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
Alfred — Sandra Bland died in jail custody after being arrested for a minor traffic violation. The officer who assaulted, then arrested her was never held accountable – despite video evidence from his own car dashboard camera. Now, new video evidence from Sandra's phone has surfaced – further casting doubt on the arresting officer's story. Petition starter Angela and thousands more are calling for Sandra Bland's case to be reopened.
Sandra Bland was arrested for a traffic stop on July 10, 2015 by Brian Encinia. She was found dead in her cell three days later. Encinia was never indicted, in spite of the fact, that he physically assaulted her her on camera. It was found that the jail did not follow proper protocols in this case. There is a new video that has come to light. It is quite possible that this video was hidden from the grand jury. I would like the case reopened. Please join me.
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Well that was something! At a press conference the other day, I received ten million signatures—the largest petition delivery in U.S. history—calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump.
This is Representative Rashida Tlaib from Michigan. And I was excited to be on the right side of history, along with Representative Al Green, when we had the honor of receiving this massive petition as we fight the outrageous abuses of power and rampant criminal corruption of the Trump administration.
As I stood with concerned Americans, received the 10 million signatures, and read some of the comments left by constituents in my home district, it was a reminder of how far we are coming together in the public case for holding the president accountable.
Back in January, I was one of the first members of this Congress to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump. Well before the Mueller report’s release, we already had all the information we needed to begin impeachment hearings, just based on what Trump had done in plain sight during two years in office.
It can be easy to be desensitized to big numbers here in D.C., so I want to just take a moment to appreciate how historic this petition delivery is. Ten million signers is more than the entire population of the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston ... combined! Whenever anyone tells you that impeachment is not politically possible, you can tell them that the largest petition in U.S. history, as far as we know, says otherwise!
Every day brings new obstruction and abuse from the Trump administration—as they defy subpoenas, stonewall Congress, and continue to trample on our rights and liberties. The fact that last week was the anniversary of Trump's family separation policy—for which nobody has yet been held accountable—is proof of the high stakes of our fight to confront and stop this administration’s hateful and illegal agenda.
This show of popular sentiment can put wind in the sails of my impeachment investigation resolution, will help more members of Congress of both parties to see that impeachment is critical, and can ensure that nobody—not Trump, not his cronies—is above the law. And just like impeachment, today was a team effort; many allies, including Free Speech for People, Democracy for America, CREDO, By the People, Need to Impeach, and more joined MoveOn members’ voices to reach 10 million, because we’re louder together!
Together, we must make our voices heard. Because doing nothing is dangerous. Trump is blatantly disregarding our Constitution and our ethical norms. By delaying impeachment investigations and falsely claiming that we need more evidence, my colleagues are bolstering Trump’s lies that we have nothing on him. We must hold him accountable, using the only tool that makes sense: impeachment investigations.
Contributions to MoveOn.org Civic Action are not tax deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. This email was sent to Alfred Johnson on May 19, 2019. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.
When History
Collides With Cinematic License-The Strange Saga Of “Green Book” (2018)-A Film
Review
DVD Review
By Frank Jackman,
The genesis of this film
review of the Oscar-winning Best Picture Green
Room at this publication is indeed a strange saga. The review was
originally assigned to younger writer Sarah Lemoyne who after viewing it told the
assignment editor that she did not feel that she could do an adequate review
because she was totally clueless about the social and racial reality, North and
South in 1962 the period which anchors the film. She did not know, could not
believe that in those days black people, then called Negroes mostly (or worse “n”
worse in redneck society and not just there) could not find public
accommodation in the South (housing, dining, going to the restroom for
Chrissake). Had to depend on the prior experience Green Book to navigate the Jim Crow South, and not just there when
travelling below the Mason-Dixon line. Sarah although she was aware of the
historic black civil rights movement had no idea that it was a fight for the
ability not only to vote, but to eat (many Woolworth 5&10 sit-ins for
example), sleep (separate but not equal hotels) or piss (very visible signs at
toilets saying where “colored” could do so) wherever you landed in this great
country. Having told her story to the assignment editor he decided that one of
the older writers, me, should do the review to have someone do the piece who at
least have some connection with those uproarious times.
(In Sarah’s defense she
did a recent article on the Frida Kahlo-Toulouse-Lautrec using her art classes background to pick up some
very interesting information about this pair and their troubled relationship
something I don’t know anything about so things have worked out okay in that
regard although I will admit I still wonder how a true Latina beauty life Frida
ever got her claws into the ugly debauched Toulouse, and why.)
Frankly, and this only
adds to the strangeness of the saga around putting this review out, I had my
own personal hard time trying to figure out a “hook” to latch onto here. This
centrally is a story in post-Black Lives Matter terms about “travelling while
black” down in the South in the days when that was at best an iffy proposition
and one had better have an updated copy of the Green Book at the ready. Obviously, any cinematic story, fiction or
as here based on a true story, can be worked any way the director and producers
want to with the story.1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 were the heart of the black
civil rights movement, the time especially in the North when people started to
hear about alarming stuff going on against black people in the South in their
movement to vote and get rid of Jim Crow which had started to build up steam in
the mid-1950s.
Probably the most
dramatic event that appeared on the black and white television most of us
looked those days was when the cops down in Birmingham, Alabama (a city where
the main characters here finished their trip at before heading North)
fire-hosing and putting the rabid dogs on young black children protesting the
Jim Crow conditions. The film while dealing with some individual manifestations
of what was faced by the lead character Don Shirley as he tried to navigate the
rigid routine racism rules of the South pretty much ignored the social
turbulence that drove him to make his own racial statements. I will give
examples below as I dissect the story line.
Adding to this conundrum
is what had been called elsewhere by other commentators the “white savior” or
buddy aspects of the film. The lowly driver saving the boss’ ass in reverse. Those
points probably would make more sense if I gave a run at the storyline which in
the end as far as worthwhile entertainment went was well worth the couple of
hours of viewing. Tony Lip, not Tony the Lip by the way, is an Italian, well
let’s call him a handyman, in the old days and enforcer, who keeps order when
the crazies get their liquor highs and weed-infested higher up at the Copa,
Copacabana the now long- gone bright light night club in New York City run by
very “connected” guys. Apparently there was no union to force concessions or
concern for employees’ fortunes by management when the joint was closed for
repairs for a couple of months (and it really was a joint with over-the-top
prices for cheapjack liquor, some say watered down to just above apple juice
level and so-so surf and turf entrees featuring music by otherwise unemployable
singers like Bobby Rydell (nee Rizzo, maybe Ratso’s spawn) after he had his moment
of fame on the rock charts when rock and roll was in one of its periods of
decline). See though Tony Lip was from hunger, had a wife a couple of kids to
support and therefore needed some kind of work. A guy in Lip’s line of work
though is pretty limited into what he can take on although the guys in the
neighborhood, the capos as it turned out would have provided him with plenty of
work helping guys sleep with the fishes. (courtesy of some beautiful
Godfather’s okay).
Word gets around though
when you have a guy like Lip who can handle himself and keep standing and so he
gets a referral for a driver’s job, you know, a chauffeur. That may seem
beneath a guy like Lip’s abilities but there was a hitch. Two really, no three.
First the guy he was supposed to drive for, the famous pianist Don Shirley, was
in a memorable term for black people among Italians then although I had heard
the “n” word used more among the Italian guys I knew who hung around Tonio’s
Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville when I was in high school which I will use, an
eggplant. Secondly Lip made it very obvious that he did not like eggplants (a
dramatic scene when a couple of black guys were working in his house and given
water in glasses by his wife caused Lip to seize up and throw the damn things
in the trash barrel). Thirdly, this so-called high-toned piano player planned a
concert tour of the South in 1962 when all hell was breaking out down there
with the explosion of the black civil rights movement to prove, well, to prove
that with a certain personal dignity that he was ready in his private way to
break Jim Crow. (By the way down in deep Jim Crow territory they had only
slightly less love for Italians, Roman Catholic Italians, than eggplants,
blacks so Lip will have to be ready not only to enforce for Din but keep his
own ass dry).
This Don Shirley,
trained in Leningrad by the best they had (now Saint Petersburg so remember we
are also talking about deep in the Cold War) who learned some manners and some,
well, airs too. Don would be what Harold Cruse called using the respectful term
of the time, the “new Negro” or W.E.B. Dubois “the talented tenth” who would
lead the struggle to break Jim Crow and attain some level of racial equality.
The problem, the 1962 problem for Don is that his aloofness from his people
left him with some serious identity problems “solved” by many bottles of Cutty
Sawk. He stated his case pretty well one Lip confrontational night when he in
anguish said he was not black enough, white enough, or man enough (finding out
he was gay via police lock-up gay interlude) for anybody. His alienation hit
home (and also made me mad) when Lip had stopped the car for some reason when
they were in the Deep South and some woe begotten share- croppers were tending
the fields across the way. They and Don might have been on two different planets.
The mad on my part was at the film’s director/producers for it was exactly
people like those sharecroppers, working people in those Birmingham steel mills
and along the waterfronts who were the backbone, the infrastructure of the
movement. Some short-change there.
I mentioned earlier that
there is continuing controversy around the themes of this film, the Lip “white
savior” aspect. No question that the unworldly Don Shirley would have never
gotten out of the South then, Green Book guidance or not, without an enforcer
like Lip. For example, one night Don decided to go for a drink in some redneck
bar in Kentucky and would have been beaten to death without the timely
intervention of Lip. There were many other situations like that as well
especially when Don decided to go cruising for some gay love (and wound up in
the jailhouse). This saving his ass by Lip time after time is the genesis of
the “white savior” criticism.
As is well know there
have been a million versions of the budding buddy story (and in post-Thelma and Louise times on the distaff side
as well.) This pairing is as improbable as it gets as the upscale (hell he has
an apartment over Carnegie Hall) black man meets street smart and street
surviving (as important) Lip. They also may have been on different planets
starting out but through the two months they are together they become, I guess,
friends, although on the historical record and despite captions at the end
stating they were friends until they died there is some question about that.
Sometimes though you can like a film despite sensing something is out of kilter.
That is the case here and although other films were Oscar-worthy this one
doesn’t have anything to apologize for in that regard.
There was always
something fascinating about the Belle Epoque, so-called in France the site of
the film under review, Colette, in the
late 19th century before World War I destroyed all illusions, or
almost all illusions that civilization, Western civilization anyway was heading
onward and upward in a permanent progressive way. An age when, for the times,
anything went at least in the major cities and at least in places like Paris
which was the epitome of the major trends. It was an age, the age in the United
States called the Age of the Robber Barons or the Gilded Age when previous moral
and economic norms went out with the wind. An age when a frisky young writer
like the woman who became known by her last name as Colette could show her
stuff. A time too when a woman like Colette could blossom (some would say
blossom as a writer and be any women’s whore at the same time but that be
something of an anachronism).
Colette, played by
British actor Kiera Knightley last seen in the seemingly endless Pirates of the
Caribbean films now played out, more than played out, is a young women from the
sticks, from out in the country who has caught and been captivated by one
nefarious and unscrupulous in the end Willy, played by Dominic West, who fancies
himself a literary entrepreneur. Really a middle-man for others who write for
him and he reaps the glory-and dough. Before long he beds and weds Colette,
brings her to Paris and finds that she can write, can write under his
imprimatur. The ups and downs of the literary life get something of a workout
here as Willy promotes the hell out of his new-found product. That will work
for a while although in the end in a panic over some bad financial decisions he
will go down the tubes.
That is the high society
and high literary part, but this film is also a let’s call it coming of age,
coming into one’s own sense for Colette as she stirs through the Parisian
social jungle. She was rumored to have had an affair with the demonic painter
and epitome of the period’s decadent moral climate Toulouse-Lautrec although I
could not pin that down. Rumor, this from Sarah Lemoyne who has a by-line at this
publication and who recently did a piece on Lautrec and another love affair of
his with the painter Frida Kahlo, that he was shacked up with Colette and her
lesbian lover Missy after having seen them at the Moulin Rouge, his regular
hang-out and been the only man in the crowd who did not boo or go loco when they
kissed as part of their stage act to pay their rent. So take that for what it
is worth.
Perhaps fifty years ago
the part of the film about that torrid love that dare not speakits name, that lesbian love would have been
either left out or done by allusion. Some convenient Boston marriage trope
although Missy running around in men’s clothing was a coded reference among the
upper classes that she was a daughter of Sappho. Colette as it turns out was at
least bisexual, although the tender moments of the film tend toward those lesbian
affairs and so the film deals with that aspect of her life as well as her going
out on her own as a stage performer with her lover in a not well-received
revue. (The Moulin Rouge the place where Willy had dropped all his cash trading
in on Colette’s name and where she allegedly caught Toulouse’s eye) How much of
this is based on fact and how much on the cinematic needs of a period biopic I
don’t know but I found that aspect of the film much more compelling that the
wrangling and anguish Colette had to deal with from the ruthless and desperate
Willy who really was a scoundrel and ne’er- do-well. A reading of a little of Colette’s
literary output though makes me wonder what the hoopla was about on her novels but
so it goes. Well done job by Knightley and West in the acting department here. .
When Art Deco-dence
Blossomed Full Flower In The Fin-de-Siècle World Before World War I-A Magical
Realistic Moment
By Sarah Le Moyne
Not all irony should be
left on the historical cutting room floor. Sometimes what today is called the
interpersonal, or maybe the ravishing rages given the cast of characters ant
the times they floated on the earth, on the always with us culturati front
should get their dime’s worth put into the mix. Take the case of two famous
artists whose names I will not mention for now for my own reasons from
different countries, cultures and frankly classes who after their love affair died
(Jesus, don’t ask either if that is what they had or we will never get to the
ironic part) had not seen each other for years finally re-met under third party
auspices and started that crazed ravishing rage business all over again. The
last I had heard the endless ravishing rages had not changed and they were to
be legally separated amid some talk about restraining orders and who gets
custody of the paintings and sketches done by each respective side during their
affair, ah, recent time together. (Don’t even ask either about who gets what on
the royalty breakdown since even their respective lawyers would be hard-pressed
to unravel the judge’s order or we will really never get to that vaunted ironic
part).
It is fortunate that we
don’t have to depend on history in the round, their personal histories, or for
that matter the histories of their respective times, about how they met and
what happened to break up what one Parisian wag of the time called “an affair
made in heaven.” The old catch-all of rumor, innuendo, lies, press agent
baloney, what is now called alternate facts and best of all fake news will see
us through. History stands humbled before the rising storm.
Rumor, and rumor will
stink this whole piece up to the high heavens, variously had him, the
well-noted Parisian artist, meeting her, the equally well-known Arte Popular
Sonora artist in the famous Tampico Cantina down in sunny Mexico where she was
hustling for dough, they called it in those days the Spanish equivalent of
bar-girl, whore is probably closer to the nub, before she got that famous Arte
Popular accolade business. He was there for his health but mainly to see if he
could break than serious lanadum habit cooling out on some high end weed (marijuana)
but according to some sources to make a big score of cocaine and pay some back
rent in those high-end Parisian apartments he kept getting bounced out of for
non-payment. A few, maybe savvier that the rest who believed whatever his
publicists at Goncourt put out, said he was fascinated by the idea of soft
Mexican women unlike the bony skinny Paris dolls when he heard about a famous
junkie whore in a book by Jack Kerouac. The twine that held this version together
was that what attracted him to her was that she was taller than he was, his diminutive
five foot statue and that what attracted her (other than he was a foreigner,
and had the look of money, dinero about him despite his obvious jones look and
unattractive appearance) was that she was taller than him by an inch.
Of coursethat was all art world press agent bullshit ,
probably from the Shane Gallery whose main claim in the art world was that it
had Sal Dino as its paid flak-catcher who could have hyped Marcel Duchamp as
anything from the cutting edge of modern art to the mastermind behind the latest
from American Standard in toilet fixtures, produced later to go along with
whatever joint exhibitions they trying to sell stuff at. The cash nexus ruled even
in those precincts.
Here is where it gets
weird. Rumor, again, around Paris was that this painter who loved to hang
around the Parisian demimonde smoking from his famous opium bong pipe carried
everywhere in the days when nobody gave a fuck what you smoked, drank, inhaled
in those precincts least of all the coppers, the gendarmes had been having an
affair with the writer Colette (one name only) who was working in the Moulin
Rouge on an act with her lesbian girlfriend, some dubious nobility fluff named
I believe Missy, when she noticed him after she, Colette, had finished kissing said Missy which caused a
scandal even in those liberal airs. He was the only one who applauded, and she
aimed headfirst for her “little man” with the bong pipe. Furthermore, the story
went, he had set up “house” with Colette, Missy and whoever came running around
thinking that he was the second coming of her Willy who had left Colette high
and dry when the money spicket ran out from sales of her teenage romance novels.
With such high overhead he had incurred in order to make the bills for a while he had put
together a million posters with her and Missy strolling like man and wife (you
figure that one out, figure who was man and who was wife when both donned
mannish boy attire) for all of proper Paris to see and gaze, male gaze at.
Weirder still was the
rumor, always rumor, that the sunny Sonora senorita at that time, the same time
was having an affair with depending on the source, usually some scumbag from
the Hearst newspaper chain before Charles Foster Kane took over and made it a fashion
rag for his next mistress, the photographer Edward Weston, the muralist David
Siqueiros and most likely as far as I am concerned the ancient Diego Rivera who
had picked her up in Viva Sampone’s Gallery in Acapulco after remarking coyly about
her eyebrow. (Yes one eyebrow or so it looked, she made it look too, with that
Mex-Tex, metizo, look which drove men from Parisian artists to Mexican banditos
crazy, loco okay. The wildest rumor of all, the one that I discredited the most
was that she had gotten her hooks into the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky
and only his death at the hands of a Stalinst agent broke off the affair right
there in the Blue House with Diego painting some big ass mural about obreros
and braceros down in his own studio. (As it turned out that affair actually had
happened but had been buried in the
archives until the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s by even the
most hardened Stalinists since they all, all the old Russian revolutionaries
from Lenin on down kept their ten million affairs and dalliances private, very
private.)
[Let me make this make
the following an aside because there were seven million other rumors all murky,
very murky, like our Parisian painter when down and out was pimping for the
famous Madame La Rue near the Versailles Palace on the avenue to make rent
money, that he was having an affair with the husband of some weird Russian
countess whom he had met through Missy who she had been having an affair with
while with Colette, that he was shipping high-grade opium from China on barges
in the Thames provided, the barges, by his junkie friend James Whistler who
took his payment in kind. A little less weird since he actually was there at
the time was that he was running on the sly a whorehouse, bordello they called it,
in Buenos Aires. It goes on and on and who is around to separate it out or why since
he was not a guy who defended his reputation very well. Who knows half the
stuff was probably bullshit since he was close friends with Leon Le Blanc the
society columnist for Le Figaro. Any mention of his name would jack up the
prices for his original art and cause a run on the posters every college kid
wanted for their lonely garret walls.
As for her, as for the
Flower of Tampico, her sudden rise in the art world left little room for
investigation since even rumors have to have an edge of truth or did in those
days, now longed for in an age when such “quaint” ideas are out the window. A
lot of it centered on her relationship with the Soviet Ambassador but such
things are tricky especially in light of what happened to Leon Trotsky later with
some agent with a trusty ax and some very murky stuff around her personage, her
role in the whole affair and what she told the federales (all bullshit but
again not known until they yanked open the Soviet KGB archives). Mostly,
despite a good Catholic girl upbringing, she tramped around, had been a
bar-girl maybe did a stint at some Sonora whorehouse and headed to Mexico City where
she started to paint in her off-hours and where she would meet Diego Rivera who
already had some “cred” in the art world. The whole Rivera episode is murky,
some say they were married others that she was living with some Matilde lover
in what in America in those days would be called a Boston marriage and showed
up when Diego was exhibiting exhibited as his marida. Let’s leave it that they
knew each other, they shared space in the big ass Blue House together and he
was sad when she passed away and left him with some vieja mistress to console
him. So you can see the need for an aside right here.]
If you follow this
story, tall tale if you like, that Parisian painter, hell, let’s give him a
name since everybody knows the shortest painter in Paris who also was a junkie
and had about a dozen social diseases was Toulouse-Lautrec had made a “connection,”
had gotten some high-grade cocaine and offered it to the Sonora senorita, hell,
let’s give her a name too because although there were many short Arte Popular
Mexicanwomen artists only one had one
eyebrow and worked her way up the art world via the Tampico Cantina, Frida
Kahlo. She accepted and once they found out they both liked James Abbott McNeil
Whistler’s moody paintings they got along very well.
All she knew of him at
the time was that he was a degenerate (having read Le Figaro and its social
columns too closely) who did posters for various, let’s call them entertainers,
in the Paris nightlife. She did not know that he actually painted. All he knew
of her was that she was the best bar-girl in Tampico and that she drew very
strange but beautiful in a weird way drawings and paintings of, well, of
herself, of her indigenous people and of the flora and fauna around sunny
Mexico with a specialty on death masks and monkey faces. They got along
famously until she wanted to go to Paris and he was afraid that his ill-defined
past would catch up with him once she landed and found a welcoming committee of
Colette and Missy and who knows who else on the docks. He was fine with the
arrangement until she started getting recognition as a famous Mexican artist
who could out-paint him six, two and even. Those earth shattering plates would
move far apart until he blew town leaving a huge hotel bill in the name of the
French ambassador (which was paid by the way by the French government after
some wrangling and threats since now he was a “national treasure” just like the
degenerate Degas) and she took up without the next best thing (which is all I
can say since I don’t know who was next on her dance card except it wasn’t
Trotsky that was later).
They say that no good
deed ever goes unpunished, intentionally or not. A million years later some
hungry, maybe from hunger but I don’t think I have seen one yet unlike artists,
curator trying to move up the food chain in the art cabal decided since their
had been a dramatic shift in American demographics with an upswing in the
Latino population around the country and around Boston that a nice exhibit
centered on Frida Kahlo and her circle would be a good idea once the Museum of
Fine Arts grabbed her famous Two Peasant Women painting on the cheap. Done. That
success fueled a mini-Frida craze and that very same now certainly not from
hunger curator cadged the idea a of bigger exhibit, a few more Frida paintings,
some Mex-Tex, metizo arts and crafts filler and the inevitable works of that
hard-pressed circle of friends. Bingo, the cash nexus boomed.
The mix? That exhibit
idea got another very hungry curator thinking after some research about the
twisted love affair between the two that the museum should “exploit” with an
exhibition of Toulouse’s material, the usual half dozen paintings, a million
posters and the usual suspects, circle of friends and contempories as filler.
Sounded great from the art cabal to the well-heeled patrons to the average
goer. Except when Frida heard that “he” was coming (she refused to dignify him
using his name) she started crying, screaming to the high heavens (in Spanish
so watch out) that he was an unreconstructed) junkie whose art world was full
of hopheads, lunatics and airheads (English translation). More-he couldn’t draw
worth a damn and what he drew was not art, not the people’s art anyway but for
the Mayfair swells who hadn’t a clue to what art really was except it wasn’t those
silly posters he kept putting out for his friends in the gutters of Paris.
Worse, worst of all she invoked what had happened to Leon Trotsky as his fate
as well all for Comrade Stalin and the beautiful Russian Garden of Eden. (She apparently
had not heard the news of the demise of both Stalin and that Garden.)
He, well, he when he heard
he would have to play second fiddle to his Flower of Tampico started to get all
misty-eyed at first, reached for his big ass bong pipe and sailed into a dream.
Then a few days later when he heard that she cursed him, that she put the pox on
him, mentioned that Trotsky stuff and then that he was nothing but a parvenu hustling
poor women out on the avenue and drew like a second-grade student with erratic crayons
flipped out. Started calling her whore and whore’s offal. Said the day of the dead
stuff was strictly out of some silly John Donne poem which she probably had
never read and that ao called monkey of the people and endless self-portrait
stuff was beneath art. So they parted, parted with that final acrimonious
lawsuit that in the end only enriched the art cabal and the fucking lawyers.