This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
When The Con Is On-Enough
Said -A Rebuttal To “When Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines-In
Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have
Wings” (1939) In Mind”
By Will Bradley
Sometimes you have to bust a
balloon. That is the case today after having recently finished reading my
colleague Lance Lawrence’s fairy tale Those Daring Young Men
In Their Flying Machines-In Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have Wings”
(1939) In Mindpublished September
21, 2018. In that piece Lance told a tale as told to him by a rum-dum, a guy
named Billy Bartlett who claimed to have known a guy named Johnny Cielo, the
greatest early aviator who could have been king the hill if he had the smarts
of the Wright Brothers and the overweening desire of Howard Hughes. (A guy who
had many aliases according to Billy although he didn’t remember many and he was
not sure that Johnny Cielo was the guy’s real name which in any case I was not
able to track down as a name having anything to do with aviation, airplanes,
who knows if he every even had been on a plane, had bought an airline ticket.)
When I
confronted Lance at the water cooler and asked him point blank whether he had
checked sources he blanched and said no, he had taken the guy’s word for it.
This lack of investigation strange as it may seem is not all that unusual in
today’s 24/7/365 news craziness, not unusual in the profession at all. When I
told Johnny that at that point I had found no record of this Johnny Cielo doing
anything like what this rum-dum Billy said he challenged me to find out what
was what. I accepted and here is the real story behind whatever this Johnny
Cielo was about.
The reason I was not able to get an
accounting for Johnny Cielo is because this was not his real name either but
tracing back from the Barranca airline episode with Letts Fagan’s grandson who
is still running the family business down there his real name, the name on the
contract which his grandfather kept was John Avian. According to what this
grandson, Avery, said his grandfather had told him when he was a kid about how
tough things were back when he had started out in Barranca and it was like the
American Wild West, crazy with con men, grifters and desperadoes of all types.
At some point Lett’s told Avery about Johnny, about how Johnny had stiffed him
(the old man’s term) on the airline deal, the mail and supplies deal which would
have been very lucrative, would have pull everybody on easy street if Johnny
could have kept his cock in his pants, if he had had an honest bone in his
body.
Avery was kind of sketchy, as his
grandfather had been to him, about how Johnny set down in Barranca except
nobody who could fly and had anything going for them was not hanging around a
then small- time banana republic. Nowhere. Lett’s had mentioned that Johnny had
claimed all sorts of stuff including having a shot at the ground floor of Allegheny
Airlines which would have put him on easy street. On the basis of those
whiskey-sodden conversations they struck up a deal. And Johnny did pretty well
for a while, until his luck changed and he started losing guys going over the
hump, the Condor Pass and he didn’t have the nerve to go up and over himself
(couldn’t check this basic act of cowardice out with Avery further but it has
the ring of truth given later events) The long and short of it was when the
contract looked like a dead duck Johnny blew town without as much as by your
leave. Leaving Letts with no dough and nothing but a bunch of broken-down World
War I-type airplanes.
When I asked him about the Billy-fed
stuff about Johnny bringing down Rita Hayworth Avery laughed. Johnny, he
guessed thought his was, and maybe he was, a lady’s man, claimed all kinds of
bigtime conquests. Letts told him when he was a teenager that Johnny had
brought down a redhead looker when he hit town. Apparently he had tried to
brush her off in America but she was determined for her own reasons to get out
of the States. Name: Rita Hayworth. This around the time the real Rita had gone
underground before hitting the sheets with the Aga Khan so Johnny played
everybody with this Rita Hayworth gag. Avery said his grandfather said she was
a looker, real good-looking but the only Rita, real Rita Johnny had was
probably his old pin-up in his locker at the airbase, or strip of land called
an airbase for lack of a better term, really just a dug-out dirt patch.
As for the “Rita” Johnny brought
down she was some tramp he met in New Orleans and couldn’t shake. When Johnny
went bust on the Barranca contract and split she was left as usual with Johnny when
he went bust high and dry. Letts told Avery when he was an adult he let her use
his backroom for taking care of some customers, gave great blow jobs, which
meant at least that part of the whole Rita story was right before she skipped
town without paying the old man his percentage (and whatever he was taking in
trade).
That leaves only Johnny’s heroic,
heroic in some left-wing circles, exploits serving as supply sergeant to Fidel
and the hombres. And of course his fateful deep blue sea splash. That Colonel
Fiero who supposedly hired Johnny for hard cash was actually a double agent for
the cocaine cartel who wanted to use Cuba as a base of operations for opening
up their drug transits to hit the United States hard from ninety miles away.
All bullshit. The last time anybody saw Johnny was when he was walking out of
Jack’s in Key West with a good-looking redhead named Rita, that same Rita who
stiffed Letts and Johnny had previously left high and dry so that part of the
legend of a subsequent going under the sheets with “Rita Hayworth” was true,
taking her, according to FAA records when they investigated the crash, along
with him on his regular flight between Key West and Naples-Florida providing
air service between those two points. Oh yes, the name they had listed on the
flight plans was John Blade. So maybe the son of a bitch is still holed up
somewhere with that luscious red-head. Lance don’t believe word one from
rum-dums I learned that long ago but learned quickly to duck when they came my
way.
If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren
Okay, Okay It’s The 350th Anniversary of Rembrandt’s (You Know The Dutch Painter With the Funny Last Name That Nobody Remembers Anyway) So Happy, Happy Birthday Brother
By Sam Lowell
By rights fellow writer here and budding amateur art critic (she insists I put that “amateur in) should be all over this short piece since she is much more involved in this aspect of human culture than I am theses days. Except Dutch painters (Flemish too or whatever they call the Netherlands painters at the art museum near you) leave her cold, do nothing for her despite their oversized place in the art world, at least in art books and generic museums.
Frankly I kind of shared her opinion about these dark color aficionados and their proper prosperous bourgeois subjects, their families, their towns and their inclinations toward showing family life from their home furnishings to their larder (those fish and fowl paintings still give me the willies). Two things changed my mind. One was that after some hiatus from museum-going I started up again and after having it up to my neck with every possible painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the death of Christ, the martyrdoms of the apostles and kindred and the whoredom of subjects like Mary Magdalene from the Middle Ages it was like a breath of fresh air to see even some hoary old bastard of bourgeois, his funky wife, and the general mayhem of urban Dutch society.
The other, strangely, was the theft many years ago of a famous Rembrandt self-portrait (among other stolen treasures taken during that heist) at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston which made me wonder why they had taken that painting. An example as shown here -a masterpiece of composition, lighting, and warts and all approach. So Happy Birthday Rembrandt and I hope they get that painting back to fill up that wall at the Gardner again.
On Becoming Jane- With “The Jane Austen Book Club” (2007)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon
The Jane Austen Book Club, starring Kathy Baker , Maria Bello, based on tehe novel of the same name which in turn is loosley based on the characters in Austen's six major novels, 2007
Recently in reviewing a couple of song and dance films in two separate reviews which I titled “Gene Kelly And Free Astaire Go Mano a Mano” I led off with a tale of woe story about the strange ways that film critics, hell any critics, any writers if it came to that get their assignments. In that particular case my general editor, the usually genial Pete Markin, had after grabbing Kelly’s An American In Paris and Astaire’s Shall We Dance for the sole purpose of seeing which man was the max daddy male popular music dancer in all recorded history he had waylaid me at the Monday morning water cooler with an explosive confession that he no longer thought durable Fred Astaire deserved the title. My response in short, after all this review is about venerable sweet pea Jane Austen she of the million word romance novels which have gotten umpteen numbers of female generation through the blahs of young maidenhood, was that he perhaps, just perhaps had spent too much time on the hash pipe of late. In any case as those who have read the pieces know that he has paid dearly in taunting words from me for his treason-and error.
As this duel within a duel unfolded (the duel between Markin and me inside the Kelly-Astaire tiff for the clueless) at least one reader was looking for other examples of the way that poor film critics are abused and forced to write, well, write stuff that assures that they will have a one way ticket to the gates of hell when they leave this mortal coil. I gave her this Markin gem. A few months ago, through a friend, he got all wound up in the celebration of the Summer of Love, 1967 and having himself participated in that wild and wooly drug, sex and rock and roll time ordered me and my esteemed associate film editor Alden Riley to write a stuff about the music (“acid: rock), films and documentaries of the times. After reviewing the famous D.A Pennebaker documentary about the first Monterey International Pops Festival in 1967 also out in California where Janis Joplin among others made their first big splashes I asked the much younger Alden what he thought of Janis Joplin. He responded that he had never heard of her. Somehow the ear to the ground Markin heard about this egregious travesty and ordered Alden, over my serious objections, to review a Joplin documentary Little Girl Blues.So that is another way.
But not everything is odd-ball editorial or putative marching orders on the question of how we reviewers come up with ideas for subjects for review. And that brings us back to Jane Austen world, to the film under review, The Jane Austen Book Club, and how I have started a “run” on reviewing the film adaptations of a number of her novels and other literary pieces. Let me get this clear when I was a kid, when I was young, 1960s young, say in high school back in down in the poor River Bottom section of Riverdale in New Jersey where I grew up I would not have voluntarily touched a Jane Austen book for love nor money. (Well maybe for love as I do now remember that I let one foxy young thing I was pining over talk to me endlessly one afternoon over sodas at Doc’s Drugstore while I was trying to listen to the jukebox as she prattled on about Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.) You see in those days in our neighborhood among the street wise guys those were strictly “girl’s books” and not anything called great literature or anything for rough-hewn larcenous guys to look at. So time passed without having dipped into the Austen well until recently I happened to see this DVD in the local library and thought that it was maybe directly about dear Jane and I could learn something about her on the cheap without having to read all that great literature. Well, as I will discuss below, this film is using Miss Austen as a “cover” to explore and exploit the plots of her novels for today’s still romantically ambiguous world although I am sure she would not mind. What is important is that I have now started that “run” through the film adaptations of her major works (the six major novels which pace the action in this film). That would not have happened I am sure if I had gone to the fiction section of that same library looking for something to read.
As old friend Sam Lowell liked to change-up say when he tired of saying “here’s the play” in a review here is the “skinny” of this film adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 book of the same name which has added itself to the Jane Austen explosion of the past decade or so when she has become the epitome of the wise woman on all things romantic (and of duplicity, greed, squalor and self-serving place-holding). One of the characters decided she wanted to start a book club based on a reading per month of Jane Austen’s six major novels. She corrals one way or another five others, four women and a man, in various condition or romance or romance-lite (or un-romance in one case) for a monthly take turns swirl through the Austen playlist. As the film unfolds we find that the collective of captive readers in the club have problems or circumstances which parallel the various themes in Austen’s books-infidelity, boredom, ennui, marital neglect, lust, disinterest in sex, philandering and other gems from the pantheon. A nice literary device on author Fowler’s part as the various character try to navigate around their desires and their fates.
In the end Austen medicine (not applicable to herself I hear since she was unmarried although once briefly engaged) is the balm for all wounds, or most wounds as a neglected housewife school teacher attracted to a young student in her class reconciles with her formerly boorish sports-addicted husband. The leader-founder of the pack trots off to her seventh marriage (wouldn’t just living together be better at least a bevy of lawyers would not get rich off the proceedings). A strictly single gal and a pining for her guy get together after a film-long series of ups and downs, mostly downs. A middle-aged wife with a philandering husband get back together after a cold civil war in the household. The only one not requited, as least not that I could see, was the kind of madcap lesbian daughter of that middle-aged women with the philandering husband problem. Maybe if you follow the staid, proper if comic Austen you could not deal with the “sin that dare not speak its name” in a positive manner in early 19th century England at least in polite society and so that lesbian daughter, madcap or not, could find no trace in an Austen plot.
Although I did not going kicking and screaming about having to do a review on this film unlike with a documentary about Janis Joplin when I erroneously confessed to Sandy that I did not know who she was since I knew who both of the actors here were I still felt that a 1950s film when I had not even been born was a stretch. A stretch because after watching the thing under today’s social and moral standards I do not understand the indiscreet part-the supposed illicit love affair between two consenting adults. What was the big deal these type of affairs are like rainwater today. Sandy assured me that such affairs had to be discreet back then especially in high society since divorce (and accompanying alimony) was a hard nut to crack.
But style is what really drives this romantic comedy from the first minute Phillip, Cary’s role, steps into Anna’s, Ingrid part, apartment to change clothes before a speech he is to give. Anna, unlucky in love of late, was easy pickings for the jut-jagged suave Phillip. And so after very few preliminaries they become lovers. There is one little problem though which twists around the plot a bit. Phillip is married, very married, meaning he cannot get a divorce from that scorned wife. Can’t even when Anna puts a full-court press on to get him to the altar. Except that little problem is not really a problem since in a reverse of what usually happens which is the man says he is single when he is really married just to get at the unsuspecting woman Phillip is not married, very not married meaning he can get married. When Anna finds out all bets are off as she plots her revenge. Almost off that is. Yeah, a boy meets girl vehicle but it’s all how you pull it off.
Once Again Out In The Summer Of Love, 1967- “Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”
By Jeffrey Thorne
Beat down (not to be mistaken for abuse, child abuse or anything like that against up against it mothers and distant fathers but just poor, bedraggled poor, “wanting habit” as the Scribe would have coming jointly out of their respective Acres). Beat around (check beat down except just hanging around luckless, shoeless, waiting for somebody else’s shoe to drop). Beat sound (hell easier to figure, listen to the swish of the sticks battling the pots and pans, some out of Africa our mother riff culled into cool be-bop be-bop and all that jazz away from big swing and into the big blast air). Beat to the ground (luckless fellahins stashed away in back room closets, gambling, washing endless dishes, what did some wit call it-diving for pearls, losing always losing, losing worst when blood-lust bullies take the law into their own hands).
Fuck it, fuck explanation since everybody will get it wrong just like the guys back in the Acre could never figure what was bothering the guy, what made him jump. Fuck it Jack just jumped into it, into its sea, into it misty sea, foghorn blasting some jazz-like moan, from his beautified beatified skull, maybe thinking of youthful skull behind some bushes or out on some back road highway jumping the bones of some friend’s one and only, that is pure speculation though. But really and truly Jack man, Jean-bon in old times jumped from some river of life, mill town life like a million guys before him and now in foreign lands a million guys after him, the river flowing to steam up some engine to grind the fabric that will clothe the world. Ha, like we who come naked into this holy coil can take solace from that low catholic trip it took him, and not just him but lots of others who broke the square habit at least for a time, for the youth duration. Damn beatitude in the end when all the shouting was over and Jack in some drunken grave under a pile of suffering dirt (the Buddha in him cried out as it did for that guy down in Sonora before they found him in some hideous back alley unnamed and unloved, maybe un-nameable if there is such a word) Why couldn’t he have listened to that guy out in Frisco town, the guy, a kid really, maybe sixteen set up in a too big older brother 1940s zoot suit, a wisp of beard which could not be shaven so wisp, eyes glazed on dope , on love on the high, on the low, who all nervous on bennie nevertheless blew that high white note that was in his DNA, provided by grandma, mother left for parts unknown, father shiva blew town with some chick who had a stash and gave her gash, to like everything else out to the fucking China seas. But that was at the end. That was when the music was over, when it no longer made sense. At the beginning hell no said Jack.
The world wasn’t big enough to hold all his desperations, keep them in check, keep those wanting habits every poor boy has inside him talk about DNA. Even rama jamma Buddha didn’t have no cure for that except maybe some jimson and jetsam and mystical balm for a shattered world. Like I say that was at the end though. At the beginning our boy took off as fast as he could from that mill town river and never looked back (except to take the dust off his shoes and bow down before our Lady of the River when luck ran out, the booze ran out, hell, the sweet tea sticks ran out and all of beat solace ran to catholic rivers, yeah I know capital C but those were the breaks, the end knotted up in some rat hole, some mother-forgotten rat hole and no more joy, stick either). Took it on the lam, went west east south north (I think on that last direction maybe back to the homeland, back to the stinking big river up north that some earlier Jack, some Jacques, crossed to get to that fucking mill river, Jesus, looking for the holy grail, looking for about six ways to get out of that beat down, beat around, beat sound, beat to the ground bitch stuff. Took up with some fat fast mad secular monk with crazed mom and sweet word poet father, not father William Blake but worldly father, who spouted stuff about negro streets (and angel-headed hipsters like we didn’t know he hung around Time Square Joe and Nemo’s midnight coffees looking for queers, con artists and hustlers, always hustlers, crazies (in and out of the asylums of the mind) and Moloch devouring the land (make no mistake ancient and evil dressed in grey flannel suits and quoting stock prices into those same China seas as that benny-suckled kid blowing that high white Frisco note), the land of milk and honey, rama rama, went to the mat (secret love in more ways than one with that loose bastard who couldn’t keep his mouth shut or cock in his pants -and that was that-for a time). No, not then that street wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with the language and ladies’ pocketbooks or that highbrow junkie hanging around New Orleans looking for quick fixes although they qualified if it came to that.
For a time no question since the pull of fast fat monks could wear off fast under the sun of boze, booze, bennies and grand simon jimson ladies. Took his hat off and let the world slip in-thought maybe the way was the way. Startled guys like desolation angels and dharma bums into thinking they could do what had never been done like some lead pipe cinch. Ran up the mountain (no Prometheus Adonis more likely who was to know) to place incense in the fatted calf body singing, singing, singing some cross between the stations of the cross and plastic nirvana (just to be cute, cute as a nine thieves). Saw Siva run the river gauntlet and leave satiated beyond compare, saw Rama too walking down Post Street in his nightshirt.
Then fame got in his way, somebody bought into his million word notebook thoughts wanderings this is poor boy long time waiting wanting habits Jack we are talking about remember in case you have lost the drift. Make him surly and brazen wondering why the hell if fame was fame didn’t it jump out at him when he started on his Calvary Road road(and it was such a road breaking from deep incense and Adam and Eve free falls so much for free will, started out in dirty sneakers and crusted blue jeans, and when he jumped out of his skull and fled that mountebank river town. Funny no more Harvard hipsters and Columbia ranters and raspers or Denver Adonis. Now fools and jesters following his every move, hiding in bushes and make that fat monk look like some holy fool, like a goof (again remember please not that street-wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with language and ladies’ pocketbooks). Ah, sullen lost planet life.
How was he to know, how was Jack to blessed know that his illegitimate children, not child, children would abandon their flea-etched sins only a short time later, hang out their own signs, reach for their own suns, reach with thumbs furled, and follow the pied piper. Follow the brethren saint mad man with the wooly beard and the incense announcing his arrival at the table singing, singing, singing and it wasn’t hosannas but some odd unspoken tune which ripped across the land for a while. Defying that man in the grey suit (defying mother and father got to dust and never figured out). Drew magnetic forces around themselves and expected the kingdom to last until end times. Hah, Jack could have given them the word on that little mistake. I am the light Jack thought and then he faded from the scene into utter darkness those unwashed, unloved, unspoken for illegitimate children to lay waste to the desert for forty years. Jesus
Notes From The “Tin Cup” Underground- The Marquee Match-Up-The Battle Of The Titans
By Si Lannon
[I have mentioned on more than one occasion that although sports, sports media, sports mania are a large representation of the American historical experience and therefore worthy of some note that generally we have tried to shy away from that subject on this site. Shied away understanding that there is no dearth of material on the subject elsewhere and certainly in the mass media. Occasionally we have reviewed the work of literary sportswriters, or literary figures who have written about sports like Damon Runyon (horse-racing) and Ring Lardner (baseball, especially the classic American summer pastime You Know Me, Al series) but that had much more to do with character development, mood and backdrop. The one serious attempt several years ago to have the well-known college game handicapper Shelly Newman cover a few college football seasons were sort of preempted once the NCAAA gurus finally adopted a semi-playoff format and took some of the fun, according to Shelly, out of weekly picking what he thought were the top 25 college football teams (and with it the all-important betting point spread). Given the formulas for inclusion in the Final Four selected at the end of the season the whole thing was weighted toward leagues with play-offs and many good teams like the SEC and Big Ten a lot of the suspense evaporated. (The SEC’s Alabama who have had a virtual lock on the mystical national title the past several years also dampened Shelly’s ardor for meeting those weekly deadlines inherent in covering such a diffuse cluster of games-and point spreads.)
Earlier this year Si Lannon, who otherwise is a pretty solid citizen and good reviewer of books and films here and at the American Film Gazette, proposed to do a few pieces on golf. It turned out beneath that solid exterior and calm demeanor was a maniac for playing this arcane and time-consuming game with its fistful of rules which don’t make sense to the average layperson, at least to me when I tried to get a handle on why Si would get up at five in the morning to play at six on weekends when the rest of the world was either just going to bed or had a few hours left before hitting the skids. So yes Si is an avid fan and devotee of hitting small dimpled white balls with funny logos who never did anybody any harm into lakes, ponds, trees, sand traps and other devilish locations as far as I know. Each calumny with its own set of penalties and procedures for getting the ball back in play and down to the goal-to the green-in order to put that little white ball into a man-made hole, the old tin cup he called it, in finely trimmed and contoured grass that also never hurt anybody.
Now Si is a guy who does not ask many favors and so against my better judgement I let him do a short piece on the subject. His choice was not some big time tournament like the U.S. Open which I might have appreciated some coverage on. Just to get a feel for who plays this game at the highest level these days when even I know that the well-advertised Tiger Woods no longer is the king of the hill of the sport. No, his choice a local, local to him, amateur golf tournament at his golf club, Frog Pond Golf Course, where he wanted to cover something called the club net four-ball club championship. Si can explain exactly what that format is for the clueless which included me until he told me about what that meant in the golf world vocabulary which apparently hasn’t changed since about the time of golf fanatic Charles I in England. Before he lost his head. (Not over golf but weightier matters like the “divine right of kings” idea he was working under and for which he paid with his life).
It seems some of his regular six in the morning golf partners (so immediately suspect in my book since this reeked of some sort of sect or cult like Druids or Maypole denizens which I made clear to him) were involved in the tournament and so he had a rooting interest in the play. He moreover had predicted that the two two-person teams (therefore four-ball since each participant flails his own ball) which he friends had partnered in had reached the finals of the championship and would be slated to go head to head on in that final. Si begged, well, asked if he could a follow up on that first article to finish up in style. I was skeptical but told him to cover the “event” and write something up and if I liked it I would make sure it was posted. I did and here it is but I hope this satisfies Si’s golf craziness and he gets back to writing real film and book stuff about the American saga-Pete Markin]
****
A Note From Si Lannon
[As my editor Pete Markin mentioned in his introduction to this piece, an introduction that may turn out to have been as long as this piece itself, I will explain, roughly explain, what the format for this net four-ball tournament is about which even he, a non-believer, could understand under constant repetition. Mercifully, mercifully to me as well as the average reader who knows of my film and book reviews, I will not except in spots discuss the arcane rules that govern seemingly every conceivable situation in golf here but just the outlines for the clueless and curious. Most readers may know about the high end of the sport, the pros, the PGA, or have seen major tournaments like the Masters or U.S. Open on television almost all of which are four day affairs in which the golfer with the lowest score for the four days wins (and these days wins a ton of money). But that is the elite, the top. The top players in an average golf club who in any case are far below that elite level are not plentiful enough to have such a tournament based on straight up stroke play. The spread between abilities is too great to make such competition fair so other formats have been created for those who want to compete against other golfers at the club level. Hence the annual club net team four-ball championship which I am covering in this piece.
This way this type of tournament plays out is that as many interested two-person teams who enter play a qualifying round in order to reduce the field to sixteen teams. That qualifying round is based on the sixteen lowest team scores of best-ball golf. Best ball is based on handicaps. (This is where I lost Pete Markin and was the source of much repetition as he was incredulous about the whole system.) For example if both team members get a five on a hole which is a par four then then would be one over par on their gross score. But if one (or either) player has a handicap stroke on that hole then they would have a net score of four-par. That is the score that counts and so on through the eighteen holes of golf which constitute a round. Handicaps are based on the premise that two people with different abilities could play each other on a relatively equal playing field if the better golfer gave the other golfer some strokes to give that person a fighting chance of winning. Handicaps are based on a complicated formula of the average of several recent rounds of golf and I need not go further than that for an explanation.
The sixteen qualifying teams then play elimination rounds to get a champion. In the first round (what in NCAA basketball championships would be the “sweet sixteen”) the top eight ranked teams play the lower eight teams in reverse order. For example the lowest qualifying team number one plays the highest qualifying team number sixteen and so on. The surviving eight then play a second round (the NCAA elite eight), the surviving four (the NCAA Final Four)a third round and the last two teams standing play a fourth round for the championship. This is where the vagaries of the format came into play when I predicted my friends the teams of Frenchie Robert and Caz Casey and Sand-Bagger Jackson and Kenny Lou would as they actually did do meet in the finals. The former team had been the top seed and the latter team number ten. If the Jackson-Lou team had been seeded eighth or less then no way could the two teams meet in the finals since they would play each other in an earlier round. As it turned out each pair fairly easily went through their earlier rounds so the final would provide bragging rights and side bet cash for the winning team for the rest of the season-and maybe beyond.
The final as it turned out was held on a granite gray late September morning and the two pairs, Frenchie and Caz, Sand-Bagger and Kenny seemed to be primed to do battle, to do the clash of titans as advertised in the headline. To give a little color to the proceedings I should mention that Frenchie, the redoubtable Frenchman a generation out of Quebec is the best golfer of the four and intensely competitive ( best meaning he has the lowest handicap which means that he got no stokes to help him against the other guys). Caz is a wily Irishman who has now safely gotten his brood of kids past the college albatross around his neck had only taken up the game the previous couple of years and so had the highest handicap (meaning he gets more strokes on certain holes than the others which could help his teammate considerable if he played well-which he did). This team was considered by the assorted touts hanging in the clubhouse bar the “young upstarts” since they had only been playing as a team for a couple of years and had not won a major championship. Sand-Bagger as his designation indicates is an old geezer, older than me, who has been playing in these events seemingly forever and is always grousing about how he should have more strokes (as he takes our money at the end of the golf round more often than not). Kenny is a diminutive Chinese who can be the best player in the world one day and a rank amateur the next. When this pair is on though it is like a perfect storm. Around the clubhouse bar, among those gadflys and barflies who populate every club not a few who have fallen under the wheel to this tandem, they are the “veterans” as their names on various plaques testify to. So this one set up as a David and Goliath affair.
This is the way Jack Jones, the Frog Pond gadfly and barfly-in-chief put it tongue in cheek in a memo tacked onto the message board in the club’s men’s locker room:
“The Moon is in the Seventh House. The usually sleepy hamlet of Huron Village will be inundated with a motley crew of people and vehicles early tomorrow morning after procuring the hottest ticket in town for the improbable match-up of the upstart newcomers the redoubtable, whatever that means, Frenchie Roberts the brash transport from up Quebec way and his erstwhile partner the mysteriously named Caz Casey against the rags to riches bloodied and hardscrabble veterans Sand-Bagger Jackson and his wily long-time partner Kenny Lou for the coveted Frog Pond Four-Ball Net Championship.
“Upon hearing of the pairing after Frenchie and Caz had vanquished their third round opponents while travelling back to his hometown to pick up his recalcitrant high school son, recalcitrant since despite constant pleading the young man has taken up the much more civilized sport of tennis, the mercurial Mr. Lou when the AP caught to him simply stated “We will take no prisoners.”
“The more sagacious Sand-Bagger has been quoted by Reuters as saying-“We are just happy to be in the tournament after last year’s failure to qualify and look forward to facing this unknown pair of upstarts for the biggest prize of all. We are pleased to be able to be pitted against a couple of young up and coming players who will give us all we can handle although the fate sisters would seem to favor that long hitting pair. It will take everything we know to have a chance against these stroke-strewn opponents. We will just play one hole at a time and see what happens”
“More to the point Sand-Bagger was quoted as saying that he and Mr. Lou had won many championships and much prize money but that the really important thing was to win that side bet of one hundred dollars per man for bragging rights the rest of the season.”
And it was as advertised a battle royal as both teams brought “game” to the vaunted showdown. I won’t bore regular readers with the play by play, hole by hole details except to say from personal experience tensions ran high on the first tee box even against long-time buddies, maybe especially against longtime buddies, and continued throughout the match as emotions ran up and down depending on the results of each hole until the end somewhere on the course hopefully not before the regulation eighteenth hole. Frenchie and Caz came out strong based on Caz playing out of his shoes that day. They were soon two holes up meaning they had won two more than their opponent (although that two up lead would be their highest lead of the day as Sand-Bagger and Kenny battled back to “stop the bleeding,” allow the young upstarts to get no further up on them). But the day belonged to the veterans on Kenny playing way out of his shoes although they did not seal the deal until the eighteenth hole when Kenny sank a ten foot birdie putt to end the game. Based on the level of play that day Sand-Bagger and Kenny had had their second lowest collective score ever. And Frenchie and Caz were only one stroke more. So yeah, as Sand-Bagger said in jest as they were waiting to tee off on the first tee this was a “friendly game to the death.” Enough said.
[In the interest of full disclosure the reason I was able to cover this event was that my teammate, Rags Johnson, and I failed to qualify-did not make the cut a subject we will hear no end of from this year’s finalists. We had actually won this same tournament last year which also shows the vagaries of golf-Si Lannon]
When The Blues Was Dues- The Classic Alligator Records Compilation
CD Review
By Zack James
Classic Alligator Records, many blues artists
Long before Seth Garth became back in the day, the 1960s day, the music critic for the now long gone The Eye published in those day out of Oakland, California he had been bitten by the blues bug. Of course in the 1960s if one was to be a successful and relevant music critic one had to concentrate on the emerging and then fading folk music minute (of which the blues was seen as a sub-set of the genre especially the country blues wings with the likes of Skip James, Son House, Bukka White, and Mississippi John Hurt) and then post-British invasion and the rise of the counter-cultural movement what was called “acid” rock. So Seth’s blues bug, except for an occasional sneak-in was cut short by the needs of his career. Even then though Seth would keep up with the various trends coming out of places like Chicago and Detroit and of the artists who had formed his first interests.
Strangely Seth had come to his love of the blues almost by accident. Back in the 1950s he had been like many teenagers totally devoted to his transistor radio to shutout the distractions of parents and siblings around the house. In those days though he was drawn to the fresh air jail breakout of rock and roll, guys like Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. One Sunday night though almost like a ghost message from the radio airwaves the station he usually listened to WMEX was drowned by a more powerful station from Chicago, WABC. The show Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour (actually two hours but that was the title of the show). The first song Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying. He was hooked, hooked mainly because in those days the blues coming out of Chicago sounded like a very primitive version of rock, like maybe it had something to do with that beat in his head whenever a serious rock song came on WMEX like Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller. He couldn’t always get the Chicago station on Sunday night, something to do with those wind patterns but he was smitten.
Like a lot of things including his later interest in folk music and acid rock Seth always wanted to delve into the roots of whatever trend he was writing about. That was how he found out that a lot of the songs that he heard on the Be-Bop Benny show were the genesis of rock. Also that rock had eclipsed the blues as the be-bop new thing leaving many of the most popular blues artists, overwhelming black artists, behind to pick up the scraps of the musical audience (only to be “discovered” later by some of the more thoughtful rock stars like the Stones just as the old time country blues artists from the South had been “discovered” by folk aficionado in their turn).
Seth also dug into the technical aspects of the industry, who was producing the music. Those where the days when there were many small, small by today’s mega-standards, essentially mom and pop record companies producing blues material. In Chicago, with the huge migration of blacks from the South during the previous two generations there were a myriad of labels. But two stuck out, two were the ones who grabs the very best artists around Maxwell Street and made them stars, from the many one hit wonders to classic stars like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King.
Of course most people have heard of those artists who worked out of the Chess Record label. But the other big label, the one under review, Alligator, also produced a shew of stars. So that very first night Seth had heard the legendary Hound Dog Taylor doing The Sky Is Crying he was under contract with Alligator. For more artists check out this two CD compilation of those others who also graced that label. Then you will be up to date on the genesis of the Chicago blues explosion that changed blues from acoustic to electric back in the day.
That word is finally being said loud and clear across the halls of Congress, in media across the country, and by voters everywhere—and now a majority of the House of Representatives supports this impeachment inquiry, including your member of Congress, Representative Stephen F. Lynch, who was part of the flood of support for impeachment this past week.
Now, Congress is home for recess, and it's an opportunity to thank Rep. Lynch—and to also make sure he knows that constituents expect him to keep supporting a robust, transparent, unhindered inquiry that leads to a vote on actual articles of impeachment and the impeachment of Donald Trump.
Just yesterday, MoveOn led a coalition of 30 progressive groups to hold an action at the Capitol, where we were joined by leading members of Congress to demand impeachment. Organized in 48 hours, this action generated images that have been featured in The New York Times and on national news shows, images that captured the passion for impeachment, firing up members of Congress who need to know that voters are on their side.
Here are a few of the images from the event:
Of course, MoveOn members have been in this fight for a long time. We called for impeachment over two years ago, after it was clear that Trump abused his power and sought to obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James Comey over the Russia probe.
Since then, our protests, rallies, relentless calls, persistent social media pressure, original videos seen tens of millions of times, and leadership in the Nobody Is Above the Law coalition helped lay the groundwork for where we are now, making impeachment a possibility.
As a former top aide to Hillary Clinton said in Vanity Fair, “You couldn’t have gone from 0 to 60 miles per hour just based on Ukraine ... But roughly 150 members had already come out for impeachment before Ukraine. If groups like MoveOn and Indivisible hadn’t built that foundation, you’d be starting from scratch trying to get freshmen from swing districts, and it would have been much harder."
Now isn't the time to hit the brakes. It's time to hit the gas.
First, we need to keep up momentum through the recess—thanking Democrats who have stepped up and demanding they stand strong, pressuring holdouts, and turning up pressure on Republicans.
Then, we need to defend the impeachment process from the right-wing echo chamber and amplify its findings—to ensure impeachment is supported by more and more of the American public.
And we need to begin to build the case for Republicans in the Senate to support impeachment—or be held accountable for aiding and protecting a criminal in the White House.
This is a lot of work—but we've been in this fight together for years. And if it takes six months to move through an impeachment trial—or 14 months to bring this criminality and corruption all the way to the election—we will confront and defeat Donald Trump, together.
–David, Isbah, Robert, Kenia, and the rest of the team
Want to support MoveOn's work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your ongoing support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?
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Click on title to link to Karl Marx Letter To Joseph Wedemeyer from the Karl Marx Internet Archives. More of their correspondence can be clicked on there. For more information about this key transplanted to America German supporter of Karl Marx Google for his "Wikipedia" entry.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Click on title to link to article by Alan Woods concerning the crisis of the world capitalism economic order. This article is presented for informational purposes, some of Woods' conclusions I agree with, some not. The main point, in any case, for our purposes today is to not only analyze what the particular breakdown of the international capitalist order is at the moment but how to overthrow that order and create a more rational socialist order. As we now know from painful experience there is no economic crisis that the capitalists can not "solve". Economic analysis helps but organizing the labor movement is critical.
For The Fifty- Steve McQueen’s “The Great Escape” (1963)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell
The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and a fistful of male stars to round out the cast, 1963
One of the great things about my long stay at this site (and at the now on-line American Film Gazette) is that Pete Markin, my editor (and Ben Gold at the Gazette) almost without exception let me review almost anything cinematic from virtually any genre and not grumble about my choices. That is true of this encore presentation the classic iconic (the big motorcycle chase for one thing) 1960s World War II movie The Great Escape as well. The encore part needs a little explanation since my first review of the film was written for my high school newspaper the North Adamsville High Magnet back when I was a sophomore. Of course that review of the film seen at the now long gone Strand Theater in Adamsville Center one Saturday afternoon was all about detailing the action, detailing how the good guy Allied officers outwitted the nasty Nazi night-takers who were trying (and almost succeeding) in over-running all of Europe and who knows where else, and concentrating on the long drama (with intermission) as it unfolded. What it did not entail, what got missed, was the little point about the murder of the fifty officers who were captured after the great escape and executed against even the barest minimum of Geneva Convention standards. What got missed then but not now as well is the dedication in the film (and in this headline) of those fifty murdered men who after all were only doing what the fog rules of war were expecting of them-escape and/or create as much havoc for the enemy as possible if you cannot.
The storyline is actually pretty simple for an almost three hour movie. A group of hard ass Allied officers who have already off-camera created problems for the German High Command by a collective untold number of escapes from other POW camps are transferred to a state-of-the-art facility. Needless to say from about minute one they individually attempt to escape. No go. Then a senior British officer just recaptured and transferred comes up with the big plan –a massive escape of 250 men to tie down as many German troops as possible. The bulk of the film then concentrates of the logistics, the temporary set-backs, and the division of labor among the officers who brought different skill sets to the table. Then the big day came but due to some problems only about seventy men escaped. As I have already telegraphed of that lot fifty were captured and executed, a few escaped, and a few were captured and returned to the camp.
The central figure in all of this, the one highlighted throughout the film is Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, who between bouts of solitary (with American as apple pie glove and ball in hand to while away the time) and that aforementioned great motorcycle chase gave the Germans all they could handle. Alas he was one of the captured and returned ones. Yeah, this one, this based on a true story about the camp and the Nazi night-takers actions is for the fifty. Enough said.
