In Honor Of May Day 2017-From The American Left History Blog Archives

In Honor Of May Day 2017-From The American Left History Blog Archives-All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker

All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!

Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?

Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines. But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.

No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.

The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.

I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:

 

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.

*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

All out on May Day 2012.

 ************

Five in the morning, maybe five-thirty, still a bit dark due to the heavy rain falling as the dawn was ready to break and he was up and about. Today Frank Jackman was in charge of making sure that the materials, the equipment for today action, today’s May Day action, which had been planned for weeks got to the meeting place by the State Street Bank at the corner of Franklin and Congress in downtown Boston.

He had been working on the organizing committee for the event, an even that came with the imprimatur of the now somewhat faded Occupy movement. The task this day, this international workers holiday, was to do no less than shut down the banks, or rather in Boston a bank, the State Street, if possible. Thus he had come out of his Cambridge home with the materials, signs, mikes, food supplies and other necessities to get the crew expected to show up in proper spirit for the hard day ahead.

As he loaded up the car, made sure that everything on his list has been taken he noticed the rain getting heavier, not a good sign for turn-out from past experiences, especially early morning events, and most especially morning events where  young students and unaffiliated radicals were expected to attend. Still he thought in his most generation of ’68 mood the times called for the big actions in the year 2012 when all hell was being cast among working people and others and the banks, the banks that were central to the cause of the current economic malaise and for the moment a juicy target.

State Street Bank had its tentacles everywhere and was ripe for selection as the target for early morning mass action. The slogan “Close It Down” was on his mind as he headed over the Longfellow Bridge (damn when are they going to finish the never-ending construction on the thing it seems like years already) and to the underground parking facility on Congress where he would later ask for help unloading his materials. Yes, May Day, he had not felt this good about the day since that May Day down in Washington, D.C.in 1971 when they tried a bigger target-the whole freaking government- and got waylaid for their efforts.    

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

It was still raining, raining hard, when old-time Cambridge radical and political organizer Frank Jackman got to the underground parking facility at the corner of Franklin and Congress Streets near the State Street Bank at about 7:00 AM on May Day 2012. The reason why Frank was at that locale at that time was that as one who had helped organize the May Day protests that year he had volunteered to bring the various materials, signs, sound equipment, food and such that would be needed by the gathering troops that day. Since he was one of the few organizers or supporters who had an automobile large enough to fit all the materials in he was the natural choice. He had gotten up a couple of hours earlier to make sure the materials were packed and ready to move.

 

As Frank walked up the stairs to start to walk the couple of blocks from the garage to the bank he thought about the reasoning behind the organizing committee’s agreement that the State Street Bank and its nefarious doings in the financial crisis of 2008 should be highlighted by the protest actions that day. The group had spent some time and energy at its weekly meetings discussing the best possible target and the one that would draw the most media attention to what the Occupy Wall Street movement was calling for that day. Actions to stop business as usual on the international workers holiday. The idea this day in Boston was to attempt by main force to block off the entire bank and then court probable arrest if necessary in order to keep the bank closed for as long  as possible. Realistically Frank thought the site could be held for a couple of hours although all their leaflets, flyers, and on-line networking materials stated the times to be 7:00 AM to noon.    

 

Frank  had been a little leery about the project especially when a couple of black and red anarchists wanted to chain themselves to the main door of the bank as some symbolic act but the overall scheme sounded fair enough. Such actions, such shutdowns, had successfully occurred before and had had a good media effect. Frank, however, was not naïve enough at his age to think they could hold out for a long period. As a veteran of the May Day action down in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they tried to shut down the entire government and took nothing but thousands of arrests for their efforts he was always cautious in his expectations for any given action although the hoopla over this General Strike call had made him more optimistic. Still to think that they could hold the bank with its many entrances against a strong police presence for long with the thousand or so people who had signed up on one of the social networking sites to put their bodies on the line gave him pause. As he finally entered the street level Frank did take a certain pride that the organizing committee had created some buzz around the General Strike idea they had been harping on all spring unlike the tepid responses on several previous May Day actions.   

 

As Frank put up his umbrella to walk that couple of blocks to get some help with the materials in his car another deluge of rain hit him, a rain that continued on until he reached the planned meeting point on the corner of Franklin and Congress. As he approached the area he was delighted to see several now well-known media vans ready to film the action. He was however a little suspicious that there was not a large open police presence as he arrived at his destination. He figured that, as on other occasions in Boston, the main force was being held in reserve and in the ready in some of the back streets. To his greater surprise at a few minutes after seven he counted only fifteen people ready to rally at that meeting point. That number would swell to no more than fifty over the next two or three hours that they held forth there. And as the rains continued throughout the morning Frank was certainly disheartened by the turn-out. They held an impromptu rally and march through some streets for effect but with no media coverage since all those glorious vans had taken off before 8:00 AM for as one reporter said “real news” it flagged considerable. Frank Jackman, an old-time political organizer from the school where you actually physically gathered people to plan and participant in actions, had just gotten his first taste of the limits of “social network” organizing in America.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-1967-The Death Of The Doors' Jim Morrison- Greil Marcus' New Book -"The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years"

Click on the headline to link to an On Point (NPR) broadcast of Greil Marcus discussing ...The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.

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The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-1967-The Death Of The Doors' Jim Morrison- Greil Marcus'  New Book -"The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years"

From American Left History

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

*AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors 
CD Review

Waiting For The Sun, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Rhino, 2007

Since my youth I have had an ear for American (and other roots music), whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.

The Doors are roots music? Yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture. Some of that influence is apparent here.

More than one rock critic has argued that at their best the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution other CD’s, like this “Waiting For The Sun” album do an adequate job. Stick outs here include: the anti-war classic "The Unknown Soldier," “Love Street,” and "Spanish Caravan".

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix who lived fast and died young. The slogan- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And creative. Even the most political, including this writer, among us felt those cultural winds and counted those who espoused this vision as part of the chosen. Those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change without a political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

MARK THIS WELL. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents at the time, exemplified by one Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. 40 years of ‘cultural wars’ by his protégés in revenge is a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

The Unknown Soldier Lyrics

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier, uh hu-uh

Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Comp'nee,
Halt!
Pree-sent arms!

Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And, it's all over,
The war is over.
It's all over, war is over.
It's all over, baby!
All over, baby!
All, all over, yeah!
Aah, hah-hah.
All over, all over, babe!
Oh! Oh yeah!
All over, all over!
Ye-e-e-ah…

What Is The Matter With Kansas-The Film Adaptation Of William Inge’s “Picnic” (1955)-A Review

What Is The Matter With Kansas-The Film Adaptation Of William Inge’s “Picnic” (1955)-A Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Picnic, starring Kim Novak, William Holden, Susan Strasberg, Rosalind Russell, directed by Joshua Logan, adapted from the play by William Inge, 1955     

There is a lot of nostalgia talk around these days in some circles about going back to the good old days when things went at a slower pace and when the old values that had gotten America through a few crises held forth. Values that would play in Peoria or in the location of the film under review, Picnic, Kansas. The plotline, the feel of this whole film is almost a chemically pure example of what people thought the good old days looked like-a time when everybody knew their place, or else. This makes the film worth a look if for no other reason. 

Of course romance, the inevitable boy meets girl thing, has to come by and mar this idyllic view of the past. That boy meets girl thing, in this case a drifter named Hal, played by a “mature” William Holden and Madge (see even the names evoke another time), played by a young Kim Novak, trying to figure out what the attraction is between them. (By the way “mature” Hal who ostensibly has as his date to the picnic Millie, played by Susan Strasberg, a high school student might have a hard time not being picked up for some child abuse crime these days. Hell he would barely pass with the nineteen year old Madge. We will let that all pass though).

Here’s the play. Hal, the former king of the hill when he was a college football star now on his uppers, figures that he will cut old touches with his college roommate, Alan, who is the scion to some wheat money (come on remember this is Kansas where they have wheat coming out of their ears) and get back on track. He drifts into town off a freight train which tells a lot about how he has missed out on the golden age of American plenty by being just a shade not good enough. At first things between Hal and Alan seem to portend some lucky breaks for Hal. Then Alan’s girl, his sweetie, Madge stirs up plenty of anxiety once Hal gets a good look at her. Of course Madge is beautiful but wants to be known for more than that (in contrast to brainy and semi-bohemian younger sister Millie who sees herself as an ugly duckling which causes tensions between the two until the end of the film).           

Then Alan makes his first wrong move. He invite’s the brawny Hal (beefcake they called it showing Hal physique off many times during the course of the film to make all the girl titter-oh yeah, in the audience too) to the annual Labor Day picnic thrown by the town fathers (you know you are in a different era when they have a local celebration for Labor Day when today it is just another long summer’s end weekend to head someplace not in your town). Before the day, maybe before the night is over is a better way to put the matter, there has been a sea-change that has rocked that little corner of Kansas. Madge is elected festival queen, which seems right, Millie gets sickenly drunk, and Madge and Hal “dance” one of the most sensually provocative dances I have seen on film in long while (they probably need air conditioning in the theaters after that episode). The result: Alan is out and Hal is in except for one final conflict between Alan and Hal over, well you know, over Madge what else would guys fight over. Hal, the consummate drifter has to flee town on that same hobo freight out. But guess what his flame Madge follows him to whatever the future may bring. So maybe there was nothing wrong with Kansas then, although if you reached below the surface you know that not all was right in the golden age.            

On The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “The Summer Of Love Experience” At DeYoung Art Museum In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “The Summer Of Love Experience” At DeYoung Art Museum In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

By Special Guest Social Commentator Alex James 

[I noted in an earlier introduction to a commentary by my oldest brother Alex that I had been “commissioned” by him and the surviving corner boys who had made the treks west for the Summer of Love, 1967 to put together a tribute book on their experiences. Alex, a lot closer to the action of the 1960s than I ever could be having only been touched by the experience around the edges and mostly second-hand through stories and research is again today’s special guest commentator since the subject matter is again about the Summer of Love, 1967 its 50^th anniversary now being commemorated in places like San Francisco and Berkeley. His previous commentary had been about an exhibit at the Berkeley university museum entitled Hippie Modernism: the struggle for utopia and in that introduction I mentioned that he would be doing a commentary on an exhibition at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park entitled The Summer of Love Experience which had first sparked his interest when he saw an advertisement for the project on a passing Muni bus. He will discuss his take on that today.

To explain further that “commissioned” mentioned above has to do with compiling a wide ranging series of writings, sketches really, and reminisces on the theme of the “Summer of Love, 1967” to be made into a small tribute book in honor of his and his “corner boys” from the Acre section of North Adamsville long departed friend Peter Paul Markin. It was Markin who was the main connection between them and the events which transpired in the Bay Area that long ago and which arguably changed their lives forever. Of if not changed forever put a big kink in the way that they were originally heading.]              

*******

I might as well mention again as I did in the Hippie Modernism commentary that I am usually not much for writing outside of my business interests or I should say my law practice which is my business interest and leave the biting or witty commentary and penetrating social analysis my youngest brother, there were six of us to divvy up the social chores, Zack, who has made a career out of such endeavors. Except events this spring around the almost half-forgotten Summer of Love, 1967 which I, and the rest of the guys I hung around with all through public school, had been as Zack said one time “washed clean” by that extraordinary “new breeze” that got a big tailwind from that happening. “Happening” a word very closely associated with all the crazy, goofy, outlandish and in some sad instances pathetic things that went on when we were forced to head west and see what it was all about. “Forced” which is exactly the right word by one mad monk of a man, Peter Paul Markin, known as the “Scribe” from junior high school on after he had been given that moniker by the acknowledged leader of the Acre corner boys, Frankie Riley who has written something for the tribute book that Zack mentioned.

I mentioned in the previous article and it bears repeating here that Markin was a small letter “prophet” unlike a capital letter prophet like Allan Ginsberg who blew Markin away with his Howl in high school which he would recite to us when he was half drunk (or later half-stoned) and which we could have given a fuck about at the time since all we cared about was grabbing petty larceny dough, girls, and fast cars not always in that order, after all was said and done, what little good it ever did him in the long haul to “check out the new breeze coming over the land.”

All that will be, or already has been, detailed in the little tribute book we asked Zack to put together with his sketches on those times and our, the surviving corner boys’ remembrances, in honor of Markin. Like Zack said in his introduction I had been in San Francisco for a law conference and was walking up Geary Street and noticed an advertisement for the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park which was presenting an exhibition titled The Summer of Love Experience. Before I went to that exhibition I snuck over to Berkeley for their exhibit after I overheard a conversation between two old geezers about an exhibit over in Berkeley at the University art museum. They didn’t give the title of the exhibition at the time. Had just said it was about hippies. But when I went to look it up it had the title, the very interesting title-Hippie Modernism: the Struggle for Utopia I couldn’t resist before I left Frisco taking that exhibit in on two counts; it was an unusual way to describe a certain modernist artistic sensibility that I think we were trying to create and a very apt way to describe what the whole “seek a newer world” experience was about (a term Markin used incessantly via Robert Kennedy via Alfred Lord Tennyson when it counted when that man epitomized at the top what might have been before his assassination if the Molochs had been defeated), or what we thought we were trying to do. Zack has mentioned in a few of his sketches that we have faced more than forty years of blow-back from the Molochs (thank Allan Ginsburg’s Howl for that term) which show no signs of abating soon for not creating that utopia, or something close to it. He was right as rain on that score.               

So much for cutting up old touches now on to the DeYoung exhibit that was a lot less academically oriented as one would expect from a general audience production. I might mention here that at both Berkeley and DeYoung the overwhelming majority of the visitors were relics from the generation of ’68, people who had been through that amazing 1960s burn-out and had survived although I was shocked by the number of fellow seniors who were cane-bound, walker-bound, or roller-bound. Not a good sign for people who were probably somewhere between sixty and seventy-five. On the sunnier side I did make a coterie of people laugh when I asked whether this was an AARP meeting. I also wondered what today’s teens to twenty somethings would make of such an exhibit if they ever by accident found themselves in the bowels of the museum where the exhibit was being held. Probably like we did yawn and chortle over the odd way we carried on and what was the big deal anyway. But enough of that.      

What the folks at DeYoung had done was put together several rooms full of posters (posters which back in the day put up around town on walls and lampposts the old fashioned way to communicate, yeah primitive looked at now in the age of Internet/Facebook flash communications, and in selected known hippie hang-out bookstores and “head” shops if you my drift merely to advertise upcoming concerts but now at least the bulk of the selections certainly worthy of mention in the same breathe as pop art that came in the wake of the new dispensation), a glimpse of what the fashion of the day, hippie garb, looked like, photographs  and of course music which continues to define a lot of what was happening in that fateful summer of 1967 if not the whole damn decade.

Summer of Love is something of a misnomer in the sense that there had been a tremendous build-up all through 1966 and the spring of 1967 with an escalating number of concerts, festivals and social events like be-ins and “acid,” you know LSD, tests and would carry over at least until 1968. Markin had gone out there in the spring of 1967 after unwisely, very unwisely, dropping out of Boston University at the end of his sophomore year to “find” himself a thing a lot of kids were doing, according to one caption at least 100, 000 kids descended on the town during that period. Markin had come back in late summer to preach the word (that “preach” not always ironic since once he got the bug in his ear about something he would keep bugging us about it like in high school his always harping on Allan Ginsburg’s Howl  a poem that I have mentioned elsewhere the rest of us could have given a fuck about-then) and round up whoever he could to go back west with him. By the time he “recruited” me and a few others it was early fall so you can see the pull of the place held even after that actual summer was over.           

Looking at the poster art, there must have been a couple of hundred of them all together, beyond the artistic question of where they fit in as representative of the times culturally, I was amazed about how many concerts and festivals were being presented during those times. You could have gone to the Avalon, as we did, Fillmore, Golden Gate Park, also as we did on a whim on any given weekend and not been disappointed since some group was performing-for free or a couple of dollars-literally. One poster featuring an iconic group of the time, Jefferson Airplane, and a host of other well-known bands had been priced at five dollars. That is five dollars and that was for a three day concert-five dollars total. I mentioned in the Berkeley article that a few years ago I spent many hundreds of dollars getting so-so tickets for a Stones concert. I had to point out those ticket numbers to people standing around looking at the poster art and they couldn’t believe it either. The biggest thing that I noticed beyond frequency and ticket price was how many of the bands-that just mentioned Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead were based in right in the area and that the sound that would define a generation’s musical taste had been created and nourished out there-on the cheap.                

I mentioned that there was also a lot of mannequin-etched fashions displayed and some of it was very good but somehow the presentation did not ring true. Maybe it was the mannequins all slender and appealing like live models these days and maybe it was the push to show high fashion back then for the celebrities and the well-off who wanted to show they were hip. But I recall that most of us wore tee-shirts and jeans boy and girls, and did not give a damn about fashion. Some people, me too when I was high and was on Captain Crunch’s magical mystery tour yellow brick road converted school bus, would create a momentary look, maybe wear a cowboy hat (me) or buckskin coat (Markin) or pretend they were pirates (Jack Callahan, the former high school football star who Markin somehow got to go out, and Bart Webber who actually had been getting ready to take over his father’s printing business) but usually we dressed simply(and changed less frequently than socially requirements would dictate especially after a three day high). Second-hand clothing from Goodwill, the Sallys and the like was a big deal and whoever was in charge of the production of these fashions had missed the point, had gotten the notion of what people were wearing from what say Neiman-Marcus thought was the “hippie” look. The only ones who went out of their way to be “dressy” were the drag queens in a grouping called the Cockettes which would hang around and look “beautiful” but that was for camp not a generation’s style.          

Above all though was the music of the times to be heard as you went around the various galleries complete with video effects making one, making me wish, I had a joint, you know some dope, you know getting high. I was tapping my toes throughout and totally flipped out when I heard the group It’s a Beautiful Day doing White Bird from their first album which I hadn’t heard in years and the Byrds’ doing Eight Miles High  I was ready to dance, dance and party down. As I mentioned earlier though my fellow veterans mostly looked like they couldn’t believe they had done such stuff when younger and looked so physically ravaged that there was no “party” in them. Markin in his happier days would not have been happy to see what that “fresh new breeze” he kept harping on had turned out to be like, what the survivors, the walking wounded looked like. But as I said in my last article and which is turning into something of a mantra for me this 50^th anniversary of Summer of Love-“Twas bliss to be alive.” See this exhibit if you are in Frisco town anytime between now and August 20, 2017.

[I did not want to put this last point in the main body of my article but one, just one, photograph still haunts me. It was a photograph from a 1968 police “runaway” board filled with photographs of runaways being sought be anxious and worried parents who were desperate to find their kids. Not all of the Summer of Love was beautiful and not every kid who went out west survived literally, some wound up in some mental ward. The kids all looked like any all-American kids, white kids, before the “devil” got to them. A lot of photographs were from high school yearbooks. Markin, who also looked mostly like the all-American boy except a little nerdish, sad to say was not alone in not surviving the whole experience.]   

       

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.

The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the "youth nation" part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)

It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at.

(For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) 

And Edward did win his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later (and by the way “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him  they were if approached the right way).  No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.

That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late.  (For the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was a nine o’clock close just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including for Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).

Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual were well behind the curve  and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.

Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him.

But Markin was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.

That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.

More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground.  But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung out and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.

He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before,   who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.

That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, the Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.

Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).

Then came 1964 and  Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                   

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, after they had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by after giving up their "slave" names.)

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long lonely mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).

Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that had his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic way out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)     

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little shorter than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester.  

And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)

They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and had purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.

In Massachusetts Support The Safe Communities Act-Don't Support Aiding ICE Immigrant Round-Ups

In Massachusetts Support The Safe Communities Act-Don't Support Aiding ICE Immigrant Round-Ups  

From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance

From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance  

Workers Vanguard No. 1104 27 January 2017 TROTSKY LENIN No to Unity with Class Enemy! (Quote of the Week) Today, the reformist left calls for “unity” to fight against Trump. This boils down to uniting behind the Democratic Party, political representatives of the class enemy. Writing in 1918, as the German Revolution was unfolding, revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht warned against the dangers of unity with those defending the capitalist order. Liebknecht, along with Rosa Luxemburg, belatedly split with the socialist conciliators who wanted to unite with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had betrayed the working class by supporting German imperialism during World War I. In January 1919, shortly after founding the German Communist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces at the behest of the SPD government and the revolution was defeated. Unity! Who could yearn and strive for it more than we? Unity, which gives the proletariat the strength to carry out its historic mission. But not all “unity” breeds strength. Unity between fire and water extinguishes the fire and turns the water to steam. Unity between wolf and lamb makes the lamb a meal for the wolf. Unity between the proletariat and the ruling classes sacrifices the proletariat. Unity with traitors means defeat. Only forces pulling in the same direction are made stronger through unity. When forces pull against each other, chaining them together cripples them both. We strive to combine forces that pull in the same direction. The current apostles of unity, like the unity preachers during the war, strive to unite opposing forces in order to obstruct and deflect the radical forces of the revolution. Politics is action. Working together in action presupposes unity on means and ends. Whoever agrees with us on means and ends is for us a welcome comrade in battle. Unity in thought and attitude, in aspiration and action, that is the only real unity. Unity in words is an illusion, ​self-​deception, or a fraud. The revolution has hardly begun, and the apostles of unity already want to liquidate it. They want to steer the movement onto “peaceful paths” to save capitalist society. They want to hypnotize the proletariat with the catchword of unity in order to wrench power from its hands by reestablishing the class state and preserving economic class rule. They lash out at us because we frustrate these plans, because we are truly serious about the liberation of the working class and the world socialist revolution. Can we unify with those who are nothing more than substitutes for the capitalist exploiter, dressed as socialists? Can we, may we join with them without becoming accomplices in their conspiracies? Unity with them would mean ruin for the proletariat. It would mean renouncing socialism and the International. They are not fit for a fraternal handshake. They should be met not with unity, but with battle. The toiling masses are the prime movers of social revolution. Clear class consciousness, clear recognition of their historic tasks, a clear will to achieve them, and unerring effectiveness—these are the attributes without which they will not be able to complete their work. Today more than ever the task is to clear away the unity smokescreen, expose half measures and halfheartedness, and unmask all false friends of the working class. Clarity can arise only out of pitiless criticism, unity only out of clarity, and the strength to create the new socialist world only out of unity in spirit, goals, and purpose. —Karl Liebknecht, “The New ‘Civil Peace’” (19 November 1918), printed in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (Pathfinder Press, 1986)