Oh Mary Magdalene Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Moan Since Your Lover Man Left You Well-Provided For And I Understand Was The “Fixer Man” To Pave The Way To Your Sainthood

Oh Mary Magdalene Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Moan Since Your Lover Man Left You Well-Provided For And I Understand Was The “Fixer Man” To Pave The Way To Your Sainthood

By Sam Lowell

In the nuttier atmospherics of art world, the vast area mostly downtrodden by modern minds who only want fresh material and kinkier fare than medieval paintings, Renaissance noise and Dutch (and, yes, Flemish) turgidity (is there really such a word my spellcheck let it through). I won’t even bother going through all the bad humor produced by average art cellar dwellers who apparently not only have time for the latest novelty in the arts but to write long screeds as well. That bad air courtesy a couple of recent sketches I did trying to honor a guy named Rembrandt, no last name or forgettable in nay case, no last known address, one of those Dutchmen painters although certainly not turgid, well, not as much as some of his fellows on his 350^th birthday. I suppose if I left it at that it would have cut down the venomous cyber-ink and perhaps for the 400^th anniversary I will keep it simple.  

Here is where instinct, DNA, socialization, whatever comes into play. For a certain crowd, and I number myself among them, the mere mention of the name Rembrandt triggers memories of the great art heist of the age, the Isabella Stewart Gardner grab of some thirty years ago where the highlights of the caper were some of Master Artist Rembrandt’s works. Putting those two ideas, birthday kudos and heist, together which I assumed might appeal to the nuttier precincts of the art world, seemed rather on point. What brought on an avalanche of bad noise, bullshit and bent noses was my rationale for taking the two assignments since for the past several years I have only been around the

edges of that sulky art world, mostly as an adviser, mentor, muse to fellow writer and amateur art critic Laura Perkins.    

My so-called bad bad was that I stated, for the record and in public, that as against the sterile cuckoo of that medieval and early Renaissance religious art, you know, ten thousand scenes with Holy Mother Mary, Blessed Virgin Mary, Madonna for the highbrows, Mary, wife, perhaps common law wife in case there were bigamy laws back then, Joseph the cuckooed carpenter out of Bethlehem (or Bedlam maybe), Mary of the ten million sorrows at the end bouncing baby Jesus (or his brother it is not always clear from the artist’s depiction who is who but let’s say mostly Jesus and let the curators battle in out in the pages of Art Today). Better the galleries and chapels are clogged with a virtual travelogue of the ever-growing good-looking, bearded increasingly charismatic and sexy Jesus working the streets with his plainsong and drawing a pretty good response from those down in the mud, down at the base of society. The folks that even today can use a break from the unrelenting misery of everyday life. (It would only be later that the depraved rich Romans who threw the brother up on the cross with a couple of sad sack common criminals, in the beginning mainly mothers and daughters then bigwigs, emperors if I recall would join under the big tent). Less happily about twenty thousand scenes of the Messiah(he was working that scam and bringing in good dough at the end although it did him little good either with the Romans or the guys running the shtetl or whatever they called the Jewish quarters then under Roman authority) going through the last stages of his life from the big orgy Last Supper (“orgy” not my term but taken either from Peter or Paul who were there and there is no reason to question that description since they were running the carnival complete with dancing girls I heard), the road show to the crosses up on Calvary hill and all the doom and craziness that brought down. Finally, about five thousand scenes of the Christ rolling the rock up the hill, getting ready to rise, or rising including a famous scene from sacrilegious German artist, one of the youngers, with Mary Magdalene sharing some last minute affections with the Lord before he heads to see his father, his real father (all these names apply to the same guy, Jesus, okay).       

Okay stuff, scenes to paint during that what did we used to call them in the old days before the revisionists worked their magic, oh yeah, the Dark Ages , if you are stuck in some hick town like Messina wanting to break out to a place like say Rome or maybe Paris, Constantinople or Athens but strictly for the rubes otherwise. And I said so, straight up. What upset everybody’s applecart is when I mentioned the only good-looking woman in the crowd, the whore and tavern B-girl Mary Magdalene (hereafter Mary Mags) and had the nerve to call her Jesus’ woman which I believe Jesus and Mary would have taken as a compliment and sign of respect for their short-term but passionate love affair. Mentioned that Mary Mags when she was working the streets had a specialty, was known as a woman who would wash a guy’s feet (for a fee of course) and that was how she ran into Jesus when he was working Galilee I think and needed some immediate relief for some unknown foot disease (unknown to this day but some random DNA testing of the famous shroud claims psoriasis).        

Anybody with half a brain when you think about it knows that the thing was a natural combination. A young guy starting out in the prophet business with nothing but a few good ideas and maybe a couple of cute tricks like the fishes and loaves gag having a woman work the crowd (as against guys like Peter or Thomas who scared the bejesus out of me when I first ran into them in church as a kid). How could you beat the combination a red-headed, light complexioned woman all dressed in black working side by side with the thief of hearts to put a new religion on the board and grab some quick cash as well. Don’t be afraid to look at the really well-done paintings showing this pair in their heyday (to be discussed more fully in the next paragraph). Especially if you have spent the day at the Met, the MFA, the freaking Cloisters or half of Italy and France and the like and were ready to scream if you saw one more cutie selfie of Mary and baby Jesus being feted by angels, and puttee. If you are ever so weary of one more photo-op of Jesus breaking bread and fish for thousands (not an orgy like the Last Supper by the way although some people got rowdy when they were reduced to hard tack end slices and fishtails when the magic wore off). Or you cannot take one more version of the death agony of Jesus, no known last name, no known last address, hanging with a bunch of ruffians and ne’er-do-wells at the end.

Compare all that claptrap with Tintoretto’s so-called Penitent Mags looking all hot and dreamy ready to wash those Jesus wayward dirty feet and get under some silky sheets with the guy. (By the way and remember this was serious counter-reformation time that “penitent” gag was to escape having this masterpiece burned at the stake by some clown cardinals who wanted the world, the Christian world anyway, to see that she had given up her whoring ways and was like Holy Mother Mary just another miraculous virgin girl). How about that Veronese painting where Jesus works his so-called magic, does some kind of exotic exorcism and wipes away Mags sins while a bunch of guys, some apostles I assume are leering in the background. (Some say Peter, a known woman-chaser and whoremaster before he got religion, had eyed her first, had had his feet washed and expected that she would be his girl except the boss had other plans). More than one theologian, I am thinking of John Paul Lawrence and Lemuel Savage, have projected that baffling scene as the first step in their becoming lovers. Interesting. Better, better for my case for the passionate romance is van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross where Mags is almost prostrate with grief that her man had gone beyond the pale, has left her to the maybe not so tender mercies of the remaining apostles. If those are not real tears of intimate distress I will eat my hat, okay. Finally, and here I am saving the best for last since even total dweebs who hate every last religious painting without fail how about Raphael’s The Deposition where Mary Mags obviously having come up in the world working alongside Jesus who liked to see his women in their best finery is clutching the lost boy’s hand hoping against hope that some of that pillow talk he mentioned after having a few tankards of strong red wine about his resurrection was more than hot air. That he would not forsake her. I rest my case.     

[*There is a very rich history, plenty of data and plenty of theory too around the notion that Jesus and his crew, the Apostles so-called were not lascivious, lecherous, wine-drinking sots chasing after everything in a skirt or whatever was the women’s fashionable grab of the day but a close-knit (meaning closeted) band of what today are called gays but back then sodomites and calamites. Of course, such a theory would blow the top off of my Jesus and Mary Mags torrid if short love affair. Since this piece is about Mary Mags I decided to put this scenario in the brackets as everybody in the West anyway knows that Jesus has gotten all kinds of ink, including now cyber-ink around his heart-rendering story.        

The main proponent, modern proponent anyway, for the homosexual cabal theory is the great if cowardly when the deal went down in Merry Olde England in 1939 English poet W.H. Auden. I believe from his early college years maybe when he was at public school he compiled lists of those in history that he could categorize as being like him, being gay. Later when Auden drew close to guys who were also leftists, usually communists, he described the closely held listings as detailing membership in the “Homintern,” a take-off on Joe Stalin’s Comintern. No question Auden did a great if covert service to help explaining today that gayness did not just start with Stonewall in 1969 but goes back to the earliest times when let’s say shepherds were out on those lonely stretches tending to their respective flocks or Greek intellectuals were tired of their wives and wanted beautiful young men hanging around them in the agora.          

            

Auden, for example, was the one who figured out that Richard II was not sleeping with his wife (a wife in name only to cover his real interests, a tactic used many times in history and not only among the rich and able by even working class and middle class guys who couldn’t take the gaff of singlehood and covered their asses with a brood and a mother hen), that Pope Gregory VI (don’t quote me on the correctness of the roman numerals) had Cardinal Mazzi as his live-in boyfriend (who in turn had a friar named Jonathan as his live-in boyfriend which must have been the subject of plenty of nasty banter among the cardinals and their mistresses, that King James I of English, that first Stuart king of England out of heathen Scotland filled with sheep was more than playing footsie with the pretty boy Duke of  Buckingham. Moving forward W.H. had the goods on Peter the Great, Leonardo, Raphael, the poet James Devine, the novelist John Richardson and many more. Probably the greatest service he did, because he did it well before some guy wrote a whole book on it a few years ago was to have Abe Lincoln’s number, have him down as brethren for his youthful romance, for his sharing his bed with Jack Tilden (and after seeing the real dagger Mary Todd no wonder he kept his options open even in the White House during wartime. Another coup to finish up on his unusually sturdy credentials was dotting the i’s on that decadent Bloomsbury crowd, especially Lytton Strachey.               

Auden, no question, comes with plenty of “street cred” as we used to say in the old neighborhood when he put a circle around the name Jesus and the boyos as certified members of the “Homintern.” But here his usually sharp nose and analysis played him false, especially in light of the new information out of Nazareth that a “diary” allegedly kept by Mary Mags had been found detailing so pretty hot stuff about her and her man Jesus, including a shocking revelation about a son begat by Jesus shortly before all hell broke loose in his case and he wound up sucking air on Calvary. Now this “evidence” is still in the speculation/verification/ DNA testing stage but it rather puts paid to something that has bothered me about Auden’s reasoning for a while.    

The core of Auden’s argument for a closeted gay cohort led by Jesus and adhered to by his manly apostles (not big- time big case Apostles like now when you have to suck up to the memory of one of them at least to get anything done in the Vatican along with fistfuls of cash to get anything done) always centered on two key pieces of information. The first was that the guys Jesus recruited were fisherman, soldiers, college students (although they would not have called them that back then but maybe priests or temple acolytes) and what we today in the post-1960s would call free and easy hippies but then more like master-less men. From those professions and an intimate knowledge of what really went on when guys were out at sea for several days, or confined to barracks, or were so-called vestal virgins, or rogues, almost exclusively men.

Auden concluded from that data that this was clear evidence that Jesus was looking for more than converts to his new wave ideas, you know washing the sins of the world clean, getting everybody’s ass back to the Garden, bringing single father love into play, chasing bad ass moneylenders out of temples and feeding tons of people on simple fare. Especially after a hard day’s work hustling for dough and converts around the various marketplaces where he preached his message. Everybody knows that fisherman, actually seamen in general, out on the open seas are well-known to bundle up together, same with soldiers out on the tramp with skimpy canvas to cover themselves up. College students, or what we call them today at exclusively men’s boarding schools ditto as well as tramps, bums, vagabonds and hoboes under the principle any port in a storm. But see once they get off work, school or the road they are as liable to be chasing wenches like Mary Mags, maybe her younger sister too who was starting to work the streets after Mary hooked up with Jesus and his salvation army crowd and didn’t need to do the street hustle and that ugly washing of feet work she really hated. Soldiers, and this is nothing in their favor, were as likely to rape women and pillage as anything else. Everybody knows, or should know, that drunken college students are as likely to hit Joe’s Tavern down by the river to get at the B-girls as hang around the dorms looking for guys to go the distance with. We won’t even speak of what cleaned up tramps, hoboes, vagabonds and bums are capable of when they have their wine casks full.  

More alarming is Auden’s second premise based on the Gospel according to a guy named Edgar whose main claim to fame is to have “discovered” some passed down accounts by Peter and Paul that the night before they nailed Christ to the cross (I am not sure if that “Christ” alias was the moniker he went by then) there was a totally out of control orgy. From there Auden swings us back to Leonardo’s famous if bogus painting of the Last Supper (remember Auden was the first to “out” Leonardo) where it is all guys getting worked up about a possible snitch in their crowd rather than getting sky high on the latest from the local vineyards. Yeah, Leonardo had it down right for public consumption, for the public of his time who were desperate that Jesus was presiding over what looked to all the world like some kind of facility conference (complete with dinky water glasses and variety store snacks). But all guys looking like they are getting ready to pair off to their respective hovels and hence his erroneous deduction. According to the Gospel according to John which Edgar I think correctly credits after all the noise about some fink in their operation had died down there had been a troupe of dancing girls, “seven veil” dancing girls if you know what I mean brought in for “entertainment.” Girls brought in to serve the wine and cut the bread if you know what I mean by that as well.        

So I will stick with my Jesus-Mary Mags sweetie story for another day. Intriguing, very intriguing is the work still to be done on that Mary Mags manuscript find in Galilee. Imagine the Son of Man begetting a son of man. All the theologians will go crazy. Me, I will just amp up my respect for Jesus’ taste in women.      

From The Partisan Defense Committee- Honoring a Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning 1946–2019-All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman He Must Not Die In Jail ! The Last Of The Ohio Seven

From The Partisan Defense Committee- Honoring a Class-War Prisoner  Tom Manning  1946–2019-All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman- He Must Not Die In Jail ! The Last Of The Ohio Seven -Give To The Class-War Political Prisioners' Holiday Appeal


 

Workers Vanguard No. 1159 23 August 2019 Honoring a Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning 1946–2019 After more than three decades of torment in America’s dungeons, class-war prisoner Tom Manning died on July 30 at the federal penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but it was the sadistic prison authorities who were responsible for the death of Manning, one of the last two incarcerated Ohio 7 leftists. In retaliation for his unwavering opposition to racial oppression and U.S. imperialism and his continued political activism, the jailers treated his medical needs with deliberate indifference and delayed necessary medication. His comrade and former prisoner Ray Luc Levasseur bitterly remarked, “Supporters scrambled to get a lawyer in to see him, but death arrived first.” Although we Marxists do not share the political strategy of the Ohio 7, we have always forthrightly defended them against capitalist state repression. Born in Boston to a large Irish family, Manning knew firsthand the life of working-class misery. In a short autobiographical sketch appearing in For Love and Liberty (2014), a collection of his artwork, he described how his father, a longshoreman and a postal clerk, worked himself to death “trying to get one end to meet the other...he always got the worst end.” A young Tom shined shoes and sold newspapers, while roaming the docks and freight yards looking for anything that could be converted into cash or bartered. Later, he worked as a stock boy and then as a construction laborer. After joining the military in 1963, he was stationed in Guantánamo Bay and then Vietnam. After returning to the U.S., Manning ended up in state prison for five years. “Given the area where I grew up, and being a ’Nam vet,” he wrote, “prison was par for the course.” There he became politicized, engaging in food and work strikes and reading Che Guevara. As Levasseur observed in 2014, “When Tom Manning and I first met 40 years ago, we were 27 years old and veterans of mule jobs, the Viet Nam war, and fighting our way through American prisons. We also harbored an intense hatred of oppression and a burning desire to organize resistance.” Moved by these experiences, Manning joined with a group of young leftist radicals in the 1970s and ’80s. Early on, they participated in neighborhood defense efforts in Boston against rampaging anti-busing racists and helped run a community bail fund and prison visitation program in Portland, Maine. They also ran a radical bookstore, which the cops targeted for surveillance, harassment, raids and assault. The activists, associated with the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit in the 1970s and the United Freedom Front in the ’80s, took responsibility for a series of bombings that targeted symbols of South African apartheid and U.S. imperialism, which they described as “armed propaganda.” Some of these actions were directed against Mobil Oil and U.S. military installations in solidarity with the struggle for Puerto Rican independence by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation). For these deeds, the Feds branded them “terrorists” and “extremely dangerous”—that is, issuing a license to kill. As targets of a massive manhunt, the young anti-imperialist fighters went underground for nearly ten years and were placed on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Manning was captured in 1985 and sentenced to 58 years in federal prison. He was also sentenced to 80 years in New Jersey for the self-defense killing of a state trooper in 1981. The Ohio 7 became the poster children for the Reagan administration’s campaign to criminalize leftist political activity, declaring it domestic terrorism. In 1989, three of them—Ray and Patricia Levasseur and Richard Williams—were tried on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government under the RICO “anti-racketeering” law and a 1948 sedition act. With Ray Levasseur and Williams (who died in prison in 2005) already sentenced to enough years to be locked up for the rest of their lives, the prosecution served no purpose other than to revive moribund sedition laws, which have been used historically to imprison and deport reds and anarchists. Despite the fact that the government spent nearly $10 million on the trial, the jury refused to convict. Manning spent half a lifetime in prison hell, marked by his torturers as a cop killer and brutalized for his left-wing political views. Stun-gunned, tear-gassed and dragged around by leg irons, he was kept in solitary for extended periods. Shortly after his arrest, he was body-slammed onto a concrete floor while cuffed to a waist chain and in leg irons, resulting in a hip fracture that was not repaired until years later. On a separate occasion, his right knee was permanently injured when five guards stomped on it. Yet another beating with his hands behind his back severely injured his shoulders. All in all, he had a total of 66 inches of scar tissue. But Manning remained unbroken. Among other things, he spoke out on behalf of other class-war prisoners, and he was also an accomplished artist behind bars. The actions of the Ohio 7 were not crimes from the standpoint of the working class. However, their New Left strategy of “clandestine armed resistance” by a handful of courageous leftists despaired of organizing the proletariat in mass struggle against the bourgeoisie. The multiracial working class, under the leadership of a revolutionary party fighting for a socialist future, is the central force capable of sweeping away the capitalist system and its repressive state machinery, not least the barbaric prisons. The Ohio 7 differed from the bulk of 1960s New Left radicals by their working-class origins and dedication to their principles; they never made peace with the capitalist order. Unlike most of the left, which refused to defend the Ohio 7 against government persecution, the SL and the Partisan Defense Committee have always stood by them, including through the PDC’s class-war prisoner stipend program. In an August 2 letter to the PDC, Manning’s lifelong comrade-in-arms Jaan Laaman (the last remaining Ohio 7 prisoner) eulogized: “Now Tom is gone. Our comrade, my comrade, who suffered years of medical neglect and medical abuse in the federal prison system, your struggle and suffering is now over brother. But your example, your words, deeds, even your art, lives on. You truly were a ‘Boston Irish Rebel,’ a life long Man of and for the People, a warrior, a person of compassion motivated by hope for the future and love for the common people, A Revolutionary Freedom Fighter.” All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman!

Self-Determination for Kashmir! Indian Troops Out of Kashmir Valley!

Workers Vanguard No. 1159	23 August 2019

Self-Determination for Kashmir!

Indian Troops Out of Kashmir Valley!

The following statement was issued on August 14 by the International Secretariat of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

In a calculated escalation of a decades-long war on Kashmir, on August 5, the Hindu-chauvinist government of Narendra Modi, suddenly and without so much as a word to the Kashmiris, dissolved the local assembly and stripped the state of the limited autonomy it has exercised since 1948. In the weeks prior, the Indian government had dispatched upwards of 40,000 troops to the Kashmir Valley to beef up the 500,000 already there, including the Central Reserve Police Force. The oppressed Kashmiri Muslims, who are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Valley, live under relentless subjugation by this massive occupying army in one of the world’s most militarized zones.

For over a week, the Kashmir Valley and its main city, Srinagar, have been under complete lockdown and isolation, with cell phone and internet communications cut off. Despite a virtual news blackout, reports have emerged of troops blasting people with shotgun pellets and using tear gas against protesters who courageously defied the curfew. Untold numbers of Kashmiri Muslims have been arrested and detained, including prominent politicians. Free all victims of Indian repression in Kashmir!

As Leninists, the International Communist League stands for the right of self-determination for Kashmir, and that includes independence. Since 1989, the Indian military has slaughtered well over 80,000 Kashmiris and subjected the population to unending terror. This includes some 8,000 “enforced disappearances,” as Kashmiris call them, in which the state denies all knowledge of the victims’ whereabouts. The army has a track record of heinous atrocities, including mass rapes. We unequivocally demand: All Indian troops out of the Kashmir Valley!

We also oppose the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35a, which codified the limited autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. These articles included a provision preventing the sale of land to non-Kashmiri residents and one determining who is a permanent resident. Those articles enabled the state to control its borders and prevent the forcible displacement of Muslims. Scrapping the measures, which Modi had long promised to do, is intended to open the floodgates for Israeli-style settlement of the Valley by Hindu-Brahmin Pandits, undoubtedly to be accompanied by stepped-up murderous communal violence against Muslims.

The Modi government’s latest assault on Kashmir has fueled tensions with Pakistan, against which India has already fought three wars for control of the territory. Fanning the flames of Hindu-Muslim communalism, the hostility between the two countries is the poisonous legacy of British colonial divide-and-rule, which culminated in the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent and its mass-scale communal slaughter. In the aftermath of Partition, one-third of Kashmir went to Pakistan. Almost all of the remainder, including the Kashmir Valley, the heavily Hindu Jammu district and the Buddhist Ladakh area, went to India, which offered the carrot of autonomy along with its military boot.

Capitalist rule in India, under both Congress-led governments and Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, has been based on Hindu-chauvinist, upper-caste supremacy, including violent repression of Kashmir, its only Muslim-majority state. Like India, Pakistan is a “prison house of peoples,” with Punjabis dominating oppressed nationalities such as the Baloch. Women are brutally oppressed throughout the region. Both India and Pakistan are dependent on imperialist powers, with the U.S., Britain and other advanced capitalist countries reaping vast profits from exploiting the working masses in South Asia and elsewhere around the world.

The way out of the enormous injustices heaped upon Kashmir lies in forging a proletarian vanguard party in India that links struggles for national liberation with the revolutionary fight of the working class against capitalist exploitation. Heavily composed of and led by Dalits, women, national and ethnic minorities and others from specially oppressed layers, such a party would imbue the proletariat with the understanding that the struggle against all forms of oppression, not least caste oppression, is in the interest of the entire working class. The ICL seeks to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties, as sections of a reforged Fourth International, that are dedicated to proletarian revolution from India and Pakistan to the imperialist centers.

Happy, Happy 100th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

Happy, Happy 100^th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

By Liam Leahy

When the deal went down the hell with street ruffian and gangster of words and thefts Gregory Corso, the hell with Zen Buddha lotus flowers sulks Gary Snyder, the hell with bright lights in the headlights like some virgin Bambi Mike McClure, double the hell with clear the coffeehouses and jazz bars out with his primal wailing to Keil, devil servant, Phil Larkin, ditto double the hell with trying to hit that high white note that only jazz boys and girls can aspire to MaJohn Dupree, back to single hells for Dante boys all choir practice glow bum-tucked like Kenneth Rexforth (and don’t forget Rexforth’s daughter who everybody took a run at and why not even gay boys like Ginsberg), to hell as well the drag queen artless Tim Riley before he fanned the flames of Miss Judy Garland’s hem and made bluegrass green in ocean spray to the China seas bays filled with oil tankers and sodomites sing his naughty boy praises. And in the end, the bookend three hot dog fucks like Miss Julie Johnson in some Joe and Nemo alley.

More retrospective, more circumspect rumbling fullback out of some Merrimack estuary looking hot dog hungry, looking like some holy goof displaced out of European DP camps and he only Icelandic run bound dropping to the titanic seas.  So Jack, Jack, Kerouac, the fuck with that Jack stuff Ti Jean of ten million Allan Ginsberg dreams and Neal Cassidy lost father’s gets some play, okay  Very much more circumspect and there is no way around it this time Moloch of modern times stripping poor Tom Eliot of everything but his shoddy bedding and his lost in the hills and trenches of Eastern France cursive language as wave after wave fell to complete one square yard Carl Solomon’s dear friend and his mother howler in the dust for all the good it did him, or her, Allan Ginsberg. Yeah, the beat down, beat around, beat sound, beatitude beat to hear holy goof Jack tell it in his Tanqueray funks, crowd that took up plenty of air come 1950s in the states come desolation row time.

Then there was the glue, the guy who kept the torch bright, the guy who had enough knowledge of business which almost to a man (or woman of that matter), beats heating squares up like toast, scorned except come poetry reading time some foggy and rainy nights, book signing when Random House said piss off, putting money in the bucket for the Thunderbird struck nights, back room shacking up to keep from the coldest days in August world. Yeah, Happy Birthday Baby, Buddha in cowboy boots and tepid wrangler jeans Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the magic 100 years. Connection,  brother, connection.

*Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"-How Beat Generation Survived Economically

Markin comment:

This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.



How Beat Generation Survived Economically
Current mood: busy
Category: Writing and Poetry

In his 2005 book, "Charles Bukowski," Barry Miles indicated how some members of The Beat Generation apparently managed to survive economically within a culturally straight, classist, Corporate-oriented economic system:

"...Until the late 60s, [Allen] Ginsberg refused on principle to accept money for a reading in case it commercialized his work. He relented only late in the decade in order to get income for his poetry foundation, which basically kept a set of junkies and junkie-poets alive...

"...By 1963 [William] Burroughs was earning enough to live on and had stopped his $200-a-month family allowance; Ginsberg had been able to scrape by on his poetry since 1958; [Gregory] Corso had never worked, preferring to demand money from admiers--usually female--or from Ginsberg; [Jack] Kerouac had been self-sufficient since the publication of "On The Road" in 1957 and, as he lived with his mother, he had low overheads; Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, Bob Kaufman and the other hard-core Beats all scraped by without jobs; others like John Clellon Holmes, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Jack Hirshman survived on a combination of teaching, translation work, readings and reviewing..."


Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=7#ixzz0zMMwzuvq

***Daydream Visions Of Adamsville Beach, Circa 1964-In Honor Of Elsa Alva (nee Daley), Class Of 1964

***Daydream Visions Of Adamsville Beach, Circa 1964-In Honor Of  Elsa Alva (nee Daley), Class Of 1964

Alex James , North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:


I have been dedicating some of my sketches to various people. When I first wrote this one in 2008 I had not one in particular in mind but when I recently rewrote it I did have Elsa in mind. I did not know her well at North Adamsville, and do not know her now much better now, but I felt her presence very strongly when I was rewriting this thing. So here it is.>
********
Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, and the Adamsville Old Sailor’s Home (and cemetery about a quarter of a mile away, closed now but the final resting place for many a sea-faring man, known and unknown). Yes, those names and places from the old housing project down in South Adamsville where I came of age surely evoke imagines of the sea, of long ago sailing ships, and of desperate, high stakes battles fought off shrouded, mist-covered coasts by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And agile enough to keep it. Almost from my first wobbly, halting first baby steps down at “the projects” I have been physically drawn to the sea, a seductive, foam-flecked siren call that has never left me. Moreover, ever since this writer was a toddler his imagination has been driven by the sea as well. Not so much of pirates and prizes but of the power of nature, for good or evil.

Of course, anyone with even a passing attachment to Adamsville has to have an almost instinctual love of the sea; and a fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But enough of those imaginings. If being determines consciousness, and if you love the ocean, then it does not hurt to have been brought up in Adamsville with its ready access to the bay and water on three sides. That said, the focal point for any experience with the ocean in Adamsville centers, naturally, around its longest stretch of beach, aptly, if not ingeniously, named Adamsville Beach.

For those of us of a certain age, including this writer, one cannot discuss Adamsville Beach properly without reference to such spots such as Howard Johnson's famous landmark ice cream stand (now a woe-begotten clam shack of no repute). For those who are clueless as to what I speak of, or have only heard about it in mythological terms from older relatives, or worst, have written it off as just another ice cream joint I have provided a link to a Wikipedia entry for the establishment. That should impress you of the younger set, I am sure. Know this: many a hot, muggy, sultry, sweaty summer evening was spent in line impatiently, and perhaps, on occasion, beyond impatience, waiting for one of those 27 (or was it 28?) flavors to cool off with. In those days the prize went to cherry vanilla in a sugar cone (backup: frozen pudding). I will not bore the reader with superlative terms and the “they don’t make them like they use to” riff, especially for those who only know “HoJo’s” from the later, pale imitation franchise days out on some forsaken great American West-searching highway, but at that moment I was in very heaven.

Nor can one forget those stumbling, fumbling, fierce childish efforts, bare-footed against all motherly caution about the dreaded jellyfish, pail and shovel in hand, to dig for seemingly non-existent clams down toward the Merrymount end of the beach at the, in those days, just slightly oil-slicked, sulfuric low tide. Or the smell of charcoal-flavored hot dogs on those occasional family barbecues (when one in a series of old jalopies that my father drove worked well enough to get us there) at the then just recently constructed old barren old Treasure Island (now named after some fallen Marine, and fully-forested, such is time) that were some of the too few times when my family acted as a family. Or the memory of roasted, really burnt, sticky marshmallows sticking to the roof of my mouth. Ouch!

But those thoughts and smells are not the only ones that interest me today. No trip down memory lane would be complete without at least a passing reference to high school Adamsville Beach. The sea brings out many emotions: humankind's struggle against nature, some Zen notions of oneness with the universe, the calming effect of the thundering waves, thoughts of immortality, and so on. But it also brings out the primordial longings for companionship. And no one longs for companionship more than teenagers. So the draw of the ocean is not just in its cosmic appeal but hormonal, as well. Mind you, however, we are not discussing here the nighttime Adamsville Beach, the time of "parking" and the "submarine races." [For the heathens, or those from Kansas or some such place, going to watch the submarine races was a localism meaning going, via car, down to the beach at night, hopefully on a very dark night, with a, for a guy, girl and, well, start groping each other, and usually more, a lot more, if you were lucky and the girl was hot, while occasionally coming up for air and looking for that mythical submarine race. Many guys (and gals) had there first encounter with oral sex that way, if the Monday morning before school boys’ lav talk, and maybe girls’ lav talk too, was anything but hot air.] Our thoughts are now pure as the driven snow. We will save that discussion for another time when kids and grand-kids are not around. Here we will confine ourselves to the day-time beach.

Virtually from the day school we got out of school for summer vacation I headed for the beach. And not just any section of that beach but the section directly between the Squaw Rock and Adamsville Heights Yacht Clubs. Now was situating myself in that spot done so that I could watch all the fine boats at anchor? Or was this the best swimming location on the beach? Hell no, this is where we heard (and here I include my old running pal and classmate, Bill Bailey) all the "babes" were. We were, apparently, under the influence of Beach Blanket Bingo or some such early 1960s Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicillo (sic) teenage beach film. (For those who are again clueless this was a “boy meets girl” saga like Avatar, except on the beach...and on Earth.)

Well, for those who expected a movie-like happy ending to this piece, you know, where I meet a youthful "Ms. Right" to the strains of Sea of Love, forget it. (That is the original Sea of Love, by the way, not the one used in the movie of the same name sung by Tom Waits at the end, and an incredible cover that you should listen to on YouTube.) I will keep the gory details short, though. As fate would have it there may have been "babes" aplenty down there but not for this lad. I don't know about you but I was just too socially awkward (read: tongue-tied) to get up the nerve to talk to girls (female readers substitute boys here). And on reflection, if the truth were to be known, I would not have known what to do about it in any case. No job, no money and, most importantly, no car for a date to watch one of those legendary "submarine races" that we have all agreed that we will not discuss here. But we can hardly fault the sea for that, right?
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The above piece came about as a result of a response to some correspondence, via, a manically hard-working and determined North Adamsville High School class reunion committee member who shall remain nameless (except for gender, she) concerning old-time memories of Adamsville Beach which formed one of the backdrops to our high school experiences. In the wake of my commentary everybody and their brother (or sister) who ever came within fifty miles of smelling the sulfuric-flecked sea air at that beach has felt some kind of ‘civic duty’ to bring out his or her own salt-encrusted memories of the place. Below, mainly unedited (who could edit someone’s civic duty), is the traffic in response to the above piece. No one is required to wade through all the blather but to make a New York Times-like offical record seems appropriate under the circumstances.
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Betty Gilroy 1985 (view profile)
Posted: Jul 22 2008 11:00pm PST
In reply to Peter Paul Markin 1964

I grew up close to Adamsville Beach...I used to ride my bike there, runaway there... was a great bike path, I loved it as a kid. I used to hang out with friends from school, had some great jelly fish fights there. Ahhh, my friend and her boy fell asleep on the beach divider {Markin: sea-wall]with his hand on her stomach. How was she going to explain that one to mom and dad? (And, no, you dirty old man, they were not having oral sex or anything like that, although I learned later from my own experience that this was a “hot” spot for such things being so secluded and all. She, maybe they, didn’t know anything about sex then according to her, although later she told me about a couple of things, nasty-sounding things then but nice now, to do with guys. I am blushing now, and getting a little funny-feeling too, when I think about it now but the sound of the ocean in the background was a great place to do those things, those so-called nasty things. I know it got me going.)

I lived in Adamsville Central in the ‘70s to the early 80s and then moved to North Adamsville. I love the views, and the clam shack, the ice cream, all the clam diggers... the pond on the way from Marlboro Street, jumping the fence trying to catch the bull frogs going to the swamp cemetery swinging from the willow tree I think... I live in California and have a son that’s 7 (I hope he doesn't read what I wrote above, about that sex stuff I mean, but the ocean did turn me on, a lot) around the age that I would ride my bike the freedom, the safeness I had skate boarding around losing track of time, I haven't been back since my 10 year reunion I miss it, my friends, but then again I'm older with responsibilities maybe some day again I will take my son and show him Adamsville Beach and throw a few jelly fish his way??

Betty
North Adamsville High 85
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Memories Of Adamsville Beach

Peter Paul Markin, 1964
Posted: Jul 26 2008 05:31am PST
In reply to Betty Gilroy, 1985

Betty- Thanks for the reply. The glint of silver off the Treasure Island Bridge when the sun hit it at a certain time. The early morning winter sun coming up over the horizon on the bay. The Boston skyline at dusk (pre-Marina Bay times when there was an unimpeded view). Well, we could go on and on with our memories but the one thing that caught my eye in your reply was the word “escape.” In one sense I was using Adamsville Beach as a metaphor for that idea in my story. I do not know about you and your family but, to be kind, I had a very rocky time growing up and certainly by the time I got to high school I was in desperate need of a sanctuary. It is no accident that I (and my old running mate, Bill Bailey) spent a fair amount of time there.

I went back to Adamsville last year (2007) while they were doing some reconstruction and cleaning the place up. I wrote about that in a sketch entitled Do You Know Adamsville Beach? that I posted here but then deleted. My original idea was to draw a comparison between the old hazy, happy memories of Adamsville in our youth and looking at it with today's older eyes. Somehow it just didn't fit right as a discussion item with the things I was trying to write then. If you would kindly reply to this message I will place it as a reply to some of what you have mentioned in your message about 'coming home.' By the way the jellyfish are still there in all their glory and please, take mother's advice, do not step on them, they might be poisonous.

Finally, I will not let you off the hook. I won’t comment on the "dirty old man" remark as I will take it as just a cute “fresh,” maybe flirty remark on your part. Yes, and I know as well as you that this is a family-friendly site but how did your friend explain away her 'sleeping' on the old wall to mom and dad? That bit about how she (they) didn’t know anything about sex, oral or otherwise, just doesn’t wash. Everybody “knew,” including parents who probably invented the spot, you only went to that particular spot with one thing in mind. You can send me a private e-mail with the real details if you like and then you can see if I am really a dirty old man or not. Regards, Peter Paul Markin

[Markin: Betty, by the way did send me an e-mail, several in fact, and I am still blushing, blushing profusely over some of her information old and ‘mature’ as I am. Let's put it this way my temperature was rising not a little. Frankly, some of the stuff (various sexual positions) she spoke of have to defy the laws of nature, but so be it. We were young and flexible (in more that one way) then. Forward.]
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Craig Wallace, North Adamsville High,1957 (view profile)
Posted: Jul 23 2008 10:34am PST
In reply to Peter Paul Markin,1964

Peter Paul: I heard from a younger friend, a woman friend (of my ex-wife’s actually) who knew you back in the day Professor Joan Murphy from over at MIT, who used to call you P.P., and that you liked it. [Markin: Tolerated it from her only because she was Frankie Riley’s ever-loving girlfriend. You remember the Riley family, the one with all the great North Adamsville raider red football players, Frankie was my corner boy chieftain up in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. And she was, well, let's leave it as Frankie's ever-loving girlfriend.]

I don't have an awful lot to say about the beach, since I lived in a few other places while growing up. I do remember walking along the old sea wall and jumping across the openings trying to grab the rail to avoid falling. I once caught the rail, but hit the edge of the concrete wall with my shin. It hurt, but I didn't think it was broken.

Once a friend ran into a guy at the beach, and for some reason began to "exchange words." They were about to go at each other, but the lifeguard told them to take their dispute elsewhere. They went across the street to the grass in front of a stand where clams and other goodies were sold. The friend proceeded to tear the other guy apart. It didn't last that long. The friend was 5'-7" tall and the other guy 6'-3". I heard that some years later they ran into each other again and had a big laugh about the whole thing. Kids do grow up.

When I visited Massachusetts with my wife and two kids in 1983, my brother took us through some of the "old haunts," and we roamed the beach a bit. They got a kick out of a pair of horseshoe crabs skittering along the edge of the low tide line. I also went back there in 2007 and took a few walks along the beach. I did miss the old candle pin bowling alley, which appears to have been replaced by condos as was the old Adamsville Grammar School where I went through 1st grade (Miss Gray) and most of 2nd grade (Miss Lindberg).

Oh, yeah. I believe the Adamsville East Elementary School on Huckins Avenue is still in operation. I read that there's a boundary somewhere in North Adamsville and that kids who live east of the line go to Adamsville East School and those west of that line go to Parker Elementary on Billings Road. What is now North Adamsville High School included grades 7 through 12 till 1958 or 1959. So, even though I lived in 3 or 4 places, I was able to attend all 6 years at the same school.

Overall, most memories of Adamsville Beach are pretty good.

Craig S. Warren, 1957
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Peter Paul Markin reply:

Craig

Nobody has to stay on the subject at hand, all information about the old times in North Adamsville is welcome, but did you ever go to the beach? From the way you described it I thought maybe you knew about it from some picture postcard, of any beach, anywhere. Were you one of those, and there were not a few if I recall, who "rode," hot-rod rode the Adamsville Shore Boulevard and never touched down on the sand, or caught a fresh sea breeze on a hot summer day. Just kept cruising, eyes forward or left honed in on the ice cream, bowling alley, clam shack side, looking for the be-bop night, girls, or something. Like old Adamsville was Kansas or some sod town.

Peter Paul Markin,1964
Posted: Jul 23 2008 12:51pm PST
In reply to Craig Wallace, 1957

This entry started as a short sketch in this space but I deleted it because it did not fit in with what I was trying to evoke in these pages then. Now the sketch does serve as a decent reply though for Betty Gilroy's,(1985) and Craig Wallace's (1957) comments above. I, moreover, actually am writing about the old-time beach here and not everything else under the sun like hot sex spots and Adamsville school locations. Christ. Peter Paul Markin

*****
Okay, in the sketch above(Daydream Visions Of Adamsville Beach, Circa 1964) this writer got all misty-eyed about the old days at Adamsville Beach. I went on and on about things like the various flavors of ice cream at HoJo's, the local king-of-the-hill ice cream stand, the vagaries of clam-digging in the oil-soaked flats and about the smell of charcoal- broiled hot dogs at Treasure Island. And I did not fail to mention the obligatory teenage longings for companionship and romantic adventure associated with the sea. But enough of magical realism. Today, as we are older and wiser, we will junk that memory lane business and take a look at old Adamsville in the clear bright light of day.

Last year, as part of the trip down the memory lane that I have been endlessly writing about in this space, I walked the length of Adamsville Beach from the Squaw Rock Causeway to the bridge at Adamsville Shore. At that time the beach area was in the last stages of some reconstruction work. You know, repave the road, redo the sidewalks, and put in some new streetlights. Fair enough-even the edges of Mother Nature can use a make-over once in a while. The long and short of this little trip though was to make me wonder why I was so enthralled by the lure of Adamsville Beach in my youth.

Oh sure, most of the natural landmarks are still there, as well as some of the structural ones. Those poor, weather-beaten yacht clubs that I spend many a summer gazing on in my fruitless search for teenage companionship (read: girls). And, of course, the tattered Beachcomber gin mill in much the same condition is still there as are the inevitable clam shacks with their cholesterol-laden goods. That is not what I mean-what I noticed were things like the odd smell of low-tide when the sea is calm, the tepidness of the water as it splashed, barely, to the shore-when a man craved the roar of the ocean-and the annoying gear-grinding noise caused by the constant vehicular traffic on the near-by boulevard. Things that I was, frankly, oblivious to back in the days.

There is thus something of a disconnect between the dreaminess and careless abandon of youthful Adamsville Beach and the Adamsville of purposeful old age-the different between eyes and ears observing when the world was young and there were things to conquer and now. The lesson to be learned- beware the perils of memory lane. But don't blame the sea for that, please.

.....and the tin can bended, and the story ended (title from the late folksinger/folk historian Dave Van Ronk's last album). That seems about right.
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On Our 'Code Of Honor'

Peter Paul Markin, 1964
Posted: Jul 26 2008 05:42am PST
In reply to Craig Wallace, 1957

Craig- I am very interested in having you fill out this story about the fight between your friend and the other guy down at Adamsville Beach that you mentioned before (see above). I do not need to know the gory details nor what happened years later. What I am looking for is your take on what the whole incident meant at the time. This was hardly an unusual event at then(or now for that matter), right?

I am trying to put together an entry based on our working class “code of honor”- male version- at the time before women's liberation and other social phenomena helped us to expand our sense of the world and how we should act in it. Even “loner” types like me would not back down on certain 'turf' issues (girls, giving way while walking on the street, who you "hung" with, where your locker was, which “lav” you used, etc.) and took a beating rather than concede the point. Enough for now but give this some thought.

Regards, Peter Paul
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Fight . . . ?

Craig Wallace,1957 (view profile)
Posted: Jul 28 2008 09:09am PST
In reply to Peter Paul Markin,1964

Peter Paul (I won’t call you P.P., okay). [Markin: Watch it old man. The days of the bogus 'code of honor' may be long gone but every working-class corner boy still has a slight edge on, even fifty years later, okay.]

The scuffle between a friend of mine and a much bigger guy at Adamsville Beach was not really "earth shaking." It started a couple days before when the friend and I were walking along one of the streets leading to the beach, Bayfield Road, perhaps. The "other guy" passed by in a car with some of his friends, including a couple girls. That guy yelled some insult at my friend in reference to his "eye-wear." He probably was trying to impress the girls by showing them he could insult anyone and all could get a good laugh out of it. Of course, my friend yelled something equally offensive at those in the passing car, which kept going. The "incident" appeared to have terminated.

A few days later the friend and I crossed the road to the beach near one of the yacht clubs and there was the guy who had yelled the insulting remarks. Apparently, he thought he could continue the verbal abuse without suffering the consequences, because he yelled something similar again. My friend went after the kid, but was informed by the lifeguard that they better take their "dispute" elsewhere. They went across the road to a grassy area and, encouraged by a small crowd that was gathering around them, proceeded to "get it on." My friend was usually a fairly pacific person, but when "pushed," he was like a cornered wolverine that would take on anybody or anything. The scuffle didn't last long, and the bigger kid got the worst of it. That time was the end of the dispute. Apparently nobody was seriously hurt, but maybe some had a bit more respect for the smaller kids after that. Some years later the two met, and remembering the incident, shared a good laugh over the whole thing.

Then, as now, I saw no esoteric meaning to the "battle." It didn't seem like the medieval days when one would "defend his honor" or that of a "damsel in distress." It was just an exchange of words that developed into a short round of what may be referred to these days as "ultimate fighting" where no rules are observed. I had a couple scuffles in elementary school and my son did in middle school, but we more-or-less outgrew such things. Sadly, nowadays those "scuffles" can become more deadly and end with somebody paying the "ultimate price." Are we reverting to the "Dark Ages." I hope not.

Anyway, enough said of a "juvenile incident."

Craig, 1957
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The "Code of Honor"

Peter Paul Markin, 1964
Posted: Aug 03 2008 11:31am PST
In reply to Craig Wallace, 1957

Craig, thanks for story. It gives me an angle for a story that I will write about on our youthful sense of “honor.” This story that you related, especially the part about impressing the girls, etc. really says something about that code.

Regards, Peter Paul
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Day and Night At Adamsville Beach

Peter Paul Markin, 1964
Posted: Aug 02 2008 06:21am PST
In reply to Betty Gilroy, 1985

I mentioned in my original story that all of us would talk about daytime Adamsville Beach (although once the kids are out of sight-the nighttime is the right time- can come into play). I hope that at some point Betty Gilroy will expand on her comment about her girlfriend down at the day time beach and the incident alluded in her comment about her falling asleep. Ms. Gilroy is more than capable of telling her own version of the story. [Markin: She did via e-mail, private e-mail, and it would take a civil war to get the information out of me, or a few bucks. Let me put it this way. I was blushing for days, maybe now even, as I mentioned above]. The only point I want to make here is that some of these day time remembrances are as funny as what might have happened at night. Funny now, that is.

Regards, Peter Paul
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Anyone Remember Adamsville Beach?

Robina Moore, 1978 (view profile)
Posted: Aug 15 2008 04:35pm PST
In reply to Peter Paul Markin, 1964

Totally agree that growing up on Adamsville Beach was an experience. So natural at the time, but looking back I now see how fortunate I was. I don’t remember the HoJo’s but I do remember the 19 cent hotdogs sold on the beach that was a few blocks from my house. What a treat for the neighborhood kids to get together and go get a dog.

As far the beach was concerned as kids, we followed the tides. Some parent would parade a group us kids and watch over us. Generally for two hours before high tide, and two hours after, and they always had snacks and drinks in tow…just gotta love the moms for that! Swim, dig in the sand, play catch in the water and when finally tired, lay on a towel and listen to WRKO or WMEX on the transistor radio.

Once I hit teenage years, I choose not to venture near the beach. I think my parents knew about the cosmic and hormonal appeal as well as primordial longings going on there. I was taught at a young age, the beach is not a good place at night. I totally thank them for instilling this and letting Adamsville Beach be filled with wonderful childhood memories. With that said, I am thrilled at the revitalization, and hope this generation of children will have a chance to create memories that they can cherished forever.
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Back In The Days

Peter Paul Markin, 1964
Posted: Aug 18 2008 02:49pm PST
In reply to Robina Moore, 1978

Robina-Very nicely told memories. That is the thing that I was trying to evoke in writing this particular commentary. A few points.

*The reason for the boxes in your entry [Markin:since deleted] is that when you transfer from a word processor to the message space here the apostrophes and quotation marks turn into some Serbo-Croatian dialect in the process. It happens to me all the time. You have to change them in this space to avoid that.

* Do you, or anyone else, know when HoJo's left the Adamsville Beach site?

* Did you mean 19 dollars for a hot dog? You put 19 cents but that can't be right. Nothing ever cost 19 cents.

• You realize, of course, that this is a generic North Adamsville site and therefore members of generations X, Y or Z may not be familiar with the term “transistor radio.” For their benefit, that was a little battery-powered gizmo that allowed you to listen to music, the 'devil's music,' rock 'n' roll, without your parents going nuts. And no, sorry, you could not download whatever you wanted. Yes, I know, the Stone Age.

Regards, Peter Paul Markin
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The Nighttime Is The Right Time....

Peter Paul Markin, 1964
Posted: Aug 21 2008 08:08am PST
In reply to Robina Moore, 1978

...to be with the one you love. Yes, that classic Ray Charles tune (covered by many, including a steamy tribute version by The Rolling Stones in their 2005 Fenway Park concert) is a good lead in to what I want to mention here. Most of the comments on this entry have concerned day time Adamsville Beach but I have been thinking that it is time to open up to the night time episodes. Here are my reasons:

• Hey, it is entirely possible that some of our fellow alumni never went to Adamsville Beach during the day. They might have a legitimate grip against us for that. Remember we are using this cyberspace so that everyone has their "15 minutes of fame."

• The heck with protecting the kids and grandkids. They know this stuff already. Let's face it, as well, no self-respecting member of the hip-hop/iPod/Sidekick/texting generations (or younger) would dream of reading this far down into the entry. Ugh!

• Frankly, there is only so far we can go with the day-time Adamsville Beach. While there have been some nice comments there is only so far you can go with jellyfish, 19 cent hot dogs, teenage romantic longings and getting sand kicked in your face. We need to spice this up. In short, sex, or the hint of it, sells.

These are all good and sufficient reasons but, as usual, my real reason for arguing inclusion here is personal curiosity. I have been waiting some forty-four years to ask this simple question. Why, while we were driving down Adamsville Shore Boulevard on those cold October nights, let's say, were most of the cars all fogged up? What, were their defrosters not working? Come on, please, tell me.

Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film “Summer Of 1942” (1971) In Mind

Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film “Summer Of 1942” (1971) In Mind

By Fritz Taylor

Seth Garth, the once well-known free-lance music critic for many of the big music and specialty publications that have come and gone over the years since he first put pen to paper some forty years ago, including the long gone alternative press where he got his start and first breaks (literally put pen to paper, forget beauties of the world processors then), had been thinking about the old days a lot recently. Had been, having the luxury of semi-retired status, also doing a run through of films via the good graces of Netflix that he had first seen when he was a youngster sitting in the dark every week for the double feature at the old Strand Theater in his hometown of Riverdale, a town a few dozen miles from Boston. Or else films that due to publication commitments that he had not run through when they came out in the 1970s in the days when he was determined to catch the wave of being a music critic and missed many of those films, left them by the wayside.

One night at Jack’s, his watering hole hang-out over in Riverdale that he increasingly frequented on his forays back to his old hometown to see if he could “channel” the past by being physically present on the old sacred soil (although not the Strand long ago turned into a condominium complex), Seth had mentioned to Brad Fox, an old friend from high school days who went through many of the experiences with him, that he had just reviewed a film, Summer of 1942, for Sal Davis the editor of Cinema Now who was looking for copy to fill a space quickly. The film which had been released in 1971 and was about coming of age, coming of sexual age during the early years of World War II. The big point he made to Brad, who had told Seth that he had seen the film when it came out but did not remember the details except that this foxy older woman played by Jennifer O’Neil had “robbed the cradle” and bedded a teenage boy, swore the film could have been about their generation, the generation of 1968 as easily as of 1942.      

Seth had mentioned, before giving Brad the details that he had missed about the film, he had started his review speculating on the fact that each generation goes through its coming of age period somewhat differently. “Coming of age’ in this context meaning after Brad had been unclear about what aspect of the term Seth meant, meaning the beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and commotions once you got to puberty. He said he had taken the one he, and Brad, had known about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old values, to turn the world upside down, from their parents’ generation. He said he tried to contrast that with the one before theirs, the one represented in the film about the coming of age of their parents’ generation. The generation that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging through World War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll.

The funny thing at least on the basis of a viewing of the film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents who, at least in their case and the case of their growing up friends, went through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding. (Of course in talking about parents and their sexual desire both Seth and Brad admitted they would have had a hard time linking up their own respective parents with sexual desire but their own kids if asked would probably say the same thing about them.)                  

Brad mentioned that his memory wasn’t so good of late and that although while they were talking he had been trying to dredge up some more facts about the movie other than the one he had mentioned earlier in the conversation about that sexy older woman cradle robber making Seth laugh that whatever the taboos were about intergenerational sex they both would have given their eye-teeth if some world-wise fox had come across their paths. Seth then went on to give Brad a rough outline of how the film had played out.

He told Brad that his habit of late was after viewing a film, particularly a film that he was being paid good dollars to produce a review on, was to go on-line and look up what somebody had to say about the film on Wikipedia.  Wistfully stated that service was something he wished had been around earlier in his career which would have saved him a lot of time in the library or looking at the archives of various publications of the time and allow him under the constant press of deadlines to be able to write better thought out copy. The story line of the film had been based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, known as “the Three Terrors,” three virginal teenage boys, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island had been Nantucket Island in the book published after the movie but had been filmed off desolate Mendocino in California). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.     

That chase had been on at two levels. The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for “meaningful” love in the person of an older foxy woman, Dorothy, played by Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her husband headed off to war. The “own age” part, funny in parts, driven mostly by pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he finally got his wish with one night at the secluded end of the beach with his most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was. 

The “older woman” (in our circles she would have been a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was spying on her and her husband in their cozy cottage so he was “saving” himself for her. And after a series of innocent (and some goofy) encounters with Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.              

Having given Brad those details Seth mentioned that those were the main lines that got played out but what had made this film more than of ordinary interest to him was the whole lead-up, the whole “foreplay” if you will of the desire of the trio to be doing something about getting out of that dreaded virgin status. Said all the guys were fearful of being tagged with the “homo” tag and didn’t Brad remember how vicious teenage guys could be about the “manhood” question. Before he could go further Brad mentioned how when they were fourteen or fifteen he could not remember when how all the guys from around the corner that they hung on, including Seth used to “fag” bait him because he had refused to kiss Sarah Langley at a “petting” party and had actually run out of the house where the party was being held he had been so embarrassed. At the time he had been sweet on Jenny Price who had been at the party although nobody was aware of that situation. Nothing ever came of that desire and so he had spent some time living down the “fag” tag until he found Sandy Lee in junior year and she took him out of that status since she was something of a fox herself. Although nobody thought anything of calling another guy a “fag” as masculine craziness about sex and sexual identity erupted nobody seriously thought that the guys were gay or anything like that it was just a separation expression. Who knows who at the time really wasn’t interested in girls, wasn’t into “getting in their pants” although Seth speculated that some guys around the block must have since not a few guys lived at home with their mothers and were not seen with women companions.

Nowadays nobody would think twice about it although the usual baiting in school and among the jocks would still go on given the unchanged nature of certain heterosexual young males. Seth mentioned that he could not believe the pressure to “lose your virginity” that all the guys suffered through, although he admitted that it also took him a long time, long after the Christopher Street riots in the Village that began the serious modern gay rights movement to stop his calling gays “fags.” Not until his eyes were opened up when gay musicians and actors whom he interviewed and assumed were straight came out of the “closet.”  

Seth had laughed at the very realistic scenes when Hermie and Oscy picked up a couple of girls at the movie theater (playing Bette Davis and Paul Henried in Dark Voyage, a film that he actually had reviewed when it came out in a film retrospective at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square for the old Avatar alternative newspaper). The scene which showed the guys “feeling up,” or trying to, had been amazing with Oscy grabbing his just met girl almost from minute one and Hermie, missing the mark thinking his girl’s shoulder was her breast. Jesus. Brad laughed but reminded Seth that no way would that kind of thing have happened in their days since everybody, or almost everybody knew the drill at the Strand Theater Saturday matinee double-header or Saturday night date it did not matter. Some ancient tradition, hell, maybe going back to 1942 for all anybody knew about the original of the practice made it clear that those who sat in the orchestra were not going to “make out.” If they were in the balcony then whatever went on, went on from “feeling up” to blow jobs. It was solely a question of asking your date where she wanted to sit. That sealed the deal, and in many cases meant a last date.

Brad’s reminder of the old “policy” reminded Seth of the time that he was cray for Rosalind Green in junior high, they had gotten along well, had been a couple of chatterboxes in English class about books by a bunch of foreign guys to show they were “hip.” One day after a few weeks after all this “foreplay” Seth had finally asked her to a Saturday matinee (the usual strategy for dealing with a girl you were not sure would accept your date by making in the daytime to soften the blow) and she accepted. When after paying for their tickets and hitting the refreshment stand for popcorn and sodas he asked her where she wanted to sit she had answered “silly, of course the balcony why else would I have come with you.” Bingo. Of such events decent youthful memories are made. Brad on the other hand spent many hours in the orchestra section once he latched onto Betsy Binstock (whom he eventually married and was still married to) who was “saving” whatever she was saving for marriage. Okay, too-now if it did have Brad pulling his hair out then.       

Seth quickly mentioned the scene, the awkward scene, where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and he got sexually excited, okay, okay, had an erection, by her off-hand helping hand touch since neither man wanted to talk about those nighttime wandering hands that came down when they got an erection.  Nor did he spent much time on the scene where the three friends “discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of Benji’s mother’s medical books since that scene rang false in their old neighborhood where sexual information was passed from older brother or sister to younger, a lot of it wrong, very wrong when the girl had to go out of town to see “Aunt Emily” (a street expression that she was pregnant and had to leave town during her term usually not coming back) in other works right out on the streets. Nobody back in 1942, or 1962 expected uptight parents who were assumed to probably not have had sex to give any serious information except some twaddle about the birds and the bees.  And of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his first sexual experience with the girl he had picked up at the movies. That scene had little over the top and as reticent about talking about sex as parents were guys and gals might give an inkling about what they were doing behind the bushes but a “free show” was off the charts.

The best scene of all though and it really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Brad automatically remembered that scene once Seth recalled it. Remembered too, as he told a disbelieving Seth that night, his own confusion when he was in junior high and had found some condoms in a bottom bathroom drawer in his family house when he was looking for some band-aids. Had asked a kid at school, actually had shown a kid at school one and the kid had said they were like balloons you fill them with water and throw them at somebody. It was not until high school and he had begun his own sexual explorations (obviously not with his ever-loving Betsy) that he found out their real purpose and blushed silently about his parents’ sexual practices. Hence another example of the very general understanding about the young that their own parents never had sex. Whatever else being a youth today may be about in terms of trauma at least there is a hell of a lot of good information hanging out there on the Internet for the young to inquire into without embarrassment. 

Yeah, Seth gave Brad the word as they finished up that last round of drinks and began to head to their respective homes -watch this film and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling around coming to terms with sex.