Monday, July 23, 2018

Dancing Cheek To Cheek, Oops-Ginger Rogers And Fred Astaire’s “Roberta” (1935)-A Film Review

Dancing Cheek To Cheek, Oops-Ginger Rogers And Fred Astaire’s “Roberta” (1935)-A Film Review 





DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Roberta, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Irene Dunne, music by Jerome Kern, 1935

I can’t dance, can’t dance a lick. Like a lot of guys, maybe gals too but I will just concentrate on guys here, I have two left feet. Nevertheless I have always been intrigued by people who can dance and do it well. Have been fascinated by the likes of James Brown and Michael Jackson growing up. As a kid though I, unlike most of the guys around my way, I was weaned on the musicals, the song and dance routines where the couples kicked out the jams. Top of the list in those efforts were the dance team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers whose dancing mesmerized a two left feet kid just at a time when I was coming of age, coming of school dance and checking out girls age and once in a while in the privacy of my lonely room I would try to work out a couple of steps seen by me on the big screen. No success. Although I had never viewed the Rogers-Astaire film under review back then I got a distinct rush of déjà vu watching this film, Roberta.          

Déjà vu is right since although I had not viewed the film on one of those dark Saturday afternoon matinee double-features when they were running a retrospective at the local theater I already knew what was going to happen. I had seen say Top Hat then and if the truth be known the formula did not vary that much in the whole series of song and dance films they did together. It was not about story line although it probably helped the director to have a working script so he could figure out where to have somebody burst out in song, or trip over a table and begin an extended dance routine.


That said the “cover” story here is Fred leading a band of upstart Americans into gay Paree (in the old fashioned-happy way not as a designation for sexual orientation) expecting to have a gig which went south on them. Fred meets Ginger working as Polish countess down on her uppers who is into high fashion which I expect everyone knows old Paris is famous for. That’s allows those bursts into song and dance to go forth without too much interference from the story-line. In short do as I did as a kid and now too just watch Ginger and Fred go through their paces. That’s worth the price of admission.  That and tunes like Smoke Gets In Your Eyes via the magical and under-rated composer Jerome Kern          

Trying To Figure Out What The Heck Is Going In A Film-A Case Study-Tom Cruise’s “The Last Samurai” (2003)


Trying To Figure Out What The Heck Is Going In A Film-A Case Study-Tom Cruise’s “The Last Samurai” (2003)





DVD Review



By Leslie Dumont



The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, Ken Wantanabe, 2003      



Usually in doing film reviews I watch the film, alone or with my companion to compare notes after viewing, and then write a draft review from scratch. I do not usually look at the now many film reviews provided by such companies as Netflix and the like on the Internet. (The best by far is still American Film Gazette which started out as a hard copy magazine about seventy years ago and went to on-line about ten years ago and has reviewed over fifty thousand films in that time, many reviews classics in the genre like that publication’s Sam Lowell’s extensive and inclusive film noir series from the 1970s which defined the genre in the wave of the French New Wave which went crazy over the 1930s-1940s material)  With the film under review though I was perplexed as to what my hook would be so I looked at some thoughtful and familiar reviewers I have known and trust (despite the cutthroat nature of the business personally between reviewers who take no prisoners  the reviews usually are spot on) and found that they had missed the point or had gotten so caught up in the action that they missed the real point which I will discuss in a minute after I take a few of the views expressed to school.







Marlene Kalen, a well-regarded reviewer and former colleague of Leslie Dumont now of this publication at Women Today, seemed to have dismissed the whole venture as just a violence-soaked way to put Tom Cruise in a period piece (1870s Japan after the American Civil War when many of the fighters of that war were free-booters, were ready and willing mercenaries for whatever came up from training foreign armies in modern warfare to robbing banks and trains a la the James gang and Cruise’s character, Captain Algren, took a leap to the Orient for a private company working on behalf of the Japanese government trying to modernize its army and put down a rebellion by traditional samurai who were resisting those efforts). To Ms. Kalen Cruise, along with Harrison Ford and the string of James Bond from Sean Connery on, were hopped up on the male fantasy cave man taking on all comers to preserve, well, preserve something. I have lost the figure, or it is not at hand but in a film of some two and one-half hours Ms. Kalen noted over twenty separate “battle, skirmish, fake battle” scenes including using children as foils for the violence. While I might today have sided a bit with her general conclusion about films, action films, which exist solely to keep people glued to their respective seats in horror, fascination I think by modern standards, and given the subject matter of the film which after all was about the demise of free agent warrior culture in a country trying to modernize the film’s violence was inherent in what was being produced.



Naturally if you want to avoid talking endlessly about violence in modern films, and not so modern films check out the gangster classics of the 1930s, then the next step is to fix on the brotherhood, the multicultural brotherhood (Japanese and American) between Captain Algren and the leading samurai, Kyoto, played by Ken Watanabe, around questions of honor, valor, and service. That was the approach Lenny Lynch then of American Film Gazette took when he made this out as one of the great buddy films in the tradition of Robert Redford and the late Paul Newman where individuals who would not normally associate with each other, would not normally interact in their respective occupations find a serious bond by virtue of their common (maybe universal at least that was the way Lenny broached the subject) regard for fellows who took honor, sacrifice and expertise seriously. Maybe if Lenny had thought more about what he saw on screen he would have seen that these two men in the end did not really understand each other since Kyoto was trying to stave off the injurious effects of modernization on Japanese society and Algren was barely more than a well-paid, well-trained but vicious mercenary. A loner to boot.    



A lot of people have prattled on endlessly, Danny Lawrence, from Film Today, for one about how the American Civil War was the harbinger of mass military industrialization and that older values and occupation had to bow down to what was coming, coming to America and to Japan and that to challenge that was fool-hardly and unwise. Thus the Kyoto-Algren axis of the film was misdirected   and the railroad magnate Omura, and his agent Colonel Bagley formerly of the Union Army as well, should have been held up as the model of modernizers and agents of serious change whatever personal benefits they would receive from such changes. The film according to Danny can be taken as a cautionary tale about what happens to those who can’t keep up with social changes and had to, should be left bury themselves in splendid isolation.      



Action-faction, buddy-buddy and holding the thumb in the dike may all have a place in a review of this film but sometimes reviewers can’t see what is in front of them, can’t get out of the way of their own shadows, can’t imagine the obvious as in this film. The key here, maybe the only thing that gives this film any energy is the “boy meets girl” aspect that none of the above reviewers had a clue about. (Remember I told you the film review occupation is not for the faint-hearted, is more cutthroat that any lawyers would dream possible and they consider themselves a pretty wild lot when they get up a head of steam). Think about it. This Captain Algren, a drunk, a stone-cold killer either while under orders or as a free-lancer, and a guy you should hang on to your wallet when he is around is nowhere, is nothing until his Japanese sweetie, Taka, whose husband he has off-handedly killed in battle sobers him up, get him to take a bath, teaches him how the show works in Japan and takes him in tow. Ms. Kalen may have counted up the number of violent acts committed in the film but what about the more numerous significant glances between Algren and Taka as the film rolls along. There will be problems as with any pair who are from different cultures but Taka softened the rough edges off of the good captain. The proof of what I say is obvious by the end of the film when there is speculation about what happened to Captain Algren after the decisive battle between Omura’s troops and the samurai warriors where Kyoto is killed and the samurai legend extinguished except in lore and novels is done and his whereabouts unknown. Does it really take a private detective like Phil Marlowe to figure out he hightailed it back to his Taka. Like I have said elsewhere Hollywood has milked this boy-girl theme a million times to good effect. Here as well.       


Sunday, July 22, 2018

When The Bad Guys Danced (And The Dance Was No Foxtrot, Brother) -James Cagney’s “Lady Killer” (1933)-A Film Review

When The Bad Guys Danced (And The Dance Was No Foxtrot, Brother) -James Cagney’s “Lady Killer” (1933)-A Film Review



DVD Review

By Alex Radley

Lady Killer, starring James Cagney, 1933 

Everybody in the old neighborhood, the Atlantic section of Carville, the used to be “capital” of the cranberry world now pushed west to Wisconsin and places like that, knew a guy like Dan Quigley, the role that legendary actor James Cagney plays in the film under review Lady Killer. Well, maybe not everyone, but close, a guy who knows, or thinks he knows all the angles, has the angels on his side too no matter what. A Teflon-type guy who might be put in a spot but comes up smelling like roses.

I’ll get to Dana’s moves, good and bad, in a moment but the character of Dana Quigley, including the lady’s man, aspect reminded very much of Lenny Logan from down in that Atlantic section of Carville where I grew up and who was if not my closest friend, or me his, then we never crossed each other, and I was never directly the butt of one of his scams, cons, brainstorms. Lenny, good-looking Lenny, also a lady’s man was as much from what other older guys who write for this site have called “from hunger” in declining market seasonal cranberry country. But he always had dough from early on when he would con guys out of their milk money by flipping “fixed” baseball cards against the schoolyard wall (until some parents complained to the teachers and it stopped-or rather he stopped on those particular kids). That deeply larcenous scheming heart would parlay that kind of scam all through school including plenty of serious housebreaks which he would plan-and others would carry out. He would, for lack of a better word, be the “finger” man with plausible deniability in case things did not work out. Sent more than one young woman off to “Aunt Emma” as writer Sam Lowell would have called it in any earlier time and we said rolling our eyes “in the family way.” Lenny, wouldn’t you know, eventually broke that bad streak by becoming a very successful local lawyer (including being mine on a couple of occasions) but it was, as always with guys like Lenny, a close thing.

With that kind of character in mind let’s see what made Dana Quigley tick, how he passed his time. Part of the problem with this particular film is that the producers or somebody wasn’t sure which James Cagney they wanted to use. The notorious 1930s headliner gangster from films like White Heat in the classic age of that genre of which audiences in Great Depression ate up like crazy or the dandy song and dance Yankee Doodle Dandy man. As usual they went for the great test audience muddle. So they kind of put them together and added in that street wise kick. Yeah Dana was always hustling, nickel and dime stuff mostly until he almost drew a sucker punch when he got conned by a dame, by a moll, twist, frail whatever you want to call a girl ringer playing the old lost pocketbook gag luring guys in and set them up for a beating of their worldly goods at the poker table.

But our boy Dana got wised up quick, and despite a roomful of thugs against his small stature he made those low-rung gangsters cry uncle-and make them plenty of dough. Of course guys like Dana are always thinking about the next best thing which is to make a big score-here doing cagey burglaries in Mayfair swell houses. Made a nice racket as the pretty boy finger-man until the beef went too far and conked too many heads, too many deaths and the future looking like the big step for everybody unless they blow town.

That blowing town begins the shift to the pretty boy part, to Dana’s rise as an actor out in Tinseltown, out in Ed Rushca’s big Hollywood sign hills. While there he takes up with a different kind of frill, a big- time movie actress. Wouldn’t you know it though that old gang of his from back east wound up in LA, including that former love interest moll he had been running around with and who left him high and dry when the deal went down. The old gang figured to work that high- end burglary scam of old with Dana in the lead. Problem: the gang, now the gang that couldn’t shoot straight if you ask me robbed his movie star honey. Bad move. Maybe bad move both ways. The gang sensing Dana was the weak link wanted to waste him, put him out in the Pacific deep heading to the China seas maybe.  Dana in turn, turned copper –a no-no in our old neighborhood and by general consensus a “fink,” “rat,” “stoolie” better left six feet under. Even Lenny understood that, maybe Lenny better than anybody since he knew he could do whatever he wanted, whatever larceny, sex acts, etc. he wanted and the Omerta oath of the corner boy neighborhood would protect his young. But this is Dana remember, shades of Lenny, and so he lands on his feet. I don’t know what to make of this film but one thing I do know I kept thinking about Lenny all the way through the film.  You probably have your own Lenny and will too. 

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts - From The Archive Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Spanish Miners light up Madrid and show workers the way to struggle! — For a 48 hour general strike to bring down Rajoy government

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 



A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21st century on the 200th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/


By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     
Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

***********


Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.


Spanish Miners light up Madrid and show workers the way to struggle! — For a 48 hour general strike to bring down Rajoy government
Jul 22, 2012
By John Hird, CWI Spain

Thousands of coal miners arrived in Madrid, last week, completing another march on the capital as part of the struggle to defend their jobs. They were greeted by thousands of workers and youth from Madrid who poured onto the streets to express their solidarity. Fire-fighters escorted the miners through Madrid, stripping off in front of the parliament to show their solidarity.

On the same day that the miners arrived, Rajoy and the right wing PP government announced a revised budget. According to commentators, this will include the worst cuts since 1956 when Spain was under Franco’s fascist dictatorship.


The cover of the Spanish satirical magazine, EL JUEVES (http://www.eljueves.es/articulo/revista/el_archivo/crisis_campeones_3.html)

shows President Mariano Rajoy giving a massive wet sloppy kiss to the national soccer goalkeeper Iker Casillas, reprising a famous kiss Iker planted on his interviewer/girlfriend when Spain won the World Cup two years ago. Rajoy has tried to milk everything he can from the Spain’s recent Euro Cup win, attending Spain’s matches and being pictured celebrating next to the Prince of Asturias. Before the tournament Rajoy even appealed to the coach Vincente Del Bosque to “win the cup for Spain to help us forget the crisis”. Del Bosque said his team would do their best but victory would not solve the socio-economic problems of the country. Wise man and great coach that Del Bosque is!


The miners of Asturias and other regions brought the class struggle to Rajoy’s door and cut short his ’Euro Cup’ feel good factor. Indeed, David Villa, Barcelona and Spanish footballer striker is tweeting his support for the miners and their struggle.


As the miners marched past the President’s Palace, Madrid workers chanted: "Esta es nuestra selección" (“This is our team”.) A miner commented that he had expected a great reception in Madrid but with the incredible reception he truly felt like ’La selección’.


The arrival of the miners in Madrid has been like a catharsis for other groups of workers under attack, like fire fighters, teachers and local government workers. “Miners, you are the dog’s bollocks! Our pride!” The shouts of encouragement by these workers show that this miner’s movement is acting as a catalyst in Spain. The miners themselves chanted; “Fix it or its war, war, war…” They sang their adopted hymn “Santa Barbara” from the civil war.


Even El Pais admits that the idea of “lucha obrera” (worker’s struggle) is taking hold. But generally the Spanish media continues to play a lamentable role. Posters on social media complained that as thousands of workers demonstrated in Madrid the TV served up its usual turgid menu of sport, US films and TV shows and scandalous gossip shows.


Lies and misinformation


The government press publishes lies and misinformation about the miners. According to ABC, the mines are so safe that female miners can go to work in high heels and that miners have salaries of €2,100 a month! They have also wasted the millions in subsidies they have received and, of course, the old chestnut, the miners are violent.


In fact, miners receive an average salary of between €1,000 and €1,500 a month for what is still very dangerous job. The police get about €1,900.


All industry is subsidised in Spain, including transport and agriculture. Why single out the miners whose industry has only received about 1% of the total paid out in subsidies? Spanish banks recently got €100,000 – where is that money now? The subsidies paid to the mining industry have been misspent by the private mining companies and local and regional governments. They should have been investing in improved infrastructure and job creation. No-one can really account for where the money has gone although undoubtedly some of it has been syphoned-off corruptly.


The miners are precisely being singled out for what they represent, including their history and tradition, as many Spanish workers instinctively understand.


As far as violence is concerned, what is more violent than the destruction of 8,000 direct mining jobs and another 30,000 indirectly and whole communities destroyed?


Rajoy’s only response to the demands of the miners has been to mobilise National Police and Civil Guard which is a provocation to the mining communities. Miners and their families have already suffered brutal repression. In Ciñera, León, rubber bullets have been used by police and school playgrounds tear gassed.


Women miners also marched from Asturias to Madrid. Miners’ wives have also started to get organised. Thousands took part in the massive demonstration outside the Ministry of Industry; miners, their families and all sectors of workers in Madrid, including the ’Green Tide’ of Madrid education workers.


The demonstrations passed off mainly peacefully despite a provocative show of strength by the police. Riot police provoked the miners when they filmed the miners’ columns as the protesters reached the Ministry of Industry. Pitched battles took place. The PP HQ was protected by 11 armed police vehicles.


The politicians are living in denial. Esperanza Aguirre, the President of Madrid, denied the miner’s march was large! Rajoy has not said anything about the miners. In Los Cortes, only the IU (United Left) leader reflected a little of the anger in the country, saying that the budget measures were ’throwing petrol onto the streets of Spain.’


Battle lines


As the miners were demonstrating, Rajoy announced an increase in VAT of 3% and a reduction in unemployment pay to 50% of what unemployed workers have paid into the social security system. Rajoy said this should “encourage” the unemployed to find work! Some hope with 5 million on the dole. The overall cuts are a further €65,000 million on top of previous cuts. The pro-big business government is also proposing to reduce the number of full time union officials in an attempt to make it more difficult for unions to defend workers. Spontaneous protests from workers in the public sector including civil servants, teachers, street cleaners, police and even sections of the civil guard have taken to the streets. According to El Pais, at one point some of the riot police took off their helmets! This is an anticipation of the massive social explosion and struggle which is now likely to erupt in Spain in the coming months.


Last Saturday, Rajoy had to cancel public appearances due to protests. Former prime ministers, such as Aznar and Zapatero, have had the same experience. However, as El Pais pointed out, they faced this after 5 years in power. Rajoy has to limit his appearances in public after 6 months!


The battle lines are now clearer. The government is acting exclusively for big business. Their only policy is to make the poor and working class pay for the capitalist crisis. Yesterday many workers were angry at this prospect but did not have the confidence or know the way to fight back. That was yesterday. Today the Spanish miners have shone a light and shown the whole of the working class the way to struggle.


The trade unions were compelled to called national protests on Thursday 19th July. However, this will not be enough. A general strike of 48 hours needs to be convened, as the next step in the struggle to bring down the Rajoy government and fight for a workers’ alternative.


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As We Pass The 1st Anniversary Of The “Cold” Civil War In America-A Tale Of Two Boston Resistance Events –Join The Resistance Now!

As We Pass The 1st Anniversary Of The “Cold” Civil War In America-A Tale Of Two Boston Resistance Events –Join The Resistance Now!

By Si Lannon

The headline to this piece is something of a misnomer as the “cold” civil war in America as I have been calling the great expanding divide between left and right, the oppressed and the oppressor (and its hangers-on including, unfortunately, a not insignificant segment of the oppressed), the haves and have nots and any other way to express the vast gulf, getting wider, between those siding with white rich man’s power and the rest of us, since this cold civil war has been building for a couple of decades at least. The Age of Trump which started officially one year ago though is a pretty good milestone to measure both how far we of the left, of the oppressed, have come and to measure the responses by the oppressed (the ones not hanging on to the white rich men) a year out in Year I of the Age of Trump Resistance.

Two local signposts, let me call them, stick out this weekend of January 20th. One, the Women’s Rally on Cambridge Common on the 20th organized to commemorate the anniversary of the historic Women’s mega-rally and march in Washington and it’s gigantic satellite event on Boston Common, The other a cultural/political event organized by Black Lives Matter and its allies held in the historic Arlington Street Universalist-Unitarian Church in Boston on the 21st.

Those two events which I attended in person in my capacity as a member Veterans Peace Action (VPA, an organization which my old friend Sam Lowell who will take the spotlight below got me involved in as fellow Vietnam War veterans) while they share some obvious over-lapping political perspectives to my mind represented two distinct poles of the resistance as it has evolved over the past several years.

No one, including I assume the organizers of the Women’s Rally, expected anything like the turnout for the 2017 Inaugural weekend event on the Boston Common or else they would have had the event on the Common so I did not expect a tremendous turnout. That event could not be duplicated and moreover over the year some of the anger over the Trump victory, etc. and maybe just plain horror and discouragement would have sapped some energies. However the several thousand who showed up represented a good turnout to my mind.

What I didn’t expect was the rather celebratory feeling that I got from the crowds as the poured into Cambridge Common from the nearby Harvard MBTA subway stop. I was positioned along with a number of my fellow VPAers as volunteers to insure the safety of the crowds and any threaten action by the Alt-Right who were said to be “organizing” a counter-rally at the Common as well. (In the event that small clot of people were isolated and protected by the Cambridge police without incident. We kept our side cool as well.)

That celebratory spirit, rather unwarranted given the defeats on our side over the previous year from Supreme Court justice to DACA to TPS to a million other injustices, flowed into the main thrust of the rally. Get Democrats, get women Democrats, elected to public office and “scare” the bejesus out of Donald J. Trump and his hangers-on. In other words the same old, same old strategy that the oppressed have been beaten down by for eons. Like things were dramatically better for those down at the base of society, down where everybody is “from hunger” with Democrats. Worse though than that pitch for the same old, same old was as the younger radicals say “who was not in the room, who had not been invited.” Who didn’t show up for the “lovefest” if it came to that. The representation on the speaker platform, always a key indicator of whose agenda and whose buttons are being pushed, looked like the old-time white middle-class feminist      cabal that has been herding these women-oriented political events for years to the exclusion on the many shades (and outlooks) of people of color. Not a good sign, not a good sign at all a year out when we are asking people in earnest to put their heads on the line for some serious social change.

Fast forward to the very next day at Arlington Street U-U Church in Boston where a Black Lives Matter event, co-sponsored by Veterans Peace Action, was held to a infinitely smaller crowd around black cultural expression and serious political perspectives. The cultural events were very fine, rap, music, poetry slam put on by skilled artists in those milieus. Interspersed in between those performances was very serious talk, egged on by the moderator, about future political perspectives, about the revolution, however anybody wanted to define that term, In short a far cry from what was being presented and “force-fed” in Cambridge the previous day.             

Now it has been a very long time since, except in closed circle socialist groups, that I have heard about the necessity of revolution (again whatever that might mean to the speaker), so it was like a breath of fresh air to hear such talk in Arlington Street Church, a place where legendary revolutionary abolitionist John Brown spoke, to drum up support for his Kansas expeditions and the later Harpers Ferry fights against slavery. Listening to the responses, as Sam Lowell who attended with me noted later, the missing links to the 1960s generation, to our generation, the last time a lot of people seriously used the word revolution, have left the younger activists in various states of confusion. That will be worked out in the struggle as long as people keep the perspective in mind. What bothered Sam, and me as well although I could not articulate it like him, were two points that seemed to have been given short shrift by the various talkers.

I was going to enumerate them but why don’t I let my recollection of what Sam said (edited by him before posting so very close to what he actually meant) to the gathering after listening to some things that as Fritz Taylor from the South, another VPAer and Vietnam vet used to say- “got stuck in his craw.” Sam had not intended to speak since he, we, thought the event was to be totally a cultural one so he kept it short but also to the point, to our collective agreement point:

“Hi, I am Sam Lowell for Veterans Peace Action (VPA), a co-sponsor of this great event. I didn’t expect to speak since I thought this would be solely a cultural event. But some comments here have got me thinking. First a quick bio point or two-like one of the sisters who performed I grew up in “the projects,” a totally white one, although still “the projects” with all the pathologies that entails and I have remained very close to those roots my whole life whatever successes I have had in breaking out of those beginnings. Early on, don’t ask me how or why, I came to admire John Brown, the white righteous avenging angel revolutionary abolitionist who fought slavery tooth and nail out in Kansas and later, more famously, at Harpers Ferry slave insurrection. He was, is, my hero, my muse if you can use such a term for avenging angels.      

A couple of points. One speaker mentioned a litany of oppressions which had to be eliminated by us, by society, by us as the most conscious of things like patriarchy, racism, classism, gender-sexual preference phobia for lack of a better term, a term that I could use anyway, capitalism and so on. What I have noticed though as people here have tried to struggle with all of that and come up with some kind of strategy is what Lenin, and others, have called imperialism, our American imperialism, which means against all the oppressed of the world we are “privileged” Americans privileged no matter what oppressions we face in this society.   

On this point I will bring back from the dead two important quotes from the legendary revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara-“it is the duty of revolutionaries to make the revolution.” We cannot spent our precious lives “purifying” ourselves of all the oppressions and all the ways we, in turn act as oppressors, so we are “worthy” of the revolution while the world outside this room suffers from our wrong-headed sense of liberation struggle. Second “we who are in the heart of the beast,” who are in America have a special obligation to bring the monster down. To fight the fight now and to be there when the masses rise up in righteous indignation.    

Second and last point. One speaker a few minutes ago mentioned that it seemed impossible that we could win against, 
I assume she meant the American ruling class, through the route of violent revolution so she projected by non-violent alternative which seemed to my ears rather utopian. She mentioned that the other side, the ruling class, had the heavy military advantage and so that route was precluded. That statement showed a lack of “imagination” which is the theme of this event. No question right now an armed uprising would be ruthlessly crushed. But when the masses rise and are determined a funny thing happens at least if you read history. The military splits along officer and soldier lines, the fighters of the war, the grunts, either go over to the people or go home. The cops go into hiding. 


 I would use the example of the Vietnam War which a lot of Veterans Peace Action members are very familiar with. At some point around 1968, 1969 the troops, the grunts on the ground in Vietnam, hell, here at home too began to essentially “mutiny” against the war in fairly big numbers. That army became unreliable, was in many ways broken both by the futility of fighting a determined enemy and vocal opposition at home. And that was not even close to a revolutionary situation but will give you an idea what that situation would look like as the masses rise. If it ever happened where will you be? Thank you.        






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

Films to While Away The 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!

Saturday, July 21, 2018

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth -Bertolt Brecht-“To Those Born After”


As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth -Bertolt Brecht-“To Those Born After”   





By Seth Garth





A few years ago, starting in August 2104 the 100th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

Almost everything the good German communist, and that is a worthy designation for him, the communist part, when that was  an important ideal reads almost as well and timely today. Here is one which those old time radicals who still are in the struggles should ponder: 


                                                                               Bertolt Brecht


                        To Those Born Later


I

Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost.)

They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfill your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times.

II

I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger reigned there.
I came among men in a time of revolt
And I rebelled with them.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

My food I ate between battles
To sleep I lay down among murderers
Love I practised carelessly
And nature I looked at without patience.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

All roads led into the mire in my time.
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers.
There was little I could do. But those in power
Sat safer without me: that was my hope.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

III

You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped.


    German; trans. John Willett, Ralph Manheim & Erich Fried