There's cancer in the water surrounding military bases
Via info=rootsaction.org <info=rootsaction.org@mail.salsalabs.net>
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Sunday, January 20, 2019
There's cancer in the water surrounding military bases RootsAction Team
1/24 Catastrophe in Yemen: Resisting US Imperialism and Raytheon's War Profiteering
1/24 Catastrophe in Yemen: Resisting US Imperialism and Raytheon's War Profiteering
Via Act-MA <act-ma-bounces@act-ma.org>
Catastrophe in Yemen: Resisting US Imperialism and Raytheon's War
Profiteering
Thursday Jan 24th, 2019 from 7-9pm
First Church in Boston Unitarian Universalist
66 Marlborough St, Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Speakers include:
Dr. Shireen Al-Adeimi - Michigan State University Professor who lived
through two civil wars in Yemen
Beth Huang - Co-chairperson of Boston DSA
Chance Charley - BU Student Activist
Sponsored by: Mass Peace Action - Next Gen, Coalition to Stop the Genocide
in Yemen, Boston DSA
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/297886380867441/
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Profiteering
Thursday Jan 24th, 2019 from 7-9pm
First Church in Boston Unitarian Universalist
66 Marlborough St, Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Speakers include:
Dr. Shireen Al-Adeimi - Michigan State University Professor who lived
through two civil wars in Yemen
Beth Huang - Co-chairperson of Boston DSA
Chance Charley - BU Student Activist
Sponsored by: Mass Peace Action - Next Gen, Coalition to Stop the Genocide
in Yemen, Boston DSA
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/297886380867441/
______________________________
Act-MA mailing list
Act-MA@act-ma.org
http://act-ma.org/mailman/listinfo/act-ma_act-ma.org
To set options or unsubscribe
http://act-ma.org/mailman/options/act-ma_act-ma.org
Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers And Not To Cops Either, Not “Projects’ Boys” And That Is No Lie-With Cop Buddies Michael J. Fox And James Woods’ “The Hard Way” (1991) In Mind
Didn’t Your Mother Ever
Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers And Not To Cops Either, Not “Projects’ Boys”
And That Is No Lie-With Cop Buddies Michael J. Fox And James Woods’ “The Hard
Way” (1991) In Mind
DVD Review
By Bradley Fox, Jr. (no
relation to the actor listed here but a relation to former and now retired American Film Gazette writer and editor Bradley
Fox, Sr.)
The Hard Way, starring
Michael Keaton, James Woods, 1991
[The reader may have not
seen the name Bradley Fox, Jr. on a by-line at this publication for some time
now. For a very good reason. A couple of years back when I was starting out at
this publication as a stringer, I locked horns with the previous site manager
Allan Jackson, who has recently returned as a contributing editor which is okay
as long as he is not my boss. The reason, reasons really but the main one was
his insistence that every writer delve deeply into the 1960s counterculture,
general 1960s culture for that matter since a number of 50th anniversary
commemorations were coming up and Allan wanted blanket coverage. Even from
younger writers who didn’t have a clue about the 1960s, could have cared less
about that ancient history or had to reach out to parents or in my case
grandparents to get a feel for the times. Not good, not good at all.
Greg Green, who Allan
had brought over from American Film
Gazette to run the day to day operations while he did the big strategic
planning and gave out the assignments, knowing how unhappy I was, knowing I
would be forever a stringer as long as Allan ran the show, ran it his way “or
the highway” as some wag put the matter, got me a job over at Film Today. In late 2017 when all hell
broke loose, and Allan was canned I thought about coming back. Problem was I
had a two-year non-competition clause in my contract to not write for some other
publication which meant that I had to wait it out. And I did. Once the contract
restriction expired Greg called me up and asked me back. This is my first
assignment back although not my first run at this film since I reviewed it at Film Today as well. Greg wanted me to
revise that effort to fit in better with his idea that this kind of film did
not need the three-thousand-word gloss that I had put on it. The revised and
shortened piece is below minus the extended analysis of the place of “buddy
movies,” male buddy movies until recently and now gal buddies as well in
Hollywood film history. Brad Fox, Jr.]
**********
Sam Lowell, the now sort
of retired film editor at this publication who still contributes a few pieces
and who right now is working on a continuing project about why certain once well-known
private investigators, specifically Lew Archer from out in California who wound
up peeping through keyholes, never made it to the P.I. Hall of Fame despite
some real promise starting out, once told my father when they both were working
at American Film Review I think a few
good tips about film reviewing. About film reviewing when you are totally
without a clue about how to proceed with a review which is in many ways a piece
of fluff like The Hard Way but which
you must say something about if for no other reason than to keep the wolves from
your door (and avoid taking hand-outs, cash outlays, from fathers and mothers
as the case may be). Without a “hook” you might as well stay home and have a drink
to drown your sorrows. Here are the three life-savers in ascending order-“slice of life” for the time
period especially if the theme has been totally superseded by newer social conventions;
feature the “buddy” aspect; and, play up the “boy meets girl (or visa versa)”
theme which has saved more Hollywood and now world-wide films than it would
seem possible to do given some of the lame plotlines.
Today we do the middle
life-line (which I used in a feverish pitch when I first reviewed this film at
my previous job at Film Today loading
up the piece with the history of “buddy movies” in Hollywood since on
re-viewing the film for this piece I came up with the same problem as there. A
piece of fluff. The difference was that the editor there was looking for “high
culture” aspects hence the three-thousand-word minimum requirement. As well as
a stringer I was being paid by the word at one of the last publications to use
that relic of indentured servitude method of payment for stringers). As usual with
buddy films there has to be some conflict of interest that gets resolved and
lets them go off hand and hand into the sunset having bonded for eternity, or
until the sequel if any. John Moss, James Woods’ character is a hard-nosed, no
non-sense and basically politically incorrect public detective, a New York
detective who has a major problem on his hands. A major crime problem which is
that some new version of American psycho is running around dance halls, barrooms,
frat houses, maybe even public restrooms off-handedly shooting people for kicks
or some mysterious reason known only to him, as usual. Our Man Moss is bound
and determined to bring this cretin to justice-by any means necessary.
Naturally the case in
widely publicized as are Moss’ relentlessly baiting remarks about that psycho. Meanwhile
Nick Lang played by Michael J. Fox as a movie star out in Hollywood is in a
funk. You might remember Nick from back a couple of decades ago when everybody
was touting him as the next Errol Flynn, on film not in personal life, an
action movie guy bringing in big studio grosses for little dough but apparently
only spending about six dollars on script-writers. Nick was having a mid-career
crisis like a lot of people when he came up with either a brilliant idea, or one
of pure genius. He would hook up with this John Moss and learn what it was like
to be a real action guy, a real cop. Pulling a few thousand strings, or maybe
the studio doing so he is in.
Of course our serious
cop John is outraged that some punk movie star who has the liberty to endlessly
shoot fantasy bang-bang scenes is going to play copper, play out in the mean
streets of New York while this psycho is running amok. Nick, as expected made every
mistake in the book, maybe more in real cop line of duty. Which only infuriated
Moss more. Meanwhile the psycho is pulling their chains, has them looking in all
the wrong places. Along the way, as expected as well, John lightens up a little
on Nick although he is still desperate to get him out of town. (Probably the best
scene in the whole film was when trigger-happy Nick “shoots” an innocent by-stander
while they are on the trail of Mister Psycho. It turns out this was a scam way
that Moss tried to get Nick out of town by setting up the scene with fellow coppers-sorry
for the egg all over your face Nick.) In the end Nick will redeem himself by
taking a few stray bullets as they go in for the kill after psycho kidnaps Moss’
estranged girlfriend out in Time Square and there is final action on a 3-D billboard
touting some film Nick had made. The psycho goes down and is chalked up as no great
lose. Yeah, thinking about it again I am glad Greg gave the okay to make this
dopey film a subject for short review. I don’t believe even with padding I
squeezed well over three-thousand words out of this mildly funny film.
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- On The Road To “On The Road”-“Maggie Cassidy”
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King
Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-
“Advertisements for Myself”-Introduction by Allan Jackson, a founding member of the American Left History publication back in 1974 when it was a hard copy journal and until 2017 site manager of the on-line edition.
[He’s back. Jack Kerouac, as described in the headline, “the king of the beats” and maybe the last true beat standing. That is the basis of this introduction by me as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of his untimely death at 47. But before we go down and dirty with the legendary writer I stand before you, the regular reader, and those who have not been around for a while to know that I was relieved of my site manage duties in 2017 in what amounted to a coup by the younger writers who resented the direction I was taking the publication in and replaced me with Greg Green who I had brought on board from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while I oversaw the whole operation and planned my retirement. Over the past year or so a million rumors have, had mostly now, swirled around this publication and the industry in general about what had happened and I will get to that in a minute before dealing with Jack Kerouac’s role in the whole mess.
What you need to know first, if you don’t know already is that Greg Green took me back to do the introductions to an encore presentation of a long-term history of rock and roll series that I edited and essentially created after an unnamed older writer who had not been part of the project balled it all up, got catch flat-footed talking bullshit and other assorted nonsense since he knew nada, nada nunca and, about the subject having been apparently asleep when the late Peter Markin “took us to school” that history. Since then Greg and I have had an “armed truce,” meaning I could contribute as here to introductions of some encore and some origin material as long as I didn’t go crazy, his term, for what he called so-called nostalgia stuff from the 1950s and 1960s and meaning as well that Greg will not go crazy, my term, and will refrain from his ill-advised attempt to reach a younger audience by “dumbing down” the publication with odd-ball comic book character reviews of films, graphic novels and strange musical interludes. Fair is fair.
What I need to mention, alluded to above, is those rumors that ran amok while I was on the ropes, when I had lost that decisive vote of no confidence by one sullen vote. People here, and my enemies in the industry as well, seeing a wounded Allan Jackson went for the kill, went for the jugular that the seedy always thrive on and began a raggedy-ass trail on noise you would not believe. In the interest of elementary hygiene, and to frankly clear the air, a little, since there will always be those who have evil, and worse in their hearts when “the mighty have fallen.” Kick when somebody is down their main interest in life.
I won’t go through the horrible rumors like I was panhandling down in Washington, D.C., I was homeless in Olde Saco, Maine (how could that be when old friend and writer here Josh Breslin lives there and would have provided alms to me so at least get an approximation of the facts before spinning the wild woolly tale), I had become a male prostitute in New York City (presumably after forces here and in that city hostile to me put in the fatal “hard to work with” tag on me ruining any chances on the East Coast of getting work, getting enough dough to keep the wolves from my door, my three ex-wives and that bevy of kids, nice kids, who nevertheless were sucking me dry with alimony and college tuitions), writing press releases under the name Leonard Bloom for a Madison Avenue ad agency. On a lesser scale of disbelief I had taken a job as a ticket-taker in a multi-plex in Nashua, New Hampshire, had been a line dishwasher at the Ritz in Philadelphia when they needed day labor for parties and convention banquets, had been kicking kids out of their newspaper routes and taking that task on myself, and to finish off although I have not given a complete rundown rummaging through trash barrels looking for bottles with deposits. Christ.
Needless to say, how does one actually answer such idiocies, and why. A couple of others stick out about me and some surfer girl out in Carlsbad in California who I was pimping while getting my sack time with her and this one hurt because it hurt a dear friend and former “hippie girl” lover of mine, Madame La Rue, back in the day that I was running a whorehouse with her in Luna Bay for rich Asian businessmen with a taste for kinky stuff. I did stop off there and Madame does run a high-end brothel in Luna Bay but I had nothing to do with it. The reason Madame was hurt was because I had lent her the money to buy the place when it was a rundown hotel and built it up from there with periodic additional funds from me so she could not understand why my act of kindness would create such degenerate noise from my enemies who were clueless about the relationship between us.
I will, must deal with two big lies which also
center of my reluctant journey west (caused remember by that smear campaign
which ruined by job opportunities in the East, particularly New York City. The
first which is really unbelievable on its face is that I hightailed it directly
to Utah, to Salt Lake City, when I busted out in NYC looking for one Mitt
Romney, “Mr. Flip-Flop,” former Governor of Massachusetts, Presidential
candidate against Barack Obama then planning on running for U.S. Senator from
Utah (now successful ready to take office in January) to “get well.” The
premise for this big lie was supposedly that since I have skewered the guy
while he was governor and running for president with stuff like the Mormon
fetish for white underwear and the old time polygamy of his great-grand-father
who had five wives (and who showed great executive skill I think in keeping the
peace in that extended family situation. The unbelievable part is that those
Mormon folk, who have long memories and have pitchforks at the ready to rumble
with the damned, would let a sinner like me, a non-Mormon for one thing
anywhere the Romney press operation. Christ, I must be some part latter day
saint since I barely got out of that damn state alive if the real truth were
known after I applied for a job with the Salt Lake Sentinel not knowing the
rag was totally linked to the Mormons. Pitchforks,
indeed.
The biggest lie though is the one that had me as the M.C. in complete “drag” as Elsa Maxwell at the “notorious” KitKat Club in San Francisco which has been run for about the past thirty years or so by Miss Judy Garland, at one time and maybe still is in some quarters the “drag queen” Queen of that city. This will show you how ignorant, or blinded by hate, some people are. Miss Judy Garland is none other that one of our old corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville, Timmy Riley. Timmy who like the rest of us on the corner used to “fag bait” and beat up anybody, any guy who seemed effeminate, at what cost to Timmy’s real feelings we will never really know although he was always the leader in the gay-bashing orgy. Finally between his own feeling and Stonewall in New York in 1969 which did a great deal to make gays, with or with the drag queen orientation, a little less timid Timmy fled the Acre (and his hateful family and friends) to go to friendlier Frisco. He was in deep personal financial trouble before I was able to arrange some loans from myself and some of his other old corner boys (a few still hate Timmy for what he has become, his true self) to buy the El Lobo Club, his first drag queen club, and when that went under, the now thriving tourist trap KitKat Club. So yes, yes, indeed, I stayed with my old friend at his place and that was that. Nothing more than I had done many times before while I ran the publication.
But enough of this tiresome business because I want to introduce this series dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac who had a lot of influence on me for a long time, mostly after he died in 1969
******
All roads about Jack Kerouac, about who was the
king of the beats, about what were the “beats” lead back to the late Pete
Markin who, one way or another, taught the working poor Acre neighborhood of
North Adamsville corner boys what was up with that movement. Funny, because we
young guys were a serious generation removed from that scene, really our
fathers’ contemporaries and you know how far removed fathers were from kids in
those days especially among the working poor trying to avoid
going “under water” and not just about mortgages but food on tables
and clothing on backs, were children of rock and roll, not jazz, the beat
musical medium, and later the core of the “Generation of ‘68” which took off,
at least partially, with the “hippie” scene, where the dying embers of the beat
scene left off. Those dying embers exactly the way to put it since most of our
knowledge or interest came from the stereotypes-beards before beards were cool
and before grandfather times -for guys, okay, berets, black and beaten down
looks. Ditto on black for the gals, including black nylons which no Acre girl
would have dreamed of wearing, not in the early 1960s anyway. Our “model”
beatnik really came, as we were also children of television, from sitcom
stories like Dobie Gillis with stick character Maynard G. Krebs
standing in for all be-bop-dom.
So it is easy to see where except to ostracize, meaning harass, maybe beat up if that was our wont that day, we would have passed by the “beat” scene, passed by Jack Kerouac too without the good offices, not a term we would have used then, if not for nerdish, goof, wild and woolly in the idea world Markin (always called Scribe for obvious reasons but we will keep with Markin here). He was the guy who always looked for some secret meaning to the universe, that certain breezes, winds, metaphorical breezes and winds, were going to turn things around, were going to make the world a place where Markin could thrive. Markin was the one who first read Kerouac’s breakthrough travelogue of a different sort novel On The Road.
Now Markin was the kind of guy, and sometimes we
let him go on and sometimes stopped him in his tracks, who when he was on to
something would bear down on us to pay attention. Christ some weekend nights he
would read passages from the book like it was the Bible (which it turned out to
be in a way later) when all we basically cared about is which girls were going
to show up at our hang-out spot, the well-known Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and play
the jukebox and we would go from there. Most of us, including me, kind of yawned
at the whole thing even when Markin made a big deal that Kerouac was a
working-class guy like us from up in Lowell cut right along the Merrimac River.
The whole thing seemed way too exotic and moreover there was too much
homosexual stuff implied which in our strict Irish-Italian Catholic
neighborhood did not go down well at all -made us dismiss the whole thing and
want to if I recall correctly “beat up” that Allan Ginsberg character. Even
Dean Moriarty, the Neal Cassidy character, didn’t move us since although we
were as larcenous and “clip” crazy as any character in that book we kind of
took Dean as a tough car crazy guide like Sonny Jones from our neighborhood who
was nothing but a hood in Red Riley’s bad ass motorcycle gang which hung out at
Harry’s Variety Store. We avoided him and more so Red like the plague. Both
wound up dead, very dead, in separate attempted armed robberies in broad
daylight if you can believe that.
Our first run through of our experiences with Kerouac and through him the beat movement was therefore kind of marginal-even as Markin touted for a while that whole scene he agreed with us that jazz-be-bop jazz always associated with the beat-ness was not our music, was grating to our rock and roll-refined and defined ears. Here is where Markin was always on to something though, always had some idea percolating in his head. There was a point where he, we as well I think, got tired of rock and roll, a time when it had run out of steam for a while and along with his crazy home life which really was bad drove him to go to Harvard Square and check out what he had heard was a lot of stuff going on. Harvard Square was, is still to the extent that any have survived like Club Passim, the home of the coffeehouse. A place that kind of went with the times first as the extension of the beat generation hang-out where poetry and jazz would be read and played. But in Markin’s time, our time there was the beginnings of a switch because when he went to the old long gone Café Nana he heard folk music and not jazz, although some poetry was still being read. I remember Markin telling me how he figured the change when I think it was the late Dave Von Ronk performed at some club and mentioned that when he started out in the mid-1950s in the heat of beat time folk singers were hired at the coffeehouses in Greenwich Village to “clear the house” for the next set of poetry performers but that now folk-singing eclipsed poetry in the clubs. Markin loved it, loved the whole scene of which he was an early devotee. Me, well, strangely considering where I wound up and what I did as a career, I always, still do, hated the music. Thought it was too whinny and boring. Enough said though.
Let’s fast forward to see where Kerouac really affected us in a way that when Markin was spouting forth early on we could not appreciate. As Markin sensed in his own otherworldly way a new breeze was coming down the cultural highway, a breeze push forward by the beats I will confess, by the folk music scene, by the search for roots which the previous generation, our parents’ generation, spent their adulthoods attempting to banish and become part of the great American vanilla melt, and by a struggling desire to question everything that had come before, had been part of what we had had no say in creating, weren’t even asked about. Heady stuff and Markin before he made a very bad decision to quit college in his sophomore years and “find himself,” my expression not his, spent many of his waking hours figuring out how to make his world a place where he could thrive.
That is when one night, this is when we were well out of high school, some of us corner boys had gone our separate ways and those who remained in contact with the brethren spent less time hanging out at Tonio’s, Markin once again pulled out On The Road, pulled out Jack’s exotic travelogue. The difference is we were all ears then and some of us after that night brought our own copies or went to the Thomas Murphy Public Library and took out the book. This was the spring of the historic year 1967 when the first buds of the Summer of Love which wracked San Francisco and the Bay Area to its core and once Markin started working on us, started to make us see his vision of what he would later called, culling from Tennyson if I am not mistaken a “newer world.” Pulling us all in his train, even as with Bart Webber and if I recall Si Lannon a little, he had to pull out all the stops to have them, us, join him in the Summer of Love experience. Maybe the whole thing with Jack Kerouac was a pipe dream I remember reading about him in the Literary Gazette when he was down in Florida living with his ancient mother and he was seriously critical of the “hippies,” kind of banged on his own beat roots explaining that he was talking about something almost Catholic beatitude spiritual and not personal freedom, of the road or anything else. A lot of guys and not just writing junkies looking for some way to alleviate their inner pains have repudiated their pasts but all I know is that when Jack was king of the hill, when he spoke to us those were the days all roads to Kerouac were led by Markin. Got it. Allan Jackson
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax
player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest
brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have
known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat
exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard
achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on
money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for
the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you
will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at
home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being,
hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid
stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man
caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the
world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings.
Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out
on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North
Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the
fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy
junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs
and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’
coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” So even
Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave
that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan
Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel
book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel
brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his
crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place
like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves
generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the
creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and
anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want
to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary
corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled
park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a
tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright
event, just mentioned. Markin was the
vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack
call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, who
got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there
was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of
years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book
which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail
since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which
would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking
to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early
1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that
book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and
hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best
part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by
hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going
high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying
unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty
Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex,
Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when
the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or
Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack
when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was
what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on
forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk
Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense
was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous
lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against
him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would
confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the
social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise.
That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about
ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked
him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got
the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the
bug to you.
Click on title to link to a site that gives a thumbnail sketch of the biography of the be-bop writer Jack Kerouac
Markin comment:
Every year, in October, in Jack Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts a Jack Kerouac Festival is presented to keep his be-bop working class fellaheen memory alive. The link is http://www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org/lck-2010
********
Book Review
Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York, 1993
As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD,The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac’s lesser works under review here, Maggie Cassidy, where the action takes place in his hometown, that this fade back to be-bop-ness all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old-time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting granitic memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Jack Kerouac's better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, On The Road, his classic modern physical and literary "search" for the meaning of America for his generation, the generation which came of age in the post-World War II period, readily comes to mind. No so well known is the fact that that famous youthful Kerouac novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition in many volumes, starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times.
Maggie Cassidy focuses on the trials and tribulations of growing up absurd in the 1930s, the inevitable schoolboy quests and missteps of sorting out what love is, teen love, Jack's desire to excel at sports which has driven young men for ages, and, off-handedly, the “meaning of the universe” of his high school days in Lowell and a little about his prep school days down in New York City in the late 1930s in the series that bears the general title The Legend Of Duluoz. So that is why we today, in the year of the forty-second anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign, no the spell, of Maggie Cassidy.
I have mentioned in a note to a review of On The Road after a recent re-reading of that master work that Kerouac's worldview, not unexpectedly for a novelist of the immediate post- World War II generation, was dominated by what today would be regarded as deeply, if not consciously, sexist impulses. Moreover, the whole “beat” experience of which he was “king” was, with a few exceptions, a man’s trip, hetero and/or homosexual. All of the books that I have read of his have that flavor. They may be, some of them, great literature but they are certainly men’s books.
Also, not unexpectedly, for a shy, sly, French-Canadian (with a little Native-American thrown in) working-class athletic youth from Lowell, Kerouac’s escapades center in this book on his high school male-bonding experiences with his “corner” boys. And being, from all reports and a quick glance at his youthful photographs, a handsome-looking man his exploits with young women. And here enters the sultry Maggie Cassidy, to the lace curtain born, the Irish colleen dream of every heterosexual young man. Although the dramatic tension of this book is not exactly gripping, after all despite some very grand, descriptive narration about Lowell, about the neighborhood, about the beauties of the Merrimack River, and above all, about young women, the episodes here clearly fall under the category of high school hi-jinks which have already had a long and honored literary exposition. Still, this is a nice little trip down memory lane and I can visualize some of the same streets around the "Acre and Pawtucketville, and some of those frosty mill-driven buildings that he refers in this book from those long ago connections that I mentioned above.
Note to Jack Kerouac wherever you are: Damn, you should have ‘talked’ to me about Maggie before you got involved with that vixen. I grew up in a part of a town in Massachusetts that while not “Little Dublin” was close enough to bear that title here in America. I knew a million Maggies (and Moe Coles too) and I could have warned you that chandelier, lace curtain, or shanty these nice Irish Catholic girls will break your heart, or something else, every time. Now that I think about it though I never listened to any well-intentioned advise on the subject either. Farewell grand working-class fellaheen.
In Honor Of Janis Joplin's Birthday -From The Archives -The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death
Classic Rock : 1968: Shakin’ All Over, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989
Scene: Brought to mind by a the cover art on this CD of a Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night.
Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some yellow bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, even hanging around with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do. Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, autumns of drugs, winters of discontent, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim runner’s frame could not afford.
Moreover, now the chickens were coming home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though (his temperature rose every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually even now) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.
What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Peter Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.
Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Ruby although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message). Josh, throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. He got surprised one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.
What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace, mad Bessie Smith, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all Piece Of My Heart.
Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting work at the Monterrey Pop Festival each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl, ya just a wisp of a girl, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster. Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. What a night, what a blues singer.
Just now though Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that look in her that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August and still be okay but he had better grab Ruby now while he could.
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