This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
From The Marxist Archives-In Honor Of Martin Luther And The Protestant Reformation (1517)- "Historical Materialism and the Protestant Reformation"
Workers Vanguard No. 1123
1 December 2017
TROTSKY
LENIN
Historical Materialism and the Protestant Reformation
(Quote of the Week)
October 31 marked the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses criticizing the Roman Catholic church to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. Friedrich Engels explained that behind the cloak of religious ideology lay a clash of class interests between the rising bourgeoisie and the decaying feudal order that was more starkly shown in the 17th-century English Revolution led by Oliver Cromwell.
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalised Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, full one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organisation, had to be destroyed....
The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature: first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants’ War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns—an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-East Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith—the value of gold and silver—began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory.
—Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
“The Last Of The Beats”- Frank Jackman’s In Search Of Todo el Mundo-A Critical Review Book Review by Professor V.E. Grant, Chair, Creative Writing Workshop-University of Wisconsin-Racine In Search Of Todo el Mundo, Frank Jackman, Black Dog Press, Boston, 2014 In Search ofTodo el Mundo (hereafter Todo) is Mr. Frank Jackman’s first longer work since he received some acclaim several years ago for his compilation, Ancient dreams, Dreamed, including from this reviewer who saw in that effort a turning away from his earlier, there is no other way to put it, self-indulgent jabs at the world in his prior short story compilations. More than that move away from self-indulgence though was a turn toward a, for a lack of a better expression, more karmic sense of the universe, a more spirited work which broke some new ground in reflecting on the condition of humankind in the last third of the 20th century among those who had come of age in the generation before mine, what he called the generation of ’68, those who came of age in the 1950s post-World War II baby boom. A generation whose reflections we will be inundated with as that generation takes stock of itself and its follies now that it will have more time on its hands and access to more self-publishing outlets. [The good professor has hit the nail on the head since over the past couple of years during my tenure first as day to day operations manager and now has site manager the number one kind of works, generally unsolicited, seeking publication, are from that very demographic finding time apparently to take infinite “nostalgia” trips back to those times, those 1960s when as one of the prospective writers put it quoting early Wordsworth-“to be young was very heaven.” Since any publication can only bear the weight of some many pieces of a similar kind most ate rejected, including the piece that had the Wordsworth quote. Greg Green] Unfortunately, Mr. Jackman has reverted back to that former incessant self-indulgence in this short tale of his addictions, mainly but not exclusively drugs, back in the 1980s when he went to Todo on the Central California coast in a failed bid to “dry out” thinly veiled and explored through his main character, Josh Breslin, in this short work. (A work which he has called a sketch, although it reads more like a short novella and probably could have been judiciously trimmed to a longish short story). Perhaps it is the distaste that I have for the current seemingly endless wave of post-addiction cautionary tales that the reading public favors if the best-seller charts are any indication which has colored my take on the work but this one that could have been left in Mr. Jackman bottom drawer until he had some other trimmed short stories with which to surround it. [The good professor has also, perhaps accidentally, hit upon another aspect of that nostalgia business mentioned in the bracketed comments above which is driving many, many of those still standing and coherent, of the confessional tales being submitted of late. Centrally concerning their own over the top drug experiences back when, according to Si Lannon, you couldn’t go into a room in most young adult apartments and communes without grabbing a big whiff of second-hand marijuana smoke. Later or current problems with addictions are not discussed, or hopefully have been overcome or at least suppressed. G.G.] The eminent cultural critic, Stanley White, a man who has imparted many very important insights about the writers of the so-called “beat” generation which surfaced in the 1950s and to avoid any additional generation-naming Mr. Jackman’s subsequent “generation of ’68” put the problem, put my problem with the book, in perspective when he wrote in the introduction the following: “It is always hard to fathom at this remove, a remove now of well over fifty years, what effect writers and poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs and the lesser lights associated with publicizing that cultural phenomenon, known collectively as the “beat” generation (Jack’s coined word meaning beaten down, beaten around, from hunger beat, from unsated wanting habits beat, from Zen-like karma angel-dream beatitude beat all meshed in one and hence all misunderstood by a rush to judgment world) had on the subsequent generations other than the obvious romance of the road that most young people associate with that term. And hard as well to fathom the effect characters created by and lives led by the beats such as attractive-repulsive fugitive figures like William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, his various wives and mistresses, and the winos and wistfuls who populated the Route 66, or whatever route, roads and the way that mass culture was shaped for a period by such personalities. In a sense the answer to that question will determine whether this nifty little work by Frank Jackman will have a shelf-life or will be submerged by an onslaught of more pressing and expressive post-modern literary movements.” I had asked that very question myself long ago about those who influenced my own youth, a youth influenced by those writers two generations before mine, the hard shell, no nonsense razor-like writings of Ernest Hemingway in his best novels and short stories, the flight of metaphoric language by F. Scott Fitzgerald, all bow down before Jay Gatsby, in describing the ebb and flow of the Jazz Age, the rugged cross adventures portrayed by John Steinbeck in his classic tales of American uprooted-ness The Grapes Of Wrath and down in the depths skid row Cannery Row, and, of course, Thomas Wolfe and his sagas of a nation turning in on itself and which came up short of the promised land once that damn frontier stopped at Western ocean’s edge. I grew up not doubting in the least the influence those writers exercised on me including my exercise books filled with little pieces “cribbed” from their handsome books. But Ialso had an uneasy feeling then that Mr. Jackman must have had when he wanted to extend the life of the beat generation beyond its “sell by” date. I found that it was not accidental, if somewhat mystifying, that he fashioned himself in Todo (through that main and only non-stick character Josh Breslin the other characters being mere foils for his jabs) as he put it in in one of his earlier short sketches “the last of the beats,” much as I had in my youth fancied myself as the “lasts of the modernist realist school writers” (although unlike Mr. Jackman I never made that declaration in any published work putting such words in the mouth of some character that I created in order for future doctoral students to be able to titter at and to make erudite remarks and endless footnotes about what I was referring to). Such are our vanities, and our debts. But in the writer’s world there is a need to move on and not keep on re-packaging the same old material which in the end is what Mr. Jackman had left us with, faded beat-ery. Faded beat-ery owning a huge debt to Jack Kerouac’s lightweight alcohol addiction book, Big Sur. I often wondered about the purpose of that incessant sameness, that incessant re-packaging of some small beat ideas while reading this work and had been surprised when I read in Literary Age that Mr. Jackman had said in an interview that to be candid he thought the “beats” had become “old-fashioned” by the time he began to appreciate their virtuous writings. Join the club brother, join the club but why the continual re-hash and the failure to move on if you had enough insight to know that these days nothing but nostalgia publications and workshops lean on the major “beats” works, and less so the other lesser lights. (Although I do not intend this remark to bolster my argument very rarely these days does the writing institute I am associated with and other workshops with which I am familiar accept applicants who claim their muse is say Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs unless they have some stronger credentials, very much stronger credentials, going for them.) That tension between the “old-fashioned” beat epiphany and the jail break- out that their writings represented to those who came of age in the post-World War II period is more than evident in this work, this admittedly Mr. Jackman’s most ambitious work to date that pays at least fleeting homage to the beats who enchanted his youth. One can see almost from the first pages that he is satisfied with some vapid post-beat anthologizing, some pallid re-rerun of the Kerouac/Cassady/Ginsberg/Burroughs gas-fueled, pedal- floored, thumb-stuck out bologna sandwich, coffee and bennies run across cultural America in the immediate post-World War II period. Strangely satisfied to my mind for the simple reason that he was not formed by the Great Depression and the sloughing through World War II that formed the pool for their social facts, formed their generation, and the same hard fact that had precluded me from totally understanding what drove those writers two generations before me like Hemingway to prostration and Fitzgerald to the bottle in the aftermath of the glow of the gilded Jazz Age back in the 1920s. Frankly though I have felt more alienated from the beats, mainly from their manic antics, and from their fudgy flinging of language as the be all and end all of literary life at the expense of coherent narrative, who were in the cohort a generation before mine than the Jazz Age writers since I had worked the more traditional avenues of writerliness in the 1980s being much closer to the “other” 1950s New York writers like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jim Jones, and Bill Styron. And I feel that same sensation, that same sense of off-key alienation from the direct heat of the beats in Mr. Jackman’s efforts. For one thing his sketch has more interior dialogue than anything the explosive self-publicizing beats ever tried to do. Of course addiction writing, either under a powerful opiate like that which sustained old Sam Coleridge searching for some modern Xanadu or post-addiction writing which is in favor in this confessional age complete with a happy ending and plenty of cautionary tale which actually withers into the maudlin has a long and cherished history so that Mr. Jackman has tapped into a well-versed literary genre. With this difference that he offers this short sketch from the perspective of some thirty years after the events and sensations described in the narrative so his claim to some studied spontaneity which was a hallmark of the beats runs dry. He, on the facts known to me about his life from his biographical information, was not looking for any particular Xanadu (on the contrary he was just looking for his next eight-ball), and he emphatically was not providing us with some cautionary tale. So while Mr. Jackman owes much to the “beat” rhythm, the “beat” pacing of the drama he has failed to move on past that, tellingly, as he told a reporter for the Boston Globe once in a review of his beat-etched short stories he did not believe that he was breaking new ground, was not doing an exercise in spontaneous writing (which he did not believe was either possible or a good thing since every writer likes to tinker with what he or she has written and if they did not then the damn editors and copyists would when they grabbed hold of any manuscript). But enough of searching Searching For Todo el Mundo for its niche in the literary pantheon because what is good, what is exquisite if I may use that old-fashioned word, what is essential in the sketch although it cannot save it is that shift of voice and person that floats through the eighty some pages. Use of such literary devices has not been unheard of but they are rarely used now especially in a short piece where it is hard enough to develop a character and a narrative never mind switching up voice and person. Yet the piece would disastrously fall apart if there were no such shifts. Mr. Jackman in an interview with Jerry Gomes of radio station WMEX mentioned that he had originally tried to tell this story strictly from the vantage point of the main character Josh’s experience in the 1980s when he went to Jack K.s cabin in the canyon at Todo el Mundo to dry out from his rather severe addiction to cocaine, nose candy he called it then, although there are a plethora of names out in the junkie world for it that the reader may be more familiar with. He told Mr. Gomes that he was unsuccessful in that effort since he did not have the advantage of writing the sketch under the influence of drugs and that his remembrances of the events back then needed to be fortified by the introduction of Josh’s (his) friend Sam Lowell’s recollections. At first reading I thought that having Sam introduce the drug problem, put the problem in the distant past only to be dragged up again in later years after they had reconnected with each other would work. When I started reading though, once I got past the first pages where Sam set the story up, basically from the point where Josh in all his desperate struggles to get through from one day to the next takes over the story line there is a sense of incompleteness, a falling off of the power of the sketch to convey that sense of isolation, physical, mental, and social that was driving Josh crazy back then and which made it a very close thing that he would ever survive the experience if Sam had not set us up for what was to follow. Although I was glad that Josh in the end grabbed that rainy day ride out of the canyon I felt empty of any emotion that he did not get the “cure” on that trip. Or that thirty years later Mr. Jackman thought he would be able to stir us about the experience. Too bad.
Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Pulls The Hammer Down On The Action Junkies Of The So-Called "Justice League"-Drops Batman, Flash-Aqua-man, Wonder Woman and Assorted Other Dopes Down Into The Abyss (2017)- A Film Review, Of Sorts
By Will Bradley
No question with this third straight debunking of overblown, fake or undeserved so-called legends assignments I have now found my niche in this business. (see the “reviews” of Man of the West the laying bare of the legend of stone-cold killer Link Jones and The Man In The Iron Mask the ripping asunder of the legend of one D’ Artagnan and his three drunken comrades of the Musketeer outfit that protected “sainted” Louis XIV for the other two anchors of this trifecta) Now have, since he gave me the assignments and go ahead in the first place the confidence of site manager Greg Green in case of any blowback. In case in our wicked divide age and society any diehard aficionados of the various legends that I have, documents and other proof in hand left totally deflated (with the one sour exception of so-called aviation pioneer Johnny Cielo which has baffled me no end and which will be analyzed below since finishing this nefarious Justice League gang will be short work) decide that they have to do bodily harm of some sort to the messenger, to me and those who are starting to cohere around me in this on-going crusade against fakers from every age.
So, generally, I am feeling very well now that I will have covered the old-time legends that haunted a lot of the generation of ’68 dreams as kids, according to Si Lannon. Although for the life of me a couple of very wide generations removed from those dope-addled bastards who are crying to the high heavens for Greg to move the operation back to Boston so they can suck up all the dope in the world, or what is available now that Massachusetts has weed up the ying-yang, I don’t know why. Nor do I know why one of the older writers, Si, Sam, Seth, couldn’t move away from the bong long enough to have taken a stab at breaking down the encrusted press agent, publicity house bull built up around genuine bad guys like Sherlock Holmes and his dear friend Doc, Robert Locklear aka Robin Hood, Old West stone- cold killer Link Jones and the others I have knocked for a loop. (By the way I am not claiming I have dented, not yet anyway, the ancient Greek and Roman bastards who had serious guys like Homer, Ovid, Virgil running their press operations but I am working on that as I write the problem, a big one, is that the documents have either blown away with the wind or are inconclusive so al we have going is to break down the Homer-Ovid-Virgil press agent noise not as easy as it sounds.) Maybe since it required no heavy lifting but merely a sharp pen some newer ones. Given their total default I am here to top off in this latest trifecta of assignments Greg threw my way a modern, very modern set to debunk the silly costume characters who call themselves, self-described is I guess the best way to put it as the Justice League made up of junkies and con artists, with a sleigh of hand artist thrown in.
Maybe I am making too much of it, certainly some fellow reviewers have thrown a jaded eye my way, but these successes in waking people up to what in the end is basically not matter what time period some press agent, some publicity maven’s free fall fantasy about whoever those pros were being well-paid to hype. Still it is nice to be able to take credit for putting a bastard like Robin Hood down, crack Don Juan’s totally fabricated exploits with the ladies, ditto one Johnny Casavova, turned around slave-trade Captain Blood on his heels, blasted cheapjack humdrum PI Sherlock Holmes or whatever name he is using these days and his dear friend Watson, Wadkins, or whatever he finally decided his name was and took down Old West legend Link Jones without a struggle.
Still, and I have had fellow reviewer eyes gaze up when I even mention this name these days, the legend of Johnny Cielo which I fully admit I have not been able to put the slightest dent into which has me concerned not only about people’s ability to swallow alternate facts completely but since Johnny’s case is relatively new makes me wonder about how I will do against the Justice League mystique which has had a massive build-up by their handlers. Bear with me a bit as I think out loud about that bastard Cielo who has some pretty ardent if weird devotees. The latest insult to anybody’s intelligence is the Friends of Johnny Cielo fan club I guess you would call it have rounded up some campesino, some peasant from the foothills of the Sierra Madre who claims that as a young man, a boy he remembers seeing a Beechcraft plane flying low overhead going toward the higher elevations where Fidel and the hermanos (and hermanas, lo siento for failing to mention them in a previous review). As far as any records that I know of Johnny Cielo never piloted a Beechcraft only Piper Clubs like on that last fateful trip taking those well-heeled passengers to Naples from Key West down in Florida so unless they have something more than some vague recollections of a besotted peasant who some sixty years later suddenly comes up with this cock and bull story I rest my case for now. Although not breaking this silly legend still bothers the hell out of me.
But forward. The last person, as least in the West, Western Civilization, as far as I knew to come back from the dead was Jesus Christ. And even in his case there was, is still plenty of controversy around the event witnessed only by his mother, some whore and a few drunken Roman soldiers who by most estimates were sleeping off hangovers when this resurrection supposedly occurred. So one really has to suspend disbelief when a guy named Superman, a caped crusader he calls himself when he is not on his day job as a reporter for some high circulation sensation rag in a place called Gotham, aka Metropolis which to my mind, and that of others I have talked to looks a lot like New York City comes back from the dead to do battle with a bunch of other freaks against an old man, a guy named Steppenwolf (not to be confused with the guy in a book by Herman Hesse or a 1960s rock group who played loud rock and roll around themes like denigrating the pusher man and desperately seeking parental help against the monster, against the government’s ’t all-out war against the Vietnamese and in the end against its own young).
Five, count them five, cretins, five so-called bad asses, not including the previously mentioned Superman, the criminally insane and probable sexual predator Batman, some nerd on speed named Flash, a guy called Cyborg who was some kind of bionic man, a woman named Wonder Woman who had some great moves and lets leave it at that and a totally worthless geek named Aqua-man get in line to beat up on this poor old man, this Steppenwolf, who is looking for what must have been the fountain of youth, something like that and got nothing but grief for his efforts. Of course as usual with guys and here for the first time I get to take down a legendary woman they all have aliases, all trying to duck the law when all is said and down so we will just use their monikers and leave it at that. The story, at least the story on the police blotter when they were rounded up for harassing an old geezer was that he, “Step” was working for some criminal syndicate and so they had to snuff him out to purify the Earthian air. Yeah, right. Old Step though should be filing an age discrimination suit any day now and if there is any justice in this wicked old world he, or his estate, should win against this vicious mob of geeks and losers. Should send this unworthy tribe back to red state Kansas (Superman), the bat cave and dear Alfred (Batman), deep dark Amazon, mother of the mother of rivers (Wonder Woman), college (Flash), some hospital for a tune-up (Cy Borg) and that flaming disaster Aqua-man to downtown Atlantis where they belong not out here in the streets where things happen, happen when you don’t expect them to.
Searching For The American Songbook- When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind
Wait until the war is over And we're both a little older The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read Television children fed Unborn living, living, dead Bullet strikes the helmet's head And it's all over For the unknown soldier It's all over For the unknown soldier Hut, hut, hut ho hee up Hut, hut, hut ho hee up Hut, hut, hut ho hee up Comp'nee, halt Present, arms Make a grave for the unknown soldier Nestled in your hollow shoulder The unknown soldier Breakfast where the news is read Television children fed Bullet strikes the helmet's head And, it's all over The war is over It's all over War is over
Well, all over, baby All over, baby Oh, over, yeah All over, baby
Ooh, ha, ha, all over All over, baby Oh, woah, yeah, all over All over, heh Songwriters Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek
From The Pen of Frank Jackman
There was no seamless thread that wrapped the 1960s up tightly. A thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames, for a while anyway although none of us though it would on be for only a while just as we thought that we would live forever, or at least fast, the dread red scare Cold War freezes of our childhood. But you could traces things a little, make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.
Start in with the mid-1950s if you like with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South with fearless ladies refusing to go to the back of the bus (and some sense for equality up North with students and young people mainly wondering what to do and getting an idea of how deep the racial divide was then as now when they started doing solidarity work for the freedom riders and standing tall picketing Woolworth’s telling them to let black people eat at their freaking lunch counters if they wanted too, if they couldhanlde the food is what I though), the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly mixed all stirred up), the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by movie star James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. An odd-ball mix right there. Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority, the old certitudes that had calmed our parents’ lives in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town, but of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy.
That event opened up a new psychological twist (twist since Smilin’ Jack was not exactly Lenin or Trotsky or guys like that who really shook up the old order), that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of the generation. There were more things, cultural things and experimentations with new lifestyles that all got a fair workout during this period as well.
Plenty of us in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of us have our specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that we still live with today for not taking the omens more seriously.
And then we have a mind's eye photograph to grace this short screed. This photograph is almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth mix stirred up in the 1960s. Think this-three self-assured women comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to bare legs, bare legs that would have shocked a mother who all corseted up dreamed a World War II dream of nylons, and would do quite a bite to get her hands on such womanly finery. Uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times when one group of women demanded that their men come home on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat and others providing a distant echo for these three women pictured here who refused their soldier boys any favors if they went off to war. That says it all enough said.
Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Don’t Believe All That Alexandre Dumas Nonsense About “One For All, All For One”- Leonardo DeCaprio, Jeremy Iron, Gerard Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne’s “The Man In The Iron Mask” (1998)- A Film Review, Of Sorts
By Will Bradley
Recently I started back on my now seemingly etched in stone niche of slaying undeserved, false or overblown legends like Robin Hood, Don Juan, early aviator Johnny Cielo and what I consider my greatest achievement, taking down the stinking rank Old West’s desperado bank robber and stone-cold killer Link Jones, although it still remains to be seen if I can break the spell that the Old West has on the American imagination. I have admitted that I while I have made significant inroads into breaking my following, breaking the general public a little too from the responses our site manager has received, from most of these fakes I have been stalled, have been bush-whacked to use a term I used in the Link Jones piece in the case of Johnny Cielo, the so-called early aviation innovator and test pilot, whose spell still lingers.
The Cielo legend still lingers over the crowd that believe that Johnny hustled guns and supplies to Fidel and his band of hermanos in the hills of Cuba when it counted in the late 1950s and refuse to believe that he was nothing but a two-bit bush pilot and tourist guide. Maybe it is because the demographic of this publication, the now hallowed (and fading) generation of ’68 as Sam Lowell calls his brethren cut its teeth on Johnny’s legend linked together with their starry-eyed admiration for Fidel and Che in the old days watching according to that same ancient Sam Lowell on black and white television those guys riding into Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. I am far too young to have even heard of Johnny Cielo until a free-lance reporter friend of mine who having been stood up by some people on another story found some guy who knew Johnny in Key West and bought his bull hook, line and sinker. Took the Johnny exploits whole based on some rummy’s DTs story that had so many holes in it that I almost didn’t have to do research on it. For example, I was able to grab the still extant copy of Johnny’s manifest on his last flight which showed him attempting to fly well-heeled passengers from Key West to Naples in Florida before the plane, a Piper Club, fell down in the Gulf of Mexico). Case closed if not the legend.
Now I have I found addition information that part of my problem for not making any inroads in the Cielo legend is that the rummy, Billy Bradley, had been interviewed by Mike Thomas, yes, that Mike Thomas who has interviewed everybody who is anybody somehow read either my reporter friend’s fluff piece on Johnny or my slash and burn on the Cielo legend and decided to investigate (or really have his people do the legwork as far I know he hasn’t done any such work for years since his ratings went from zero to a million when he exposed the famous actor Lenny Grove as a two-bit ex-convict who hustled his ass on the street to make his coffee and cakes before he hit Hollywood ). The problem for me is that letting that rummy spout his bull on the Mike Thomas Show put things up in the air, put “may or maybe not” in play rather than what really happened with documentary proof. It would not be the first time such things have obscured the truth.
I will keep at it although I have been asked by more than one colleague why I am so intent, other than that holding on to that niche which in this cutthroat business of “you are only as good as your last piece” is not unimportant as even they recognize, on breaking myths, legends and alternative facts. Fortunately, I have another assignment today busting up an old legend that also has refused to die, the baloney about the three musketeers and their supposed exploits and their admittedly clever slogan “one for all, all for one.” Their press agent or publicity people hit pay-dirt on that gem making it that much harder to legend-bust. That “supposed exploits ” though should alert the reader to more revelations about this crowd of fakers although as usual with this business some people will gladly keep to their silly illusions and believe the legends until the bitter end.
This musketeer stuff is beautiful, is tailor-made to be busted. I don’t know about the reader but in high school we were required to read this Dumas stuff, The Man In The Iron Mask stuff although it had a different name and was not so unbelievable as the actual legend that has grown since that time. All the musketeers, all four, D’ Artangan (not his real name which would have conveyed the idea that he was some kind of noble, of the sword or of blood, but Jean Rous, a farmer's son in Brittany, plus three other drunks and rowdies, Artemis, Arthos, Porthos which were apparently their real names according to the records of what then was the Ministry of Interior, the cops, were sworn to serve the King of France, and not just any king in their time but the well-known autocrat Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, philander, despot and grinder of the peasantry whose work kept him in over the top lavish luxury. And for a long time this quaded (sic)brethren feasted off the crumbs from the king’s larder, his wine cellar mainly. This is the king, this is the crowd in a more democratic time we are supposed to root for, supposed to pay homage to their stellar defense of king, country and wine cellar with a few tavern wenches and off-hand ladies-in-waiting thrown in. Give me a break.
Apparently though the three underling musketeers had a falling out with Lou, had been cut off from access to the wine cellar and milady’s palace bedrooms and so began the long process of staging something like a palace revolt against the monarch under a banner of “free wine, free wenches” although they masked this in some plebeian “give alms to the people and be nice.” Usual plot, and usual trick up to create that legend. That in this case “all for one, one for all,” which became the exclusive copyright of the three underlings when D’Artagnan decided to stick with the king for his own purposes. For as it turned out filial duties but more on that in a moment.
We all know what a bastard Louis XIV was, how his policies and appetites started the long train wreck that would wind up in the glorious French Revolution later in the next century. How could you possibly defend that bum of the month. That is where the iron mask deal comes in. According to legend Louis’ mother had twins one dying in childbirth leaving only bastard, bastard in more ways than one, ugly Lou. What these musketeers, Artois mainly, figured was to get a guy who looked like Lou and do a bait and switch. As it turned out Lou did have a brother Phil who looked enough like him to pass in the dark although they were not twins. Not satisfied that Phil would play along he found a guy from Brittany who was the spitting image of Lou and so after a little off-hand swash-buckling with Lou’s loyal personal guard the switch was made.
The kingdom prospered, or rather the king and his courtesans prospered, although the new Lou was as much a son of a bitch and as nasty as old Lou. The main thing is that the three musketeers took at the credit for the coup, D’Artangan stuck with the king almost to the end then realizing what a bastard Lou was switched sides. Here is the funny part, Lou was his son as it turned out since he has been going under the sheets with the Queen Mother back in the day and took a hard thrust to the heart for his majesty, his new his majesty, Phil, the rest of the guys had full access to the wine and women under the new monster. Yeah, one for all, all for one. Bullshit.
Searching For The American Songbook-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
No Regrets, narrated by Tom Rush and whoever else he could corral from the old Boston/Cambridge folk scene minute still around, 2014
I know your leavin's too long overdue For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon It felt so strange to walk away alone
No regrets No tears goodbye Don't want you back We'd only cry again Say goodbye again
The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone I woke last night and spoke to you Not thinkin' you were gone It felt so strange to lie awake alone
No regrets No tears goodbye Don't want you back We'd only cry again Say goodbye again
Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn It feels so strange to lead my life alone
No regrets No tears goodbye Don't want you back We'd only cry again Say goodbye again
A few years ago in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia fit I did a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan. That series asked two central questions-why did those folk singers not challenge Dylan whom the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky (then) coffeehouse night and, if they had not passed on, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. Were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley kingdom.
Here is the general format for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time:
“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2010 as I have done periodically, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get an answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. And that would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year when those who tried to turn the world upside down to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.
The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960’s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.
As for the songs themselves I mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”
Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary under review, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past at some point he did lose the flaming burn down the building fire, just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” in which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian.
He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, the continuing struggle from what he said. Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt get a nod of recognition and does the role of key folk FJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the show where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”). So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night watch this film.
Sir Alfred Falls Down- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Family Plot” (1976)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon
Family Plot, starring Barbara Hershey, Bruce Dern, William Devane, Karen Black, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock before he was a Sir, 1976
[When I first decided on the title for this piece (or rather the beginning of the title) I was not trying to be ironic but merely pointing out that the film under review Family Plot had been far from one of Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s bests efforts, a crude and predictable attempt at some cranky footloose humor involving a couple of scam operations which go awry as they cross paths. Since choosing the title I have come by information via an NPR segment on another aspect of the fall of Sir Alfred, a less savory one, concerning a recent revelation (at least to me) from Tippi Hendron who starred in one of his best films, The Birds, in the 1960s that he sexually harassed her almost beyond endurance. Advances which she repeatedly rebuffed. As we are becoming almost daily aware many years later in 2017 in a slew of other cases involving powerful men in positions to do something gross and get away with it because of Hitchcock’s powerful position as famous and profitable film director he was able essentially ruined Ms. Hendron’s career by bad-mouthing her to others who might be interested in her for a role in some production.
Of course since apparently this whole subject of predatory sexual activity (epitomized by the slightly more than vaguely suggestive term ‘casting couch” the gauntlet that many young actors of both sexes on occasion were confronted with if they expected to go farther up the food chain) “was an “open secret” in Hollywood at the time perhaps she would have had no recourse at all once the big man put the whammy on her when she didn’t respond to his sexual advances. (Apparently even his every-loving wife of many years had no influence when Tippi tried to get him to back off and asked her to intercede to no avail. Jesus.)
This whole sordid episode (among an escalating number of such revelations about men in powerful positions acting boorishly and worse) brings up a problem which has until now remained unspoken when apparently a great many public men have assumed that given their positions, young women, or for that matter any women, were fair game for their sexual advances, harassment or criminal behavior. The problem exemplified in the Hitchcock case is how much film reviewers, scholars, fans should weigh that outrageous human behavior of any creative person against whatever cinematic or cultural values the works they have produced have. Not an easy question to answer but I would have to think as in the review below knowledge of that rotten behavior will seep into this piece. In any case there is no reason to change the title if anything it is more appropriate than ever. Sandy Salmon]
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Sir Alfred Hitchcock went all fall down in the late production under review Family Plot. A man whose long career gave us such black and white classics as Saboteur and The 39 Steps and all-time modern suspense classics like Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds seemed to have run out of energy when it came time to bring this one to the screen. Not a horrible film by any means but shockingly a rather lame attempt at a humorous look at star-crossed con artists working different sides of the street whose paths cross unconvincingly. The real problem was by the time this film reached its climax this reviewer didn’t care which pair of con artists won the day. Not a good sign, not at all.
Here is the subtext, what my old friend Sam Lowell who used to do this job and still is in emeritus status calls “the skinny.” A pair of low-end con artists, played by Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern, working the old Madame LaRue crystal ball fortune-telling con have landed a big fish in a wealthy old maid woman who is looking to find her wayward sister’s illegimate son and make amends for shuttling him off to another poorer family to avoid the shame of what that bastardy meant for her family’s good name in order to give him his rightful inheritance. So this pair is hired at a serious for them amount of money to find that heir, to do the leg-work to find a guy who seemingly does not want to be found for his own reasons. That is one thread. The other thread is that another pair of con artists, played by Karen Black and William Devane, are working a high-end kidnapping of wealthy private citizens for ransom racket with the payoff in serious diamonds. The twain shall meet as the storyline evolves because the subject of the first pair of cons search is that male part of the high-end kidnapping duo.
That is the so-called drama tension of the piece, the unwinding of the plot, the family plot I guess, where the work of each pair eventually cross each other and not for the benefit of what either set is trying to do. The capers each go through on the one hand for the “detective” cons and the other the pursued kidnapping cons are prankish and result in a comedy of errors which however will lead one set to prevail and the other to wind up doing Edgar Allan Poe time. Hey I won’t give away the ending any more than that but if you have a Hitchcock film you really need to watch then try Saboteur or Vertigo to see where Hitchcock was before the wheels came off, before he got cranky.
The Last Of The Classical Lyric Poets?- Bob Dylan’s 121st Dream-With Professor Richard Thomas’ “Why Bob Dylan Matters” In 2017 In Mind
[During the past several years, which has built up some extra stream the past couple of year, there has been a storm brewing among the writers who write for various departments in this space, for the American Left History blog (and the on-line Progressive American, American Film Gazette and American Folk Gazette websites with which we have fraternal relations including cross-publication of certain articles). Since a great deal of the storm has subsided after we have now reached agreement on some decisions about the road forward I feel it is appropriate as the about to retire administrator to let the reading public know what those decisions entail, what way we are heading. Over the past few years we have brought younger writers like Zack James, Bradley Fox, Jr., Alden Riley and the writer of the article below, Lance Lawrence, in to begin the transition away from writers, including myself, who were totally “washed clean” as one of the older writers Fritz Taylor is fond of saying by the turbulent 1960s, a watershed in American culture, politics and social arrangements.
While it has been entirely possible to read plenty of other material including older films, music and books over the years the strongest component, the subject that has held sway more often than not has been somehow involved with the growing up days in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s of the first wave of writers. That has tilted all have agreed, although I have dissented, vigorously dissented as to the degree and to the extent of my alleged role in the process, the axis of the American Left History experience we are trying to educate people about and preserve too one-sidedly around experience from fifty or sixty years ago when we came of age as if nothing has happened since then beyond the long haul rearguard actions against the reactionary trends of the past forty or so years when we have taken it on the chin once the “60s” ebbed.
Almost naturally the storm (what my old high school friend and low time associate here oldster Sam Lowell called a “tempest in a teapot” as he sided with the younger writers against the old guard, against my leadership casting the decisive vote against me) reflected the generational divide-the sensibilities of the old guard against the very different perspectives of the younger writers who were plainly way too young to have appreciated except second-hand all the tales and lies that we older folk have imposed on them. This whole dispute came to a head, although other similar disputes this year played a role, over the figure of Bob Dylan not what Lance will write about below but an earlier dispute over our tendency to have a music review on every one of the seemingly never-ending, seemingly never-ending to me as well, bootleg series volumes including Volume 12 which Zack had considered nothing but a commercial rip-off and composed of nothing but a million out takes and other crap and not worthy of giving review space here.
That dispute was the beginning of our awakening to the fact that not everything the man (our “the Man”) did was pure gold something which would have been blasphemy if one of older generation had uttered those words. The hard fact, as the younger writers were at pains to explain, younger writers who self-styled themselves as the “Young Turks,” Bob Dylan to the extent than any of them listened to him or saw him as anything but some old fogy who will probably die on the road doing his two hundred boring concerts a year, to draw anything from his music was something like our reaction to Frank Sinatra when we were young. Square, too square. That comment by I think Bradley Fox cut me especially to the quick. In any case other writers can give their respective takes on what has gone on of late. Since I am headed for retirement which just this minute feels like some kind of exile that seems best rather than my going on and on in defense of various objectionable actions I have taken over the past few years. Soon to be retired administrator Peter Paul Markin]
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By Writer Lance Lawrence
I suppose if a man, if a man like Bob Dylan the subject of this short piece, has lived long enough, has been in the public eye, mostly in his case the public eye of a dwindling number of hard core folkie aficionados then somebody will write what he or she thinks is the definitive say on the subject. Especially some academic somebody like Harvard Professor Richard Thomas who has indeed written a treatise called “Why Bob Dylan Matters” where he regales the brethren, the devotees who will buy the book because they buy everything Dylan-etched including bogus Bootleg series volumes some of which are nothing but stuff better left on the cutting room floor. The good professor’s premise is that Mister Dylan is the second coming of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, who knows maybe Cato and Cicero too in the “big tent” lyrical poet pantheon.
Originally this piece was going to be written by I think Bart Webber, one of the older writers who would probably like a number of the older writers in this space, on this American Left History blog drool on and on in agreement with the good professor. (This is nothing personal against Bart which has pulled me out of more dead-ends on stories than I care to count but he unlike the more thoughtful Sam Lowell who was like a breath of fresh air in the dispute Markin mentioned above in that quasi-introduction was his most rabid supporter.) Would have make up a laudatory piece which according to my archival research on this site has had over four hundred Bob Dylan-related articles almost all of them “soft-ball puffs” like Dylan was the King of the world and not the nightshade of the old guard. Looking over the archives nobody except Leon Trotsky, who after all was a world historic revolutionary, led a real revolution, and was a key historic figure even if he seemed to have been snake-bitten in his struggle to keep the faith in the Bolshevik future when old “Uncle Joe” Stalin bared his fangs in public has more entries.
Markin, I might as well say it since we have all been given the go ahead to give our respective takes on the internal fight now that the smoke has apparently cleared, mercifully soon to be retired Markin, or is it “purged” like his buddy Trotsky, started the whole madness early in his regime on when he wrote a ton of his own stuff rather than just run the site and hand out assignments as he was supposed to do. He lashed together extensive 3000 word reviews of Dylan’s five or ten first albums and then went over the top when he decided several years ago to write a series entitled “Not Bob Dylan.” That series seemingly endless series about the ten million or so it seemed male folkies who had not been dubbed by Time magazine to be the “King” of the 1960s folk minute (and it was only a minute despite all the hoopla here making it seem like some world-historic event like Trotsky’s Russian Revolution which even I could see had some merit for that designation rather than a tepid passing fad) and who had gone on to something else or who still inhabit the nether-world of the backwaters folk venue world.
I swear Markin must have written up the employment bios, resumes, and fates of every guy who knew three chords and a Woody Guthrie song learned in seventh grade music appreciation class with the likes of Mister Larkin at my middle school who walked into a coffeehouse back then. Even guys I had never heard of in passing like Erick Saint Jean who was supposed to be big in Boston and New York and Manny Silver who was supposed to be the greatest lyric writer since Woody (and probably if Professor Thomas took a whack at it probably since Milton or somebody like that). If I hear one more word about those guys, hell now that I think about it he also added insult to injury by doing a series on the ten million folkie women who were “Not Joan Baez” Dylan’s paramour and the queen of that 1960s folk minute (according to omnipotent Time).
But enough of taking cracks at the folk aficionados wherever they are who saw Dylan as a god, a guy who wrote lyrics better than he could sing. Frankly the guy was a has-been by my time, a leader of the folk minute that had passed mercifully away. We used to laugh at the graying long-haired guys guitar in hand in the subway still singing covers of his songs while the trains roared by. Would drop a dollar in the guitar case if they DID NOT sing Blowin’ In The Wind or The Times Are A-Changin’ one more freaking time remembering Mr. Larkin that music teacher in seventh grade, another guy from the 1960s line-up, trying to get us to sing that crap since the words were so meaningful, so important to know and remember according to him.
Finally since I am supposed to be an objective reporter of sorts, supposed to give all sides a short at reasoned opinion let me take Professor Thomas’ thesis at face value. Now my take on Homer is that he wrote pretty good stories made up of whole cloth no crime and created quite an oral tradition. Same with plenty of Greeks and Romans we read about in high school and college. They survived the cut, they represented some pretty high standards for the lyric form. Got quite workout by Miss Laverty my high school English teacher who was crazy for those guys and the way she read their words out loud you could see why they lasted. Literary comparisons aside about who was the king the lyrical poetic hill who except those guys like Markin and Sam Lowell, despite his honorable part in our internal fight, and who I do not believe know one song later than maybe 1972 which everybody will admit is a long time to be stuck on an old needle even listens to Dylan anymore except for old nostalgia trips.
For those three people who may be interested in exploring Professor Thomas’s ideas, see what makes him tick, see why he seemingly a rational man is a Dylan aficionado who probably one of the two guys who bought that dastardly Volume 12 which started this “revolution” here is a link to an NPR On Point broadcast hosted by Tom Ashbrook where the good professor holds forth:
[Although Professor Thomas’ thesis about Dylan’s place in the pantheon was not central to the recent disputes among the coterie of writers who ply their trade here Dylan did figure in the mix when all hell broke loose the day Zack James refused to write a review on Volume 12 of the never-ending Bootleg series. I would still be surprised if going out the door Pete Markin will let my “venomous” words see the light of day. As is. If he does then maybe we will have new day after all.]
