This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
We have exciting news to share with you. The most recent issue of Jacobinmagazine features Ginger Jentzen's election campaign for Minneapolis City Council! Jacobin is the national magazine for the Democratic Socialists of America - who have endorsed Ginger's campaign. Ginger’s campaign is about empowering working people to fight for a political revolution against the 1% and to make Minneapolis affordable for all. That means taxing the wealthiest developers to create high quality, city-owned affordable housing, building a movement to fight for rent control, and building a political alternative to corporate politics as usual.
“Our district is really at a crossroads for what will happen in the rest of the city. There’s a lot of working- and middle-class home ownership [and renters], and it’s one of the places where some of the fastest development is happening throughout the city, a lot of which is done by these profit driven, big developers who have been given basically free rein to transform the city into a playground for the rich...
You cannot be taking money from big developers and say that you will be able to just easily vote against their interests. You cannot be taking money from the Downtown Council or slumlords...and have working people still believe that you’re going to have their best interests in mind or be able to really fight and organize with them.
It’s critical to stay materially connected with the folks who are constantly dealing with the pressures of trying to make ends meet, facing issues with housing, and all these day-to-day problems. I think taking the average wage of a worker in the ward is one key way that a representative of working people can remain accountable.” - Ginger Jentzen
“[Winning a $15/hr minimum wage] is about racial, gender, and economic equity. It is disproportionately women and workers of color who are in these low-wage jobs, and you can’t just say a lot of nice things about being for racial and economic equity and then fundamentally disregard that in the end. What we won is $140 million going from the biggest businesses in Minneapolis back into the pockets of workers every year once this is fully implemented. It’s huge. It’s going to have a dramatic impact on people’s lives…”
We have exciting news to share with you. The most recent issue of Jacobinmagazine features Ginger Jentzen's election campaign for Minneapolis City Council! Jacobin is the national magazine for the Democratic Socialists of America - who have endorsed Ginger's campaign. Ginger’s campaign is about empowering working people to fight for a political revolution against the 1% and to make Minneapolis affordable for all. That means taxing the wealthiest developers to create high quality, city-owned affordable housing, building a movement to fight for rent control, and building a political alternative to corporate politics as usual.
“Our district is really at a crossroads for what will happen in the rest of the city. There’s a lot of working- and middle-class home ownership [and renters], and it’s one of the places where some of the fastest development is happening throughout the city, a lot of which is done by these profit driven, big developers who have been given basically free rein to transform the city into a playground for the rich...
You cannot be taking money from big developers and say that you will be able to just easily vote against their interests. You cannot be taking money from the Downtown Council or slumlords...and have working people still believe that you’re going to have their best interests in mind or be able to really fight and organize with them.
It’s critical to stay materially connected with the folks who are constantly dealing with the pressures of trying to make ends meet, facing issues with housing, and all these day-to-day problems. I think taking the average wage of a worker in the ward is one key way that a representative of working people can remain accountable.” - Ginger Jentzen
“[Winning a $15/hr minimum wage] is about racial, gender, and economic equity. It is disproportionately women and workers of color who are in these low-wage jobs, and you can’t just say a lot of nice things about being for racial and economic equity and then fundamentally disregard that in the end. What we won is $140 million going from the biggest businesses in Minneapolis back into the pockets of workers every year once this is fully implemented. It’s huge. It’s going to have a dramatic impact on people’s lives…”
Defend DACA! Extend TPS! Jail Joe Arpaio! No Ban! No Wall!
Defend Transgender Rights! Resist Fascism!
Mobilize Saturday, September 16
Rally 1:00 PM, Boston Common
On the steps across from the Statehouse
followed by a March to the JFK Federal Building
The government in Washington has stepped up attacks on migrants to levels not seen in years. Trump's attacks on Muslim migrants were only the beginning. Deportations are accelerating. Trump is terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and has pardoned the racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. He also threatens to shut down the government if a Mexican border wall is not built. He threatens the Temporary Protected Status program. This comes on top of his recent bigoted executive order against transgender troops in the US armed forces and his defense of Fascists in Charlottesville, NC. Millions of youth and decent hard working people are under attack! Trump and his cheerleaders in the U.S. Congress are leading a generalized assault on our lives, rights, and living conditions. The leading edge of this assault today is the stepped up attacks against migrants. An injury to one is an injury to all! Mobilize September 16!
Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film “Summer
Of 1942” (1971) In Mind
By Fritz Taylor
Seth Garth, the once well-known
free-lance music critic for many of the big music and specialty publications
that have come and gone over the years since he first put pen to paper some
forty years ago, including the long gone alternative press where he got his
start and first breaks (literally put pen to paper, forget beauties of the
world processors then), had been thinking about the old days a lot recently.
Had been, having the luxury of semi-retired status, also doing a run through of
films via the good graces of Netflix
that he had first seen when he was a youngster sitting in the dark every week
for the double feature at the old Strand Theater in his hometown of Riverdale,
a town a few dozen miles from Boston. Or else films that due to publication
commitments that he had not run through when they came out in the 1970s in the
days when he was determined to catch the wave of being a music critic and
missed many of those films, left them by the wayside.
One night at Jack’s, his watering hole
hang-out over in Riverdale that he increasingly frequented on his forays back
to his old hometown to see if he could “channel” the past by being physically
present on the old sacred soil (although not the Strand long ago turned into a
condominium complex), Seth had mentioned to Brad Fox, an old friend from high
school days who went through many of the experiences with him, that he had just
reviewed a film, Summer of 1942, for
Sal Davis the editor of Cinema Now who
was looking for copy to fill a space quickly. The film which had been released
in 1971 and was about coming of age, coming of sexual age during the early
years of World War II. The big point he made to Brad, who had told Seth that he
had seen the film when it came out but did not remember the details except that
this foxy older woman played by Jennifer O’Neil had “robbed the cradle” and
bedded a teenage boy, swore the film could have been about their generation,
the generation of 1968 as easily as of 1942.
Seth had mentioned, before giving Brad
the details that he had missed about the film, he had started his review
speculating on the fact that each generation goes through its coming of age
period somewhat differently. “Coming of age’ in this context meaning after Brad
had been unclear about what aspect of the term Seth meant, meaning the
beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and
commotions once you got to puberty. He said he had taken the one he, and Brad,
had known about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of
the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet
unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old
values, to turn the world upside down, from their parents’ generation. He said
he tried to contrast that with the one before theirs, the one represented in
the film about the coming of age of their parents’ generation. The generation
that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great
Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging through World
War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and
its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth
who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla
perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares
and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll.
The funny thing at least on the basis
of a viewing of the film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge
and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents
who, at least in their case and the case of their growing up friends, went
through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding.
(Of course in talking about parents and their sexual desire both Seth and Brad
admitted they would have had a hard time linking up their own respective
parents with sexual desire but their own kids if asked would probably say the
same thing about them.)
Brad mentioned that his memory wasn’t
so good of late and that although while they were talking he had been trying to
dredge up some more facts about the movie other than the one he had mentioned
earlier in the conversation about that sexy older woman cradle robber making
Seth laugh that whatever the taboos were about intergenerational sex they both
would have given their eye-teeth if some world-wise fox had come across their
paths. Seth then went on to give Brad a rough outline of how the film had
played out.
He told Brad that his habit of late was
after viewing a film, particularly a film that he was being paid good dollars
to produce a review on, was to go on-line and look up what somebody had to say
about the film on Wikipedia. Wistfully stated that service was
something he wished had been around earlier in his career which would have
saved him a lot of time in the library or looking at the archives of various
publications of the time and allow him under the constant press of deadlines to
be able to write better thought out copy. The story line of the film had been
based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer
Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two
companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, known as “the Three Terrors,”
three virginal teenage boys, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the
beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the
American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese
bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island had been Nantucket Island in the book
published after the movie but had been filmed off desolate Mendocino in
California). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or
peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual
experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.
That chase had been on at two levels.
The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see
what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for
“meaningful” love in the person of an older foxy woman, Dorothy, played by
Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her
husband headed off to war. The “own age” part, funny in parts, driven mostly by
pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he
finally got his wish with one night at the secluded end of the beach with his
most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he
had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was.
The “older woman” (in our circles she
would have been a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion
of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was
spying on her and her husband in their cozy cottage so he was “saving” himself
for her. And after a series of innocent (and some goofy) encounters with
Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been
killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the
matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the
cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.
Having given Brad those details Seth
mentioned that those were the main lines that got played out but what had made
this film more than of ordinary interest to him was the whole lead-up, the
whole “foreplay” if you will of the desire of the trio to be doing something
about getting out of that dreaded virgin status. Said all the guys were fearful
of being tagged with the “homo” tag and didn’t Brad remember how vicious
teenage guys could be about the “manhood” question. Before he could go further
Brad mentioned how when they were fourteen or fifteen he could not remember
when how all the guys from around the corner that they hung on, including Seth
used to “fag” bait him because he had refused to kiss Sarah Langley at a
“petting” party and had actually run out of the house where the party was being
held he had been so embarrassed. At the time he had been sweet on Jenny Price
who had been at the party although nobody was aware of that situation. Nothing
ever came of that desire and so he had spent some time living down the “fag”
tag until he found Sandy Lee in junior year and she took him out of that status
since she was something of a fox herself. Although nobody thought anything of
calling another guy a “fag” as masculine craziness about sex and sexual
identity erupted nobody seriously thought that the guys were gay or anything
like that it was just a separation expression. Who knows who at the time really
wasn’t interested in girls, wasn’t into “getting in their pants” although Seth
speculated that some guys around the block must have since not a few guys lived
at home with their mothers and were not seen with women companions.
Nowadays nobody would think twice about
it although the usual baiting in school and among the jocks would still go on
given the unchanged nature of certain heterosexual young males. Seth mentioned
that he could not believe the pressure to “lose your virginity” that all the
guys suffered through, although he admitted that it also took him a long time,
long after the Christopher Street riots in the Village that began the serious
modern gay rights movement to stop his calling gays “fags.” Not until his eyes
were opened up when gay musicians and actors whom he interviewed and assumed
were straight came out of the “closet.”
Seth had laughed at the very realistic
scenes when Hermie and Oscy picked up a couple of girls at the movie theater
(playing Bette Davis and Paul Henried in Dark
Voyage, a film that he actually had reviewed when it came out in a film
retrospective at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square for the old Avatar alternative newspaper). The scene
which showed the guys “feeling up,” or trying to, had been amazing with Oscy
grabbing his just met girl almost from minute one and Hermie, missing the mark
thinking his girl’s shoulder was her breast. Jesus. Brad laughed but reminded
Seth that no way would that kind of thing have happened in their days since
everybody, or almost everybody knew the drill at the Strand Theater Saturday
matinee double-header or Saturday night date it did not matter. Some ancient
tradition, hell, maybe going back to 1942 for all anybody knew about the
original of the practice made it clear that those who sat in the orchestra were
not going to “make out.” If they were in the balcony then whatever went on,
went on from “feeling up” to blow jobs. It was solely a question of asking your
date where she wanted to sit. That sealed the deal, and in many cases meant a
last date.
Brad’s reminder of the old “policy”
reminded Seth of the time that he was cray for Rosalind Green in junior high,
they had gotten along well, had been a couple of chatterboxes in English class
about books by a bunch of foreign guys to show they were “hip.” One day after a
few weeks after all this “foreplay” Seth had finally asked her to a Saturday
matinee (the usual strategy for dealing with a girl you were not sure would
accept your date by making in the daytime to soften the blow) and she accepted.
When after paying for their tickets and hitting the refreshment stand for
popcorn and sodas he asked her where she wanted to sit she had answered “silly,
of course the balcony why else would I have come with you.” Bingo. Of such
events decent youthful memories are made. Brad on the other hand spent many
hours in the orchestra section once he latched onto Betsy Binstock (whom he
eventually married and was still married to) who was “saving” whatever she was
saving for marriage. Okay, too-now if it did have Brad pulling his hair out then.
Seth quickly mentioned the scene, the
awkward scene, where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and
he got sexually excited, okay, okay, had an erection, by her off-hand helping
hand touch since neither man wanted to talk about those nighttime wandering
hands that came down when they got an erection.
Nor did he spent much time on the scene where the three friends
“discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of
Benji’s mother’s medical books since that scene rang false in their old
neighborhood where sexual information was passed from older brother or sister
to younger, a lot of it wrong, very wrong when the girl had to go out of town
to see “Aunt Emily” (a street expression that she was pregnant and had to leave
town during her term usually not coming back) in other works right out on the
streets. Nobody back in 1942, or 1962 expected uptight parents who were assumed
to probably not have had sex to give any serious information except some
twaddle about the birds and the bees.
And of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his
first sexual experience with the girl he had picked up at the movies. That
scene had little over the top and as reticent about talking about sex as
parents were guys and gals might give an inkling about what they were doing
behind the bushes but a “free show” was off the charts.
The best scene of all though and it
really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations
can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in
schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate
enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village
drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Brad automatically remembered
that scene once Seth recalled it. Remembered too, as he told a disbelieving
Seth that night, his own confusion when he was in junior high and had found
some condoms in a bottom bathroom drawer in his family house when he was
looking for some band-aids. Had asked a kid at school, actually had shown a kid
at school one and the kid had said they were like balloons you fill them with
water and throw them at somebody. It was not until high school and he had begun
his own sexual explorations (obviously not with his ever-loving Betsy) that he
found out their real purpose and blushed silently about his parents’ sexual
practices. Hence another example of the very general understanding about the
young that their own parents never had sex. Whatever else being a youth today
may be about in terms of trauma at least there is a hell of a lot of good
information hanging out there on the Internet for the young to inquire into
without embarrassment.
Yeah, Seth gave Brad the word as they
finished up that last round of drinks and began to head to their respective
homes -watch this film and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling
around coming to terms with sex.
“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”- Sally Field’s Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015)
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Hello, My Name Is Doris, starring Sally Field, Max Greenfield, 2015
You know if you watch enough movies and review them as well every once in a while a film will knock you for a loop. Take the film under review Sally Field’s Hello, My Name Is Doris. Now usually when the subject of a film is an older (oops, mature) woman who is involved romantically in any way with a younger man the natural assumption is (or used to be) that he was “her kept man,” “her handy man,” if you want to invoke a blues expression, her rasping at faded youth, maybe a gigolo, maybe just looking for the main chance or she was on a lark merely “robbing the cradle” (the term used in my old corner boy neighborhood growing up but usually in reverse-guys around the corner once they got out of high school still sniffing around from “jailbait” if you get my drift). This one turns that idea, that 20th century older woman pursuing a younger man idea in the early 21st century on its head. Makes the whole thing of all things a romantic comedy-and socially okay.
Now intergenerational sex (or sexual attraction as here) has always been a thorny issue as mentioned above. Here though mainly through AARP-worthy stalwart actor Sally Field’s extraordinary performance as the Doris of the title makes the idea the stuff of legitimate dreams. (Field, who for the oldsters reading this will remember that she started as a flying nun in the 1960s, is thus no spring chicken). Takes the new-fashion idea that 60 is the new, let’s say 40, and runs with it.
Here’s the play. Doris is a holdover from an old-line company which got bought up by some tech-savvy outfit. One day John is introduced to the staff as the new art director and thus starts Doris’ flights of fancy (although she had already “met” him in the elevator coming up). Now Doris is starting out kind of dowdy, definitely not “hip” having lived her pedestrian life caring for her now departed aged mother on Staten Island. And like dear mother had turned into an inveterate pack-rat. But she is smitten by John and come hell or high water she after attending a “power of positive thinking seminar” is ready to rock the boat of her humble and dreary existence and make her play.
This fantasy though would only be a fantasy without the help of a feisty thirteen year old granddaughter of Doris’s best friend. You automatically know you are in the 21st century because the way Doris will attempt to hook her man is via that feisty granddaughter’s use of Facebook to find out what makes dear John tick and that otherwise Doris would have been clueless if not for this timely intervention. Problem: a young good-looking upwardly mobile guy in New York City is not going to “friend” some dowdy AARPer so, like a lot of people on the Internet they make up a fake profile for Doris. Bingo it works.
Works better when she finds out what his musical interests are and forms a live friendship through that association. Problem” John is already “spoken for” by a beautiful younger woman. Problem solved: that younger beauty breaks it off with John when she suspects he is fooling around with some assumed to be young woman on the Internet. Uh, Sally of course. Sally makes her big move but no way is John going for her except in her dreams (and maybe at the end). What makes this one worth watching is how Sally Field takes a tough subject and makes it seem totally normal and without overdoing the sappy pulling for emotion part. Attention all AARPers see this one-younger folks better ask your parents’ permission.
