In Boston-SATURDAY 6/30: Standout for Korean Peace: Peace Treaty Now!

SATURDAY 6/30: Standout for Korean Peace: Peace Treaty Now!

Cole Harrison<cole@masspeaceaction.org>

7:46 AM

Via  Act-MA <act-ma-bounces@act-ma.org>

To  mass-peace-korea@googlegroups.com,    MAPA Nuclear Disarmament   and 4 others

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Standout for Korean Peace: Peace Treaty Now!
Saturday June 30 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm - Park Street Station, Boston
[image: World Peace: One Korea. Korea is One]
Korean Americans Call for a Lasting Peace in KoreaPeace Treaty Now!
Complete Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula!

*Join us on Saturday, June 30, 1pm **@Park Street Station*


*1. We applaud the success of the US-North Korea Summit:*
On June 12, 2018, all eyes of the world were on an unprecedented and
historic summit between the US and North Korea in Singapore. Korean
Americans shed tears of excitement and hope as the leaders of the US and
North Korea shook hands in this momentous event. Finally it appears that
seven decades of division and confrontation are nearly ended, but it might
be hard to believe what is taking place before our eyes. The two leaders
have just taken their first steps on a journey for peace and
denuclearization on the Korean peninsula. We Korean Americans extend our
deepest gratitude to President Trump and Premier Kim for their openness and
resolve that the Korean peninsula can be peacefully reunited. We expect
that both leaders will continue to take bold steps to ensure positive
outcomes in the negotiations that follow.

*2. Sign a peace treaty with North Korea!*
After the Korean War the US and North Korea signed an armistice in 1953, a
compromise that resulted in decades of military tension on the Korean
peninsula. Now is the time to declare an end to the Korean War and replace
the armistice with a peace treaty between the US and North Korea. A new era
of reduced tension and suffering on the peninsula is possible, one where
separated families from North and South Korea can reunite and travel
without restrictions. We urge the Trump administration to sign a meaningful
peace treaty with North Korea, and we urge Congress to support the
administration’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea in the interest of a
lasting peace.

*3. We demand complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.*
We must remember that President Eisenhower initiated the nuclearization of
the Korean peninsula. The USA changed the status of the United States
Forces Korea (USFK) agreement to emphasize the deployment of tactical
nuclear weapons beginning in 1956, resulting in uneven power relations,
which lasted until 1991. As a result North Korea chose to defend itself by
securing a nuclear deterrent for defensive purposes. However, North Korea
has recently announced its resolve to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Now is the time for meaningful reconciliation, and for the US to withdraw
its nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula. True denuclearization of the
Korean Peninsula can only be realized when both sides are willing to
abandon nuclear weapons.

We Korean Americans and our allies stand up for peace in Korea and the
whole world. Please show your support for the Korean peace process. Contact
your members of Congress and urge them to support peace negotiations.

Peace and Unification Action of Boston

Committee for Peace and Human Rights

Massachusetts Peace Action
info@masspeaceaction.org/ 617-354-2169

*Download a Printable Flyer*
<http://masspeaceaction.org/home/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/korean-peace-rally_6_30.pdf>


--
*"Not one step back"*

Cole Harrison
Executive Director
Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace
organization
11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169 w
617-466-9274 m
www.masspeaceaction.org
Facebook: facebook.com/masspeaceaction
Twitter: masspeaceaction
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When The Blues Was Dues-Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

When The Blues Was Dues-Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

  

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in the now long gone  Johnny D’s over in Somerville, over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. (The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery, Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus the animals of the farm kingdom, Humpty Dumpty, a silly overweight goof who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression or used it in the high Roman Catholic Morris household out in Troy, New York where Ralph grew up and still lives, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. in case you have forgotten.)

Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Or as in the case of music in junior high school as Sam chimed in with his opinion as he thought about switching over to a high-shelf whiskey, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. That “second coming” referring to guys like Montgomery and Eric Clapton, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta south of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  

Yeah, that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third bottle of beer sipping getting him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on him that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids say amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks so you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that Dasher  was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)  

Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had and it would not be nice either). He added that some of the remembered music  reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms.

That mention of transistor radios got them yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and Ralph thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again if they were to make it through both sets that night. This transistor thing by the way for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).

Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to move over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential  from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit).

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.

What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform. Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe he truth, maybe just kicks, what he, or something associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, called the “beat” generation (beat of the drum, dead beat, dread beat, beaten down, beatified like saintly you take your pick of the meanings-hell they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town) strictly second-hand. I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been there, being an understanding there at the creation.         

Of course anytime you talk about books and add my brother Alex’s name in that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, still alive recently had me put together tribute book for in connection with the Summer of Love, 1967.  Markin was the vanguard guy who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. Some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand in those cold, hungry cultural days) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet, William Burroughs and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation but of a very different world. But above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957 and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple and hard part). Had to spend some time thinking through the path of life by hitting the road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.     

Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys from a few months to a few years. Markin started first but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end.  With maybe this difference from today’s young. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big tool on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys then, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” fromteh time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then although nobody in their right minds would have Markin actually execute the plan that was for Frankie to lead. That was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduces some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into, still doesn’t, that genre despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using a term from the times could have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital.   

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell a working class town very much like North Adamsville and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having my summertime blues. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

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