Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-From The Pen Of Frank Jackman- Ti Jean Kerouac’s Sea- “The Sea Is My Brother”

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman- Ti Jean Kerouac’s Sea- “The Sea Is My Brother”

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs,   who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Book Review

The Sea Is My Brother: The Lost Novel, Jack Kerouac, De Capo Press, 2011

…Jack, Jack of the two-hearted river, Jack of the rushing Merrimack running to Newburyport old time seas evoking cruel Captain Ahabs desperate fights for booty, and fights to keep it. Jack of the two million words to write, of the need, by the asphalt road, by the boat sea (okay, ship, tramp steamer, freighter), by railroad -tied bedrock, by airplane, I guess, if you had the price of the fare, a close time at times, needed to breakout from the nine to five world, needed to address the loneliness of man’s fate, needed to address the big old, sad old karma snake-bitten world of the spiritual needs that were being squeezed out (hell, swept aside like some old perfect wave storm washing everything out in one swoop in keeping with the theme here, alright), and to people that world with ambiguous, very ambiguous, frustrated, sullen, seekers. People (Jack, oops, Wesley/Bill front and center in the cast), surprise, surprise very much like himself and those who he associated with in the sea-going early 1940s when he joined to the merchant marines to see the world, to do his war effort bit, to be alone (strangely true, alone despite the close quarters and guys breathing down your neck at every turn), to think through his place in the sun.

…and hence this long ago lost first novel, portending later asphalt roads taken, whisky drinks ( and reefer smokes) taken, male friendships taken, women love them and leave them taken, divided two hearted-body-mind rivers taken, swooping hell-bent lonelinesses taken, fates taken.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- One More Time On The "Beats" -"The Source"

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- One More Time On The "Beats" -"The Source"


A "YouTube" film clip of "beat" fixtures, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

DVD Review

The Source, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and a gang of other poets, pranksters, and preachers of the beat in the 1950, 1999

Over the past several months I have, seemingly, grabbed every film documentary about the “beat” literary movement of the 1950s that I could get my hands on. This film, “The Source”, continues that quest. And why am I interested in this movement, essentially a literary movement and not particularly, at least overtly, a consciously political movement that would not seem to fit in with other literary movements that I have given space to here? Well the short answer is that I just like the free verse spontaneous literary styles of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and company. More to the point I have been trying, as this documentary and others reviewed in this space have attempted as well, to link the liberating effects of that 1950s scene as forbears of my own generation, the Generation of ’68, a much less literary-inclined generation.

That idea sets one of the parameters of my interest. Another is the question of what of this collective wealth of archival footage, interviews and readings that virtually all the films reviewed have presented gives the best idea of what was going on then for those of us who were really too young (or were not born yet)to appreciate this breathe of fresh air. This effort is one the better ones for two reasons. First, the producers have established clearly who they believe are (as I do) the central players in this drama, the above-mentioned Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Of course, the “beat’ scene is not complete without recognizing the role that madman-for-all seasons Neal Cassady, Zen-master poet Gary Snyder, street poet Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (if for no other reason that the establishment of the City Lights Bookstore, a central hangout) , and host of other minor poets, hangers-on and crazies played. They are given space here, as well. But without the core literary/philosophical leadership of the three there make not have been such a phenomenon.

Secondly, and more importantly, in recognition of that centrality the producers have given over a fair amount of time for a rather short documentary (about an hour and a half) to extensive readings of Kerouac’s work (by Johnny Depp) , Allen Ginsberg’s ground-breaking and defining “Howl”, and Burroughs “Naked Lunch” (by Dennis Hopper, who else, right?). These readings are important. “Beat” was driven by the sounds of jazz and the blues, among other aural influences so the sounds (and nuances) of the works are more critical than more cerebral efforts. Although to our current ears much of this may sound self-indulgent this was the breakout sound of the “beats”, and to paraphrase Kerouac’s ending to “On The Road”, the sound of the fathers, the fathers that we never knew, Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs.

On Childhood Memories-With The Somerville, Ma Honk! Parade In Mind

On Childhood Memories-With The Somerville, Ma Honk! Parade In Mind

By Frank Jackman

[I normally confine myself to current events political commentary or some especially significant anniversary or comment on some event of historical import from the distant past but the other night I ran into Fritz Taylor, a guy I have known for a number of years and a fellow Vietnam War veteran, at Jack’s over in Cambridge where I still like to grab a quick drink when I am in that town. He had just finished up marching in the annual Honk! Parade (that ! belongs there and is no typo) which starts in Somerville and ends in Harvard Square. While we were chatting about this and that he started talking about his childhood remembrances of parades down South in his hometown of Mill Ridge in Georgia. This piece is a short take on what he talked about which might interest those who have their own memories of childhood parades, of long ago parade traditions which attempted to unite communities and did on occasion. Frank Jackman]

*****

Fritz Taylor, was, is a man of institutional memories. Will tell you that using that exact term himself. By that he means that he has grown over the years to think more about certain critical events that formed his life ever since he was a small fry (his term) down in rural Georgia. And do it by comparisons on occasion. Fritz had recently participated in the annual Honk! Parade which is something of an alternative parade from the ones in his, my, maybe your childhood when some town volunteer association, or the town itself went all out on say Memorial Day, July 4^th, Christmas time for examples and gathered up various organizations, groups and clubs to form some sort of celebration for town folk, for the young really.         

The way Fritz put it (and I agreed and you would probably do so too) was that the organizers grabbed every viable civic organization, band and exotic float assemblage possible. So an average parade would have the local high school band (maybe college if one was nearby), the school glee club, the school majorette baton twirlers and cheerleaders, 4-H club if in a rural area like his Mill Ridge growing up home, the Elks, Masons, Lions and such, church bands, CYO, Demo-lay, choirs, and whatever other cheap transport musical organization available. Then a ton of automobile, open convertible types housing various public officials, fire engines, police cars, street sweepers, public works dump trucks and so on. Also assorted walkers carrying signs advertising some drugstore, pizza parlor or supermarket usually with some pretty girl leading the procession. Naturally as well floats sponsored by various organizations the most important one being the float carrying the Queen of the May, the town queen or event queen and her court of a bevy of young lovelies. Throw in a few clowns, geeks, nerds, hispsters and some misplaced derelicts and wanderers and you have pretty full picture. Oh yeah, and placed here at the end not by accident the local VFW, American Legion or specialized veterans organizations of specific wars like the Spanish- American War.          

That last category the Spanish-American War veterans (you know the guys who went up San Juan Hill with Teddy R. and hi-jacked Cuba for a few decades or hijacked the Philippines, Puerto Rico other such spots) is what fascinated Fritz when he was a small fry (remember his term), well, that and those wholesome well-shaped lovelies on those preposterous floats when he came of age to notice such things. He said he would always remember these ancient men walking, slowly walking mostly, some with canes some aided by comrades, with erect carriage usually wearing their Sunday best suit laden with medals on their lapels. (Probably when he first started to watch parades in the early 1950s these men were in there seventies and early eighties and so ancient to a young boy who probably thought twenty was ancient in the great scheme of things.) Would notice each year that there were maybe fewer marching, more with canes or being aided but always treated by the very patriotic crowds with much hand-clapping and salutes.      

Fast forward to Somerville Honk! Parade-2017

If the parades of Fritz’s youth were filled with civic pride and immense patriotic fervor the Honk! Parade is the antithesis. Started   

several years ago this parade features every type of odd-ball band which can put instruments and outlandish costume together each Columbus Day Sunday beginning at noon (also known as Indigenous Peoples Day among politically correct progressives in some quarters). Add in people on stilts, people riding bicycles, floats and whatever pleases them. Add in all kinds of progressive activist and peace groups and you get a feel for what is going on that day in Somerville as it wends its way to finish line Harvard Square a couple of miles down the road. A Very Blue occasion in a very blue state in a very blue town. Each year for the past few years, years in which Fritz has felt duty-bound to march, a contingent from Veterans for Peace his organization since after Vietnam War times when he finally got “religion” (my term) on the issue has participated in the extravaganza.     

Veterans for Peace has a great portion of its local membership culled from those who served in ancient times Vietnam War  (a war now being examined by Ken Burns/Lynn Novack in an eighteen hour ten part series on PBS). So come Columbus Day Sunday those who line up to march are very similar in age to those old days Spanish-American War veterans from Fritz’s Mill Ridge growing up days. Except they tend to be a rag-tag army of guys wearing anything from shorts to long pants along with an assortment of VFP tee-shirts of different colors and with different slogans embossed on the back). And of course the now very familiar and famous flags of white with a black dove embossed on them which stick out in an event thet participate in. As Fritz ambled along Massachusetts Avenue as it turned into Cambridge he wondered if the many small fry who lined the route with their parents were as fascinated with the ancient VFP contingent as he has been with those old men Spanish-American war veterans. He hoped so and hoped they got a very different message from than he had back in the day. Thanks Fritz                   

[I did not march that day since I have been recovering from knee replacement surgery but I expect to be back on the line next year to wonder Fritz’s wonder. Frank Jackman]  

He Could Have Been A Contender, Oops, Champion Of The World-Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart’s “Kid Galahad” (1937)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Kid Galahad, starring Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Warren Morris, Jane Bryan, 1937    

A guy I used to work for when I was a kid, when I was looking for a little spending money to escort whatever flame I was pursuing at the moment was fond of saying “some guys are born to be lovers, some fighters.” That comment directed at me since in those days I was as prone to fight somebody over some now misty and silly slight, maybe someone said something about some gal I was interested before I got wise to the fact that I wasn’t much of a fighter at a skinny 140 pounds taking on guys much bigger and stronger. That guy I worked for had me tagged though as a lover not a fighter if you had to choose between the two. Especially when at sixteen I mixed it up with a guy much bigger than I over a girl and got nothing but the worst of it. This cutting up old touches had resulted from viewing the film under review, Kid Galahad, where the fighter, a guy who would turn professional fighter before the film is half over, was both a lover and a fighter. Some mean feat which would have garnered much respect in the old neighborhood if such a person existed in those days. My growing up time employer would have gladly tipped his hat to that duel prowess. Would probably too note this big exception to the rule, and exception which would not have included me in any shape or form.

     

I can’t say that as a kid I was very interested in pugilism, the art of fighting, fighting in the ring although I never then had qualms about guys who did try for the brass ring. Guys who would start out young at the local police station gym, club fighters, and move up or out, mostly out. These were mostly “from hunger” Irish and Italian guys looking to break out of the heavy labor which would be their fate if they didn’t make it out. They were never a big part of the local scene and I don’t’ remember much talk about anybody but Irish Johnny Mangone (playing the Irish mother, Italian father card) who was some kind of Golden Gloves champion although how far up I don’t remember. I do know, because my father Boyo was a ringleader, that the fathers, uncles, older brothers used to populate the local gin mill, The Tam, every Friday night to watch, and presumably bet on the profession fights on television from maybe the old Madison Square Garden in New York City sponsored by Gillette Razor Company in those beardless days.

But enough of old touches and let’s get to why this Warren Gooseberry, played by Wayne Morris, or whatever his name was from down on the farm and nothing but a blonde hick and rube who would have lasted about two minutes in my neighborhood except he had a deadly right hook before somebody got wise and christened him Kid Galahad to make the women wet as a songwriter wrote about Elvis one time. This kid was trying to make his way, trying to make enough money in the big city to buy a farm and get married. This guy was strictly from nowhere because he believed he could make the nut on tips or whatever as a bellboy in an upscale hotel. Fat chance.       

Fat chance except as part of his duties the Kid (I refuse to further  use his given moniker) winds up serving them off the arm, serving drinks, hard liquor for a boxing promoter, Nick Donati, played by tough guy  gangster type Edward G. Robinson and his significant other (although no way they called such arrangements that back then in the time frame of this film the 1930s but more like mistress or kept woman, whore in some quarters), Fluff played by Bette Davis.

(By the way according to fellow reviewer Seth Garth the last time Robinson was seen in this space was as famous Chi town gangster Johnny Rocco, he of the tough guy racketeers who dominated urban life back then, maybe now too, bleeding like a sieve after a character played by Humphrey Bogart who will be mentioned below popped him full of lead for being ugly. No, for roughing up his flame down in the Keys in Key Largo. Come to think of it that was the last time Bogie made this space as well as a good guy (in the end) who after seeing hard service in the European Theater in World War II at first claimed that “one more Johnny Rocco, more or less, was not worth dying for.” Until Johnny roughed up his honey. To complete the triad the last time Bette Davis was seen in this space according to fellow reviewer Will Bradley she was being stalked by an enraged Pacific islander woman whose paramour had been murdered by an enraged Ms. Davis who thought she was his lover in The Letter.)  

Yeah you read it right Nick Donati, the famous fight manager who had many a contender but never seemed to have guy who could have or wanted to go all the way.  Nick a guy who worked the newspaper scribes like a violin whenever he had a prospect. Of course in those days the fight game, the way out for many a young guy who faced the soup kitchen or hard labor lugging stuff to and fro had many illustrious promoters ready to see what they were made of-contenders or tankers, mostly the latter. Like Nick’s nemesis Turkey Morgan, Bogie’s role, a gangster trying to get his cut in the fight racket who had through fair means or foul, mostly foul the hottest property in the game-the heavyweight champion of the world. The whole thing gathers steam when rube from nowhere Kid takes umbrage when that vaunted heavyweight champion of the world roughs up Fluff. Bang Nick Donati, how he did it nobody knows, had another fighter in his stable. And for playing Sir Galahad Fluff was ready to ditch sullen neglectful Nick for the young stud, for somebody who treated her like a lady. One conquest and the Kid hasn’t even gotten into the ring to make the Garden women audiences get funny thoughts. 

On the basis of knocking the champ for a loop Nick sent the Kid into the ring to get a little bloodied on his way up. Except to the chagrin of Nick and the deadly anger of Turkey the Kid bounces the prelim guy on the floor. The Kid had to blow town for a while so Fluff stashed him upstate at Nick’s mother’s farm. The Kid was right at home too just like he had left before seeking the bright lights of the city. Oh yeah except Ma was not alone for there is a virginal Nick younger sister, Marie, played by Jane Bryan, who winds up being crazy about the Kid-and he her. Problem, big problem, maybe two big problems really. That Fluff hunger for him and Nick’s fervent attempt to keep the mugs, the sawdust bums, the punching bag stiffs away from her. The Fluff part got taken care of by her taking a powder on Nick once she knew the freaking score with the Kid and Nick’s sister. She had been around enough to know things were hopeless especially when the Kid and Marie showed up at the nightclub where she was warbling, and Marie knew how she Fluff felt before all hell broke loose when Turkey and the champ tried to provoke the Kid.

Once Nick caught onto the romance between Marie and the Kid though he went wild, tried to do serious damage to the mug, to the Kid. Pushed the Kid into fighting the champ too soon and with the purposefully wrong strategy. Wrong approach, wrong once Fluff and Marie who were in attendance begged for mercy for the Kid. Bang-bang new strategy and the Kid takes the crown. Unfortunately, Nick, as was not usual for him, left a few loose ends like welshing on the underhanded deal he had made with gangster angry Turkey and as things worked out rather than a post-fight victory party there was a mutual shoot-out where both contestants were mortally wounded. Too bad. But good was the Kid winning the championship-and Marie. My employer would have scratched his head in approval.    

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- *Honor The Stiff-Necked Boston Abolitionists

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for stiff-necked abolitionist, Wendell Phillips.

BOOK REVIEW

The Bold Brahmins: New England’s War Against Slavery (1831-1863), Lawrence Lader, E.P. Dutton & Sons, New York, 1961

I recently reviewed a little biography of the famous pre-American Civil War reformer Samuel Gridley Howe in this space. As a result of some information that I found in that biography I was led to this book that, in broader strokes, tells the tale of the milieu from which Howe sprang. In the two or so decades before the American Civil War New England, and Boston in particular, carried decisive weight in the struggle against slavery. A strong, very strong argument can be made that without the efforts of those Boston reformers-pushing the struggle forward in the face of the public indifference and, at times, active hostility- the slavery question might never had been resolved. Kudos

This book highlights the New England anti-slavery struggle from its weak beginnings in small propaganda circles centrally around the figure of William Lloyd Garrison and the confrontations of the "Conscience" Whigs with the "Cotton" Whig aristocracy that dominated the Boston financial and commercial scene that was heavily dependent on Southern cotton in the early decades of the 19th century. The book further highlights the national struggle against slavery that heated up in the 1850's, the fight for revolutionary military and political strategies against slavery led by these same Brahmins in the early days of the Civil War and culminates in the fight of the Robert Gould Shaw-led black Massachusetts 54th Regiment before Fort Wagner. Key figures like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the above-mentioned Howe are highlighted throughout.

Events like the plantation owner-driven Mexican War, the fruitless Clay-Webster-led Compromise of 1850 with its abhorrent Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska struggles to keep those territories free from slavery and John Brown’s Harper's Ferry military efforts get a full summary airing here, as well. A lot of well-spent time is also used in describing the various struggles of the rank and file of the anti-slavery movement organized in local vigilante committees to free individual slaves (literally, in some cases). There is plenty of material here to pick up on for further study. Naturally, as almost always with an older book, the subject matter of this book is in need of some updating and expansion. But, as a slice of New England life in this pre-Civil War period it serves its purpose.

Aside from a rather nice chronological description of events and thoughtful personality sketches the central premise that Mr. Lader is working under is also interesting. He argues that the core of the anti-slavery ‘party’ (that took various political organizational forms over time from the split of the Northern Whigs, through the Liberty and Free-Soil Parties, culminating in the emergence of the Republican Party in the mid- 1850’s) were not to be found in the newly emerging financial and commercial elites. They were rather to be found in the traditional professional elite (lawyers, doctors, professors, etc.) that was being displaced by the increasing capitalization of the American economy.

Under those terms the united front of Boston Unitarian preachers, Concord poets, Cambridge academics and Newburyport pacifists and sea captains in their struggle against slavery, which was by any terms historically progressive, was also, essentially, the last rearguard action from the old Puritan vanguard that had traced it ancestry back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Of course, what militants today take away from this struggle is that there was a time when the bourgeoisie (or a section of it) in this country actually represented a progressive force in the political struggles taking place here. Strange to some, maybe, given the current political realities, but true. In short, this thesis is a prime example of the materialist concept of history that we place so much store by; although I am sure that was not the author’s intention. Read on.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- A Kerouac/Burroughs Joint Effort From The Pre-"Beat" Days

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- A Kerouac/Burroughs Joint Effort From The Pre-"Beat" Days

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation.  Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Book Review

And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Grove Press, New York, 2008

In the past I have looked at Jack Kerouac’s densely-packed explanations of his early days in such thinly-veiled autobiographical novels as “Maggie Cassidy” and “Visions Of Dulouz”, detailing his leap from working class Lowell to the bright lights of New York City in the very early 1940s. I have also gone on and on about the importance of William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” in the modern American literary canon. Here, in “Hippos” (for short), we are treated to both a very, very thinly- veiled novel about the fate of their mutual friend, Lucien Carr, and his troubles with the law as a result of his killing of an older man who was seemingly psychotically sexually attracted to the young man.

The novel is meant to work at the level of straight forward, straight talking exploration of the milieu behind the Carr crime and in the process gave this reader a very interesting take on war time New York, the goings-on of the emerging “Beat” crowd and their antics, and a look at the budding literary careers of two stalwarts of the American literary canon. None of those antics, however, are remarkable or really much different from the youth adventures of other writes except the always surprising New York City night life in war time. Parties, men who want women, dope, booze, jazz, blues, women who want men, men who want men, women who want women, more booze, more dope, and a few more cigarettes. Sounds very familiar. What makes this story a cut above the rest for an early literary effort is the crime story embedded in the overall scheme of things.

Does this joint effort work? Certainly this novel tells me that both authors are “literary” men destined for bigger things, even this early on. The literary device of telling the tale from two perspectives that do not necessarily give the same emphasis to events is interesting. However, whatever reason, literary or confessional, that drove this joint effort describing a story that both were personally involved in (including some criminal complicity, after the fact) there is not enough of either man giving his all to the telling. As community-oriented (fellow “beat” community-oriented, that is) as Kerouac and Burroughs were something is missing here. And what explains what is missing is the hard fact that “beat” writers, whatever their philosophical inclinations were primarily loners, at least loner writers. See if you agree.

Note: Although this novel has been touted mainly as a prime example of an early “beat” work the real virtue of its publication is the Afterword where William Burroughs’ literary executioner gives a very detailed and important description about how this “lost” work came to see the light of day. For “beat” literary scholars presumably already familiar with the Carr case in the careers of the authors this is priceless. Even I was fascinated by the twists and turned needed to get the thing published at all.

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -On The 150th Anniversary Of The Start Of The American Civil War- A Salute To The Northern Side- Racist Trash: Not Gone With the Wind Yet

Workers Vanguard No. 979
29 April 2011

Racist Trash: Not Gone With the Wind Yet


In addition to being the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, this year also marks the 75th anniversary of the most wildly successful, poisonously syrupy and all-around trashiest justification for slavery produced in the U.S.: Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind. The continued popularity of such racist “entertainment” as this book and movie counters the myth, touted by President Barack Obama, that he has ushered in a “post-racial” society. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, countering the “smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in our society,” pointed out recently that the result of the histories written in the war’s aftermath “has been to blur the reality that slavery was at the heart of the matter, ignore the baser realities of the brutal fighting, romanticize our own home-grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, and distort the consequences of the Civil War that still intrude on our national life” (“A Conflict’s Acoustic Shadows,” New York Times, 12 April).

Atlanta will host Gone With the Wind celebrations once again this summer, billed as “a global pilgrimage to Atlanta.” On the occasion of the book’s 50th anniversary, the Atlanta area saw “Tara balls” ad nauseam, one of which was attended by then mayor Andrew Young and his wife, the only black people present amid the plethora of Confederate army uniforms. On that occasion, we wrote “‘Gone With the Wind’—50 Years of Racist Trash” (WV No. 407, 4 July 1986), excerpts from which are printed below.

* * *

This book and the hugely successful movie based on it sprinkle “moonlight and magnolias” on one of the most brutal slave systems the world has ever known. The life of a slave meant backbreaking work from dawn to dusk; a slave’s child or spouse could be sold at any time; hunger was ever-present. The antebellum South was a totalitarian police state ever in fear of slave uprisings. This is the society Margaret Mitchell referred to as “glamorous,” writing at length about the happiness of the “childlike” slave and his devotion to his master. At one point, the novel’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, muses that “Negroes were provoking sometimes and stupid and lazy, but there was loyalty in them that money couldn’t buy, a feeling of oneness with their white folks.”…

Gone With the Wind, the novel, appeared in the mid-1930s in a period of unremittent lynch terror in the South, symbolized by the prolonged struggle to save the Scottsboro Boys from the hangman’s noose—while “liberals” like Franklin D. Roosevelt and the editor of the Atlanta Constitution opposed the anti-lynching law in Congress. The movie came out on the eve of World War II. The heritage of slavery and police-state oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South belied American imperialism’s fraudulent claim to be fighting for “democracy” against Nazi racism. Gone With the Wind shined up the tarnished image of racist America and in this way furthered Washington’s mobilization for war. Attacks on the struggle for black rights have always accompanied the U.S. rulers’ preparations for war.

Margaret Mitchell worshipped slave society. She grew up in a period that saw the rebirth of the Klan with the hanging of the innocent Jewish businessman Leo Frank, framed for the murder of a white girl, a period when the Klan off and on ran the Georgia state government for years. Mitchell was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution in an era when Georgia was trying to crush the life out of courageous black Communist Angelo Herndon. It says a lot about Mitchell that she was ten years old by the time her family broke the news to her that the South had lost the war!

Gone With the Wind is not just another trashy Harlequin romance, a piece of escapist fluff. It is about as politically innocent as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which openly glorified the Klan. It will take a third American revolution to truly finish the Civil War, set the record straight and relegate Gone With the Wind to the scrap heap of history. The cultural record of human emancipation will record this debunking with great relish.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-As Hometown Lowell Celebrates -Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- “The King Of The Beats”-Jack Kerouac- On The Road To “On The Road”-“Maggie Cassidy”

Click on title to link to a site that gives a thumbnail sketch of the biography of the be-bop writer Jack Kerouac

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs,   who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Frank Jackman  comment:

Every year, in October, in Jack Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts a Jack Kerouac Festival is presented to keep his be-bop working class fellaheen memory alive. The link is http://www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org/lck-2010
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Book Review

Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York, 1993

As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD,The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac’s lesser works under review here, Maggie Cassidy, where the action takes place in his hometown, that this fade back to be-bop-ness all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old-time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting granitic memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Jack Kerouac's better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, On The Road, his classic modern physical and literary "search" for the meaning of America for his generation, the generation which came of age in the post-World War II period, readily comes to mind. No so well known is the fact that that famous youthful Kerouac novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition in many volumes, starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times.

Maggie Cassidy focuses on the trials and tribulations of growing up absurd in the 1930s, the inevitable schoolboy quests and missteps of sorting out what love is, teen love, Jack's desire to excel at sports which has driven young men for ages, and, off-handedly, the “meaning of the universe” of his high school days in Lowell and a little about his prep school days down in New York City in the late 1930s in the series that bears the general title The Legend Of Duluoz. So that is why we today, in the year of the forty-second anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign, no the spell, of Maggie Cassidy.

I have mentioned in a note to a review of On The Road after a recent re-reading of that master work that Kerouac's worldview, not unexpectedly for a novelist of the immediate post- World War II generation, was dominated by what today would be regarded as deeply, if not consciously, sexist impulses. Moreover, the whole “beat” experience of which he was “king” was, with a few exceptions, a man’s trip, hetero and/or homosexual. All of the books that I have read of his have that flavor. They may be, some of them, great literature but they are certainly men’s books.

Also, not unexpectedly, for a shy, sly, French-Canadian (with a little Native-American thrown in) working-class athletic youth from Lowell, Kerouac’s escapades center in this book on his high school male-bonding experiences with his “corner” boys. And being, from all reports and a quick glance at his youthful photographs, a handsome-looking man his exploits with young women. And here enters the sultry Maggie Cassidy, to the lace curtain born, the Irish colleen dream of every heterosexual young man. Although the dramatic tension of this book is not exactly gripping, after all despite some very grand, descriptive narration about Lowell, about the neighborhood, about the beauties of the Merrimack River, and above all, about young women, the episodes here clearly fall under the category of high school hi-jinks which have already had a long and honored literary exposition. Still, this is a nice little trip down memory lane and I can visualize some of the same streets around the "Acre and Pawtucketville, and some of those frosty mill-driven buildings that he refers in this book from those long ago connections that I mentioned above.

Note to Jack Kerouac wherever you are: Damn, you should have ‘talked’ to me about Maggie before you got involved with that vixen. I grew up in a part of a town in Massachusetts that while not “Little Dublin” was close enough to bear that title here in America. I knew a million Maggies (and Moe Coles too) and I could have warned you that chandelier, lace curtain, or shanty these nice Irish Catholic girls will break your heart, or something else, every time. Now that I think about it though I never listened to any well-intentioned advise on the subject either. Farewell grand working-class fellaheen.

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir-Dan Duryea’s “Terror Street” (1953)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir-Dan Duryea’s “Terror Street” (1953)

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

Terror Street, starring Dan Duryea, Hammer Productions, 1953 

Long time readers of this space know, or should be presumed to know, of my long-standing love affair with film noir. The classic age of film noir in this country in the age of black and white film in the 1940s and 1950s when I would sneak over to the now long gone and replaced by condos Strand Theater in growing up town North Adamsville and spent a long double feature Saturday afternoon watching some then current production from Hollywood or some throwback from the 1940s which Mister Cadger would show in retrospective to cut down on expenses in tough times by avoiding having to pay for first –run movies all the time. I also on infrequent occasions would attend a nighttime showing with my parents if my strict Irish Catholic mother (strict on the mortal sin punishment for what turned out to have been minor or venial sins) thought the film passed the Legion of Decency standard that we had to stand up and take a yearly vow to uphold and I could under the plotline without fainting (or getting “aroused” by the fetching femmes). But mainly with me and five siblings they went to one of the three, count them three, movie theaters in small town North Adamsville by themselves to get away from our madness while Grandmother Riley tended to us with her no-nonsense regimen.

Yes, who could forget up on that big screen for all the candid world to see a sadder but wiser seen it all, heard it all Humphrey Bogart at the end of the Maltese Falcon telling all who would listen that he, he Sam Spade no stranger to the seamy side and cutting corners had had to send femme fatale Mary Astor his snow white flame over once she spilled too much blood for the stuff of dreams. Or cleft-chinned barrel-chested Robert Mitchum knowing he was doomed and out of luck taking a few odd bullets from his former femme fatale trigger –happy girlfriend Jane Greer once she knew he had double-crossed her to the coppers in Out Of The Past. Ditto watching the horror on smart guy gangster Eddie Mars face after being outsmarted after sending a small time grafter to his doom prime private detective Phillip Marlowe ordered him out the door to face the rooty-toot-toot of his own gunsels who expect Marlowe to be coming out in The Big Sleep. Those were some of the beautiful and still beautiful classics whose lines you can almost hear anytime you mention the words film noir.

But there were other lesser films that were produced in this country starring the likes of the queen bee of the B-film noir night Gloria Grahame and he-man Glenn Ford. And not just this country but in Great Britain (if that term still applies after empire lost and Scotland and Wales clamoring to go their own ways) where in the 1950s many minor Hollywood stars like Dan Duryea in this film under review Terror Street (in merry olde England released as 36 Hours got work when benighted England took on the film noir world. When an outfit called Hammer Productions produced a tonof such small epics none with the cinematography mood play, diologue or plotline of those classics mentioned above and among the best of them only running neck and neck with those quickly produced Hollywood B classics.        

In the old days before I retired I always liked to sketch out a film’s plotline to give the reader the “skinny” on what the action was so that he or she could see where I was leading them. I will continue that old tradition here (and in future Hammer Production vehicles to be reviewed over the coming period) to make my point about the lesser production values of the Hammer products. Thoughtful American military pilot Bill Rogers, the role played by minor Hollywood star Duryea, snuck out of America by a friendly fugitive military plane on a mission to find out why his good-looking Norwegian-born wife met during the war (you know what war if the film was made in 1953) in holding out against the Nazi scum in England hasn’t written, has flown the coop. 

No question war-time romances were not made in heaven and so that wife, Katie, after seeing Bill off for a long term flight school assignment in America got lonely, got antsy and struck up a bad relationship with a guy who promised her adventure and some much needed dough. Dough earned by being part of an international smuggling operation, mostly diamond. So once she had some serious dough and some serious wanting habits fulfilled like minks and high-end clothes she blew Bill off-headed uptown with the Mayfair swells. Leaving no forwarding address. Yeah, the vagaries of war. But intrepid Bill wasn’t buying that story and through musing up her girlfriend found out where she was hanging her hat. That is when all hell broke loose and maybe Bill should have just shaken it off and moved on.    

But not intrepid Bill. He confronted Katie at those new digs but before he could either make his case or find out why she had cold-shouldered him he got conked on the head by a party or parties unknown. And Katie well Katie got dead, got very dead by a gun found in Katie’s old apartment by Bill but which wound up in his conked-out head hand. The frame is on and Mister Bill is made to fit it. Fit to take the big step-off, to meet his maker (via the bloody hangman) unless he can work out who the hell killed his beloved wife, and why, within 36 hours when he has to catch that fugitive plane back  to America-or else.     

Of course the thing he needed to do immediately was flee that uptown swell apartment so he could avoid the bloody coppers who wanted to make sure he met that maker. Of course as well not being English he needed some help once he made his getaway. In his dashing getaway he found himself in an apartment of a young woman, some Judy who had a heart of gold since she worked the mission racket down on cheap street. He charmed his way into her good graces and she got knee- deep into his plot. Things seem to begin to make sense once Bill got information that dear Katie was shilling for this con artist who was working the international smuggling racket and with a nefarious fence who didn’t care if school kept or not as long as the dough kept rolling in.    

Naturally that Salvation Annie had to be put in danger by Bill’s plan to smoke out this dastardly con man posing as a treasury inspector. But the thing about Salvation Annies is that they don’t wilt so easy and ours doesn’t either. When the deal went down Bill put the rooty-toot-toot to the con man and the fence took some heat from the cops. Our Bill made the 36 hour connection no swear as Annie left him off at the base nice as could be. So you can see no femme like Jane Greer, no smart guy like Eddie Mars with gunsels at his disposal and no dark scenes to make you hope old Bill doesn’t face that hangman’s noose. Now if a fox like Katie had been highlighted well maybe after she led Bill a merry chase we could have had a plotline worth talking about. Sorry Hammer.