket condemnation of humankind’s follies, its folly that war can resolve human disputes, is a tough dollar to break through as the film under review, Wonder Woman, has made amply clear. Apparently Ken Burns when talking about his ten part, eighteen hour overview of the Vietnam War which was a central defining point of Sam and my youth and thereafter when we tried to keep the lamplight burning on the issues of war and peace is not alone in his view that “war is in our DNA.” When the whole thing gets boiled down, both by the dialogue and the action in the film, that is what stands out to these eyes about the film-makers motivations. Of course since we are also dealing with a female character, Wonder Woman aka Diana Prince, played by Gal Gadot, even if a comic super-hero there are feminist issues raised as well. I want to address them but I have noticed that the folly of war has gotten lost, as it has lately in at least American society in the almost non-existent peace movement lost among the swelter of other social concerns even by progressives and leftists. Believe me Sam and I know of whence we speak on that one since more than once we have been among very few kindred out in the street protesting the current craze for war with North Korea or Iran, or both by the madmen in the White House, Pentagon and the Congress.          

As Sam always likes to say, which I can reveal now that he got from me who got it from my Irish grandfather, here’s the “skinny” on this one. I will admit I have played a little tongue in cheek on which seems right or a comic book-etched super-hero. Apparently Zeus, yes the Greek god, created humankind out of an act of hubris, who thereafter proved to be troublesome and not into perfection after the Fall, you know, the exit from the Garden of Eden, that he had created to give them something to do. His son, mother unknown, or at least unknown to me, Ares, who will armor up as the God of war in the pantheon, has the bright idea that the way to bring back the purified Garden now lost due to human culpability, is to kill off all the citizenry (an idea shared by the various generals in WWI given the casualty numbers). In short to make the good green Earth a wasteland fit only for him apparently. Zeus wastes but does not kill Ares in a titanic sky battle so he will live to wreak havoc another day.

Enter Diana, aka Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, or rather her mother who created her out of clay although the real deal is that she, the Queen mother, coupled with Zeus on the quiet. When all hell broke loose in the heavens among the menfolk she led her Amazon warriors, and no men, to a secluded spot and set up a female commune, nunnery, convent, military academy waiting for the wounded but not defeated Ares to make his inevitable charge. Diana will be the vessel who will champion the Amazons, champion the humankind cause once she breaks out of that female retreat and heads out into the messy real world.          

Enter the real world out of nowhere in the person of her future star-crossed lover Captain Steve, played by Chris Pines, who happens to be an American on loan to the British who are using him as a spy.  A spy trying to figure out what the nasty brutal Germans, the Huns, are up to in the days leading up to the Armistice maybe trying for one last bit glory and victory. The German strategy. Develop serious gas to exterminate everybody on the other side, along with those who get in the way. Steve finds the secret formula book laying around the secret lab of the well-known notorious Doctor Poison who is cozy with General Death (Ludendorff but let’s call him by his generic name, an evil guy no question who has a serious junkie drug problem from what Sam said when I asked about whatever Doctor Poison provide medication was giving him the energy to be a bad ass).   

After saving Captain Steve Diana (you already know aka Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman so let’s stick with her given name) and hears his story about the mass murder, injustice and civilian collateral damage going out in the real world beyond the retreat she senses this is the work of that damn Ares her mother keeps alluding to but wouldn’t confide in her about. Off they go to London so Steve can give the book to the proper authorities and await further instructions. For a foreigner, an isolated island young woman, she acclimates to society pretty well. Takes everything in stride, including sex and other such things that if she was not a super-hero she would be clueless about. She keeps clamoring to go to the front like any action junkie super-hero and so Steve and some comrades who Steve picks up along the way escort her there. Once there she cannot believe what humans will do to each other for whatever reason those in charge give.

Everything Diana was bred and trained for back in the barracks at home comes to the fore now and Steve and the other guys are just ornaments, back-up for whatever caper she is into. This is strictly her show from here on in. Along the way she solves the trench warfare stalemate that has taken many lives and driven many generals crazy by a frontal attack on the German trenches to get to that poison gas lab and a confrontation with General Death who she thinks is Ares in earthly disguise. Along the way the obvious attraction between her and Captain Steve plays out and they go as guys like Sam like to say “under the silky sheets” but I will just say have sex (off-stage of course). Her intelligence proved to be wrong after a mini-battle with General Death when she finds that the people are still going about the business of war full throttle.

These humans certainly have messy and contrary motives. As it turns out Ares is alive and well in the area in the person of a British War Council member who is conning the world into believing that he is leading efforts to bring an armistice to fruition. (That armistice will come in the real world on November 11, 1918 which is now commemorated in the United States as Veterans Day which Sam and his crowd is trying to get changed back to the original intention he wishes me to tell you). Diana, as you know daughter of Zeus in “real” life and hence a goddess, goes hand to hand with her brother Ares who now is dressed up in funny costume and she vanquishes him forthwith. Unfortunately for the lovely couple Steve committed suicide when he took a plane loaded with poison gas up and exploded it saving his little segment of humankind. Probably better that he got killed early on since Diana was still around 100 years later and he would have been long gone by then. Yeah, she was still around trying to figure what makes these humans tick and why does she have to endlessly go out and save their butts.    

It seems rather fitting, to me at least who has always been on my own and with Sam interested in history (we actually met at a forum on the influence of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the October one, on world politics in the 20^th century), that the backdrop to the storyline in this film is the fruitless, insane blood-letting of World War II. Yes, the war to end all wars, a faulting premise for going to war from the start, which this year will be commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the armistice that stopped the slaughter. For a while but as we are painfully aware did not resolve anything in the great scheme of things. Ironic as well, and probably every general’s wet dream was to have a warrior woman who could break the awful trench war stalemate by the force of her singular personality. The irony being, as is always a subtext in these comic philosophical underpinning, that the peacemaker will untold wreak havoc on her chosen bad guys (who not so strangely from an American view, comic strip or otherwise, happen to be the very same enemies of the British and the Americans with the “bloody Huns represented by a renegade general as the bad guys) with as many kills under her belt as any machine gun or bombshell. The old adage of blessed are the peacemakers takes a holiday in this film except as the two main characters go back and forth about the foibles of humankind.       

To finish up in the year 2018 after all of the stuff about male sexual harassment and sexual crimes against well-known women, and as it turned out by not so well known women by powerful public men in Hollywood, Washington, the media, academia and wherever else some men given an unequal power relationship use that for perverse purposes I have to deal with the implications of a film showing a super-woman with plenty of regular woman traits (empathy, sense of justice, compassion, sorrow) and some useful warrior traits that some of the #metoo women could have used to advantage. As mentioned above there is an odd confluence here between Diana’s basic “human” empathetic instincts and her means of playing that out as an aggressive warrior not unlike every warrior who has come down the path worried more about kill ratios than trying to figure another way to deal with the problem. Sometimes that is the only way but not always and you don’t have to be a pacifist to say that. You also don’t have to be a feminist, although it helps, to wonder out loud about what image being projected on the screen those very impressionable girls and young women with the tubs of popcorn and cup of soda in hand and cellphone at the ready are seeing about the way women have to navigate in the world.       

I won’t bother to address the “dress,” the scanty dress issue which seems to have been a bugaboo for some feminists, some women in general since the real point is about the character was projected and how and not about her attire, well-bundled proper lady in London and scanty warrior princess on the killing fields.   

[I would like to acknowledge, at least a little, Sam Lowell’s help on this first film review and some of the touchstone points may reflect the fact that we have been companions for a fair amount of time now and I have been reading his reviews for years. After this maiden voyage I will be better able to reflect my own “voice” a bit better. Sam thinks so too. Laura Perkins]    

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  

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-*Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic? to set the mood for this piece.

CD Review

The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: 1957: Still Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988

Markin comment:

Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these classic rock reviews in this space. The part that starts out with a tip of the hat to the fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then the part that is befuddled by today’s teenage-hood. And then I go scampering back to my teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this review is no different, except, today we decipher the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses) that drive this one.

See, this series of reviews is driven, almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs of this mammoth set of compilations. In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If you really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food at that, off a tray while seated in their cherry, “boss" 1959 Chevy.

And beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), and the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home a few cars over) there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where all of this gets mixed in.

Of course, just like another time when I was reviewing one of the CDs in this series, and discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” makes me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Ya, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.

Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she enters, she always in the end enters into these things? Yes, I see that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie has really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation on more than one occasion to no avail) he is nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not for his looks although they were kind of Steve McQueen okay. What they go for him for is his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose (midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And not just “beat’ girls, that liked him, either as you will find out.

Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the...(oh, forget it) Joanne had had their 207th (really that number, or close, since 8th grade) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)

Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (ya, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). What I didn’t know was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was enamored of his patter (or so I heard later). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine, And here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl). The not so funny thing was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.

Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I get a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).

Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor and told me the whole story and even now , as I recount it, I can’t believe it. Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said she when he first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.

The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop, Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two(as if you could rob the cradle with Frankie)but nineteen, almost twenty and was just embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. Moreover, somewhere along the line she and cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, was looking for a way to take revenge and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. And he is sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles to secrecy. I’m telling you this is strictest confidence even now. Just don’t tell Joanne. Ever.

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Australia, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, 2008 

I suppose I am not supposed to talk about it under some bogus agreement Sam Lowell made with the current boss but I will test the waters while I am still here. Still have a job. Finally I have gotten a goddam assignment that doesn’t belittle my intelligence, belittle the intelligence of anybody except maybe “stable genius” Donald Trump. (I know, I know you are not supposed to mix politics with movie reviews but I couldn’t resist the comparison after what I have had to endure the last few months and my time is short here anyway from the look of things). Finally have gotten away from a steady diet of super-hero flicks, Batman, Superman, Ironman, those clowns, whose collective plotlines wouldn’t fill a whole page unless I did my puffing-out magic. Got those silly assignment as “punishment” called “broadening my horizons” by certain influential parties. (I do still have the right to characterize the nature of the work without recrimination, don’t I?) So I bled over the carpets a little and drew if not a great film then an adequate one to sink my teeth into Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s great blue-pink  Australia Western night film, ah, Australia (those Aussies know how to promote themselves).       

Funny except for the Aussie English accents and local slang words like “sheila” for woman, the names of the major cities, the time frame of the film just before and during World War II with the Japanese breathing fire on Australian ports, the  positive spin on the native population, the Aborigines, the weather and seasonal differences since Australia is as they say “down under,” and the stuff the ranch hands and citizens drink for hard liquor this film could have been a classic cowboy movie set in the America Wild West before the taming in the late 1800s. And that is the riff I think that the film-makers were trying to play off of in this one what with the desperate cattle drive through the desert making one think of John Wayne trying to get the herd to market in Rio Bravo, the “good injun” coming  to manhood through some rites of passage (read here Aborigine) versus the bad gringo white bastard land grabber trying to grab the neophyte landowner’s land, the feeding at the public trough with Army meat contracts and the shoot ‘em up stuff every few minutes.       

That might be what the film-makers in their cinematic dreams were looking for but this film is really about two things. The “cat and mouse” game played by that neophyte land-owner rancher Lady something from England played by the handsome and still at times eye-catching Nicole Kidman and the everyman every cowboy man “Drover” played by the beautiful, no, that is too good a description for him, pretty boy Hugh Jackman. From the minute Lady eyes Drover and he her you know, you can bet six, two, and even that they will be messing up some sheets before this one is over, well before it is over. The other point is an interesting look at what in old time American Westerns would never be looked at except as an aside-at best-at what coming of age means in Native cultures. We have come a long way from the idea that “the only good injun is a dead one” in relationship to Native cultures in the struggle to tame the west-America or Australia.       

The latter idea is pretty straight up with a precocious youth and a wizen wise old man of the earth showing the way that the culture gets passed through (and in the clinch saving some gringo asses as well). That leaves the boy meets girl thing, man meets women, in this one via the common struggle of Drover and Lady to save her inherited ranch from bankruptcies, unscrupulous cattle barons, and deadly “land hungry” upstarts. Like I said the stars were aligned and Lady and her Drover man  hit the sack not without prior and subsequent differences as befits to culturally different characters (he had had an Aboriginal wife whose death was a result of white racism in not getting her medical treatment and she had shown up without a clue shortly after her husband had been murdered by parties at first unknown but later proven to be that land-grabbing son of a bitch ). So now you have the “skinny” as old Sam Lowell who apparently has lost a step or two with that silly pact with the devil site manager used to like to say in the days when he wrote reviews hot and fast.          

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, with Jazzman Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and his All-Stars coming up and stealing the show-a few big scenes anyway, music and lyrics by legendary Tin Pan Alley composer Cole Porter, 1956

It is a little ironic that I am doing this assignment at the same time as my fellow writer here Sam Lowell just finished doing a short review of folk troubadour Bob Dylan’s tribute to Frank Sinatra, In The Shadow Of The Night from several years back. Ironic in the sense that those of us who came of age in the 1960s like Sam and me whatever else we may have disagreed on, no matter whether one took Sam’s hippie path or my more middle class career we almost universally rebelled against the music of our parents’ generation the Tin Pan Alley-derived stuff that got them through the Great Depression and World War II. And number one on their hit parade was “the Chairman of the Boards,” one Frank Sinatra just as Elvis was our growing up rock and roll hero and for some of us, not me, that folk minute hero Bob Dylan now covering one Frank Sinatra.    

All of this as prelude to talking about Mr. Sinatra in another of his musical performance films here. This time not about his Oscar-winning role as a wise-ass Army grunt in pre-World War II Hawaii in the film adaptation of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity, the madman “max daddy” junkie fixer man in the film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm or the eerily chilling role of presidential political assassin in Suddenly but as the odd-man out in a love triangle down in Mayfair 1950s Newport. In the 1950s Jazz Festival times not the old time summer watering hole of the ultra-rich robber barons who built the massive mansions back in the 19^th century but still quaint and high end Newport before the tourists swarmed in.

Frank definitely gets his shots at his first career, the singing that in the 1940s made all the bobby-soxers take off their bobby-socks and who knows what else if you go by the frenzy Elvis provoked in a later generation here in the musical/drama High Society.  Add in a word as well about the jazz for the Festival being hot as per Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong or off-stage like Dizzy, Charlie, the Duke who blew away a 1954 crowd of younger upstart Mayfair swells and almost caused a riot when his max daddy sax player hit the high white note.

But enough of that Frank sex stuff, Satchmo blowing big rings around staid Newport or even Mister Cole Porter from up in Tin Pan Alley land doing his popular music American Songbook thing because musical, musical comedy if you will although the gags are strictly from nowhere, or not this is about romance, romances. And that seems about right if you figure that Grace Kelly is the protagonist who gets all the attention. I might as well say here in the interest of transparency, or drooling, take your pick, that for a while now I have been adding this too every Grace Kelly pic review. After seeing her here, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and High Noon I now understand why Prince Rainer, her husband, not a man given to public display of emotion had wept openly at her funeral when she passed away in that awful car accident.

To the film.  Here’s how the Mayfair swells go about their private business in a not so private way since half the world knows what it knows. Tracy, played by gracious Grace, now happily divorced from low-ball achiever/mere musician/composer and not classical like Mozart or Bach but jazz if you can believe that, and not a big time financial operator like her father, three name C.K. Dexter, played by another crooner from the 1940s Bing Crosby, is ready to do the deed again with a real self-starter, a guy who worked his way up the food chain and not some sportsman scion of the wealthy set like old C.K. (By the way that divorce business not then, or now for that matter, not well-disposed of by the money set as it confuses wealth transfer and other technical problems.)

That little fact, that underachiever and ne’er-do-well part sets the tone for what will be become a “battle of wills” between Grace and Bing who as you know already to my mind is still rightly in love with her. Enter Mike Connor, an world wary everyman regular guy played Frank, not at this moment like in other entry moments in the film ready to burst into song either alone or with Bing, but as a reporter who is out to get the low-down on the rich and famous for a sleaze bag publishing outfit. To get any juicy pics worldly wise Liz, played by Celeste Holms, who is half in love with Mike but letting him  out on a long leash, tags along for the ride.         

Scene set the rest of the film, interrupted by song and more importantly by savior Satchmo and his All-Stars doing some great old time jazz to make the heart flutter is a breeze through. (Please remember Satchmo and his gang and Bing are there for the Newport Jazz Festival and are merely “crashing” the wedding festivities.) Tracy and C.K. cat and mouse it while the intended groom is in the dark, clueless and moreover happy about that fact until the hammer comes down. The happy hammer coming down at the pre-nuptial wedding digs where Tracy gets blasted and runs off with… No, not C.K. things are too 1950s chaste for that but with a smitten Mike (to work partner Liz’ chagrin). That short intoxicated fling over the next morning the wedding is to be called off once that intended groom takes the high moral ground and foolishly (oops) doesn’t take Tracy in all his arms and carry her off. Wait. You cannot disappoint Mayfair swell guests come for a wedding any more than any other wedding. So Tracy and Mike, no, C.K. retie the knot. Who knows how long that rematch will last with these two wild kids.       

If this all sounds familiar, sounds like a film review plot that I have done before it is. This is just a musical remake of the classic version of the story in black and white The Philadelphia Story with Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in the respective roles. Cary naturally in Bing’s place. That’s the go-to film unless like Prince Rainer you need to see Grace when she was in her prime. And Satchmo in high dungeon.     

***In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

***In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

A YouTube film clip of Van Morrison performing his pre-Belfast Cowboy Into The Mystic.

CD Review


Seth Garth

Pay The Devil, Van Morrison, Exile Productions, 2006


[One of the enduring things about the older writers here, the ones who were “present at the creation” of this publication in its hard copy days back in the mid-1970s when there was still something of an afterglow alive, if not well, from their 1960s countercultural is their love of music. Mainly back in that self-same 1960s rock and roll which most of them were also “present at the creation” at although it was left to older brothers and sister to partake of the full “jail-break” as Sam Lowell liked to call the early uprising. Of course rock and roll has gone through many incarnations, has suffered as has my favored music, jazz, its share of blossom times and barren periods. When that has happened in jazz I tend to go back to the blues, or better rhythm and blues from which a lot of modern jazz had emerged from to break out again.       

When Seth Garth, who knows more about music, about the American songbook that all the rest of his old-time cohort combined hits a dry spot he looks, feverishly at times from this review, for some other nuggets from the songbook. I know because of later he has been humming and low-voice singing the lyrics from a bunch of Cole Porter songs. But back in the 1980s he was working his way through the great American go west young man, young cowboy to be myth and what it meant to some songwriters who were tired of what passed for such music and brought some vigor into the genre. Not so strangely to my mind as that was something of an off period for modern jazz as well I went back to the blues, went back to the old country blues from down in the Delta. On this beat unlike our “dispute” over the merits of film noir we have some agreement if not of kind then of spirit. Greg Green]     


**********
Apparently just now, although this time rather accidentally, I am on something of an outlaw country moment tear, again. I have mentioned on previously occasions when I have discussed county music, or rather more correctly outlaw country music, that I had a very short, but worthwhile period when I was immersed in this genre in the late 1970s. After tiring somewhat of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other more well know country outlaws I gravitated toward the music, eerily beautiful and haunting music, of Townes Van Zandt whose Steve Earle tribute album Townes I have recently reviewed in this space. As I noted there, as well, while this outlaw country thing was short-lived and I scrambled back to my first loves, blues, rock and folk music I always had time to listen to Townes and is funny mix of blues, folk rock, rock folk, and just downright outlaw country.

And that brings us to the album under review, Pay The Devil, and another “outlaw” country music man, the Belfast cowboy Van Morrison. Wait a minute, Van Morrison? Belfast cowboy? Okay, let me take a few steps back. I first heard Van Morrison in his 1960s rock period when I flipped out over his Into The Mystic on his Moondance album. And when I later saw him doing some blues stuff highlighted by his appearance in Martin Scorsese PBS History of Blues series several years ago I also flipped out, and said yes, brother blues. But somewhere along the way he turned again on us and has “reinvented” himself as the “son”, the legitimate son, of Hank Williams. And hencethe Belfast cowboy.

If you do not believe me then just listen to him ante up on There Stands The Glass, a classic honky-tonk midnight sorrows tune; the Williams’ classic Your Cheatin’ Heart; the pathos of Back Street Affair; the title song Pay The Devil; and, something out of about 1952, and the number one example of his cowboyishness (whee!), Till I Gain Control Again. The Belfast cowboy, indeed, although I always thought that was in the North.

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Otto Preminger’s “Fallen Angel”- A Film Review

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Otto Preminger’s “Fallen Angel”- A Film Review

DVD Review


By Josh Breslin  

Fallen Angel, starring Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, directed by Otto Preminger, 1945

[Alright I have had my say about my less than utter devotion to the film noir genre in a recent introduction to Josh Breslin’s film review of the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers (see, Archives, dated January 12, 2019). That still stands. What does not still stand though is the utterly crass response, a respond worthy of wounded elephants, when I mentioned that guys like Josh and Sam Lowell had ill-spent their youths in dark, popcorn-festered Saturday afternoon double feature matinees rather than breathing some innocent fresh air. Let me put it this way the kindest response was by Si Lannon (as usual) who speculated that as much as we are collectively opposed to capital punishment for criminal activities that offend against humankind that perhaps some exceptions should be made particularly egregious cases, mine. It went downhill from the gist of sentiment being that I never had been manly enough to understand the genre having been pampered in my youth up there in swank Hudson River digs        

That hurt whether it is true or not but remember that I am just enough younger and less poverty-driven conscious that those guys although having been through life none of these guys have to worry about where their next meal is coming from-very definitely don’t in some kind of survival of the fittest sense since they survived unlike some of the guys who as Seth Garth has said “laid down their heads in bloody Vietnam or like their icon Markin as a result of that experience.

Still on the face of it and I go with my having been involved with something like forty thousand reviews over the past few decades (not as a writer, Jesus no, not for a long time since that is such a perilous and cutthroat business depending on nothing but your last review and maybe not even that at some journals), the premise behind the noir is not something that ever wowed me, the photography, the black and white scene setting and sequel effects yes. The storyline and shabby treatment of women, even femmes leave a lot to be desired.

Yes, yes, I know we live in the #MeToo era and that has some effect even going back to the noirs but shabby is not too far a stretch that these films were only keeping the so-called feminine mystique alive. Take one example, and not the worse of the lot, Jane Greer’s role in Out Of The Past where she is treated by Robert Mitchum as so much eye candy to be looked up and down and back again. Treated by mobster Kirk Douglas and noting but an appendage. No wonder the woman had ot make her own way, her own space as best she could. If she had to get a little gun crazy, start shooting to keep herself going that was part of the overhead for her to stay alive. Hey, the guys knew what they were getting into and still came after her-and not just for her charms. It might be hard to make a feminist-friendly film, and maybe back then probably impossible but that is no reason for guys doing film reviews today to get all gushy about this genre. Touche. Greg Green]        

*********
As I have mentioned at the start of other reviews in this genre I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. There is nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background (one can tell without watching the beginning of the film, the credits, that a noir is on hand, or noir-influenced and those shadowy fugitive moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh yah, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s) produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good, some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, Fallen Angel, is under that former category. This film is an example of what 1940s film noir was all about, maybe not the best but still more than passable.

Once you have started to get fixated on crime noir films a key question that inevitably comes up is the femme fatale, good or bad, although not every crime noir film had them. Fallen Angel does, although rather unusually this femme fatale (played by sultry big-lipped Linda Darnell) is working in a one-arm joint (come on now you know what that is right? A hash house, a diner, a road house, a dew-drop in and the person serving them off the arm, one arm see, is none other than Darnell as the magnet waitress, Stella). Now all femme fatales, at least the ones I have seen in film (and a few, okay more than a few, that I have been run over by in life), have some kind of shady past and/or have gone wrong by hooking up with a wrong gee. Some of them have put on high class- airs (like Gilda in the movie of the same name and The Lady From Shang-hai both played by sultry, very sultry, let me get my handkerchief out Rita Hayworth) and others, like the Stella role Ms. Darnell plays here, are just hard-boiled gold-diggers from the wrong side of the tracks.

And that little fact is what has all the boys crazy here, and also drives the plot line.
The Great Depression and World War II unhinged a lot of the certainties that earlier American society took for granted. Those mega-events left a lot of loose-end people struggling, struggling hard to find their place in the sun, or at least some dough to help find that place. And that notion goes a long way in explaining why down-at-the-heels Eric (played by Dana Andrews) find himself on the left coast (California before the post- World War II land’s end explosion westward, westward from any east) with no dough and no prospects. But that doesn’t stop him from drawing a bee-line to femme fatale Darnell when he was unceremoniously dropped off in some backwater California ocean town. But brother Eric, take a ticket, get in line, because every other guy on the left coast, including the very unglamorous hash house owner, has big ideas, or wants to have big ideas about setting up house with this two-timing brunette waitress. (Personally I don’t see it but I run to perky blondes and fire-haired red heads although, truth to tell, a few of those femmes I have been run over by, mentioned above, have been brunettes too.) But when a man, as men will do, is smitten well there it is. There are no hoops big enough that he will not roll through and that is where the plot thickens. See Stella, she from the wrong side of the tracks born, wants a home with a picket fence like all the other girls and if you don't have the cash, the cash in hand, then get lost, brother. Be a long gone daddy.  

Needless to say old Eric is ready to move heaven and earth to get the dough for that white picket-fenced house. And here is his scam. A scam that played right has worked since time immemorial. Go where the money is. In that one-horse town, ocean-fronted or not, the dough resides with two prominent sisters who have some dough left from their father’s estate. So Eric plays up to one sister, June, (the pretty one, of course, played by Alice Faye) and through a convoluted series of events they wind up married. Ms. Darnell was not pleased by this turn of event, as you can imagine.

Although Stella not being pleased was cut short by a little problem, she was murdered on the night of Eric’s honeymoon with June. And all signs lead to him as the stone-cold killer- the frame is on, no question. But also “no question” is that he is not that kind of guy. But just step back a minute and remember that point about having to take a ticket to line up for Stella's affections. Plenty of guys (and at least one woman) had motive. See the film and figure who that was. Like I say this not the best of the 1940s crime noirs for plot line but is interesting enough. And the film was directed by Otto Preminger so you know the black and white cinematography shadows and contrasts will be just fine.

The Old Man’s Old Sea- In Honor Of Our Homeland, The Ocean-From The Pen Of Old Time Acre Neighborhood Corner Boy Allan Jackson

The Old Man’s Old Sea- In Honor Of Our Homeland, The Ocean-From The Pen Of Old Time Acre Neighborhood Corner Boy Allan Jackson

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin 

[No, you are not seeing things in some weird way when you see a seeming disconnect between the named person in the title of this piece and the person who wrote it. They are one in the same person. Peter Paul Markin was the moniker that Allan used when he was the site manager, then called administrator, at this publication for many years both in its hard copy and current on-line forms. The demise of Allan Jackson, his removal by a vote of no confidence from among the younger writers, has been written unto death and need not detain us further.

What I do want to detain you about is the origin of the Markin moniker because that long-departed mad man, Allan’s words, still hovers over this publication, especially among the older writers who knew Markin, who in a funny way have almost made a cult out of his sordid memory. To make a long story short since along the way many of the older writers have written their remembrances of their long- fallen corner boy brother I will hurry along. (In fact young Zack James, at the request of his brother Alex, who knew and was best friends with Markin in high school, was commissioned to edit and see to hard copy publication a collective memoir dedicated to Markin’s memory which will be released for the general readership next year.) Markin, whatever happened to him later after his Vietnam War military service and the drug addiction which would lead to his downfall, was the recognized “intellectual” leader of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys and while he could barely tie his shoes in practical matters was the guy who came up with all the ideas, good and bad, legal and illegal.

Allan, as he told me once we got him back on board as a contributing editor when things started going awry with some of the younger writers wo buckled under a few suggestions I tried to pass their way, took Markin’s murky death down in Mexico pretty hard since one of the he and a bunch of other writers looking for steady work and publication to avoid that cabdriver (now Uber or Lyft, that faced every unrequited writer, had put this operation together with Markin in mind. He was so bereft that he had to take Markin’s name if only to keep the bastard’s aura hang over the joint, and so it remains. I, frankly don’t like it, don’t like a two bit junkie with big dope-filled eyes hanging around overhead looking down at my every move. But that is just me and I know I will take a rash of nonsense for even mentioning Markin’s name without genuflecting my ass off. Sorry, guys. Greg Green]       

*************

It is dawn, or maybe just those few minutes before the dawn, those dark light minutes when the sun’s battle for the day is set. The waves splash, today not so innocently, today not tepidly like the past several days when the she sea sounds did not mercifully drown out traffics, construction hammers, or beach tractor clean-ups but swirling out from some hidden sea swells beyond the horizon against the defenseless waiting sand, sand beaten down since time immemorial. Or as long as anyone has been watching that feat, that seemingly endless feat.

This beach, this northern clime beach, the far end of Saco, Maine beach, is this day filled with empty clam shells from some timeless previous sea swirlings waiting sandification (is that right?), abandoned and mislaid lobster traps (and one up in lobster country had better know the difference, know the livelihood difference between the two conditions , just in case some irate boat craggy captain, aged liked sea, decides to reclaim one over your head), occasional oil slicks spilled from the trawlers (and hopefully only small working  residues and not some monster slick by some tiny horizon tanker heading to oil depot ports further up the coast), working trawlers nearby, the flotsam and jetsam streamed here of a thousand ships, cargoes, careless throwaways and conscious, very conscious dumpings, like the sea was just another land-fill wanting filling.

Today though I am ready, ready for the hundredth hundredth time to walk the walk, the ocean walk that has defined more parts of me than heaven will ever know. As I button up my yellow slicker against the April winds that come here more often than, and can come out of the blue against the Bay of Fundy confusions, one minute eighty degrees the next thirty five, I see, see faintly in the distance, a figure, a fellow traveler taking his, her or its (don’t laugh I have seen horses, unridden horses, trotting these beaches, although no sea monsters), maybe also hundredth hundredth walking along the ocean sidewalk, and maybe, just maybe, for the same reason.

Today, hundredth, hundredth walk or not, I am in a remembering mood, a high dudgeon remembering mood that always gets triggered by proximity, fifty mile proximity if the truth be known, to the ocean. I have just finished up a piece of work that reminded me of seas, sea-sides, sea walks, sea rocks, ocean-side carnival amusement parks placed as if to mock the intrinsic interest that one would have in the sea, our homeland the sea, and I need to sort this out, also for that now familiar ten-thousandth time. But I best begin at the beginning, or try to, so I will be finished in that hour or so that it will take me to walk this walk, this rambling ocean walk, and I will pass that solitary walker coming the other way and be obliged under some law of the sea to break my train of thought and remark on the nature of the day, the nature of the ocean, and the joys of ocean-ness brought forth by old King Neptune to that passing stranger.

Ah, memory, jesus, just the names, Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, and the Snug Harbor Elementary School tell a story all on their own. Yes, those names, those seemingly misplaced, misbegotten names and places from the old housing project down in Adamsville, down in my old hometown, and where I came of age, sea-worthy age as well, surely evoke imagines of the sea, of long ago sailing ships, mast-strewn ships, and of desperate, high stakes battles fought off shrouded, mist-covered coasts by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And agile enough to keep it. Almost from my first wobbly, halting baby steps down at “the projects” I have been physically drawn to the sea, a seductive, foam-flecked siren call that has never left me.

Needless to say, ever since I was a toddler my imagination, my sense of imagery, my sense of the nature of the world has been driven by the sea as well. Not so much of pirates and prizes, although those drove my youth a bit but of the power of nature, for good or evil. And on those long ago days, just like now, I dressed against the impending inclement weather with my mustard yellow rain slicker(French’s mustard color not Guiden’s, okay) complete with Gloucester fisherman’s rain floppy rain hat of the same color and rubber boots, black, knee-length boots that go squish, squish and have done so since before time immemorial.

Of course, anybody with any sense knows that anyone who had even a passing attachment to a place like Adamsville, tucked in a bay, an Atlantic bay, had to have an almost instinctual love of the sea; and, a fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings. If being determines consciousness, and if you love the ocean, then it does not hurt to have been brought up in Adamsiville with its ready access to the bay and water on three sides. That said, the focal point for any experience with the ocean in Adamsville centered, naturally, around its longest stretch of beach, Adamsville Central Beach. Puny by Saco beach far-as-the-eye-can-see standards, and Saco puny by Carlsbad (California Carlsbad) farther-than-the-eye-can-see standards but a place to learn the ropes of how to deal with the sea, with its pitfalls, its mysteries, it lure, and its lore.

For many of us of a certain age brought forth by the sea, including this writer, one cannot discuss Adamsville Central Beach properly without reference to such spots such as Howard Johnson's famous landmark ice cream stand (now a woe-begotten clam shack of no repute). For those who are clueless as to what I speak of, or have only heard about it in mythological terms from older relatives, or worst, have written it off as just another ice cream joint you can only dream of such heavens although someone, not me, not me today as I remembrance with a broad stroke and have no time for pretty descriptions, for literary flourishes, should really do themselves proud and write the history, yah, the child’s view history of that establishment. And make the theme, make the theme if you will, the bond between New England love of ice cream and of the sea (yes, it is true, other parts of the country, other ocean parts of the country as well, are, well, nonplussed by the ice cream idea, and it shows in their product).

Know this for now though: many a hot, muggy, sultry, sweaty summer evening was spent in line impatiently, and perhaps, on occasion, beyond impatience, waiting for one of those 27 (or was it 28?) flavors to cool off with. In those days the prize went to cherry vanilla in a sugar cone (backup: frozen pudding). I will not bore the reader with superlative terms and “they don’t make them like they used to”, especially for those who only know “HoJo’s” from the later, pale imitation franchise days out on some forsaken turnpike highway, but at that moment I was in very heaven.

Nor can one forget those stumbling, fumbling, fierce childish efforts, bare-footed against all motherly caution against the dreaded jellyfish (or motherly cautions against everything, everything even the slightest bit harmful in this dangerous old world), pail and shovel in hand, to dig for seemingly non-existent clams down toward the South Adamsville end of the beach at the, in those days, just slightly oil-slicked, sulfuric low tide (the days before dinosaur lament fossils fuels exploded the oceans). Or the smell of charcoal-flavored hot dogs on those occasional family barbecues (when one in a series of old jalopies, Nash Ramblers come to mind and disappear, that my father drove worked well enough to get us there) at the then just recently constructed old Treasure Island (now named after some fallen Marine) that were some of the too few times when my family acted like a family. Or, more vivid, the memory of roasted, really burnt, sticky marshmallows sticking to the roof of my mouth (and maybe still ancient wound stuck there).

But those thoughts and smells are not the only ones that interest me today. No trip down memory lane would be complete without at least a passing reference to high school Adamsville Central Beach. The sea brings out many emotions: humankind's struggle against nature ( a fitful and uneven struggle at best as a few over the top wave crashes have demonstrated to keep us on our toes, and humble), some Zen notions of oneness with the universe (and if not Zen then Kali, Misha or some Zoroastrian flaming fire god mad monk), the calming effect of the thundering waves (rule: speak no louder than the angriest wave in its presence, children under twelve excepted), thoughts of mortality (endless seas bring that notion to the fore and not just ancient wounds and sorrows), and so on. But it also brings out the primordial longings for companionship. And no one longs for companionship more than teenagers. So the draw of the ocean is not just in its cosmic appeal but hormonal, as well. Mind you, however, we, you and I, just in case a stray naive child of about eight is around, are not discussing the nighttime Adamsville Beach, the time of "parking" and the "submarine races.” Our thoughts are now pure as the driven snow. We will confine ourselves to the day time beach.

Virtually from the day we got out of school for the summer vacation I headed for the beach. And not just any section of that beach but the section directly between the John Adams and John Quincy Adams Yacht Clubs (yes, it was that kind of city touting ancient wise men long gone and not missed, not missed after the obligatory sixth grade crypt visit in the Center, not missed, hell, not even on the radar for heady 1960s teenagers. Now, I ask you, was situating myself in that spot done so that I could watch all the fine boats at anchor? Or was this the best swimming location on the beach? Hell no, this is where we heard (and here I include my old running pal and classmate, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, the king of the North Adamsville corner boy night around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor of blessed memory and nothing but a flame-throwing lady-killer, uh, when his honey, Joanne Doyle was summering elsewhere) all the "babes" were. We were, apparently, under the influence of Beach Blanket Bingo or some such teenage beach film. (For those who are again clueless this was a grade B ‘boy meets girl’ saga the plot behind a thousand Hollywood films, except they exploded into song on the beach as well.)

Well, for those who expected a movie-like happy ending to this section of the remembrance piece, you know, where I meet a youthful "Ms. Right" to the strains of the song Sea of Love, forget it. (That is the original Sea of Love, by the way, not the one used in the movie of the same name sung by Tom Waits at the end, and a cover that you should listen to on YouTube.) I will keep the gory details short, though. As fate would have it there may have been "babes" aplenty down there but not for this lad. I don't know about you but I was just too socially awkward (read, tongue-tied) to get up the nerve to talk to girls (female readers substitute boys here). And on reflection, if the truth were to be known, I would not have known what to do about such a situation in any case. No job, no money and, most importantly, no car for a date to watch one of those legendary "submarine races" that we, you and I, have agreed that we will not discuss here. But we can hardly fault the sea for that, right?

But visions of nearly one-half century ago hardly exhaust the lure of the sea. And, speaking of visions, that fellow sea-seeker I mentioned a while ago, coming from the other end of the beach is starting to take shape, it is a he, I can tell by the walk, by the sea walk that men put on when they are alone with their thoughts, although beyond that he is too far away for me to determine age, class (this is a very democratic beach, in most spots, with few vulgar and almost universally disregarded no-trespassing-private property-keep out-beware-of-dogs-police-take-notice signs on some Mayfair swell properties), or physical description, as the suppressed light from the cloudy morning day gets a little brighter

Funny, some people I have known, including some I grew up with, grew up with breathing ocean air embedded in their inner beings and who started with a love of the sea much as I did, moved to Kansas, Omaha, Peoria, Winnemucca or some such place, some such distinctly non-ocean place and never looked back. Christ, as is well known by one and all who know me I get very nervous even now when, as a city boy, I go to the country and do not have the feel of city lights to comfort me. Not as well known is the fact, the hard fact that I get nervous, very nervous, when I am not within driving distance of some ocean, say that fifty miles mentioned above. So keep, please keep, your Kansas, your Omaha, your Peoria, and your damned Winnemucca (and that desolate bus station bench I slept on one night after giving up on the hitchhike road for the evening trying to head out of town to no avail, trying to head ocean west, and let me be, be in places like Bar Harbor, Maine, Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, Sanibel Island, Florida, Carlsbad, California (hell no, not the New Mexico one ), Mendocino, ditto California, Seattle, Washington just to name a few places on this continent, and there are many others, and on other continents, or the edges of other continents, as well. And stories, plenty of stories, which I don’t have time to tell you now except for one that will stand in as an exemplar for what I mean. By the way that form, that mannish form, coming toward me is looking more like a young man by the speed of his walk, and he too seems to have on a favored sea dog yellow rain jacket.