Sunday, October 15, 2017

Poor People's Campaign : Boston Mass Meeting Thursday, October 19, 7:00 – 9:30 PM

Poor People's Campaign : Boston Mass Meeting
Thursday, October 19, 7:00 – 9:30 PM
Trinity Church
206 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA 02116

BMDC reserved a couple of seats in the Trinity Church before the space for 500 people filled up.  Now additional space has opened up for more people. The latest announcement is below:

**All public tickets have been reserved HOWEVER we expect that there will be additional space the day of. Even if you haven't reserved a ticket, stop by Trinity Church to see if there is space. If there isn't, there will be space at Old South Church, 645 Boylston St., a 1 minute walk across the Plaza from Trinity Church, where you can watch the livestream with others and receive the same materials as those inside the Sanctuary**

LIVESTREAM EVENTS
Boston, MA (Overflow location 1 minute from Trinity Church)
Host: Old South Church
645 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02116
https://www.facebook.com/events/284954262008842/
You can watch the Mass Meeting live from your home by visiting http://www.breachrepairers.org/livestream

The Boston May Day Coalition has voted to join the Poor Peoples Campaign and participate in future actions organized by this campaign. We also are trying to build support around the need for this campaign to put Resisting Deportations as a central task in their efforts. There will now be overflow space available in another large church across the street from the Trinity. I think that everyone who can make this should be there. We will have lots of literature, sign-up sheets, and hopefully buttons to pass out for those interested in the fight against deportations. Our main task at this mass meeting is to connect with the participants and get our message out. With a good BMDC turnout we can announce our Sunday meeting, sign folks up, distribute brochures, and get to know a broader layer of folks who may be interested in joining the fight against deportations. Please go online and click register and be added to the "wait list": https://www.eventbrite.com/e/poor-peoples-campaign-boston-moral-revival-mass-meeting-tickets-38179324387 

Adelante,
John


Gene Kelly And Fred Astaire Go Mano a Mano- Kelly’s “An American In Paris” ( 1951 )-A Film Review

Gene Kelly And Fred Astaire Go Mano a Mano- Kelly’s “An American In Paris” ( 1951 )-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

An American In Paris, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, music by George and Ira Gershwin, 1951

Someday let me give you the complete story of how a film critic gets his or her assignments from “upstairs” (unless of course that person is hard road free-lancing and is just submitting pieces to publications “on spec”). I should know after some thirty plus years of doing this type of work recently here and from many years at the American Film Gazette (where I still do on-line reviews and where I started out as that free-lancer submitting pieces “on spec” when the publication was strictly hard copy  before I was taken on as a staff member). For now though since I am on a “run” so let me say that the reason I got this assignment to review Gene Kelly’s An American In Paris (and the next one which will be on Fred Astaire’s, and Ginger Roger’s, Shall We Dance) is that the editor here, Pete Markin, had grabbed these two films via Amazon for one purpose and one purpose only-to see who was the better dancer back in the day -Kelly or Astaire. (There is not even a question of anybody today touching the hem of either’s skirt since dance kings are a rare breed and one would be hard pressed to name one male popular dancer who is even close. Whatever else our disagreements as will be noted below we agree on that point-to our collective sorrows.)

This no academic question because not only did Pete go out of his way to view both film he engaged me in a heated argument one morning in front of the water cooler when he casually laid a bombshell on me. The bombshell? After years of assuming that Fred Astaire had the title of king hell king popular dancer wrapped up he had switched his allegiance to Kelly on the sole basis of this film under review. Needless to say I had to upbraid him for both his treason and his error. And hence this “run.” So you see here is a prime example of the odd-ball ways of those high and mighty general editors in doling out the work. But to the lists.          

Maybe An American In Paris with its paper thin plotline is not the best place to critique Mister Kelly’s dancing (or acting efforts which whatever faults I find in his dancer they do not compare to his wooden glad hand acting in this role) but I did not throw down the gauntlet this time. I do not utter that term “paper thin” lightly here. Here’s the play as my predecessor and friend in this department Sam Lowell always liked to say. Kelly finds himself in Paris after the war, after World War II of which he was some of veteran of although it was probably work in a Special Services unit entertaining entertainment-starved G.I.s fresh off the front lines with his song and dance routine. Empathically not after World War I when Paris was the center of the F. Scott Fitzgerald-dubbed Jazz Age and the period when the Gershwins, George and Ira, wrote the music and lyrics for the origin concept and which given the playlist here would have been a better time frame for Kelly’s character, a guy, a regular guy, named Gerry Mulligan stew to have strutted his stuff. In gay Paree (gay in the old-fashioned sense of happy, light, and so on not today’s sexual identity usage) Gerry was doing his best to be a mediocre artist, a painter (already you can see there is a problem since the transition to dancer in each routine seems bizarre or his being an artist seems bizarre when he was at least a better dancer than artist - take your pick). He is getting nowhere fast in his humble little garret imitation of how he thinks his heroes the Impressionists suffered for their art. Finally some moneybags “art patroness” takes up his cause and easy street and high society (which is really a ruse for trying to get him to fall for her-no dice-no nice dice)

What or rather who he does fall for, falls hard for, is a little French twist with a turned up nose and who we will find out quickly is as light on her feet as Gerry is on his on the dance floor. She gives him the cold shoulder for a while mainly because she is trying to do the honorable thing for her benefactor and fiancĂ© (and to boot Gerry’s friend too). As Gerry pulls the hammer down on the romance she softens a bit. But still no sale until the end when after this serious imaginary dance Gerry has worked himself up over recreating various paintings by his max daddy artist Impressionist artists heroes (and a couple of guys from early trends in French art) where he and Leslie trip the light fantastic she relents. Or rather her lover-benefactor seeing the writing on the wall brings her to Gerry’s doorstep. Nice guy. So you can see no way that even the best song and dance man could overcome these disservices to the Gershwins 1920s be-bop Jazz Age pieces.    


Of course this whole dispute, this tempest in a teapot, brewed up by Mister Markin is not about the qualities of the storyline but about Kelly’s dancing (and singing too but dancing is enough to chew on). On the question of pure physical energy and verve Kelly is not bad reflecting I think the hopped up (maybe drugged up) post-World War II period when everybody who had slogged through the war was in a rush to get to wherever they thought they should be going. He has all the moves if not all the grace that Fred Astaire had in his own prime. And that is really the sticking point here, the point that became clear during that seventeen minute interlude where Gerry imagined those painterly scenes from the works of his favored artists. Kelly was all arms and legs and odd-ball twists and turned but only for a few seconds during that whole “why the hell is this long scene in this film anyway except to prolong the film” did he exhibit any grace and that was when he was doing yeoman’s work lifting Ms. Caron in balletic style. How the usually level-headed Markin could have called that one of the best dance scenes he had ever seen tells a lot. Tells me he, he Mister fancy general editor has maybe been at the hash pipe too long of late. TouchĂ©    

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-The Risen People?-May Day 1971

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-The Risen People?-May Day 1971




Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all we knew, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let her rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some wheat field night fantasy this trip.


No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war (World War II so as not to confuse the reader) break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we are, he is, ready. On that dusty road ready.


More. See all roads head south as we and they, his girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and his sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.


Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of them figured would be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and we knew (know) who they were, had their antennae out too, they KNEW those who were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct., nothing except Arizona was). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).


The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, they thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms these jailbirds-in-waiting- were ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention then to anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in our presence and we were at every meeting, high or low. Moreover we had our ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. We, rightly or wrongly, silly us thought “cop.”


So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (He, we, thought, but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted) to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee-slurping to keep the juices flowing).


Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.


Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big ironic (past ironic) Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.


And, as we were being led away by one of D.C.s finest, we turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and we had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive us. (Not so anonymous actually since we saw her many times later in Boston, and Peter Paul almost would have traded in lust for her but he was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, he, let the moment pass, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. We saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)


Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramps acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, we were longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raiit

When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raiit





[The world of on-line editors and named bloggers is actually rather small when you consider what cyberspace can allow the average ingenious citizen to do. I have been highlighting some of the conversations between long-time music critic Seth Garth and some of his growing up in Riverdale (that is in Massachusetts west of Boston) friends as he/they discuss a various older CDs which reflect a certain period in their then youth lives growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Part of this latest series of sketches by me is based on information that Seth has provided comes under the sign of the Summer of Love, 1967 out on the West Coast, especially in the San Francisco and Bay area.      

I am a bit too young by about a decade to have had anything but a nodding acquaintance with the Summer of Love experience. That era’s music did not form the basis for my musical interests although I heard it around the house from older siblings but rather the music of the 1970s which when I get a little bored with book reviews or general cultural pieces I write about for various publications including this one I write some music reviews. Knowing that let me take a step back so that you will understand why I made that statement about the review world is really a small place.

As I said earlier I was a little too young to appreciate the music of the Summer of Love first hand but my eldest brother Alex was not. Had in fact gone out to the West Coast from our growing up neighborhood the Acre section of North Adamsville that summer along with a bunch of other guys that he had hung around with since highs school. He wound up staying in that area, delving into every imaginable cultural experience from drugs to sex to music, for a couple of years before heading back to his big career expectations-the law, being a lawyer. The original idea to head west that summer was not his but that of his closest friend, the late Peter Paul Markin forever known in town and by me as the Scribe (how he got that is a long story and not germane to the Seth sage). The Scribe had dropped out of college in Boston earlier in 1967 when he sensed that what Alex said he had been yakking about weekly for years that a “new breeze,” his, the Scribe’s term, was going to take youth nation (and maybe the whole nation) by a storm and headed west. A couple of months later he came back and dragged Alex and about six others back west with him. And the rest is history.             
I mean that “rest is history” part literally since earlier this year (2017) Alex, now for many years a big high-priced lawyer after sowing his wild oats and get “smartened up” as he called it once the bloom of the counter-culture they were trying to create faded had gone to a business conference out in San Francisco and while there had seen on a passing bus an advertisement for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He flipped out, maybe some latent recoil from those long ago drugs, and spend one “hooky” afternoon mesmerized by the exhibit of poster art, hippie clothing, photographs and music. That was not all though. When he got back to Boston he contacted all the old neighborhood guys still standing who had gone out there in 1967 to put a small memoir book together. One night they all agreed to do the project, do the project in honor of the late Scribe who had pushed them out there in some cases kicking and screaming (not Alex at the time). That is when Alex, knowing that I have had plenty of experience doing such projects contacted me to edit and get the thing published. Which I did without too much trouble.    

The publication and distribution of that book while not extensive got around to plenty of people who were involved in the Summer of Love, or who knew the Scribe. And that is where Seth Garth comes in. While he was not part of the Summer of Love experience he did drift out west after college to break with his Riverdale growing up home in the early 1970s. As a writer he looked for work among the various alternative presses out there and wound up working first as a free-lancer and then as staff as a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye which operated out of Oakland then. Guess who also was working as a free-lancer there as well after he got out of the Army. Yes, the Scribe who was doing a series of articles on guys like him who had come back from Vietnam and couldn’t relate to the “real world” and had established what amounted to alternative communities along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California. So yeah it is a small world in the writing for money racket. Here is what Seth has to say right now. Zack James]     

CD Review

The Best Of Bonnie Raiit

By Zack James

Seth Garth and Jack Callahan who had been friends since highs school down in Riverdale after they returned from a whirlwind few months on the road on a magical mystery tour yellow brick road merry pranksters adventure out in California during the Summer of Love, 1967, were sitting in Jack’s, the local hang-out bar in Cambridge where the drinks were cheap and the conversation interesting, when a young woman stepped up to the small stage preparing to sing. Jack mentioned to Seth that she looked familiar, that flaming red hair a giveaway, and asked him if he could place the face. Seth who was beginning his long career as a music critic just then for The Eye whom he had contracted with when he was out in California blurted out that didn’t Jack remember seeing her, seeing Bonnie Raitt, on the Boston Common before they had taken off for California where she blew away the crowd with a cover of Down Highway 61. Jack laughed and said that he was so stoned that night that he wasn’t sure who he had heard (Seth reminding him that it had been an afternoon concert).                    

Of course Seth, as a budding music critic, expecting to ride the wave from folk to folk rock to what was now being called “acid” rock with all the strobe lights and dipping into the drug bag to bring out the right mood had done some basic research on Bonnie as an up and coming star who was riding her own wave of the new trend in having female singers lead the bands they were in. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Amy Kline, Nicky Adams and then her. He had found out that Bonnie had dropped out of Radcliffe a little earlier in order to pursue her musical career as a result of the success of the Boston Common concert. He also had found out that her budding virtuosity with the slide guitar had come from sitting at the feet of country blues legend Mississippi Fred McDowell. So she had a pedigree. Still she a was only starting out and grateful that Jack’s had allowed her up on the stage a couple of years earlier where she had begun to hone her skills both at presenting a professional musical veneer and connecting with the audience. So the night Seth and Jack were sitting there at the bar drinking and talking about everything under the sun Bonnie was doing “pay back.” Performing for the old crowd, performing for Jack. 

She started her first set with Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying and McDowell’s Highway 61 and the rest would be history. A history which is well documented in this compilation from those classics to Fairport Convention member Richard Thompson’s The Dimming of the Day.            


The Good Heist-With “The Bank Job” (2008) In Mind

The Good Heist-With “The Bank Job” (2008) In Mind




DVD Review

By Zack James

The Bank Job, starring Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, 2008


Recently I did a short review of the film adaptation of writer con-artist’s Clifford Irving’s The Hoax about his take (remember he was a con artist and so his fast-talking-writing should be taken for what it is worth) on his con of a major publishing company over an “autobiography” of the reclusive eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes back in the early 1970s and mentioned that everybody loves a con. Everybody except the person con of course. That notion can be extended, was extended in my old working-class growing up Acre section of North Adamsville, to include high profile bank robberies. In those days the big deal was the then never solved great Brink armored car robbery of the early 1950s where it turned out one of the participants had lived in the neighborhood at one time. So when Pete Markin tagged me to do a short piece on  the film under review The Bank Job about an equally famous bank robbery in London in the early 1970 I was all in.     

Usually the genesis of a bank robbery (aside from the famous bank robber Willie Sutton’s response to the question of why he robbed banks for a living- because that was where the money was) is to grab some quick dough and split. Average stuff. In this film, based on a true story, although it is hard to separate fact from fiction according to the historical record, the motives are a little bit trickier. Oh sure the guys who are touched for the job have that motivation-have that wanting habits hunger but this one has a catch to it. See the robbery is just supposed to be a front for getting some very juicy photographs of a member of the royal family, a royal princess acting the slut. (According to my sources that part is make-believe courtesy of the thriller-crazed producers and not a bad motive at that if you hold any republican sympathies. In any case given the batch of whores, whore-mongers, homos and lesbians when that was not cool, dope fiends, junkies, sex addicts, lunatics, mad men, philanders and the like who have made up the royal family and nobility that would not be so far-fetched. And those are from the good side of the families the others’ depravity starts from there.) Maybe nowadays with 24/7/365 celebrity exposure that would be nothing for royals to bother with but back then it was enough to get certain secretive governmental agencies on the move to cover the damn thing up-to bury it deep. That was the story then anyway make of it what you will.

The whole play came about because one neighborhood working class woman, Martine, played by Saffron Burrows, who took a turn at modeling had been stopped with a hell-broth of drugs in her suitcase at the airport.  So she needed to get out from under any way she could since female prison life would quickly turn her into somebody’s honey and she would not have looked good in prison garb anyway. Fortunately she had a lover-boyfriend from MI5 who was in need of a favor. Seems that a sneaky fiery black nationalist leader, Michael X, had the vaunted photographs in question in a safety deposit box for further use-blackmail, trade for freedom, you know the rest. Also in need of a favor was Terry, played by Jason Statham, a hard-pressed auto body shop owner and small time hood. The man, men, he needed a few confederates for this caper, and the moment meet. Martine cons Terry into this fantastical notion of robbing a bank (naturally the Baker Street branch bank where the safety deposit box is located) to get out from under-to get him and his family on easy street. At first he balks but then facing a blank wall future he bites.        

In a funny way the bank job is actually not only clever planned but despite a couple of glitches and close-calls a relatively easy job done by creating a tunnel from an adjoining shop to the vaults. Beautiful. Then all hell breaks loose once the job is done and the photographs secured.  See everybody and there aunt and uncle has something to hide from all that hidden cash and jewels to a listing of all the crooked cops on a local mobsters pay-roll. Between the governmental agents, the mobsters, the cops and who knows who else Terry and his comrades are led a merry chase. But in the end the resourceful Terry works his way out of danger and is allowed to keep the ill-gotten goods and seek a new life somewhere out of fetid London. Martine blows town with her cut. The royals dodge yet another scandal and the mobster and the crooked cops take a fall, a hard fall. But the hard criminal life is not for everybody and not everybody made the grade. One gang member got wasted for not giving up his comrades. That’s the way it is down on the edge. Whatever its closeness to what really happened before, during and after this caper on Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes’ street-right) the movie was well-done           


Films To Class Struggle By-"Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story"- Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail

Films To Class Struggle By-"Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story"- Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail







Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review


Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story, Leonard Peltier, various leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), defense attorneys, prosecuting attorneys, witnesses and by-standers, directed by Michael Apted, 1991

Let’s start this review of this documentary of the incidents surrounding the case of Leonard Peltier at the end. Or at least the end of this documentary, 1991. Leonard Peltier, a well-known leader of the Native American movement, convicted of the 1975 murder, execution-style, of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota after he had been extradited from Canada in the wake of the acquittal of two other Pine Ridge residents. In an interview from federal prison in that period the then still relatively young Peltier related that after receiving his life sentences and being told by prison officials that that meant his release date would be in 2035 he stated that he hoped not, for he would then be an old, old man. Here is what should make everyone interested in the case, and everyone interested in the least sense of justice, even just bourgeois justice, blood boil, he is now an old sick man and he is still in jail for a crime that he did not commit, and certainly one that was not proven beyond that cherished “reasonable doubt”

This documentary, narrated by Robert Redford in his younger days as well, goes step by step through the case from the pre-murder period when Native Americans, catching the political consciousness crest begun in the 1960s by the black civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, started organizing, mainly through the American Indian Movement (AIM), on the Indian reservations of the West, some of the most impoverished areas in all the Americas. The focal point of this militant organizing effort came in the war zone-showdown, the siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. The tension that hovered in the air in the aftermath of that war between the American government and its Indian agent supporters on one side, and the AIM-led “warrior nation” on the other is the setting for this incident at Ogala.

Through reenactment of the crime scene; eye witnesses, interested and disinterested, voluntary or coerced; defense strategies at both trials from self-defense to lack of physical evidence, and on appeal; the prosecution's case, its insufficient evidence, and it various maneuvers to inflame white juries against unpopular or misunderstood Native Americans in order to get someone convicted for the murders of one of their own; the devastating, but expected effect of the trials on the political organizing by AIM; and the stalwart and defiant demeanor of one Leonard Peltier all come though in this presentation. As a long time supporter of organizations that defend class-war prisoners, like Leonard Peltier, this film only makes that commitment even firmer. With that in mind- Free Leonard Peltier-He Must Not Die In Jail!

The 50th Anniversary Of The Anti-Vietnam War March On The Pentagon (1967)-With Norman Mailer’s “Armies Of The Night” In Mind (1968)

The 50th Anniversary Of The Anti-Vietnam War March On The Pentagon (1967)-With Norman Mailer’s “Armies Of The Night” In Mind (1968)  




By Political Commentator Frank Jackman  
  
Earlier this year driven by my old corner boys, Alex James and Sam Lowell, I had begun to write some pieces in this space about things that happened in a key 1960s year, 1967. The genesis of this work has been based on of all things a business trip that Alex took to San Francisco early this spring. While there he noted on one of the ubiquitous mass transit buses that crisscross the city an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum located in Golden Gate Park. That exhibition The Summer of Love, 1967 had him cutting short a meeting one afternoon in order to see what it was all about. See if he was just having a “flashback” (not uncommon back the day for those who did not take their Kool-Aid straight but laced with mysterious chemical imbalances). What it was all about aside the nostalgia effect for members of the now ragtag Generation of ‘68 (an AARP-worthy generation but I prefer the less commercial Generation of ’68 to tag that crowd, my crowd) an entire floor’s worth of concert poster art, hippy fashion, music and photographs of that noteworthy year in the lives of some of those who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. The reason for Alex playing hooky from his important business meeting was that he had actually been out there that year, had been out in Haight-Ashbury-etched 1967) and had stayed and imbibed deeply of the counter-culture for a couple of years after that. (Imbibed not in running out of steam fast Frisco but on a magical mystery tour yellow brick road former school bus courtesy of Captain Crunch which went up and down the West Coast searching, hell, just searching.)

Alex had not been the only one who had been smitten by the Summer of Love revival bug because when he returned to Riverdale outside of Boston where he now lives he gathered up all of the corner boys from growing up North Adamsville still standing to talk about, and do something about, commemorating the event. His first contact was with Sam Lowell the old film critic who also happened to have gone out there and spent I think about a year, maybe a little more. As had most of the old corner boys for various lengths of time usually a few months. Except me which I will explain in a minute. Alex’s idea when he gathered all of us together was to put up a small commemoration book in honor of the late Peter Paul Markin with memory pieces by each of us. See Markin, always known as “Scribe” after he was dubbed that by our leader Frankie Riley (now a big time lawyer with a swanky office in downtown Boston but then poor as a church mouse and nothing but a serious con artist), was the first guy to go out there when he sensed that the winds of change he kept yakking about around the corner on desolate Friday and Saturday nights when we had no dough, no girls, no cars and no chance of getting any of those quickly were coming west to east.

Once everybody agreed to do the book Alex contacted his youngest brother Zack, the fairly well known writer, to edit and organize the project. I had agreed to help as well. The reason I had refused to go to San Francisco then had been that I was in the throes of trying to put together a career as a political operative by attempting to get Robert Kennedy to run against that naked sneak thief of a sitting President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had us neck deep in the big muddy of Vietnam and so I had no truck with hippies, druggies or “music is the revolution” types like those who filled the desperate streets around Haight-Ashbury. Then.  Zack did a very good job and we are proud of tribute to the not forgotten still lamented late Scribe who really was a mad man character and maybe if he had not got caught up in the Army, in being drafted, in being sent to Vietnam which threw him off kilter when he got back to the real world he might still be around to tell us what the next big trend will be.              

[I should mention here for the young or clueless something about corner boy culture since you no longer see guys hanging around corners at variety stores, pizza parlors, bowling alleys and the like as that scene has successively been replaced by mall “rat-dom” and now “don’t look up from the fucking phone” social media. (Don’t see gals either for the same reasons although back in the day the gals hanging around corners were with guys, glued to guys, otherwise they generally were inside say Doc’s Drugstore soda fountain or the pizza parlor spending their who knows where they got it discretionary money throwing dimes and quarters into the jukebox to play the latest heartthrob tunes). Corner boy-dom was a rite of passage in working class neighborhoods like the Acre section of North Adamsville where we grew up having certain corners passed on to you as you grew older like our progression from Harry’s Variety in elementary school to Doc’s Drugstore in junior high to Tonio Pizza Parlor in high school and beyond.

You, we, I hung on the corner for a very simple reason in those days- no dough. No serious dough although everybody had some scam from roughing up younger siblings for coin or a back door sneak at mother’s pocketbook to the midnight creep which best be left at that since who knows if the statute of limitations has run out on those high crimes and misdemeanors. No dough meant no car, meant nowhere in golden age of the automobile America where any guy with a car, handsome or ugly, had some young thing sitting very close in the front seat of his Chevy something. Meant even if you could find a girl who didn’t mind taking the bus or walking you had no money for dates even for a cheapjack movie date much less say hitting a drive-n restaurant. And no dates meant no girls hovering around which meant the corner with that cohort of guys in the same condition as you. Meant having a bunch of sullen surly guys with time on their hands, lust and larceny in their hearts, and an overweening desire to fall outside the law. That most of us survived is amazing but it was a close thing, very close.]

That initial impetus to think about 1967 at a time when I was in love with Robert Kennedy and that kind of grass-roots progressive politics of which we see very little now led me to do a piece about the first Monterrey International Pops Festival held at the beginning of that summer and where revered names for the Generation of ’68 like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar (he, additionally the papa of today’s Norah Jones) had made their first big splashes. I always loved the music, always loved to go to concerts, generally free or cheap concerts if you can believe that in these days of nostalgia high-priced tickets for groups and singles well beyond their primes on Boston Common and elsewhere and hear what was what. Those were the days when I heard the first stirrings, and maybe half wanted to believe it was true, that “the music was the revolution.” That somehow new sounds and the emerging lifestyle, the hippie lifestyle of communal sharing, good vibes and easy going would be the impetus for a new ethos. That some idea of “dropping out” of bourgeois society (not a term I would have used then but which now kind of fits what I am getting at) would bring the new utopia onto our doorsteps. The Scribe and the others at the time having been through the initial stages of the Summer of Love out in the West were filled with such ideas to the extent that they could articulate such a vision. (The Scribe was able to and did at the time and carried the others with him.) I was having none of it, or very little, since at that time I neither believed in any kind of revolution nor did I think that society needed anything more than tweaking (with me helping the throw the tweak switch.) I argued against and I believe, unfortunately, that those who professed the “music is the revolution” idea have been shown to have been totally over their heads and left no serious mark on the social fabric.                        

There was another trend, another 50th anniversary trend which I would argue was counter-posed to the above mentioned theory. This event is the 50th anniversary of the famous, or infamous, March on the Pentagon in October of that year. The one that the late writer Norman Mailer wrote about in his well-received and highly honored The Armies Of The Night a review of which I have reposted elsewhere on this blog. That event was not the first massive Washington anti-Vietnam War demonstration (the first had been in New York in 1965) nor the first to feature acts of civil disobedience but it was the first threshing out, the first understanding that something big was going to be needed to stop the fucking war. That the government was not going to stop the madness on its own hook. Moreover that despite whatever residue remained from the intoxicating Summer of Love “dropping out” under the rubric of the “music is the revolution” mantra was not going to create the “newer world” in the words of the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson those of us from supporters of Robert Kennedy to the left were seeking.         

Of course as described in detail including an overabundance of detail about his own part, his own arrest in the melee by Mailer this effort was very much a helter-skelter thing with mixed results. The key idea to be taken by any serious anti-war militants that the government (run by either major party as it later turned) was going to viciously thwart any such people’s efforts to bring an end to the damn thing. There would be a parting of the ways essentially not only between “drop out” and “confrontation” partisans but within the confrontationists camp a split over peaceful mass marches and more vigorous actions. The March on the Pentagon was the laboratory for all those ideas from “levitating” the place to a guerilla warfare-type actions to shut the place down.    

Of course today I am commemorating an event, not for the first time, that at the time I was adamantly opposed to, saw as very disruptive to the attempts by first Senator Eugene McCarthy and his insurgent run at Lyndon Baines Johnson and later after Johnson’s withdrawal from candidacy by Robert Kennedy to solve this problem through parliamentary means. In short while I was vaguely anti-war, or thought I was only at that level, I did not participate in or honor such efforts. The turning point would be later, the next year as it turned out, when I was drafted by my “friends and neighbors” at the Draft Board in North Adamsville (that greeting was how the letter of induction actually started) and accepted induction even if half-heartedly in the U.S. Army. I have written, and others have written as well, about my complete turnaround once I was inducted and of my two year struggle including serious stockade time for refusing to go to Vietnam. One of the books I read during that time was Mailer’s The Armies Of The Night taking to heart some of the lessons from that experience (although still a bit put off by the centrality of Mailer’s ego in the whole process).


Here is the payoff though. In the spring of 1971 shortly after I had been released from the Army I started hanging around with a bunch of Cambridge radicals. The big idea at the time was to have a massive May Day civil disobedience action in Washington around the theme-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” I did not even think twice about not going, of not getting arrested and of thinking that such as action was desperately necessary. Although I drew some other conclusions about how to end war from that aborted experience I saw it as a continuation of that struggle at the Pentagon in 1967. And whatever else I never regretted my actions in 1971 and I hope those who were at the Pentagon in 1967 have not either, not in these desperate times.       

Chelsea Manning tells off Harvard & the CIA





FYI, sent by Al Sargis, VFP... 



03 October 2017

Chelsea Manning. (photo: Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images)
Chelsea Manning. (photo: Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images)

Chelsea Manning Tells Off Harvard and the CIA

By Spencer Ackerman 

helsea Manning never ended up lecturing at Harvard University after loud objections from the Central Intelligence Agency. But late Monday afternoon, the day she was supposed to begin her fellowship, Manning did talk about surveillance, tech, and social repression down the street—at the similarly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For someone who enlisted in the Army at a young age and spent most of her adult life in a military prison, seeing the prevalence of domestic surveillance and the militarization of policing is “like I’m walking out into the most boring dystopian novel I can imagine,” she told The Daily Beast shortly after her talk. “It feels like American cities, certain parts of them, are occupied by an American force, the police department.”

Having traveled across the East and West Coasts since her release, one of the 21st century’s signature whistleblowers is trying to reconnect with her country and spread an activist message about political engagement. She ran up against an obstacle last month: the current and former intelligence officials who pressed Harvard to reject her fellowship.

Yet the result was an MIT conversation with the ACLU’s Kade Crockford that encouraged the software engineers of tomorrow to think through the applications of their innovations that might aid a more expansive surveillance apparatus—itself a statement of defiance to those who’d rather respectable institutions shun her.

“What’s important here is that the Central Intelligence Agency and associated people in the intelligence community, they think they can stifle dissent, all forms of dissent, all across America and use academic institutions as a battleground,” Manning said.

Last month, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government withdrew a fellowship offer it had extended to Manning. Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director, set off a backlash by resigning his own Harvard fellowship over outrage that “leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk.” Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director, followed up by calling Manning an “American traitor.” (Never mind the fact that Pompeo promoted WikiLeaks, the outlet that published Manning’s leaks, during the 2016 campaign.)

Manning said she couldn’t be bothered by the spymasters’ words. “I’m not going to be afraid and I’m not going to be intimidated,” she added.

Her MIT talk, delivered to about 130 students and other attendees, was the result of a post-Harvard invitation extended by Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Manning reached out through a mutual friend, MIT confirmed. In it, Manning said, she touched on living in the panopticon of prison as a “microcosm” for tech-fueled advancements in repression, “when it comes to facial recognition, surveillance, using databases and techniques to monitor and surveil people,” as well as how she depended on other inmates for support while imprisoned.

Then she issued a warning to the engineers MIT will matriculate: “While we might be making a piece of software that does one thing, for medicine or marketing or advertising, it can be used in a military context or to suppress dissent. These technological solutions are kind of universal in that sense that they can be misused.”

‘Aiding the Enemy?’

The MIT talk was the latest skirmish in a battle over Manning’s legacy—one that shows no sign of stopping.
“One of the things we wanted to make sure was that it was about the substance of the conversation, we didn’t want this to be just about snubbing Harvard,” Ito explained in introducing one of the first public talks given by a figure who has been defined for seven years mostly by hostile, powerful officials.

Contrary to Pompeo’s invective, a military judge in 2013 specifically acquitted Manning, then known as Bradley, of knowingly “aiding the enemy.” She was convicted of multiple counts of leaking classified information and received a 35-year sentence. After serving seven years, to include pre-trial detention, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in January. She walked free from Fort Leavenworth in May after confinement so severe—it included a yearlong stint in solitary—that a U.N. special rapporteur on torture called it a violation of her “right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of [her] presumption of innocence.”

Manning’s deployment to Iraq and exposure to the material she leaked disillusioned her to the U.S. war effort. She said at her sentencing: “It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.”

Pompeo and Morell made points frequently invoked by Manning’s detractors, and not often carefully. In the wake of her disclosures’ publication by WikiLeaks in 2010, the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the group “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Yet an actual taxonomy of any harm resulting from Manning’s leaks, something that might allow for a balanced assessment of what she did and the punishment she subsequently endured, is not a matter of public knowledge seven years after Manning’s saga began. Detractors in the intelligence agencies say doing so would put more sources and methods at risk, compounding the damage; Manning supporters consider that too convenient, permitting overblown accusations against her to remain in perpetual circulation.

Manning’s defense counsel in her military trial was not permitted to read a classified document assessing the impact of her leaks of thousands of tactical military reports and diplomatic cables.

But BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold obtained the document earlier this year after transparency litigation and wrote that the multi-agency task force found her leaks “largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to U.S. interests.” The 2011-era document found the leaks had potential to “serious[ly] damage… intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population” and would have their greatest likely effect on “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”

Academics and human-rights groups have said that contacts with the U.S., revealed in the diplomatic cables, complicated their jobs and potentially placed them in danger in authoritarian countries. But there remains little certainty over whether those leaks actually led to someone suffering harm.

Evidence the leaks contained about greater civilian deaths and injuries than the Pentagon had disclosed, something Manning’s defenders cite to demonstrate her leaks’ importance, could damage “support for current operations in the region,” the task force found, focusing more on the leaks than on the deaths they revealed.

That matched contemporaneous reporting, which found the Obama administration’s claims about the damage Manning caused exaggerated. A congressional official briefed on the leaks’ impact in 2011 told Reuters they were “embarrassing but not damaging.”

‘An Historic Embarrassment for American Academia’

In a confusing statement following the CIA pressure, Harvard’s Douglas Elmendorf called extending the fellowship to Manning “a mistake.” Elmendorf said the initial invitation to her was defensible but neglected the impact of the “perceived honor that it implies to some people,” which opened up Harvard to criticism for hypocrisy in honoring, among others, Sean Spicer, who repeatedly lied from the White House podium as President Trump’s press secretary. As a consolation, Elmendorf offered Manning a one-day opportunity to “spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.” That isn’t going to happen.

The filmmaker Eugene Jarecki told The Daily Beast that Harvard’s decision was “an historic embarrassment for American academia.”

Jarecki interviewed Manning at a public event on Nantucket shortly after Harvard’s about-face and pronounced himself impressed with her willingness to engage with hard questions.

“She’s a remarkable human being who really is a walking concentration of several-hot button issues in American life,” Jarecki said. “It was both a surprise and no surprise, in a way, to see an institution such as Harvard quake in their boots when Chelsea’s name is mentioned.”

Despite the CIA pressure and Harvard’s acquiescence to it, Manning indicated to The Daily Beast that political activism will be a feature of her unfolding life as a free woman.

In prison, she learned “we are our own political agents,” depending on one another—a message that seems to inform where she’s going next.

“I’m trying to live my life, but I realize I can’t go back to the life I was living before. I need to be with the people I care about, and we need to be with each other. It’s not about me—I’m very concerned about the direction all of us are going in,” she said.

“I think it’s important people understand they have power. Nobody can give them power and give them rights, we need to assert that.”

Out in the tech world, Manning said she got the sense engineers are “expecting someone to tell them what to do” with their innovations, rather than figuring out their social utility through dialogue with their neighbors.

“The reality is people need to... have these conversations in our communities right now. We can’t wait for someone to come up with a final product, idea, [or] solution,” she said. “There’s no roadmap to the future. We have to chart our own course.”
___________________________________________________
Spencer Ackerman is a senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast. The former U.S. national security editor for the Guardian, Ackerman was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team reporting on Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations.

Everybody Loves A Con Man (Or Woman)-With Richard Gere’s “The Hoax” In Mind

Everybody Loves A Con Man (Or Woman)-With Richard Gere’s “The Hoax” In Mind  




DVD Review

By Book Critic Zack James

The Hoax, starring Richard Gere

Everybody loves a con man (or at the headline states con woman as well although there tend to be fewer of them in the deep rich history of this art form). Everybody that is except the guy (or gal) being conned. That egg on the face person most definitely does not love a con although he or she gets what they deserve in my book. I have seen some beautiful work in my time. The time when Eddie Murray took some hungry greedy stockbroker for a cool million when a million was something on non-existent stock, nada. Or that time when Conrad Vedt a seemingly mild mannered non-entity took the local syndicate for five mil and got away with it (although he did spent some serious time looking over his shoulder before the coast was clear). The big one though at least the one I was close to, knew some of the players, was when Jack Kiley took down a couple of high-end Las Vegas gamblers for something like ten million all by himself. The stuff of legends. And that brings us to the film under review the rough film adaptation of writer Clifford Irving’s book about his big time literary scam of the so-called billionaire when a billion was serious money Howard Hughes “autobiography” The Hoax. (Although the thought occurs to me why would you believe what a con artist has written about himself-oh well.)  

Clifford Irving, played by Richard Gere, understood the first rule of the con-go big or don’t go at all. It is not worth the time or energy to do the con for chicken feed although I have known back in the old Acre section of my growing up town North Adamsville guys to do cons for chicken feed. A serious con like the one Irving tried to pull for a million bucks and maybe more if things had worked out on a well-known if reclusive public figure working the literary scam which meant bucking a high-end publishing company also meant possible jail time if the thing went south on him. Which in the end as everybody now knows it did dragging his wife and his closest collaborator down with him in the gutter-into jail time.       
       

Still you have to like the brass of the guy taking a shot at immortality in the con artist pantheon-a place not for the faint-hearted. First he had to get a big enough target for his appetites which seemed to narrow down to Howard Hughes for no better reason than he saw his name on a magazine cover and figured he could use that notorious reclusiveness of Hughes’ to work his magic. Of course the second rule of the con is to talk fast on your feet and be plausible which Irving did with relish starting with his agent and working up the food chain to the big-time publishing company executives. The dicey part or one of the dicey parts was that the potential publishers advised by their platoon of lawyers were going to be looking for some proof and a lot of the film dealt with working around that problem. But see the third rule of the con or maybe it really is the first rule once you get a bead on human nature as it has evolved over the last few millennia is to understand how to play to a  little greed or some vanity advantage over your competitors. Bingo here. 

The other dicey part which in the end did Irving and his compadres in was the blow-back from the super security conscious Hughes empire.  Irving almost had it made but just couldn’t work out that last kink about how to grab the dough-the fatal check-which needed to be cashed with Hughes’ name on it. Tough break. Yeah, everybody loves a con. Conrad Vedt, Jack Riley and Eddie Murray would have been proud.