Monday, December 23, 2019

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, 2011, Marvel Productions

[Now it is my turn to say WFT, although I could have probably gotten what the initials stood for long before my fellow reviewer on this site long time contributor Phil Larkin decoded the latest shorten terms in modern text-twitter-Internet world. His WTF reason, Phil’s, was that he went here on this site publicly to grouse about having to do another film in this so-far Captain America trilogy rather than what he considered should have been his plum assignment doing a review of his hero actor Humphrey Bogart’s  in one of his lesser later films from the 1950s Deadline-USA. A film about the even then declining (against television) newspaper racket’s struggle for the big story and how to beat off the stiff competition of the other news sources in the big cities.     

Under the new regime, manager Greg Green and the newly instilled Editorial Board, which Phil showed great disrespect for by calling that panel toadies of Greg’s, each writer has the option of airing his or her grievances in the introduction to their articles. With no particular role for either Greg or the board except as something like “gatekeepers” to avoid letting any personal obscure animosities spill into cyberspace. New as I am to this site I have no quarrel with that policy which seems right after what other writers have told me the previous manager Allan Jackson’s never-ending attempts to sweep any writerly controversies under a very deep rug. I have no quarrel either with Phil grousing in public about how he was short-shifted on what he expected to be his assignment. What I do object to and feel a need to mention if only in passing is my “cred” to do the Bogart review.        

Phil seems to believe that if you were not at least alive, as neither I nor my parents were, to have seen the film you are reviewing then that mere fact disqualifies you from reviewing the damn thing. He probably got that idea, an old idea in any case, from his buddy-buddy relationship with Allan Jackson and the coterie of older writers he surrounded himself with until a few years ago. Jackson  seeing the writing on the wall that the older writers were either running out of creative steam or were so hung up on the 1960s when most of them came of age, including Jackson, that they needed younger writers to stop the drainage of younger reader away from the site. While, in general, we younger writers will write material reflecting our coming of age experiences I reject the idea in this specific case that Phil was the only one who could do justice to the Bogart piece.

As I mentioned in my review, and either Phil missed or consciously ignored, I was spoon-fed on Bogie movies as a kid because my parents who met in the 1980s in Ann Arbor were crazy for Bogie (and for the four films with his honey Laruen Bacall especially) after having gone to the campus film department’s periodic retrospectives on the age of black and white films. Later too when they had their version of nostalgic for Bogie they would traipse me along with them to some commercial retro-theater like the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts when they were graduate students. So I will special plead my “cred” on that film. In any case Greg, to placate Phil I guess although that era was supposed to be over with the departure and what some writers have called the exile of Allan Jackson, has assigned me what was supposed to be Phil’s second review in the Captain America trilogy. Truth is I know and care less about that whole Marvel comic book operation than Phil could ever know but being a good sport and also able to feast off of his first review to avoid any heavy lifting I consented. I am, unlike the apparently more paranoid Phil, confident that this introduction will see the light of day. Kenny Jacobs]          

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Phil Larkin in his review of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War made the appropriate point that these basically mutant creations of humankind’s off-beat fantasies who squared off in that film pale in comparison with a guy like hard-boiled no nonsense private eye Phillip Marlowe, sea-worthy Captain Harry Morgan, closet anti-fascist resistance fighter Rick of Rick’s CafĂ© Americian out in the Kasbah, or for that matter unjustly convicted for murder escapee Vincent Parry Bogie. See I am stealing Phil’s stuff already. I won’t deal with the other mutants here since they, except for bad guy Winter Soldier, played by Sebastian Stan and a cameo by youthful inventor Stark aka Ironman, play no role here in The First Avenger saga but this Captain America specimen aka Steve Rogers out of Brooklyn, played by hulky Chris Evans, is a good example of why I shunned such matter when I was a kid. Phil was beautiful in noting that the idea of taking a ninety-eight pound weakling right out of a matchbook cover Charles Atlas “kick sand in your face” advertisement and turning him in 1945, or anytime, in a humanoid monster and then conveniently deep freezing him is kind of a hoot. Filling him up with a ton of what were, are, probably toxics did wonders for his ability to leap, do the 400 meters fast, and collide into people with his trusty shield but left his short on the brains side. Strictly a bronzed beauty-male version in a tight outfit for all the girls, young women, regular women in the theater audience to ogle over.      

Well enough of bursting the bubble and let’s take what we are given for a plotline which Greg Green, the managing editor, now rather irritatingly,  has again insisted that I make sure to outline to give the reader a leg up on what the thing is about. So using the “present at the creation” 1945 motif from the headline let’s get to how this whole mess started when the kid who used to have sand kicked in his face by girls or get his ass whipped by guys got to be on humanity’s short-list of saviors. First off blame it on some screwy doctor who convinces the scrawny weakling to be a trial balloon in one of his experiments to make super-human fighters by the bushel load to fight the bad guys, real bad guys the Nazis and their friends and hangers-on. Bingo he is in although not knowing he was not the first to go into the program. A Frankenstein, who will go by the name Red Skull once he arrives on the scene, is running amok trying to seize some advanced technology which will make him the numero uno bad guy pulling guys like Hitler and Mussolini off their pedestals.

So the quest for the golden fleece, for the fountain of youth, or whatever they are searching for is on. In this case a super-powerful energy source to do the do with Red Skull’s mad scientist colleague’s mad world-controlling inventions. Red Skull has it but not for long as the newly minted Captain America chaffing under the bit doing war bond drives instead of off-handedly saving the world (and creating as Phil noted many more innocent casualties than lowering the count on bad guys). So he moves off dead center and goes mano a mano with Red Skull finally grabbing the valuable energy elixir in a big air fight in which Red Skull comes up with the short end of the stick. Problem is our good Captain is left to guide the plane to safe harbors but can’t avoid crashing into big cities if he does so he “falls on his sword” taking the plane down in the Artic to wake up some seventy years later a stranger in a strange land-New York City. To continue saving a world even wackier than when he wound up in that deep freeze. End of story.


No, not quite, because comic he-man adventures or not there has to be a love interest here his Peggy, a British intelligence agent and all around whizz which naturally fizzles out when duty calls. As well we have a preview of what will come up in future episodes when his high school buddy, Barnes, who is presumed dead, will give his old buddy the masked man more trouble than he could shake a stick at. Yeah, I am with Phil, WTF, yawn.     

Sunday, December 22, 2019

*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party -Origins Of The 1920s Labor Party Policy

Markin comment:

In the introduction to a recent posting that started a series entitled From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) I noted the following that applies to this series on the roots of the American Communist Party as well:

“In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive…..”

I am continuing today in that vane in what I also anticipate will be an on-going series on the early days of the American Communist party from which we who are students of Leon Trotsky trace our roots. Those roots extend from the 1919 until 1929 when those who would go on after being expelled, led by James P. Cannon, to form the Socialist Workers Party which also is part of our heritage. That is not the end of the matter though as the American Communist Party also represented a trend in the 1930s, the Popular front strategic policy, that has bedeviled revolutionaries ever since in one form or another. Those 1930s issues need to be addressed as well.
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Additional comment on this article-Markin

A certain amount of caution is needed in dealing with the Stalinized American Communist Party, as with the Communist International, because the Stalinists, then and now, were more than happy to slander political opponents on their left, and to rewrite history for their own purposes. Hardly a new idea among those who “win” whatever battle they are fighting. But a little bit tough on those of us who are trying to draw the lessons of the past for today’s left-wing militants. This series starts with the reflections of that early Communist leader mentioned above, James P. Cannon, who had his own axes to grind politically, no question. However, as Theodore Draper who wrote the definitive study on the history of the early American Communist Party in two volumes noted, of all the people whom he interviewed for the his books James Cannon was the one that stood out as wanting to remember as truthfully as he could that early history. I will use that statement as the touchstone for using Cannon’s work first. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and the others will get their chance later.
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James P. Cannon
Letters to a Historian
(1954 – 1956)
* * *
These articles from the magazines Fourth International and International Socialist Review are based on letters Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper who was then researching his two-volume series on the history of the US Communist Party

Written: March 1954 to February 1956.
Published: Fourth International, Summer 1954–Spring 1956, & International Socialist Review, Summer 1956–Spring 1957. Source: Original bound volumes of Fourth International and International Socialist Review and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive

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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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Origins of the Labor Party Policy

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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.1, Winter 1956, pp.25-26.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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March 17, 1955

Dear Sir:

I think there is enough evidence to establish beyond dispute that the initiative for a positive attitude toward a prospective labor party in the United States came from Moscow. Just when the decision was first made by the Comintern, and the specific steps taken by the American party in the process of putting the pdlicy into effect, are not so easy to sort out.

My own recollections are far from clear. It had been my impression that the definitive decision of the Comintern on this question was made only at the time of the Fourth Congress at the end of 1922. I think the statement of the Foster-Cannon group, published in the Daily Worker of November 26, 1924 to the effect that the Comintern’s approval was obtained“ mainlyon the strengthof the information supplied to the Comintern by our delegates” – was intended to refer to the discussions in Moscow at the time of the Fourth Congress, and not to an earlier discussion.

It may be that the earlier 1922 American delegation – Bedacht and Katterfeld – discussed the question at the Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in February-March, 1922, and that some sort of directive issued from the discussion. But I have no recollection of it.

I don’t remember the labor party statement issued by the American party in May 1922. Prior to my departure for Moscow about the middle of that month, I have remembered only general talk and general sympathy for the idea “in principle” but no concrete action to implement it. But now that you refresh my memory, I would say you are probably correct in your guess that the meeting of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in February 1922 stimulated the first action by the party.

I recall a conversationon the subject with Lovestone, initiatedby him. By party standards at that time, we were both “right wingers,” looking for all possible openings for the party to break out of its isolation and become a factor in American life. That was probably his reason for approaching me first.

Lovestone said the party should try to get into this CPPA movement some way or other. I was sympathetic to the idea, although it had not occurred to me until he brought it up. I don’t recall anything concrete being done before I left far Moscow. But reconstructing the evolution of the question, it is probably safe to assume that Lovestone continued to press his idea after my departure and that his persistence contributed, first to the affirmative statement on the labor party question published in the Worker, June 24, 1922 and, later, to the decision to send Ruthenberg to the second conference of the CPPA in Cleveland, in December 1922.

In my memory, therefore, Lovestone stands out as the initiator of the first positive proposal to approach this CPPA movement, which led, in a chain of circumstances, to the Chicago Farmer-Labor convention of July 1923, arranged by a collaboration of the Workers Party with the Fitzpatrick leadership of the Chicago Federation of Labor.

* * *
It must be remembered, however, that in the meantime Pepper had become a factor in the affairs of the American CP – and what a factor! – and that he undoubtedly was the driving force in all the labor party experiments and adventures thereafter. When he entered the situation, the production of ideas and decisions was put on a whirling conveyor and things really moved. I recall now that toward the end of 1922, or early in the next year, before he had his feet wet in the country, he wrote a pamphlet on the problem of the labor party in America. The pamphlet was widely distributed in 1923 as an exposition of the party’s position.

I was outside all these developments during my long stay in Moscow, and again for many months on my tour after my return. For that reason, I had no direct part in the decisions, but I was involved in them by a general sympathy with every move in an outward direction, even at the risk of opportunist errors to which, I must admit, I was not very sensitive at that time.

I do not recall that the question of the labor party was a specific issue between the liquidators and the leftists. But the liquidators had a more affirmative tendency to expand party activity and were undoubtedly the initiators of all the concrete moves, even it the leftists did not specifically oppose them. By the middle of 1923 the “Goose Caucus” of the leftists had been demolished and any opposition from its few recalcitrant members wouldn’t have counted for much anyhow.

As far as I know, all the liquidators went along with the various decisions that lead upto the organization of the July 3 convention at Chicago. The differences within their camp became serious, and took definite form, only after the catastrophe of the July 3 affair.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****

James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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After the 1924 Elections

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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.1, Winter 1956, pp.26-27.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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March 22, 1955

Dear Sir:

Here are some brief comments on matter-of-fact questions in your letters of December 21 and February 28, not specifically dealt with in my long letter of March 17.

After the 1924 presidential election, as I recall it, the Ruthenberg faction (still master-minded to a considerable extent by Pepper from Moscow) wanted to continue the old labor party policy as if nothing had happened. We considered the labor party a dead issue for the time being and were opposed to any policy that would lead to the creation of a caricature of a labor party under communist control without any mass base in the trade unions.

In one of my articles in the Daily Worker, in the public party discussion after the November 1924 election, I stated that we were not opposed to the labor party in principle but conditioned our support of the labor party slogan on the existence of a mass sentiment for it in the trade unions. There’s no doubt, however, that we did bend the stick backward in the course of the conflict and that we began to show a decided sectarian trend. I think it fair to say that Bittleman’s influence came into play in this situation more than at any other time. Foster himself was the initiator of the proposal to drop the labor party slogan, on the ground that the movement lacked vitality and that it would be a waste of time and effort to try to build a shadow labor party which in essence would be a mere duplicate of the Communist Party. I repeat, Foster was the initiator of this change of policy; but we all readily agreed with him. The change was accomplished without difficulty in all the leading circles of our faction. As I recall it, there were some objections from the Loreites such as Zimmerman (now a vice-president of the ILGWU).

It was also Foster who initiated the proposal to drop the candidates of the “Farmer-Labor Party” nominated at the St. Paul Convention in June 1924 and to nominate our own party candidates instead. On this we also followed Foster’s lead, and the Ruthenberg group went along without opposition.

In general, the main initiative in determining the policy of our faction, from the time of Foster’s return from the Comintern Plenum of April-May 1924 until the conflict within the faction over the Comintern cable at the 1925 Convention, came from him. I went along in general agreement. But I did not share the sectarian twist which Bittleman and Browder tended to give to the policy, and was careful to emphasize in my writings during the discussion that our opposition to the labor party at the given time was based on the lack of mass sentiment for it and was not put as a question of principle.

I believe Foster tended to go overboard a little bit in the direction of Bittleman’s slant, but this was probably due more to overzealousness in the factional struggle than to real conviction. Foster was no sectarian. While Foster and I were in Moscow in the early part of 1925, Bittleman and Browder were running things in the party, and I remember that we were both quite dissatisfied with the sectarian trend they were manifesting.

I probably had less difficulty in accepting the Comintern decision in favor of a continuation of the labor party policy than Foster did. In retrospect it appears to me now that this decision of the Comintern was dead wrong, as were virtually all of its decisions on the American question thereafter. After the internal struggle broke out in the Russian party, the American party, like all other sections of the Comintern, became a pawn in the Moscow game and Comintern decisions on national questions were no longer made objectively. But that is the wisdom of hindsight. I was a thoroughgoing “Cominternist” in those days and it took me three more years to get the picture straight.

I didn’t know what was really going on in the Comintern, and I can’t recall than I even knew of any differences between Trotsky and Zinoviev on the American question. It may be true that Pepper was in reality Zinoviev’s agent, and that Zinoviev yielded to Trotsky on the LaFollette question to avoid a showdown on an inconvenient issue. Trotsky’s polemics against the Zinovievist policy on the so-called “Peasants’ International,” and the whole business of seeking to build a communist party by maneuvers with petty-bourgeois leaders of peasant movements, later revealed a big controversy around this point.

I did not get a grasp of this dispute until I first saw Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program (published later in America under the title The Third International After Lenin) at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. As I have related in my History of American Trotskyism, I was preoccupied with “our own” American questions at that time and did not know, or even suspect, that the fate of our party was so directly involved in the Russian party struggle.


Lore
I didn’t know Lore very well personally and never had close relations with him, but I always thought he was a very likeable fellow. His tradition was that of the pre-war left Social Democracy. I don’t think he ever felt really at home in the Comintern, or that he ever became an all-out communist in the sense that the rest of us did. Ass I recall it, he interpreted the united front policy of the Comintern favorably as a step toward reconciliation and reunification with the Second International and not as, among other things, a means of struggle against the Social Democrats.

I think his opposition to the “Third Party Alliance” was determined, by his left social-democratic orthodoxy on the question of the peasantry. I don’t know whether he was influenced by Trotsky in his position or whether he knew what stand Trotsky was taking in Moscow on this question. I doubt it.

Lore’s political tendency in general was to the right. In the first stages of the fight in the Russian party, Lore, like some others in Europe, supported Trotsky under the mistaken impression that his opposition represented a revolt against the “leftism” of Zinoviev. Lore’s later evolution showed very clearly that he was no “Trotskyist” in a political sense. Looking back now, there is little doubt that the Comintern blasts against Lore were motivated by his original declaration in favor of Trotsky and not, as alleged, by his policies in American affairs.

I don’t think the LaFollette policy was the only or main reason for Lore’s break with the Ruthenberg-Pepper group and his support of the Foster-Cannon group. He was decidedly anti-Pepper and against “maneuverism” in general. He was also anti-Zinoviev, but whether he considered Pepper Zinoviev’s agent or not, I do not know.

Lore was popular in the party ranks in New York but not decisively influential in a factional showdown. He was a supporter of the Foster-Cannon faction but was never a decisive member of its inner councils. The two strong factions between them completely dominated the parity. This state of affairs confronted Lore and his sub-group with the necessity of making a choice; there was no prospect whatever for his group to contest with the others for party control.

I think his determining reasons for supporting us were that he considered us more American, more proletarian trade-unionist, and therefore more capable of establishing the party as a factor in the real life of the country.


Third Party Convention
The Third Convention (1923) took place before the extensive organization of caucuses of the factions in the party ranks. Probably a majority of the delegates came to the Convention uncommitted. As the delegates straggled into town on the eve of the Convention, both factions worked industriously to secure their allegiance. I suppose I was most active and effective on this front for our faction and Lovestone for the Pepperites.

The general disposition of the majority of the delegates in bur favor, and their dissatisfaction with the Pepper regime, became fairly evident before the formal opening of the Convention. The election of Bittleman as Convention Chairman at the first session, by a decisive majority over the candidate of the Pepper faction, indicated a Convention line-up which was never changed during the subsequent debates.

We made no special efforts to win the support of Lore and the Finnish leaders and offered them no special inducements. That would not have been necessary in any case; they indicated their preference in the first discussions with them before the Convention was formally started.

I recall that they were pleased at the prospect of Foster graduating from his position as trade-union specialist and taking his place as a party leader, and that they strongly objected to Bittleman having a prominent position in the new leadership. In fact, they objected to Bittleman altogether. This was in deference to Olgin and his supporters in the Jewish Federation, who were closely associated with Lore, and who had had plenty of trouble with Bittleman.

Foster was impressed and worried by this opposition to Bittleman. Foster was always ready to dump anybody who was under fire, but I learned of his addiction to this annoying peccadillo only later. At the time, I attributed his concern in this matter to his unfamiliarity with party affairs and party people, and he yielded to my insistence on Bittleman. The Loreites finally accepted Bittleman as a “concession” on their part.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon

*****

James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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The Beginning of the Degeneration

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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.1, Winter 1956, pp.27-29, 35.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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March 31, 1955

Dear Sir:

Fourth Plenum of the Comintern

I did not attend the Fourth Plenum of the Comintern in 1924. We had no report of it except that given by Foster. This was not so much a report on the Plenum as on the decisions on the “American Question.” At least, that’s what we were primarily interested in and that’s all I remember. We had been prepared for the decision against the “Third Party Alliance” by previous letters from Foster as well as by a telegram directly from the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

I don’t recall that anybody in either faction raised any objections to the decision. We were pronounced “Cominternists” at that time and Comintern decisions, especially those on political questions, were accepted as coming from the highest authority and as binding on all. Both sides were far more interested in the question of party control, and what bearing the Moscow decisions might have on that, than in the LaFollette question.

I don’t recall that anybody in the top caucus of our faction got excited about the Comintern’s criticisms of Lore. He had been with us, so to speak, but not of us; we did not feel responsible for him as an all-out member of our faction. It is true that he had supported us in the Convention, but in his daily practice he acted pretty much as a free lance. He had his own little principality in the Volkzeitung, and his own ideas, and he expounded them freely from day to day without consulting us.

We tcok the Comintern’s political criticisms of Lore, like all its other political pronouncements, for good coin and thought it was up to Lore, to straighten himself out with the Comintern. At the same time, it can be safely said that we would have paid no attention to Lore’s “deviations,” and most probably would not have noticed them, if they had not been pounced on in Moscow. I am sure that it did not occur to any of us at the time that the strictures against Lore ware in reality motivated by factional considerations in the struggle against Trotsky in the Russian party and in the Comintern.

* * *
I believe it would be risky to say flatly that “the beginnings of anti-Trotskyism coincide with the beginnings of pro-Stalinism” in the American party – or for that matter, in the Russian party and in the Comintern. That’s the way it worked out, but the process by which Stalin came to complete domination was gradual and insidious, and all the more effective because of that.

I do not recall that we identified Stalin as the leader of the Russian majority in 1924 as much as Zinoviev, who was the Chairman of the Comintern with whom the party had had the most direct dealings.

The opposition of Trotsky had been represented to us as the revolt of a single individual against the “Old Guard” of Lenin who constituted the Central Committee of the Russian party, the official leadership. We knew nothing of any differences within the ruling group at that time. Stalin came fully into prominence in our understanding only after the split between him and Zinoviev, and even then Stalin appeared in alliance with Bukharin, with the latter as Chairman of the Comintern.

It may be that the conflict between Zinoviev and Stalin within the camp of the Russian majority was already being prepared in 1924 and that the Ruthenberg faction, which had Pepper in Moscow as a representative and source of information, knew what was pending better than we did, and were better prepared to jump on the new bandwagon before it started rolling. But even at that, they were not sharp enough to break with Bukharin in time, and this hesitancy cost Lovestone his head in 1929.


Fifth Plenum of the Comintern
I attended the Fifth Plenum of the CI in 1925 together with Foster. Both factions had their delegates in Moscow weeks in advance of the Plenum. Our work there before the Plenum consisted chiefly of an endless round of interviews with various leading people in the Comintern, particularly the Russian leaders, in an attempt to gain their support.

The eventual decision was pretty clearly intimated beforehand. I soon got the chilling impression, and I think Foster did too, that the position of our faction was far weaker in Moscow than at home, and that we couldn’t do anything about it. The other faction had the advantage there. With Pepper as an active representative, busy in the apparatus of the Comintern, the Ruthenberg faction seemed to have the inside track.

Bukharin was particularly outspoken in favor of the Ruthenberg faction and acted like a factional partisan. So also did the leftists then representing the German party, particularly Heinz Neumann. Zinoviev appeared to be more friendly and impartial.

I had the definite impression that he wanted to correct our position on the labor party question without upsetting our majority, to restrain the majority from any suppression of the minority, and in general to slow down the factional struggle. I remember him saying to Foster at the end of one of our talks, in a friendly, persuading tone: “Frieden ist besser.” If I remember correctly, we did not see Stalin and did not know that he was becoming the real power behind the scenes.

* * *
My memory is not too sharp about the details of the negotiations and proceedings that led up to Zinoviev’s original proposal that “the new Central Committee [of the American party] is to be so elected at the Party Conference that the Foster group obtains a majority and the Ruthenberg group is represented proportionally at least by one-third.”

Foster was jubilant about the proposal, but I wasn’t. The idea that the composition of the American party leadership should be arbitrarily fixed in Moscow did not sit well with me, even if we were to be the beneficiaries of the decision at the moment. In arguing with me Foster emphasized the point that it would guarantee our majority control of the party. He was more interested in the bare question of party control than I was at that time, and this difference between us – at first apparently a nuance – grew wider later on.

I was disturbed because I had become convinced in our discussions with the Russians, that we had made a political error in our estimate of the prospects of a labor party in the United States, and I was most concerned that we make a real correction. With inadequate theoretical schooling I was already groping my way to the conception, which later became a governing principle, that a correct political line is more important than any organizational question, including the question of party control.

Looking back on it now, in the light of later developments in the United States, I think the evaluation we had made of labor party prospects in this country, and our proposals for party policy on the question, were far more correct and closer to American reality than those of the Ruthenberg faction. Even the 1925 Comintern decision on the question, which was more restrained and qualified, was away off the beam. But at the time I was convinced by the arguments of the Russians, and perhaps also by the weight of their authority.

There was hardly a trace of a genuine labor party movement in the United States in the ensuing years, and the feverish agitation of the party around the question, based on the Comintern decision came to nothing. This was tacitly recognized in 1928 when the party again nominated its own independent candidates for President and Vice President and relegated the labor party to a mere slogan of propaganda.


The “Parity Commission” of 1924
The decision of the Comintern to set up a Parity Commission to arrange the Fourth Convention of our party, with Gusev, a Russian, as chairman, was manifestly a decision against us, for in effect it robbed us of our rights as an elected majority. I do not think Zinoviev was the author of this decision; it was far different from his original proposal. His acceptance of the parity commission formula manifestly represented a change on his part, and probably a compromise with others who wanted to give open support to the Ruthenberg faction.

After the arrival of Gusev and the setting up of the Parity Commission – Foster, Bittleman and Cannon for our faction, Ruthenberg, Lovestone and Bedacht for the other side – the elected Central Committee and its Political Committee, as such, virtually ceased to exist. All question’s of party policy, organization matters, convention preparations and everything else were decided by the Parity Commission, with Gusev casting the deciding vote in case of any disagreements.

Within that strict framework the struggle for Convention delegates proceeded furiously. Gusev proclaimed a strict neutrality, but he gave us the worst of it whenever he could do so neatly and plausibly. The fact that under such conditions we gained a majority of 40 to 21 at the Convention, is the most convincing evidence, I think, of the real will of the party members to support our majority and to reject the Ruthenberg group, which should more properly be called the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group, with the latter playing an increasingly important role in the struggle.

I think the beginning of the degeneration of the internal life of the party, from conflicts of clearly defined political tendencies, which had characterized all the previous factional fights since the beginning of the movement in 1918, into an increasingly unprincipled struggle of factional gangs, can be traced to the year 1925.

As far as political issues were concerned, the situation in the party, in the period of preparation for the Fourth Convention, could be approximately described as follows: Both sides had accepted the Comintern decision on the labor party, which had favored the Ruthenberg position with some important modifications. The trade union policy of Foster had been accepted by the Ruthenbergites. From a political point of view there really wasn’t much to fight about. This was shown most convincingly by the circumstance that the Parity Commission agreed unanimously on both the political and trade union resolutions, the former written for the greater part by Bittleman and the latter by Foster.

The party members had only one set of resolutions before them, and they accepted them unanimously all up and down the party. Normally, such unanimity should have called for a moderation of the factional atmosphere, a trend toward the unification of the contending groups in the leadership, and toward the liquidation of the factions. But that’s not the way things went. The factional struggle raged more fiercely than ever before in the history of the party – over the issue of party control.

The debate over political issues, insofar as there was such a debate, could deal only with nuances and factional exaggerations. There was not much for the party members to learn in that kind of a fight, and not much satisfaction in at for conscientious communists who hadn’t forgotten the great ideal they had started out to serve. I believe I already began to feel at that time that we were all caught in a trap; and that the only sensible thing to do was to look forward to a liquidation of the factional gangs and an agreement of the leading people to work together in a united leadership.

But the task in hand at the time was to secure a majority for our faction in the Convention, and I worked at that as earnestly as anyone else. We won a two to one majority in the fight for delegates on a strict basis of proportional representation. But it didn’t do us any good.


The “Cable from Moscow”
As the drawn-out Fourth Convention in the summer of 1925 was nearing its end, Gusev called us to a meeting of the Parity Commission to hand us the famous “cable from Moscow.” This cable stated that “the Ruthenberg group is more loyal to the Communist International and stands closer to its views,” and prescribed that the Ruthenberg group should be allotted not less than 40 per cent of the representatives in the new Central Committee. That was a sudden blow for which we were in no way prepared, a blow calculated to put one’s confidence in the Comintern to a rather severe test.

My immediate reaction was to wait, to say nothing there at the session of the Parity Commission. As I recall, Bittleman also kept silent. But Foster exploded with a statement that he would not accept the majority under such conditions, that the Ruthenberg group should take over the majority of the new Central Committee, and that he personally would not accept membership. I decided immediately to oppose such an attitude but did not say it there. I think it was on my proposal that we adjourned the meeting to report the cable to the majority caucus of the Convention delegates who were assembled and waiting for us.

This was the one time that Foster, Bittleman and I went straight into a caucus meeting without prior consultation and agreement among ourselves as to what we would recommend. I don’t know why we skipped this customary procedure, but that’s the way it happened. Foster seemed bent on taking his defiance directly to the caucus and I was no less determined to oppose it.

He had no sooner reported the cable to the caucus and announced his decision to let the Ruthenbergites have the majority in the Central Committee, to which he would not belong, than I took the floor with a counter-proposal that we lock up the new Central Committee on a 50-50 basis, with each faction sharing equally in the responsibility in the leadership.

Dunne supported my position, Bittleman and Browder supported Foster. Abern and Schachtman spoke for my proposal. Johnstone and Krumbein spoke for Foster’s. One by one, as the ominous debate proceeded, the leading people from all parts of the country took positions, and the split of our faction right down the middle began.

* * *
It is an effort to describe this stormy conflict in tranquillity thirty years afterward, without the embellishment of hindsight wisdom; to report it as it really happened, what we did with what we knew and didn’t know and with the sentiments which actuated us at the time.

As I have remarked previously, I was then a convinced “Cominternist.” I had faith in the wisdom and also in the fairness of the Russian leaders. I thought they had make a mistake through false information and that the mistake could later be rectified. I did not even suspect that this monstrous violation of the democratic rights of our party was one of the moves in the Moscow chess game, in which our party, like all the other parties in the Comintern, was to be a mere pawn.

I thought Foster’s attitude was disloyal; that his ostensible willingness to hand over the majority to the Ruthenbergites, and to withdraw from the Central Committee himself, was in reality designed to provoke a revolt of our faction against the Comintern. Foster made the dispute between us a question of confidence in himself personally, as the leader of the faction. This hurt him more than it helped him, for the communist militants in those days were not the regimented lackeys of a later day. There was outspoken resentment at Foster’s attempt to invoke the “follow the leader” principle.

I felt that I was fighting for the allegiance of the party to the Comintern, and I think the majority of the delegates who supported my motion were actuated by the same sentiment. The final vote in favor of my motion, after an all-night-and-next-day debate, not only ended Foster’s revolt against the Comintern – and I repeat my conviction that that was the real meaning of his proposal to “step aside.” It also ended all prospects of his ever realizing his aspiration to rule the American party with a group of subordinates who would support him out of personal loyalty and serve in an advisory capacity, something like a presidential “cabinet,” but leave final decisions to him.

* * *
I had thought that the adoption of my motion for a 50-50 Central Committee would stalemate the factional struggle, make each faction equally responsible for the leadership, and compel them to work together until the situation could be worked out with the Comintern. I was not permitted to nurse that childish illusion very long.

When we went to the first meeting of the new 50-50 Central Committee, the Machiavellian Gusev made another contribution to what might be called “The Education of a Young Man” who had a lot to learn about the ways of the Comintern in the post-Lenin era. Gusev blandly announced that while the agreement was for a parity Central Committee he, as Chairman, would feel obliged to follow the spirit of the Comintern decision and support the Ruthenberg group.

That meant, he said, that the Ruthenberg faction should have a majority in the Political Committee and in other party bodies and institutions. So it turned out that Foster’s caucus proposal to hand over the majority to the Ruthenbergites was actually carried out in practice, and my proposal to freeze the committee on a parity basis was deftly frustrated by Gusev.

If I admit that I went along with this treacherous double-play and still refused to have any part in any revolt against the Comintern, it is not to claim any credit for myself. I write down this distasteful recollection now simply to show that devotion to the Comintern, which had originally been one of the greatest merits of the pioneer communists, was being turned into a sickness which called for a radical cure.

That sickness, on my part, hung on for three more years and affected everything I did in the party. It was not until 1928 that I took the cure, but with the help of Trotsky, I took it then for good and all.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind




By Sam Lowell 

Recently I did a review of Bob Dylan’s CD, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley Frank Sinatra. (No, not as part of the never-ending and getting weird for material bootleg series which I believe is up to volume thirteen or some such number with outtakes and such overriding any real music certainly nothing that hasn’t been done better on the long list of classic album CDs like Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home) I noted that such an effort was bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins’ and so on. That proposition though seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he with Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, whether he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.

What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. Just like Frank when he was in high tide. What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back with him doing Hank Williams’ Lost Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes with everything for Williams to Johnny Cash to some old stuff he must have heard coming up in growing up Hibbing, Minnesota). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now his hero is Frank Sinatra as well.


I may long for the old protest songs, the songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank, Tex-Mex, the Carters, the odd and unusual like Desolation Row or his cover of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (it was always about the lyrics not the voice although by comparison that young voice seems not to bad if not always on key) I do wonder though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards.” What goes around comes around.             

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind




By Sam Lowell 

Recently I did a review of Bob Dylan’s CD, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley Frank Sinatra. (No, not as part of the never-ending and getting weird for material bootleg series which I believe is up to volume thirteen or some such number with outtakes and such overriding any real music certainly nothing that hasn’t been done better on the long list of classic album CDs like Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home) I noted that such an effort was bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins’ and so on. That proposition though seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he with Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, whether he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.

What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. Just like Frank when he was in high tide. What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back with him doing Hank Williams’ Lost Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes with everything for Williams to Johnny Cash to some old stuff he must have heard coming up in growing up Hibbing, Minnesota). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now his hero is Frank Sinatra as well.


I may long for the old protest songs, the songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank, Tex-Mex, the Carters, the odd and unusual like Desolation Row or his cover of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (it was always about the lyrics not the voice although by comparison that young voice seems not to bad if not always on key) I do wonder though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards.” What goes around comes around.             

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Captain America: Civil War, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johannsson, 2016

[WTF and anybody who is ready this freaking review will know exactly what I am saying and not worry about the kids, since kids don’t come anywhere near this site because they are way too busy texting each other or doing some unearthly social media vamping. Yes, WTF am I, a guy who has shaded three score and ten doing reviewing a Marvel Comic film production about some silly guy who had been frozen since about 1945 and ever since being defrosted has been running his ass off (remember it is okay-no kids will see this) trying to save every American city that he can from various evil parties, parties from a place which bear a striking affinity to the late USSR, the Soviet Union today’s just plan Russia-and Crimea. And now in a brawl with other super-heroes over turf and policy Yeah, what the hell. 

Here is my take and it burns me up because a film that I should have naturally reviewed, Deadline-USA, a late effort by legendary actor Humphrey Bogart which while not his best or most classic work (Casablanca, To Have And Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo are in my book) should have been mine by right. I, who spent many a Saturday afternoon double film matinee with one stretched out bag of popcorn in the second-run Strand Theater in North Adamsville about forty miles south of Boston watching and many times more than once to get out of the chaotic household I grew in at least am old enough to have seen the films before the dust settle on them. Unlike the kid, the young man, this Jacobs kid, who new site manager Greg Green had assigned to do the review, his first, and who came right out and said that he went to the re-run theaters in Michigan with his parents, his parents for God’s sake, when he was nothing but a kid, Didn’t even understand half of what was going on. 
   
No. This coup has all the earmarks of new site manager Greg Green’s work although I am sure he will deny this simple truth as will this new toady Editorial Board who has bowed to his every wish getting even with me for supporting one hundred per cent, and still supporting, the recently deposed long-time site manager and a childhood friend Allan Jackson. I don’t expect this comment to see the light of day. Probably I will be pieced off with one of those not enough space excuses and told I can have it to introduce my next article when again space limitations will be cited and I will be pieced off until infinity or the end days come around. Bullshit (don’t worry even a stray curious kid has long ago stopped reading this screed as some meanderings of an old three score and ten guy if they know how much that is and that is not a given). But onto the review. Phil Larkin] 

Frank Jackman who writes here now on anything as per the new so-called Editorial Board rule but who used to be the senior political commentator under Jackson and a good one has spent most of the last year proclaiming to everybody who will listen or read that we are in the age of Trump in a cold civil war situation for real. And there is plenty if not definitive proof of that escalating this year rather than as Trump publicity hounds would have it become a dead issue. Compare that real not “fake” storyline with the stuff that this film is throwing your way as Captain America yet again bounces of buildings and people with maybe a scratch or two since they took him out to defrost a few years back comes firing at you (having been in deep freeze since 1945 if you can believe that therefore unlike three score and ten me looking like about twenty-five or whatever graphic the studios are shooting for).   

That said and I hope you can hold your ability to suspend your disbelief long enough for me to give you what my old friend Sam Lowell calls the “skinny” here  (a guy who nevertheless stabbed his old friend Alan in the back by voting with the kids to send him packing).  I will grant no question the super-hero grift is a tough racket. Even with a motley of those with some specialized skills like speed, iron, being good with a bow and arrow, spidery, flame-throwers, robotic, double- flip artists who have the ability to fend off the bad guys they are too few in number to keep the world save from the creeps for long. Moreover for every action they, these so-called avengers, take against the creeps, usually not many at least in the leading cadre  there is “collateral damage” as they say, innocents by the scores, hundred, thousands,  get wasted through no fault of their own.

The question becomes, ever for those running kinds who make up the avenger herd, a moral one. Against cutting off a few bad guys who will just be replaced by another crop how many innocents must die. That is the premise behind the duel to the death here not only against the bad guys but with a falling out among the good guys when push comes to shove between the immoral rogues and the guilty accommodators. And it will be push come to shove when the various super-heroes pick up sides. Those who are willing to come under some international control commission to become essentially a super elite special forces operation working under instructions and those who want to roam free and kill whatever they can and let the devil take the hinter-post.       

Leading the rogue element, the don’t give a fuck about casualties, is this former ninety-eight pound weakling out of an old matchbook Charles Atlas kick sand in your face advertisement who gets boosted up like crazy so he can run, fight and bounce off walls is the aforementioned Captain America played by bean-head Chris Evans. This is the third film in the series so we already know his bio-and his trail of destruction. He can do everything but think beyond the killing fields he has created. Leading the civilized avengers, a brainy guy who can actually think before he acts Stark aka Ironman, played by Robert Downey, Jr. who is, catching on about that collateral damage outweighs whatever bad guys get wasted argument, willing to take himself and some others into that elite unit under international control. That is how the good guys divide up and since they all have checkered pasts the line-up splits down the middle. Of course the joker is the bad guys led by the totally berserk Winter Solider, played by Sebastian Stan, who is really an old buddy of the Captain’s who has been brain-washed by the Russians to do their dirty work. A little Cold War I scenario familiar from Le Carre novels and James Bond films.      


So the so-called tensions between the two factions mount especially when Winter Soldier allegedly blows an international conference building to smithereens with heavy causalitie. Wrong fall guy as it turned out and when he is captured miraculously he goes over the Captain’s side just like the old days once he is out of range of his handlers and their nefarious skills. But there are still those government toady avengers to deal with and so the two sides go mano a mano until, well, until it is discovered that some over-the top nefarious fourth party, a Doctor Zemo has been manipulating the whole controversy for his own sense of revenge. So all the old gang get back together after waylaying each other in such a manner that mere mortals would have gone beyond the pale long ago-or held some serious long-standing grudges. Yeah, now you know why I said WTF. Give me a hard-boiled rough-edged private detective, a salty sea captain ready to do his bit for the cause, ditto a nightclub/cafĂ© owner in the Kasbah, or another private detective who sends a gun-simple femme fatale over for the big step-off Bogie just regular anti-hero any day.        

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-On The 60th Anniversary Of Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl”Writer’s Corner- Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums” Hold Forth- A 40th Anniversary Re-Reading

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums".

Book Review

The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac, Viking, New York, 1958


Let me set the scenario. I first read Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums” in 1970 after racing though in one sitting his classic “beat” anthem, “On The Road”. I have read that novel many times since then, including a recent reading last fall to mark the 40th anniversary of his death. That physical and spiritual road "wanderlust" story affected me and my generation in more ways that it is necessary to mention here. As the headline notes, “Dharma Bums” has been gathering dust on the shelf lo these many years. Why the different response?

The difference is this. “Road” , its madcap wanderings, its setting its sights toward the expansive American West, any distance west as far as that goes,, its characters in search of some elusive meaning to life. Or maybe no meaning and the best bet is to hang out existentially hit nerve that many, including me, could relate to. In “Dharma” Jack and his madcap friends of this period (late 1950s) are already in the West and as a quick look at the map will show, you have to stop. Stop, at least physically if you want to stay in the continental United States. And that is where Jack, his spiritual search for his version of the meaning of existence, and I part company. Not because his search was worthless, but because that was not the type search that I needed to go on, then or now. Still, on those pages where he lets go and comes close to his vision of truth, he makes me wish that I could have gone with him, part of the way at least. I’ll put the difference in shorthand though. I relate to Jack's cruising off of Dean Moriarty’s hyper-energetic quest better than off of Japhy Ryder’s search for Zen balance.

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-From Some People Who Know About Endless Wars

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of  ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-From Some People Who Know About Endless Wars

Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review

Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review   




DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Deadline-USA, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, directed by Richard Brooks, 1952 

I am thrilled to be doing my first review, first film review, in this space of a film, Deadline-USA, starring Humphry Bogart an actor whom my parents would forever be quoting lines from one of his films like “Play it again, Sam,” “We will always have Paris” stuff like that since they had “discovered” him at a second-run artsy theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they met and went to school back in the 1980s. Of course Bogie (and his sweetie wife Lauren Bacall) was, is a legend, somebody to watch go through his paces whatever your age. Whenever they got nostalgic for their youth my parents would find some re-run retrospective theater and they would take me in tow to see things like The Big Sleep (which would make me hungry later for everything crime detective novelist Raymond Chandler ever wrote), Dark Passage (a film I never understood what with the face change and all in some back alley with a doctor who looked and acted more like a barber), and To Have And Have Not (where he and Bacall steam up the screen with some of the sexiest stuff with clothes on you will ever see but that observation was not made until much later-post puberty later having seen the film a few more times). Although Deadline is nowhere in the same category as the aforementioned films it nevertheless has a plotline about the fate of the modern newspaper business and freedom of the press that interests me.    

Now freedom of the press as my father, Lester, an editor of the famous These Times when he was in college said the best lesson he ever learned about press freedom  was given to him by an old English professor who had been through the red scare of the 1950s (the time frame of this film although none of those press self-censorship and acting on governmental directives issues were addressed by this film), had been something of a radical and had suffered the fate of plenty of people in those day not being able to find work in newspapers. That professor, I forget his name, told my father that freedom of the press was important to those who owned the presses the rest of us want to defend the freedom of expression part wherever we land. For a long time I thought that myself but this film brought out something else that professor had not mentioned and that was the death of the presses was the death of democracy. Although non-linear social and commercial on-line media is now a primary and growing place for people to get their news and that has dramatically portended the ellipse of the hard-copy versions that point is still worth thinking through.          

Some film critic when I was doing background for this piece, Roger Evans from the American Film Gazette I think, has called Deadline the best film about the inner workings of the hard copy newsprint industry ever made. Maybe he is right although every filmed newspaper story, and that includes sent-ups of front page sensationalism like The Front Page, serious investigative journalism like the Watergate expose All The President’s Men, and the recent The Post about the fight to publish Daniel Ellsberg’s The Pentagon Papers has extolled the notion of the big story which motivates the newsrooms and makes careers driving the plotline to culmination. Deadline is no different in that regard and so maybe that critical remark should be the beginning of further research rather than the last word on this film.

Greg Green, the site manager here, knowing this is my maiden effort has asked me especially when reviewing older films, in this case a film when I wasn’t even born and my parents weren’t  either to give a few details about the film. This is truer still of Deadline which in the great Bogie list of film credits had almost disappeared from sight until last year when it was released on Blu-Ray. A little against type considering such roles as the hard-boiled private detective Phillip Marlowe, the old salt Captain Harry Morgan and the framed-up escaped con Victor Parry Bogie plays the idealistic, if heavy-handed, crusading editor, Hutchison, of a major daily newspaper in what is New York City in the days when there were many newspaper for every taste and readership competing dog eat dog for the public’s acceptance. As stated in one of the dialogues between Hutchison and the hard-pressed owner, played by Ethel Barrymore, he was all newspaperman and would have as she said “married the paper if it had legs” (which is true since he was estranged from his actual wife until late in the film).    
      



That hard-pressed publisher had trouble keeping up with what was needed and so a lot of the story revolves around that aspect of the business and her decision to sell the paper which would be sold to parties who would close it down tight. The other big part, the part that sells newspapers by drawing the public to the headlines created is “the big story.” Here the big story is not the red scare effects like I mentioned above or the world going to hell in a hand-basket but your “bread and butter” crime and corruption story. The crime. A young woman who turns out to be connected to a known mobster, a bad guy to mess with, is found murdered after she would not reveal where the money he had given her to hold to pay off some crooked politicians in her apartment. Hutchison sends out his investigative reporters to sniff around. They make the connections, dot the i’s and cross the t’s and come up with a big story connecting that mobster to the murder and the corruption. That despite all kinds of threats against hard guy Hutchison by him who keeps spouting Fourth of July picnic oratory about the beauties and hard-fought struggles to keep that free press intact against all the pressures to fold up shop and run. A story that seemed very appropriate today what with all the talk about the press being “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Yeah, very much a film for these times.            

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries The Preference Polls Unfurled-Maybe


Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries The Preference Polls Unfurled-Maybe

By Sam Lowell

Recently in a quick sketch after reading a crime novel by the late Robert B. Parker which was a fictionalized account of legendary black baseball player Jackie Robinson’s 1940s breaking in the Major Leagues I noted that as a kid I was crazy to crunch numbers, and still am. That despite the fact, unlike Parker apparently and Lowell’s own Beat maven Jack Kerouac, that I did not wile away my hours pouring over baseball stats like RBIs, averages, ERAs. I even admitted to the cardinal sin of 1950s childhood of not going deeply overboard in charting the amazing Mickey Mantle of the New Yrok Yankees. Still I liked the number crunches.       

Fast forward to 2019. I along with a coterie of my old political comrades have taken a very big leap forward in attempting to stem the rot of the age of Trump by supporting a candidate, in this case Senator Sanders from Vermont, for the Democratic Party nomination against Trump next year. Once we had made our decision back in January it was natural for me to be assigned the number crunching task extraordinaire of following and analyzing the preference polls. I will have to say I was amazed at the number of polls that are out there as if each news agency or polling outfit could not trust any other source but their own to give their spin on the numbers. In the old days a few organizations such as Gallup and Harris would do the bulk of the work and that would be that. Now there is literally a whole cottage industry doing this kind of work. Nate Silver over at “538” actually ranks poll reliability among his other chores.     

Here is the funny part, the part where old-time polling meets new technology. Almost every poll contains a caveat warning that their numbers only reflect “a moment in time” during the campaign season. Nice, right. The beauty of having had a large field for the Democratic Party nomination is that a whole layer of candidates are bunched together within, get this, the margin of error, meaning something like a four to five point swing which could mean anything for any candidate.

Here something equally as funny the gaps between the numbers of the two dozen or so authoritative polls is unbelievable wide and frankly baffling considering they all are assumed to use some scientific random processing to get results. Frank Jackman made me laugh one day when he mentioned that based on some of the polling numbers whether maybe the pollers just went out on the street and ask opinions of passers-by. Or use an old dodge like land lines as the source. In any case for now at least I take these beautiful numbers as “moments in time” and we shall see what flushes out as the process goes forward. Enough for now.       


Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-On The 60th Anniversary Of Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl”Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "America"-" ... When Will You Be Worthy of Your Million Trotskyites?"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube" film clip of Allen Ginsberg reciting "America". Thank you, Internet technology.

Markin comment:

Every once in a while I need to read (or, now, listen to) Allen Ginsberg's poem, "America". Especially the line quoted in the headline- "When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?". His numbers were off a little (alright way off)but the idea behind that number still stands. Forward


America
Allen Ginsberg


America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band





As told to Alex Radley


Who knows how it happened maybe somebody in the band looked up some songs in the album archives, or found some gem in some record store, an institution now on the ropes what with Amazon and every other on-line music site to tear into the very marginal profits of record store brick and mortar operations, that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and you could find some gems if you searched long enough. That is where Si Lannon found Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something by Miss Patti Page or Tennessee Ernie Ford stared you in the face and you got pissed off that those selections were even in a record store). From there they found, maybe Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, saw they could prosper going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, and that was that.

See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand. And that search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence, from Si Lannon in this case, having grown up with rock and roll and restless for something new, found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music and found some grizzled old geezers who had made a small name for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.


So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin and Cole Porter got a hearing), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area. (That Bay Area a few years later a hub for all kinds of rock but also saved space for the Kweskin Band as a number of poster art concerts now considered high art would testify even in that Summer of Love craze, maybe because of it.)  And for a while they did, picking up chimes, kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even standard guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night out in the hinterlands. Yeah, in the beginning was the jug…