To Joyell Davin In Lieu Of A Letter- With J.E.D. In Mind
Freight train, freight train going so fast,
Freight train, freight train going so fast,
Please don’t say what train I’m on,
So they won’t know where I’ve gone.
-Chorus from ancient folk blues artist Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train.
As this story unfolds, Elizabeth Cotten’ s Freight Train, in an upbeat Peter, Paul and Mary-style version complete with Bleecker Street reference, is being covered just then near the well firewood- stocked, well-stoked fireplace of the great room in a hard winter, February version, snow-covered rural New Hampshire old time religious order assembly hall by some upstart urban folkie a long way from his home and a long way from that 1960s folk revival minute that then had had even jaded aficionados from the generation of ’68 clamoring for more.
Meanwhile, the front hall entrance adjacent to that great room where that old-time folkie and his old-time tune are being heard by a small early-bird arrival gathering crowd who never tire of the song, and who this night certainly do not tire of being close by the huge well stocked, well-stoked fireplace where the old brother, hell, let’s give him a name, Eric, Eric from Vermont, okay, is holding forth is starting to fill with more arrivals to be checked in and button-holed. The place, for the curious: the Shaker Farms Peace Pavilion (formerly just plain vanilla Shaker Farms Assembly Hall but the “trust fund babies” who bought and donated the site, ah, insisted in their, of course, anonymous way on the added signature) the scene of umpteen peace conferences, anti-war parlays, alternative world vision seminars, non-violent role-playing skits, and personal witness actions worked out. A handy hospice for worn-out ideas, ditto frustrations, and an off-hand small victory or two.
That very last part, that desperate victory last part, is what keeps the place afloat, afloat in this oddball of a hellish anti-war year 1971 when even hardened and steeled old-time peace activists against the Vietnam War are starting to believe they will be entitled to Social Security for their efforts before this bloody war is over. Hence the urgency behind this particular great room fireplace warm, complete with booked-in urban folkie singer, umpteenth anti-war conference. But onward brothers and sisters and let us listen in to the following conversation overheard in that now crowded front hall:
“Hi, Joyell, glad you could make it to the conference. Are you by yourself or did you bring Steve with you?” asked Jim Sweeney, one of the big honchos, one of the big organizational honchos and that is what matters these dog days when all hope appears to have been abandoned, these now fading days of the antiwar movement trying yet again to conference jump start the opposition to Nixon’s bloody escalations and stealthy tricky maneuvers.
“Good to see you too, Jim,” answered Joyell, who said it in such a singsong way that she and Jim Sweeney, obviously, had been in some mystic time, maybe some summer of love time before everything and everybody needed twelve coats of armor, emotional armor, just to move from point A to point B, more than fellows at one of those umpteen peace things. Joyell knew, knew from some serious reflection last summer, that she had put on a few more armor coats herself and, hell, she was just a self-confessed rank and filer. Their “thing” had just faded though for lack of energy, lack of high “ism” politics on Joyell’s part unlike frenetic Jim, and for the cold, hard fact that Jim at the time wanted to devote himself totally to the “movement” and could not “commit” to a personal relationship.
“Jesus, can’t any guy commit to anything for more than ten minutes,” Joyell thought to herself. From the weathered look on his face Jim was still in high thrall to “saving the earth” although rumor had it that Marge Goodwin, ya, that Marge Goodwin, the “mother” of organizers every since she almost single-handedly called out the national student strike in 1970, almost had her hooks into him, into him bad from all reports.
“No, Steve and I are not together anymore since he split to “find himself” on some freight train heading west, heading west fast away from me, I think. But you don’t want to hear that story, and besides we have to push on against this damn war, Steve or no Steve and his goddamn freight smoke-trailing dreams.” What Joyell didn’t say was that she was half-glad, no quarter-glad, Steve had split since the last couple of months had been hell. A fight a day it seemed, two a day at the end.
Reason: Steve too was not ready to “commit” to a personal relationship what with the whole world going to hell in hand-basket (his expression). Besides they all had plenty of time, a life-time to get “serious” and, forbidden words, “settle down.” Here is where the quarter-glad part comes in. Steve was getting in kind of heavy with some Weathermen-types and while that did not cause an argument a day between them it didn’t help. Joyell half expected to hear that Steve, Steve the meek pacifist, a freaking meek Catholic Worker guy just a couple years before, blew up something, or got blown up. Jesus, she thought, was I that hard to take, hard to get along with.
“I’m sorry to hear that Joyell. Maybe when we get a break later we can talk.” Of course, and maybe for the same Steve smoke-trailing-freight-dream-escape-seeking-the-great-American be-bop night reason, or maybe a heroic end traced out since boyhood redemptions reason, Jim and Joyell never would meet later, as Jim would be tied up, well, tied up in whatever organizational thing he was honcho of these days. Their time too had irrevocably passed. And now, and from here on in, this is Joyell’s time, her story, her voice as she enters the spacious but cold, distant from the well-stoked fireplace cold, conference room to the left of the great room with its rickety elongated table weighted down with timeless banging against ten thousand flickered night dreams, scarecrow chairs that caused more than one modern arched-back to falter helplessly, and unhealthy air, air make rank from too many spent speeches, and spent dreams.
*******
“Who is that guy over in the corner, that green corner coach, the guy with the kind of wispy just starting to fill out brown beard, and those fierce piercing goy blue eyes, that I just passed? I’ve not seen him around before,” Joyell asked herself and then Marge Goodwin, expecting Marge the crackerjack organizer of everything from antiwar marches to save the, and you can fill in the blank, to know all the players. Moreover Marge and Joyell got along well enough for Joyell to ask such a question, “girl talk,” they called it between themselves although to the “men” this was a book sealed with seven seals since the “correct” thing was to put such girlish things back in prehistoric times, four or five years ago okay. Joyell also sensed that since Marge’s “thing” with Jim hadn’t worked out they had something in common, although nothing was ever said. Nor would it be.
“Oh, that’s Frank Jackman, the anti-war GI who just got out of the stockade over at Fort Shaw last week and he is ready to do some work with us,” volunteered Marge. Later that evening Joyell would hear from a reliable source that Marge had gotten, or had tried to get, very familiar with the ex-army soldier resister. Marge had a thing for “heroic” guys. Heroic guys being guys like Jim, Joan Baez’s hubby, David Harris, who had refused draft induction, the Berrigan Brothers who were getting ready to do time for draft board record destruction (although she, Marge, couldn’t get that damn Catholic trick part that drove their actions) and now this Frank Jackman who had done a year, a tough soldier non-soldier year, some of it in solidarity, in the stockade for refusing go to Vietnam (and refusing to wear the military uniform at one point). Joyell also heard from another source that evening that it was no dice between Marge and Frank. This source thought it was that Marge, always getting what Marge wanted when it came to “movement men,” figured this guy would just cave in and take the ride. Not this guy, no way, not after taking on the “big boys” over at Fort Shaw. No dice, huh. That’s a point in his favor. But that was later fuel.
“Oh, that’s why his beard is so wispy and he is wearing those silly high top polished black boots and that size too big Army jacket with those bell-bottomed jeans. He certainly has the idea of what it takes to fit in here,” Joyell figured out, figured out loud. Marge just nodded, nodded kind of dismissively that she was right. And then left to do some organization business setting up the evening’s work.
And then suddenly, she, Joyell Davin (suitably Americanized, naturally, a couple of generations back), freshly-damaged in love’s unequal battles but apparently not ready to throw in the towel, got very quiet, very quiet like she always did when some guy caught her eye, well, more than her eye tonight, now that Steve was so much train smoke out in the cornfields somewhere. Maybe it was the New York City armor-coated brashness, hell Manhattan grow-up hard and necessary brashness required in a too many people universe, and learned from her very opinionated father, that her quietness tried to rein in at times like this so guys, guys like this Frank, wouldn’t be thrown off. But whatever it was that drove her quietness she was taking her peeks, her quiet half- peeks really, at this guy. With Steve, and a few other guys, it was mostly full steam ahead and let the devil take the hinter- post. This time her clock said take it easy, jesus, take it easy.
And as she found herself catching herself taking more and more of those telltale peeks she noticed, noticed almost by instinct, almost by some mystical sense that he was “checking” her out, although their dueling eyes had not met. Then, after Jim had finished giving the opening address about what the conferees were trying to do, this Frank Jackman stood up quickly without introduction and started talking, in a firm voice, about the need to up the ante, to create havoc in the streets, and in the army camps. And do it now, and with some sense of urgency. But he said it all in such way that everybody in the room, all forty or fifty of them, knew, or should have known, that this was not some ragtag wispy–bearded fly-by-night “days of rage” kid spirit, freshly bell-bottom pants minted, but some kind of revolutionary, some kind of radical anyway, who had thought about things a lot and wasn’t just a flame-thrower like she had seen too many of lately, including Steve, before he went to find himself.
When Frank was done he looked, half-looked really, quickly in her direction like he was seeking her, and just her, approval. And like he needed to know and know right this minute that she approved. She blushed, and hoped it did not show. And hoped that she had read his look in her direction correctly. But before that blush could subside she blushed again when out of nowhere this Frank gave her a another look, a serious checking out look if she knew her “movement” men, not a leer like some drunken barroom guy, or “come on, honey,” like a schoolboy but a let’s talk high “ism” talk later, and see what happens later, later. Maybe this umpteenth conference would work out after all.
So our Joyell was not surprised, not surprised at all, when during the break, the blessed break after two non-stop hours of waiting, Francis Alexander Jackman (that’s what he was called from when he was a kid and it kind of stuck but he preferred simply Frank) came up behind, tapped her gently on the shoulder to get her attention, introduced himself without fanfare or with any heroic poses, and thanked her for her work on his behalf.
“What do you mean, Frank?” she asked, bewildered by the question. “Oh, when your Peace Action committee came up to Fort Shaw and demonstrated for my freedom,” he replied in kind of a whisper voice, very different from his public voice, a voice that had known some tough times recently and maybe long ago too, but that soft whisper was what she needed, needed to hear from a righteous man, just now. The shrill of Steve’s voice, and a couple of others in her string of forgotten luck, still echoed in her brain.
“That was you? I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t know that was you, sorry, that was about a year ago and I have been going non-stop with this antiwar march and that women’s lib things. Were you in the stockade all that time?” she continued.
“Ya,” just a ya, not forlorn or anything like that but just a simple statement of fact, of the fact that he had needed to do what he did and that was that, next question, came that soft reply like this Frank and she were on some same wave-length. She was confused, confused more than a little that he had that strong effect on her after about five minutes of just general conversation.
Just then Marge, super-organizer but, as Joyell had already gathered intelligence on by then, not above having the last say in her little romances with the newest heroes of the movement, or trying to, called to Frank that Stanley Bloom, the big national anti-war organizer, wanted his input into something. But before he left soft -whispering still, calm still, unlike when he talked, talked peace action talk, he mentioned kind of kid-like, bashful kid-like, maybe they could meet later. Joyell could barely contain herself, and although she usually acted bashfully at these times, kind of a studied bashfulness starting out, even with Steve and some of the movement guys, she just blurted out, “We’d better.” He replied, a little stronger of voice than that previous whisper, “I guess that is a command, right?” And they both laughed, laughed an adventure ahead laugh.
Later came, evening session complete, as they were sitting across from each other in the great room, the great fireplace room where Eric was going through his second rendition of Freight Train to get the room revved up for his big stuff. Frank came over and asked, back to whisper asked, if Joyell would like to go outside for a breath of fresh winter air. Or maybe somewhere else, another room inside perhaps if she didn’t like the cold or snow. No second request was necessary, and no coyness on her part either with this guy, as she quickly went to the coat rack and put on her coat, scarf, and boots. And so it went.
They talked, or rather she talked a blue streak, a soft-spoken blue streak like Frank’s manner was contagious, and maybe it was. Then he would ask a question, and ask it in such a way that he really wanted to know, know her for her answer and not just to ask, polite ask. As they walked, and walked, and as the snow got deeper as they moved away from the pavilion she kind of fell, kind of helpless on purpose fell. On purpose fell expecting that he might kiss her. But all he did was pick her up, gently but firmly, held her in his arms just a fraction of a second, but a fraction of a second enough to let her know, and let her feel, that they had not seen the last of each other. And just for that cold, snow-driven February night, as war raged on in some distance land, and as she gathered in her tangled emotions after many romantic stumbles and man disappointments, that thought was enough.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
In Search Of Lost Time- Short Course…
In Search Of Lost Time- Short Course…
....with apologies to the great early 20th century modernist French writer Marcel Proust whose most famous (and massive) work I am stealing the title from in this little sketch. Apparently I will steal any literary tidbit, from any source and from any time, just to round out some little word trifle of mine. I had also better explain, and explain right now, before some besotted, hare-brained, blue pencil-at-the-ever-ready school of novel deconstruction devotee, probably tragically childhood’d, post-modern literary-type jumps on me I know, and I know damn well, that an alternative translation for the title of Proust's six volume work is Remembrances Of Things Past. But isn't this In Search Of Lost Time a better title for the needs of this space. For wondering where it went and why this or that did or did not occur when we had the chance to do sometime, some big and courageous about it, or just do the right thing. In any case I promise not to go on and on about French pastry at teatime (which, by the way, brother Proust did do, for about sixty pages in the volume Swann’s Way, so there is the trade-off, the short course trade off. Okay?).
*********
As I, clumsily, pick up, or try to pick up some precious dirt to rub between my fingers from the oval in front of the old high school, blessed and beatified, not beat beatified but ancient memory beatified, North Adamsville High, on this bedraggled, prickly frigid, knife-like wind- gusting in my face, not fit for man nor beast, kind of a winter’s day as the shortly-setting sun begins it descent into night, I really do wonder what demons, what cast-out-of-the-inner-sanctums-of-hell demons, have driven me here, here to this worn-out patch of an oval, after so many years of statutory neglect. Not legally culpable neglect, maybe, but memory neglect, proper memory neglect.
Moreover, here I stand picking up dirt from an oval that I have not walked on, much less picked up gravel from, in over forty-five years, although I have logged many a mile around a larger version (I believe) of this oval either practicing during track or cross country season, or, and this may jog demographic brethren reader memory, running the 600 yard dash as part of the old time President’s National Physical Fitness Test. Something out of the Eisenhower red scare, cold war be-bop echo night. Yes, I thought mention of that event might bring ring a bell, a bell of anguish for some, as they puffed and chortled their way to the finish line in their tennis shoes, or whatever knee-busting sneakers we wore in those days, in order to be cool. Maybe even Chuck’s, Chuck Taylor’s black of course. Was the any other color? Kind of like today.
In any case, here I stand, and now you know, or have a pretty good idea where I am. What you do not know, at least do not know yet, is that I am not here, rubbing some funky old town dirt through my fingers on a cold winter’s day just for the joy of it. For raider red oneness, either. Or some such old man’s quirks. Rather, I am here, and you can start calling 911 right now if you like, to evoke, evoke mind you so there is no fooling around about it, the spirit, the long past spirit of days gone by at the high school. The spirit of the time of my time. Probably not since old Tommy Wollaston went looking for a suitable site for his maypole debaucheries, and stumbled on Merrymount has this town seen such a land grab, in a manner of speaking. See, what I am thinking is that some dirt-rubbing, a little kabala-like, or druid-like, or keltic-like, or Navajo-like, or something-like, dirt-rubbing will give me a jump start on this “voyage”.
I will confess to this much , as this seemingly is a confessional age, or, maybe just as a vestige of that hard-crusted, family history-rooted, novena-saying, stations of the cross walking, ceremonial high mass incense-driven, mortal sin-fearing, you’ll-get-your-reward in-the-next-life-so-don’t-expect-it-here, buster, fatalistic Catholic upbringing long abandoned but etched in, no, embedded in, some far recesses of memory that my returning to North Adamsville High School did not just occur by happenstance. A couple of years before my mother, Doris Margaret Markin (nee Riley), Class of 1943, had passed away.
For a good part of her life my mother lived in locations a mere stone's throw from the school. You could, for example, see the back of the school from my grandparents' house on Young Street. As part of the grieving process, I suppose, I felt a need to come back to North Adamsville. To my, and her, roots. In part, at least, for the feel of roots, but also to figure out, or try to figure out for the 584th time, what went wrong in our old, broken down, couldn't catch a break, working poor, North Adamsville family. As part of that attempted figuring out, as I walked up Main Street from Chestnut Street (the site of the old, woe-begotten, seen better days, ram-shackled homestead still, barely, standing guard above part of the Newport Avenue by-pass) and swung down East Street I passed by, intentionally passed by, the old high school. And here I stand, oval-stuck, dirty-handed, bundled up not to well against the day’s winds, or against the fickle, shifting winds of time either, to tell my tale.
Now I will also confess, but without the long strung-out stuff that I threw in above about my Catholic upbringing, that in figuring out why ill winds blew across my family’s fate I was unsuccessful. Why, after all, should the 584th time bring some sense of enlightenment, or of inner peace, when the other five hundred, more or less, did not do so. What this sojourn did do, however, was rekindle, and rekindle strongly, memories of sittings, without number, on the steps of the high school in the old days, in the high school days, and think about the future, if there was going to be a future.
I tried to write this story, or a part of it, a couple of years ago so a little background is in order so the thing makes some sense to others. That now seemingly benighted story, originally simply titled,A Walk Down “Dream” Street, started life by merely asking an equally simple question posed to fellow classmates in the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 about whether their high school dreams had come true or not, as least for those who had thought about the issue, on the class website. I had “discovered” the site that year after having been pushed and pulled in ways that drove me back to memories, hard, hard-bitten, hard-aching, hard-longing, mist of time, dream memories, of North schoolboy days and of the need to search for my old high school friend and running mate (literally, in track and cross country, as well as “running” around town doing boy high school things, doing the best we could, or trying to), Bill Bradley. I posed the question this way there:
“Today I am interested in the relationship between our youthful dreams and what actually happened in our lives; our dreams of glory out in the big old world that we did not make, and were not asked about making; of success whether of the pot of gold or less tangible, but just as valuable, goods, or better, ideas; of things or conditions, of himalayas, conquered, physically or mentally; of discoveries made, of self or the whole wide world, great or small. Or, perhaps, of just getting by, just putting one foot in the front of the other two days in a row, of keeping one’s head above water under the impact of young life’s woes, of not sinking down further into the human sink; of smaller, pinched, very pinched, existential dreams but dreams nevertheless. I hope, I fervently hope, that they were the former."
Naturally, the question was posed in its particular form, or so it seemed natural at the time for me to pose it that way, because those old, “real”, august, imposing, institutionally imposing, grey granite-quarried (from the Granite City, natch) main entrance steps (in those days serious steps, two steps at a time steps, especially if you missed first bell, flanked by globular orbs and, like some medieval church, gargoyle-like columns up to the second floor, hence “real”) is a place where Bill and I spent a lot of our time, talking of this and that.
Especially in summer night time: hot, sultry, sweaty, steam-drained, no money in pockets, no car to explore the great American teenage night; the be-bop, doo-wop, do doo do doo ,ding dong daddy, real gone daddy, rockin’ daddy, max daddy, let it be me, the night time is the right time, car window-fogged, honk if you love jesus (or whatever activity produced those incessant honks in ignition-turned-off cars), love-tinged, or at least sex-tinged, endless sea, Adamsville Beach night. Do I need to draw you the big picture, I think not.
Or for the faint-hearted, or the merely good, denizens of that great American teenage night a Howard Johnson’s ice cream (make mine cherry vanilla, double scoop, no jimmies, please) or a trip to American Graffiti-like fast food drive-in, hamburger, hold the onions (just in case today is the night), fries and a frappe (I refuse to describe that taste treat at this far remove, look it up on Wikipedia, or one of those info-sites) Southern Artery night. Lost, all irretrievably lost, and no thousand, thousand (thanks, Sam Coleridge), no, no million later, greater experiences can ever replace that. And, add in, non-dated-up, and no possibility of sweet-smelling, soft, bare shoulder-showing summer sun-dressed (or wintry, bundled up, soft-furred, cashmere-bloused, I would not have been choosy), big-haired (hey, do you expect me to remember the name of the hair styles, too?), ruby red-lipped (see, I got the color right), dated-up in sight. So you can see what that “running around town, doing the best we could” of ours, Bill and me, mainly consisted.
Mostly, we spoke of dreams of the future: small, soft, fluttery, airless, flightless, high school kid-sized, working class-sized, North Adamsville -sized, non-world–beater-sized, no weight dreams really, no, that’s not right, they were weighty enough but only until 18 years old , or maybe 21, weighty. A future driven though, and driven hard, by the need to get out from under, to get away from, to put many miles between us and it, crazy family life (the details of which need not detain us here at all, as I now know, and I have some stories to prove it, that condition was epidemic in the old town then, and probably still is). And also of getting out of one-horse, teen life-stealing, soul-cramping, dream-stealing (small or large take your pick on dream size), even breathe-stealing, North Adamsville. Of getting out into the far reaches, as far as desire and dough would carry, of the great wild, wanderlust, cosmic, American day and night hitch-hike if you have too, shoe leather-beating walking if you must, road (or European road, or wherever, Christ, even Revere in a crunch, but mainly putting some miles between).
We spoke, as well, of other dreams then. I do not remember some of the more personal aspects of the content of Bill's dreams. If you want the “skinny” on Bill’s dreams he’s around, ask him. However, a lot of what Bill and I talked about at the time was how we were going to do in the upcoming cross country and track seasons, girls, the desperate need to get away from the family trap, girls, no money in pockets for girls, cars, no money for cars, girls. (Remember those were the days when future expectations, and anguishes, were expressed in days and months, not years.) Of course we dreamed of being world-class runners, as every runner does. Bill went on to have an outstanding high school career. I, on the other hand, was, giving myself much the best of it, a below average runner. So much for some dreams.
And, maybe, on my part, I also expressed some sketchily-drawn utopian social dreams, some fellaheen justice dreams. Oh, you don’t know that word, "fellaheen," perhaps. To have oneness justice for the "wanters" of the world; for the “no got”, not the other kind, the greed-driven kind, want; fear-driven, fear to go left or right or to put two feet in front of you want; for the misjudgment-making from having too little of this world's goods want; for all the cramp-spaced in this great big planet want; for the too many people to a room, one disheveled sink, one stinking toilet want: for the bleary-eyed pee-smelled, dawn bus station paper bag holding all your possessions want; for the two and three decker house no space, asphalted, no green between want; for the reduced to looking through rubbish barrels, or worst, want; for the K-Mart, Wal-mart, Adamsville Square Bargain-Center basement outfitted out of fashion, no fashionsista, no way, want,; for the got to have some Woolworth’s five and dime trinket to make a small brightness want; for the lottery, keno, bingo, bango, mega-bongo waiting for the ship to come in pay-out want; for the whiskey soaked, wine-dabbled, or name your poison, want; for the buddy, can you spare a dime want; for the cop hey you, keeping moving you can’t stay here, want; for the cigarette butt strewn pick-up streets want; for fixing, or fixings, to die want; and, for just plain, ordinary, everyday, non-descript want, the want from whence I, and, maybe, you came.
This is the sing-song of the fellaheen, the life-cycle of the fellaheen, the red masque dance of the fellaheen; the dance of the working, or not so working, poor, the day time dance. The dance that I will dance, at least it looks that way, until I draw my last breathe. For the night time, the "takers", stealth thief, jack-roller, pimp daddy, sweet-dark covering abandoned back alley streets, watch out behind you (and in front too), sweated, be-fogged, lumpen fellaheen night, the no justice wanted or given night, you will have to look to the French writers Genet, Celine, or one of those rough boys, the takers have no need of my breathe, or my tears. I have had my say now, and it was worth standing, as the night devours the sun, at this damn wintry oval to say it, alright.
....with apologies to the great early 20th century modernist French writer Marcel Proust whose most famous (and massive) work I am stealing the title from in this little sketch. Apparently I will steal any literary tidbit, from any source and from any time, just to round out some little word trifle of mine. I had also better explain, and explain right now, before some besotted, hare-brained, blue pencil-at-the-ever-ready school of novel deconstruction devotee, probably tragically childhood’d, post-modern literary-type jumps on me I know, and I know damn well, that an alternative translation for the title of Proust's six volume work is Remembrances Of Things Past. But isn't this In Search Of Lost Time a better title for the needs of this space. For wondering where it went and why this or that did or did not occur when we had the chance to do sometime, some big and courageous about it, or just do the right thing. In any case I promise not to go on and on about French pastry at teatime (which, by the way, brother Proust did do, for about sixty pages in the volume Swann’s Way, so there is the trade-off, the short course trade off. Okay?).
*********
As I, clumsily, pick up, or try to pick up some precious dirt to rub between my fingers from the oval in front of the old high school, blessed and beatified, not beat beatified but ancient memory beatified, North Adamsville High, on this bedraggled, prickly frigid, knife-like wind- gusting in my face, not fit for man nor beast, kind of a winter’s day as the shortly-setting sun begins it descent into night, I really do wonder what demons, what cast-out-of-the-inner-sanctums-of-hell demons, have driven me here, here to this worn-out patch of an oval, after so many years of statutory neglect. Not legally culpable neglect, maybe, but memory neglect, proper memory neglect.
Moreover, here I stand picking up dirt from an oval that I have not walked on, much less picked up gravel from, in over forty-five years, although I have logged many a mile around a larger version (I believe) of this oval either practicing during track or cross country season, or, and this may jog demographic brethren reader memory, running the 600 yard dash as part of the old time President’s National Physical Fitness Test. Something out of the Eisenhower red scare, cold war be-bop echo night. Yes, I thought mention of that event might bring ring a bell, a bell of anguish for some, as they puffed and chortled their way to the finish line in their tennis shoes, or whatever knee-busting sneakers we wore in those days, in order to be cool. Maybe even Chuck’s, Chuck Taylor’s black of course. Was the any other color? Kind of like today.
In any case, here I stand, and now you know, or have a pretty good idea where I am. What you do not know, at least do not know yet, is that I am not here, rubbing some funky old town dirt through my fingers on a cold winter’s day just for the joy of it. For raider red oneness, either. Or some such old man’s quirks. Rather, I am here, and you can start calling 911 right now if you like, to evoke, evoke mind you so there is no fooling around about it, the spirit, the long past spirit of days gone by at the high school. The spirit of the time of my time. Probably not since old Tommy Wollaston went looking for a suitable site for his maypole debaucheries, and stumbled on Merrymount has this town seen such a land grab, in a manner of speaking. See, what I am thinking is that some dirt-rubbing, a little kabala-like, or druid-like, or keltic-like, or Navajo-like, or something-like, dirt-rubbing will give me a jump start on this “voyage”.
I will confess to this much , as this seemingly is a confessional age, or, maybe just as a vestige of that hard-crusted, family history-rooted, novena-saying, stations of the cross walking, ceremonial high mass incense-driven, mortal sin-fearing, you’ll-get-your-reward in-the-next-life-so-don’t-expect-it-here, buster, fatalistic Catholic upbringing long abandoned but etched in, no, embedded in, some far recesses of memory that my returning to North Adamsville High School did not just occur by happenstance. A couple of years before my mother, Doris Margaret Markin (nee Riley), Class of 1943, had passed away.
For a good part of her life my mother lived in locations a mere stone's throw from the school. You could, for example, see the back of the school from my grandparents' house on Young Street. As part of the grieving process, I suppose, I felt a need to come back to North Adamsville. To my, and her, roots. In part, at least, for the feel of roots, but also to figure out, or try to figure out for the 584th time, what went wrong in our old, broken down, couldn't catch a break, working poor, North Adamsville family. As part of that attempted figuring out, as I walked up Main Street from Chestnut Street (the site of the old, woe-begotten, seen better days, ram-shackled homestead still, barely, standing guard above part of the Newport Avenue by-pass) and swung down East Street I passed by, intentionally passed by, the old high school. And here I stand, oval-stuck, dirty-handed, bundled up not to well against the day’s winds, or against the fickle, shifting winds of time either, to tell my tale.
Now I will also confess, but without the long strung-out stuff that I threw in above about my Catholic upbringing, that in figuring out why ill winds blew across my family’s fate I was unsuccessful. Why, after all, should the 584th time bring some sense of enlightenment, or of inner peace, when the other five hundred, more or less, did not do so. What this sojourn did do, however, was rekindle, and rekindle strongly, memories of sittings, without number, on the steps of the high school in the old days, in the high school days, and think about the future, if there was going to be a future.
I tried to write this story, or a part of it, a couple of years ago so a little background is in order so the thing makes some sense to others. That now seemingly benighted story, originally simply titled,A Walk Down “Dream” Street, started life by merely asking an equally simple question posed to fellow classmates in the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 about whether their high school dreams had come true or not, as least for those who had thought about the issue, on the class website. I had “discovered” the site that year after having been pushed and pulled in ways that drove me back to memories, hard, hard-bitten, hard-aching, hard-longing, mist of time, dream memories, of North schoolboy days and of the need to search for my old high school friend and running mate (literally, in track and cross country, as well as “running” around town doing boy high school things, doing the best we could, or trying to), Bill Bradley. I posed the question this way there:
“Today I am interested in the relationship between our youthful dreams and what actually happened in our lives; our dreams of glory out in the big old world that we did not make, and were not asked about making; of success whether of the pot of gold or less tangible, but just as valuable, goods, or better, ideas; of things or conditions, of himalayas, conquered, physically or mentally; of discoveries made, of self or the whole wide world, great or small. Or, perhaps, of just getting by, just putting one foot in the front of the other two days in a row, of keeping one’s head above water under the impact of young life’s woes, of not sinking down further into the human sink; of smaller, pinched, very pinched, existential dreams but dreams nevertheless. I hope, I fervently hope, that they were the former."
Naturally, the question was posed in its particular form, or so it seemed natural at the time for me to pose it that way, because those old, “real”, august, imposing, institutionally imposing, grey granite-quarried (from the Granite City, natch) main entrance steps (in those days serious steps, two steps at a time steps, especially if you missed first bell, flanked by globular orbs and, like some medieval church, gargoyle-like columns up to the second floor, hence “real”) is a place where Bill and I spent a lot of our time, talking of this and that.
Especially in summer night time: hot, sultry, sweaty, steam-drained, no money in pockets, no car to explore the great American teenage night; the be-bop, doo-wop, do doo do doo ,ding dong daddy, real gone daddy, rockin’ daddy, max daddy, let it be me, the night time is the right time, car window-fogged, honk if you love jesus (or whatever activity produced those incessant honks in ignition-turned-off cars), love-tinged, or at least sex-tinged, endless sea, Adamsville Beach night. Do I need to draw you the big picture, I think not.
Or for the faint-hearted, or the merely good, denizens of that great American teenage night a Howard Johnson’s ice cream (make mine cherry vanilla, double scoop, no jimmies, please) or a trip to American Graffiti-like fast food drive-in, hamburger, hold the onions (just in case today is the night), fries and a frappe (I refuse to describe that taste treat at this far remove, look it up on Wikipedia, or one of those info-sites) Southern Artery night. Lost, all irretrievably lost, and no thousand, thousand (thanks, Sam Coleridge), no, no million later, greater experiences can ever replace that. And, add in, non-dated-up, and no possibility of sweet-smelling, soft, bare shoulder-showing summer sun-dressed (or wintry, bundled up, soft-furred, cashmere-bloused, I would not have been choosy), big-haired (hey, do you expect me to remember the name of the hair styles, too?), ruby red-lipped (see, I got the color right), dated-up in sight. So you can see what that “running around town, doing the best we could” of ours, Bill and me, mainly consisted.
Mostly, we spoke of dreams of the future: small, soft, fluttery, airless, flightless, high school kid-sized, working class-sized, North Adamsville -sized, non-world–beater-sized, no weight dreams really, no, that’s not right, they were weighty enough but only until 18 years old , or maybe 21, weighty. A future driven though, and driven hard, by the need to get out from under, to get away from, to put many miles between us and it, crazy family life (the details of which need not detain us here at all, as I now know, and I have some stories to prove it, that condition was epidemic in the old town then, and probably still is). And also of getting out of one-horse, teen life-stealing, soul-cramping, dream-stealing (small or large take your pick on dream size), even breathe-stealing, North Adamsville. Of getting out into the far reaches, as far as desire and dough would carry, of the great wild, wanderlust, cosmic, American day and night hitch-hike if you have too, shoe leather-beating walking if you must, road (or European road, or wherever, Christ, even Revere in a crunch, but mainly putting some miles between).
We spoke, as well, of other dreams then. I do not remember some of the more personal aspects of the content of Bill's dreams. If you want the “skinny” on Bill’s dreams he’s around, ask him. However, a lot of what Bill and I talked about at the time was how we were going to do in the upcoming cross country and track seasons, girls, the desperate need to get away from the family trap, girls, no money in pockets for girls, cars, no money for cars, girls. (Remember those were the days when future expectations, and anguishes, were expressed in days and months, not years.) Of course we dreamed of being world-class runners, as every runner does. Bill went on to have an outstanding high school career. I, on the other hand, was, giving myself much the best of it, a below average runner. So much for some dreams.
And, maybe, on my part, I also expressed some sketchily-drawn utopian social dreams, some fellaheen justice dreams. Oh, you don’t know that word, "fellaheen," perhaps. To have oneness justice for the "wanters" of the world; for the “no got”, not the other kind, the greed-driven kind, want; fear-driven, fear to go left or right or to put two feet in front of you want; for the misjudgment-making from having too little of this world's goods want; for all the cramp-spaced in this great big planet want; for the too many people to a room, one disheveled sink, one stinking toilet want: for the bleary-eyed pee-smelled, dawn bus station paper bag holding all your possessions want; for the two and three decker house no space, asphalted, no green between want; for the reduced to looking through rubbish barrels, or worst, want; for the K-Mart, Wal-mart, Adamsville Square Bargain-Center basement outfitted out of fashion, no fashionsista, no way, want,; for the got to have some Woolworth’s five and dime trinket to make a small brightness want; for the lottery, keno, bingo, bango, mega-bongo waiting for the ship to come in pay-out want; for the whiskey soaked, wine-dabbled, or name your poison, want; for the buddy, can you spare a dime want; for the cop hey you, keeping moving you can’t stay here, want; for the cigarette butt strewn pick-up streets want; for fixing, or fixings, to die want; and, for just plain, ordinary, everyday, non-descript want, the want from whence I, and, maybe, you came.
This is the sing-song of the fellaheen, the life-cycle of the fellaheen, the red masque dance of the fellaheen; the dance of the working, or not so working, poor, the day time dance. The dance that I will dance, at least it looks that way, until I draw my last breathe. For the night time, the "takers", stealth thief, jack-roller, pimp daddy, sweet-dark covering abandoned back alley streets, watch out behind you (and in front too), sweated, be-fogged, lumpen fellaheen night, the no justice wanted or given night, you will have to look to the French writers Genet, Celine, or one of those rough boys, the takers have no need of my breathe, or my tears. I have had my say now, and it was worth standing, as the night devours the sun, at this damn wintry oval to say it, alright.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- A Pre-Miranda Nightmare- Dana Andrew’s “Boomerang”- A Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Boomerang.
DVD Review
Boomerang, starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, directed by Elia Kazan, 1947
Most crime noir is NOT a lesson in plebeian civil virtue, good republican police procedure, or wavy grey area moral dilemmas. The best crime noir is where, sure, the bad guys has it coming and by fair means or foul the good guys, cops, privates dicks, or just guys and gals caught in the middle of something, made sure they got it, got in spades, right up to the chair. No quarter given, none taken and we, the audience we, were happy with the result, or at least were not going waste good mother-washed and ironed handkerchiefs over their fate. Or, alternatively, alternatively, best crime noir, that is, occurred when some femme fatale, good or bad, and, we, the male part of the we audience anyway, were not all that choosey which as long as she was fetching, wrapped up a guy so bad he couldn’t think straight, and led him, maybe led him right up to that aforementioned chair. Gladly, or half gladly anyway.
In the film under review, Boomerang, neither of these conditions exists yet this is still an interesting crime noir despite its sometimes cloying moral certitudes and raw virtuous civics lesson overhang. Moreover, watching this thing in a post-Miranda (1964) world made this reviewer finally realize what the fuss was all about when the Warren Court brought the wild west boys cop justice under a little control. A little I said, so don’t make too much of it. Let’s just get to the plot and you can figure out why, okay.
As the film opens a man of the cloth, a padre, gets dead-aim stone-cold killer shot out in the mean 1940s Middle America Connecticut streets by a someone, some guy. Back then, and maybe today too, this gangster-style or psycho-driven execution rated big 24/7 news and howls of protest, especially since the padre was on the way to neighborhood sainthood. So like any high profile murder case the cops and the DA are pressing, and being pressed, and pressed hard to find this killer who is still walking free to maybe do murder and mayhem again.
And here is where the Miranda part comes in. The cops, the newly anointed town reform civil leaders, the recently thrown-out corrupt city leaders, the newspapers, and the DA’s office are all crying for vengeance and a quick solution to the murder (and their PR problems). The cops, the pre-Miranda cops, led by Lee J. Cobb, are more than happy to oblige them when after a massive manhunt they turn up one drifter, grifter, down at the heels guy, played by Arthur Kennedy, as the fall guy. The frame is on, on big time. Of course, he is the fall guy after a little off-hand by the book, the unwritten book, rough stuff down sans lawyer at the precinct house and some very tricky footwork around the evidence bin, the human witness and murder weapon evidence bin. They have poor Brother Kennedy screaming “uncle” before long and he is tailor-made for the big house, and the chair. Open and shut.
But hold on a minute, a very long minute, the DA, played by Dana Andrews, has second thought qualms about this railroad job and despite every possible corrupt effort to derail him from the compliant judge, to the cops, to some newspaper guys, to those virtuous civic-minded city fathers, he is after all a truth-seeker. He plods on supported only by wifey, played by Jane Wyatt, who knowing her man, sticks by him through thick and thin. Natch. But, jesus, justice in this case was a close thing, and only came off because our DA boy actually listened up that day they had the ethics class in law school. So you see what I mean about this being an okay film even with no drop-dead bad guys, or drop-dead beautiful femme fatales.
Note behind the camera: Looking at the credits here you will note at least two names that deserve special mention, the director Elia Kazan and the actor Lee J. Cobb. No, not for their well-known cinematic efforts then, or later (films such as On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Death Of A Salesman, etc. between them), but for their less that stellar (I am being kind here considering we are dealing with classic “finks” and stoolies.”) performances before various congressional committees in high 1950s cold war, red scare times “dropping dimes, (hell, quarters and half dollars)” on their communist fellows (mostly one-time pinkish fellow-travelers but the effect was the same) in the entertainment industry. Obviously these two guys didn’t “get” the point in Boomerang after all. The hell with them.
DVD Review
Boomerang, starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, directed by Elia Kazan, 1947
Most crime noir is NOT a lesson in plebeian civil virtue, good republican police procedure, or wavy grey area moral dilemmas. The best crime noir is where, sure, the bad guys has it coming and by fair means or foul the good guys, cops, privates dicks, or just guys and gals caught in the middle of something, made sure they got it, got in spades, right up to the chair. No quarter given, none taken and we, the audience we, were happy with the result, or at least were not going waste good mother-washed and ironed handkerchiefs over their fate. Or, alternatively, alternatively, best crime noir, that is, occurred when some femme fatale, good or bad, and, we, the male part of the we audience anyway, were not all that choosey which as long as she was fetching, wrapped up a guy so bad he couldn’t think straight, and led him, maybe led him right up to that aforementioned chair. Gladly, or half gladly anyway.
In the film under review, Boomerang, neither of these conditions exists yet this is still an interesting crime noir despite its sometimes cloying moral certitudes and raw virtuous civics lesson overhang. Moreover, watching this thing in a post-Miranda (1964) world made this reviewer finally realize what the fuss was all about when the Warren Court brought the wild west boys cop justice under a little control. A little I said, so don’t make too much of it. Let’s just get to the plot and you can figure out why, okay.
As the film opens a man of the cloth, a padre, gets dead-aim stone-cold killer shot out in the mean 1940s Middle America Connecticut streets by a someone, some guy. Back then, and maybe today too, this gangster-style or psycho-driven execution rated big 24/7 news and howls of protest, especially since the padre was on the way to neighborhood sainthood. So like any high profile murder case the cops and the DA are pressing, and being pressed, and pressed hard to find this killer who is still walking free to maybe do murder and mayhem again.
And here is where the Miranda part comes in. The cops, the newly anointed town reform civil leaders, the recently thrown-out corrupt city leaders, the newspapers, and the DA’s office are all crying for vengeance and a quick solution to the murder (and their PR problems). The cops, the pre-Miranda cops, led by Lee J. Cobb, are more than happy to oblige them when after a massive manhunt they turn up one drifter, grifter, down at the heels guy, played by Arthur Kennedy, as the fall guy. The frame is on, on big time. Of course, he is the fall guy after a little off-hand by the book, the unwritten book, rough stuff down sans lawyer at the precinct house and some very tricky footwork around the evidence bin, the human witness and murder weapon evidence bin. They have poor Brother Kennedy screaming “uncle” before long and he is tailor-made for the big house, and the chair. Open and shut.
But hold on a minute, a very long minute, the DA, played by Dana Andrews, has second thought qualms about this railroad job and despite every possible corrupt effort to derail him from the compliant judge, to the cops, to some newspaper guys, to those virtuous civic-minded city fathers, he is after all a truth-seeker. He plods on supported only by wifey, played by Jane Wyatt, who knowing her man, sticks by him through thick and thin. Natch. But, jesus, justice in this case was a close thing, and only came off because our DA boy actually listened up that day they had the ethics class in law school. So you see what I mean about this being an okay film even with no drop-dead bad guys, or drop-dead beautiful femme fatales.
Note behind the camera: Looking at the credits here you will note at least two names that deserve special mention, the director Elia Kazan and the actor Lee J. Cobb. No, not for their well-known cinematic efforts then, or later (films such as On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Death Of A Salesman, etc. between them), but for their less that stellar (I am being kind here considering we are dealing with classic “finks” and stoolies.”) performances before various congressional committees in high 1950s cold war, red scare times “dropping dimes, (hell, quarters and half dollars)” on their communist fellows (mostly one-time pinkish fellow-travelers but the effect was the same) in the entertainment industry. Obviously these two guys didn’t “get” the point in Boomerang after all. The hell with them.
Out Of The 1940s Crime Noir Night-Have Gun Will Travel- “Gun Crazy”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Gun Crazy.
DVD Review
Gun Crazy, starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor, 1949
Personally I like my crime noir femme fatales on the kind of good side, not too good but maybe good like Lauren Bacall in To Have or Have Not or The Big Sleep. Or Rita Hayworth when the dust settled in Gilda. No way do I want a dame that I have to watch out over my shoulder on like the same Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hia or Jane Greer in Out Of The Past. That company is just a little too fast for me. And, no I ain’t no Walter Mitty, or no fading, wilting flower but a guy has enough troubles in this world without some frail turning him over, turning him over bad. And no way, no way in hell, do I want some femme fatale, good, bad, or indifference who is kind of trigger-happy. Jesus, no way. So needless to say I am staying far, far away from Ms. Laurie (played by Peggy Cummins), the twist that has our guy Bart (played by John Dall) all wired up in the film under review, Gun Crazy.
And this is a good place to run the plot line in this little 1949 sleeper of a film. While the dialogue gets thin in spots and it’s just a little too didactic in the "don’t play with guns" department the adventures of this pair and the fast pace they need to travel at makes this an enjoyable one and one half hour see. As you can tell from the film’s title and as I have already tipped you to this is about guns, or rather about a pair of young, post-World War II modern alienated youth who have a yearning, a lust, for guns. And each other, make of that what you will. As for Bart the gun thing is more a fascination, a feel good thing . And as for Laurie, well let’s just say she has problems, serious problems every time she gets within two feet of a gun, and the slightest smell of danger.
What hold this thing together is that Bart is dizzy, dizzier that he is about guns, for the dame, unlike sensible guys like you and me. Laurie wants to live the high life and in order to do so she needs a guy who can step with her. And shooting the stars out of the rubes in a two-bit back road carnival where she meets up with Bart is not going to do it. So they run away, off-handedly get married (this is 1949 after all), and try their luck at this and that. But like many young footloose couples then, and now, this and that didn’t work out. So a little career change was in order, say armed robbery to get a stake together and then on to easy street down in some south of the border lamster village.
But, see, here is where the “moral” that drives all of these crime noirs, crime doesn’t pay, kicks in, kicks in big time. Crime and guns don’t pay for good guys, or bad, or even young footloose couples trying to make a stake, especially when wifey has that loose trigger-finger. So you know without me telling you that this pair, out of luck, on the lam, and friendless can’t ever, ever see that white picket fence day just ahead. No way.
Note: Of course 1949 was the heart of the cold war, red scare, commie under every bed, and behind every film, Hollywood Ten before congressional subpoena committees, dark cultural blizzard night. So don’t be fooled by the screenplay writer credits. This joint effort had one red scare Hollywood Ten writer, Dalton Trumbo, using that old time devise, the front. Hollywood, this country, and future generations should remember that black time, that dark night when some vaunted cultural freedoms got short shrift. And remember too a guy name Kirk Douglas who said the hell with all that later and gave Hollywood Ten-types like Trumbo and John Howard Lawson screen credit when he made Spartacus.
DVD Review
Gun Crazy, starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor, 1949
Personally I like my crime noir femme fatales on the kind of good side, not too good but maybe good like Lauren Bacall in To Have or Have Not or The Big Sleep. Or Rita Hayworth when the dust settled in Gilda. No way do I want a dame that I have to watch out over my shoulder on like the same Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hia or Jane Greer in Out Of The Past. That company is just a little too fast for me. And, no I ain’t no Walter Mitty, or no fading, wilting flower but a guy has enough troubles in this world without some frail turning him over, turning him over bad. And no way, no way in hell, do I want some femme fatale, good, bad, or indifference who is kind of trigger-happy. Jesus, no way. So needless to say I am staying far, far away from Ms. Laurie (played by Peggy Cummins), the twist that has our guy Bart (played by John Dall) all wired up in the film under review, Gun Crazy.
And this is a good place to run the plot line in this little 1949 sleeper of a film. While the dialogue gets thin in spots and it’s just a little too didactic in the "don’t play with guns" department the adventures of this pair and the fast pace they need to travel at makes this an enjoyable one and one half hour see. As you can tell from the film’s title and as I have already tipped you to this is about guns, or rather about a pair of young, post-World War II modern alienated youth who have a yearning, a lust, for guns. And each other, make of that what you will. As for Bart the gun thing is more a fascination, a feel good thing . And as for Laurie, well let’s just say she has problems, serious problems every time she gets within two feet of a gun, and the slightest smell of danger.
What hold this thing together is that Bart is dizzy, dizzier that he is about guns, for the dame, unlike sensible guys like you and me. Laurie wants to live the high life and in order to do so she needs a guy who can step with her. And shooting the stars out of the rubes in a two-bit back road carnival where she meets up with Bart is not going to do it. So they run away, off-handedly get married (this is 1949 after all), and try their luck at this and that. But like many young footloose couples then, and now, this and that didn’t work out. So a little career change was in order, say armed robbery to get a stake together and then on to easy street down in some south of the border lamster village.
But, see, here is where the “moral” that drives all of these crime noirs, crime doesn’t pay, kicks in, kicks in big time. Crime and guns don’t pay for good guys, or bad, or even young footloose couples trying to make a stake, especially when wifey has that loose trigger-finger. So you know without me telling you that this pair, out of luck, on the lam, and friendless can’t ever, ever see that white picket fence day just ahead. No way.
Note: Of course 1949 was the heart of the cold war, red scare, commie under every bed, and behind every film, Hollywood Ten before congressional subpoena committees, dark cultural blizzard night. So don’t be fooled by the screenplay writer credits. This joint effort had one red scare Hollywood Ten writer, Dalton Trumbo, using that old time devise, the front. Hollywood, this country, and future generations should remember that black time, that dark night when some vaunted cultural freedoms got short shrift. And remember too a guy name Kirk Douglas who said the hell with all that later and gave Hollywood Ten-types like Trumbo and John Howard Lawson screen credit when he made Spartacus.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
On The 100th Anniversary Of The Great IWW-led Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-Reflections In A Wobblie Wind
Every kid who has had wanderlust, even just a starry little, little bit on his or her way to the big, bad world. Meaning every half-starved, ill-clothed, hard-scrabble kid reduced to life in walking paces, footsore, time-lost sore, endless bus waiting sore, and not the speed, the “boss” hi-blown ’57 gilded cherry red Chevy speed of the 20th century go-go (and, hell, not even close in the 21st century speedo Audi super go-go) itching, itching like crazy, like feverish night sweats crazy, to bust out of the small, no, tiny, four-square wall project existence and have a room, a big room, of his or her own.
Meaning also every day-dream kid doodling his or her small-sized dream away looking out at forlorn white foam-flecked, grey-granite ocean expanses, flat brown-yellow, hell, beyond brown-yellow to some evil muck prairie home expanses, up ice cold, ice blue, beyond blue rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (or name your very own generational signifier) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Ya, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it.
And every kid who dreamed the dream of the great jail break-out of dark, dank, deathic bourgeois family around the square, very square, table life and unnamed, maybe un-namable, teen hormonal craziness itching, just itching that’s all. Waiting, waiting infinity waiting, kid infinity waiting, for the echo rebound be-bop middle of the night sound of mad monk rock daddies from far away radio planets, and an occasional momma too, to ease the pain, to show the way, hell, to dance the way away. To break out of the large four-square wall suburban existence, complete with Spot dog, and have some breathe, some asphalt highway not traveled, some Jersey turnpike of the mind not traveled, of his or her own.
Meaning also, just in case it was not mentioned before, every day-dream kid, small roomed or large, doodling, silly doodling to tell the truth, his or her dream away looking out at fetid seashores next to ocean expanses, corn-fed fields next to prairie home expanses, blasted human-handed rocks up rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (oh, ya, just name your generational signifier, okay) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Ya, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it.
And every guy or gal who has been down on their luck a little. Like maybe he or she just couldn’t jump out of that project rut, couldn’t jump that hoop when somebody just a little higher up in the food chain laughed at those ill-fitted clothes, those stripped cuffed pants one size too large when black chinos, uncuffed, were called for. Or when stuffed bologna sandwiches, no mustard, had to serve to still some hunger, some ever present hunger. Or just got caught holding some wrong thing, some non-descript bauble really, or just had to sell their thing for their daily bread and got tired, no, weary, weary-tired weary, of looking at those next to ocean, prairie, rocky mountain expanses. Or, maybe, came across some wrong gee, some bad-ass drifter, grifter or midnight sifter and had to flee. Ya, crap like that happens, happens all the time in project time. And split, split in two, maybe more, split west I hope.
And every guy or gal who has slept, newspaper, crushed hat, or folded hands for a pillow, all worldly possessions in some ground found Safeway shopping bag along some torrent running river, under some hide-away bridge, off some arroyo spill, hell, anywhere not noticed and safe, minute safe, from prying, greedy evil hands. Worst, the law. Or, half-dazed smelling of public toilet soap and urinals, half-dozing on some hard shell plastic seat avoiding maddened human this way and that traffic noises and law prodding keep movings and you can’t stay heres in some wayward Winnemucca, Roseburg, Gilroy, Paseo, El Paso, Neola, the names are legion, Greyhound, Continental, Trailways bus station. Or sitting by campfires, chicken scratch firewood, flame-flecked, shadow canyon boomer, eating slop stews, olio really, in some track-side hobo jungle waiting, day and day waiting, bindle ready, for some Southern Pacific or Denver and Rio Grande bull-free freight train smoke to move on.
Hell, everybody, not just lonely hard- luck project boys, wrong, dead wrong girls, wronged, badly wronged, girls, wise guy guys who got catch short, wrong gees on the run, right gees on the run from some shadow past, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, society boys on a spree, debutantes out for a thrill, and just plain ordinary vanilla day-dreamers who just wanted to be free from the chains of the nine to five white picket fence work forty years and get your gold watch (if that) retirement capitalist system was (and, maybe, secretly is) an old Wobblie at heart. Ya, just like Big Bill (Haywood), Jim Cannon, the Rebel Girl (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn), Joe Hill, Frank Little, Vincent Saint John (and me). Ya, all the one big union boys and girls from way back, just to name a few.
Except when you need to take on the big issues, the life and death struggle to keep our unions against the capitalist onslaught to reduce us to chattel, the anti-war wars giving the self-same imperialists not one penny nor one person for their infernal wars as they deface the world, the class wars where they take no prisoners, none, then you need something more. Something more that kiddish child’s dreams, hobo camp freedom fireside smoke, or Rio Grande train white flume smoke. That is when day dreaming gets you cut up. That is when you need to stay in one place and fight. That is when you need more than what our beloved old free-wheeling wobblie dream could provide. And that is a fact, a hard fact, sisters and brothers.
Meaning also every day-dream kid doodling his or her small-sized dream away looking out at forlorn white foam-flecked, grey-granite ocean expanses, flat brown-yellow, hell, beyond brown-yellow to some evil muck prairie home expanses, up ice cold, ice blue, beyond blue rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (or name your very own generational signifier) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Ya, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it.
And every kid who dreamed the dream of the great jail break-out of dark, dank, deathic bourgeois family around the square, very square, table life and unnamed, maybe un-namable, teen hormonal craziness itching, just itching that’s all. Waiting, waiting infinity waiting, kid infinity waiting, for the echo rebound be-bop middle of the night sound of mad monk rock daddies from far away radio planets, and an occasional momma too, to ease the pain, to show the way, hell, to dance the way away. To break out of the large four-square wall suburban existence, complete with Spot dog, and have some breathe, some asphalt highway not traveled, some Jersey turnpike of the mind not traveled, of his or her own.
Meaning also, just in case it was not mentioned before, every day-dream kid, small roomed or large, doodling, silly doodling to tell the truth, his or her dream away looking out at fetid seashores next to ocean expanses, corn-fed fields next to prairie home expanses, blasted human-handed rocks up rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (oh, ya, just name your generational signifier, okay) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Ya, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it.
And every guy or gal who has been down on their luck a little. Like maybe he or she just couldn’t jump out of that project rut, couldn’t jump that hoop when somebody just a little higher up in the food chain laughed at those ill-fitted clothes, those stripped cuffed pants one size too large when black chinos, uncuffed, were called for. Or when stuffed bologna sandwiches, no mustard, had to serve to still some hunger, some ever present hunger. Or just got caught holding some wrong thing, some non-descript bauble really, or just had to sell their thing for their daily bread and got tired, no, weary, weary-tired weary, of looking at those next to ocean, prairie, rocky mountain expanses. Or, maybe, came across some wrong gee, some bad-ass drifter, grifter or midnight sifter and had to flee. Ya, crap like that happens, happens all the time in project time. And split, split in two, maybe more, split west I hope.
And every guy or gal who has slept, newspaper, crushed hat, or folded hands for a pillow, all worldly possessions in some ground found Safeway shopping bag along some torrent running river, under some hide-away bridge, off some arroyo spill, hell, anywhere not noticed and safe, minute safe, from prying, greedy evil hands. Worst, the law. Or, half-dazed smelling of public toilet soap and urinals, half-dozing on some hard shell plastic seat avoiding maddened human this way and that traffic noises and law prodding keep movings and you can’t stay heres in some wayward Winnemucca, Roseburg, Gilroy, Paseo, El Paso, Neola, the names are legion, Greyhound, Continental, Trailways bus station. Or sitting by campfires, chicken scratch firewood, flame-flecked, shadow canyon boomer, eating slop stews, olio really, in some track-side hobo jungle waiting, day and day waiting, bindle ready, for some Southern Pacific or Denver and Rio Grande bull-free freight train smoke to move on.
Hell, everybody, not just lonely hard- luck project boys, wrong, dead wrong girls, wronged, badly wronged, girls, wise guy guys who got catch short, wrong gees on the run, right gees on the run from some shadow past, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, society boys on a spree, debutantes out for a thrill, and just plain ordinary vanilla day-dreamers who just wanted to be free from the chains of the nine to five white picket fence work forty years and get your gold watch (if that) retirement capitalist system was (and, maybe, secretly is) an old Wobblie at heart. Ya, just like Big Bill (Haywood), Jim Cannon, the Rebel Girl (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn), Joe Hill, Frank Little, Vincent Saint John (and me). Ya, all the one big union boys and girls from way back, just to name a few.
Except when you need to take on the big issues, the life and death struggle to keep our unions against the capitalist onslaught to reduce us to chattel, the anti-war wars giving the self-same imperialists not one penny nor one person for their infernal wars as they deface the world, the class wars where they take no prisoners, none, then you need something more. Something more that kiddish child’s dreams, hobo camp freedom fireside smoke, or Rio Grande train white flume smoke. That is when day dreaming gets you cut up. That is when you need to stay in one place and fight. That is when you need more than what our beloved old free-wheeling wobblie dream could provide. And that is a fact, a hard fact, sisters and brothers.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Out In The 1950s Film Noir Night- Nicolas Ray’s “On Dangerous Ground”- A Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir On Dangerous Ground.
DVD Review
On Dangerous Ground, starring Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond, directed by Nicolas Ray, RKO Pictures, 1952
Sure, I have run through a ton of film noir of late good, bad, and indifferent and for lots of different reasons. In the film under review, On Dangerous Ground, you would expect that what I was looking at was an example of Nicolas Ray’s pre-Rebel Without A Cause resume. And this film is not a bad example of his directorial ability, especially his ability to frame black and white nature scenes rather starkly, but that is not why I am reviewing this film. The primary reason is one Ida Lupino. I saw her in a very B non-descript black and white film from 1942 with French star Jean Maurras and that reminded me of her great performance as Humphrey Bogart’s Roy Earle hard guy moll, or wannabe moll, in High Sierra. And so we were off to the races looking for her other work and here we are.
As for the rating part, good, bad or indifferent, remember, it is the latter. You always like a film to have certain cinematic core, a certain frame of reference, but this one just kind of gets away. That is not Ms. Lupino’s fault, or Mr. Ray’s, or for that matter Robert Ryan’s, who plays the high pressure big city cop at the center of the story. And maybe that is where it all falls down. See, Ryan, a guy who might have had early dreams of glory and kudos but they are long gone by the time he gets on screen, is waiting out his time until he gets his pension. Obviously in his chosen profession he sees nothing but bad guys, their tough dames and everything else that comes up from under the rocks. So this life steels him to any emotional commitment to see human existence as anything but short, nasty and brutish as Professor Hobbes used to say. Of course in an evolving “civilized” society one cannot be judge, jury and executioner so Ryan’s methodology for getting at the truth, the criminal truth, by beating it out of the tough guys, does not stand up to today’s Warren Court Miranda standards. So he is shipped out to the country to cool off for a while and to assist in a homicide investigation out in the wild-edged boondocks.
Bingo, primitive man meets primitive nature and one senses right away that Brother Ryan’s soul will be cleansed before we are through. But crime even hits the boonies every once in a while; here a heinous murder of an innocent young girl done by a very mentally disturbed young man. Enter, finally, Ms. Lupino as the disturbed young man’s sister, blind sister, who wants to do what’s right for brother but mostly that he not fall into the hands of the local vigilante justice that is hunting him like a dog, especially that dead girl’s father (played by Ward Bond) who swears vengeance unto death. Of course poor brother is doomed, one way or another. However during the course of the chase our cop is smitten (well, what else would it be) by Ms. Lupino’s ways of thinking and is drawn to her. The final segment of the film revolves around this unusual budding romance. Like I said, it is just a little too melodramatic to be a good noir. But don’t blame Ms. Lupino, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Ray, or even Mr. Bond for that.
DVD Review
On Dangerous Ground, starring Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond, directed by Nicolas Ray, RKO Pictures, 1952
Sure, I have run through a ton of film noir of late good, bad, and indifferent and for lots of different reasons. In the film under review, On Dangerous Ground, you would expect that what I was looking at was an example of Nicolas Ray’s pre-Rebel Without A Cause resume. And this film is not a bad example of his directorial ability, especially his ability to frame black and white nature scenes rather starkly, but that is not why I am reviewing this film. The primary reason is one Ida Lupino. I saw her in a very B non-descript black and white film from 1942 with French star Jean Maurras and that reminded me of her great performance as Humphrey Bogart’s Roy Earle hard guy moll, or wannabe moll, in High Sierra. And so we were off to the races looking for her other work and here we are.
As for the rating part, good, bad or indifferent, remember, it is the latter. You always like a film to have certain cinematic core, a certain frame of reference, but this one just kind of gets away. That is not Ms. Lupino’s fault, or Mr. Ray’s, or for that matter Robert Ryan’s, who plays the high pressure big city cop at the center of the story. And maybe that is where it all falls down. See, Ryan, a guy who might have had early dreams of glory and kudos but they are long gone by the time he gets on screen, is waiting out his time until he gets his pension. Obviously in his chosen profession he sees nothing but bad guys, their tough dames and everything else that comes up from under the rocks. So this life steels him to any emotional commitment to see human existence as anything but short, nasty and brutish as Professor Hobbes used to say. Of course in an evolving “civilized” society one cannot be judge, jury and executioner so Ryan’s methodology for getting at the truth, the criminal truth, by beating it out of the tough guys, does not stand up to today’s Warren Court Miranda standards. So he is shipped out to the country to cool off for a while and to assist in a homicide investigation out in the wild-edged boondocks.
Bingo, primitive man meets primitive nature and one senses right away that Brother Ryan’s soul will be cleansed before we are through. But crime even hits the boonies every once in a while; here a heinous murder of an innocent young girl done by a very mentally disturbed young man. Enter, finally, Ms. Lupino as the disturbed young man’s sister, blind sister, who wants to do what’s right for brother but mostly that he not fall into the hands of the local vigilante justice that is hunting him like a dog, especially that dead girl’s father (played by Ward Bond) who swears vengeance unto death. Of course poor brother is doomed, one way or another. However during the course of the chase our cop is smitten (well, what else would it be) by Ms. Lupino’s ways of thinking and is drawn to her. The final segment of the film revolves around this unusual budding romance. Like I said, it is just a little too melodramatic to be a good noir. But don’t blame Ms. Lupino, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Ray, or even Mr. Bond for that.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
A Dream Fragment On Looking For A Few Good…Mystics -In The Matter Of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
Okay, blame this foam-flecked entry totally on old wanna-be “gonzo” journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe and his infernal 1960s classic countercultural expose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’ll explain the ‘wanna-be’ part in some book review, or in some of other place where talking about and discussing the "new journalism (1960s-style, including the likes of Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion)” is called for. But, at least for now, I want to explain the why of that ‘where the blame should be placed’.
And why does Brother Wolfe (or is it really Brother Wolf?) earn this blame? Well, frankly, merely by telling this acid-etched (literally) story about the late author Ken Kesey (most famous for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion), his California-gathered (naturally, right?) tribe of Merry Pranksters, their then rural California coastal communal arrangements (or non-arrangements, or dis-arrangements, as the case may be), and their antics, including a collectively produced and massively-filmed cross-country “bus” ride “further in” that cemented their zany experiences. No kidding- you were truly either on the “bus” or off the “bus” if you got entangled with this crowd.
Oh, did I mention, as well, their deep-end “edge city” drug experiences, especially the then little known acid (LSD) trips? Those drug experiments, important as they were to the story line of the book, are, however, not what have me up in arms though. Hey, experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with sometime (sex, the karma sutra, zen, sex, abstract primitivist painting, free-form verse, sex, hitchhiking the universe, sex, etc.) was de rigueur in those halcyon days. I wouldn’t waste my breath, and your time, recounting those kinds of stories. Everybody did drugs back then, or was….un-hip. And almost no one, hip, un-hip, cloven-footed devil, or haloed angel wanted to be thought of as un-hip, un-cool.
The others, those who today claim memory loses on the subject, or some story along those lines, just lie. Or were cloistered somewhere, and such circumstances are better left untold. Or, and here is my favorite, didn’t inhale. The number of guys (and gals) who NOW say that they didn’t inhale exceeds the total youth tribe members of the 1960s, by far, especially those with wayward children of their own. Unless, of course, my numbers are off, slightly. I, in any case, need not go through that scene again. Read Wolfe’s book or watch Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, or ask your parents or…ouch, grandparents.
Today, however, I am excised on another point. Wolfe mentioned, repeatedly, the quasi-religious, mystical nature of the Kesey-gathered Merry Prankster tribal experience. And central to that, as to all such mystical communal experiences, is the emergence of some kind of “messiah” figure, or at least a chief mystic who guides the group’s actions, including the inevitable breakout into the real wide world when that time comes. Then, the breakout time, is when the power struggle really begins as the increased number of acolytes gather round and begin the long process of the selection of the “ins” and “outs”. To speak nothing of the very serious question of who is to “guard” the wisdom tablet (maybe, literally, a tablet in this case). Or who conducts the ceremonials to adhere the devotees. This is well-trodden ground, in any case.
And what in hell am I mad about that little quirky business for? Kesey was hardly the first guy or gal, and will hardly be the last either, to come down off the mountain to spread the “good news,” if only among the elect-at first. Hear me out though. I am sick and tired, utterly sick and tired, after a life time of listening, or really, half-listening to the latest screeds of the “god-seekers”, secular or religious. And of the side show carnival guys claiming for the umpteenth time they have the “new message” about human redemption. And of the about the 287th, or so, rendition of the story line of those who succumbed to some “conversion” religious experience. Enough, right? Well, perhaps, but what I want to blurt out is that, damn, I think Wolfe, and through him, Kesey were basically right that this was a time, the 1960s that is , when we, and I include myself in this as well, were looking for the “new messiah.”
For starters though, just in case the reader is caught up short on the term “new messiah”, forget all the rough and tumble organized traditional religious stuff. That was a non-contender, then anyway. Hell, that was what we were running away from, and running as hard as our wobbly, drug-filled heads would force our legs to take us. (The three of us who have "confessed" to such activity in those days, excuse me. I don’t know in what condition the others were in during their runs.) No, any “church” had to be in some freshly-mown meadow, or among the squirrel-infested pines, or at the edge of the earth on some place where ‘our homeland’ the ocean, the sand and our sense of the vastness of space met. And any “preacher,’ of the “good book” or, for that matter, of the virtues of demonology had to wear multi-colored, flowing home-spun robes, or some discarded army-navy store uniform, or some sheepskin vest, or maybe nothing. But, please, no collars around your neck, or ours. There were plenty of candidates looking for the job, looking to be heard, looking to be listened to and looking for those who were looking, for awhile anyway, until they ran out of steam, ran off with their sweeties, or with the cash box.
What we were looking for, at least what I think we were looking for was someone, once the traditional politicians proved to have feet of clay, or were mired in mud and blood up to their necks, or were blown away, to lead us to the “Promised Land.” That’s right the “Promised Land,” not some old quirky, queasy, hard scrabble, no air place that we all knew, or all of us that were “hip” knew, was not where we were at then. You know sometimes it was as simple as finding someone who had an answer or two. If they had a plan, or maybe had the whole thing mapped out, so much the better. Mainly they just didn’t have to shout about it to the whole square world and bring the squares in to corner it, corral it, organize it, and make it a thing that not even your square, square parents could love.
And that, my friends, is where someone like Ken Kesey got some play, got his edge. His simple Western- bred (American Western-bred) ways, his obvious literary talents that acted as a magnet for those who saw no real difference between mad scientist Kesey and ‘mad scientist’ McMurphy (in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), and his strong branding personality held the Prankster commune together. For a while. Until he too proved to have feet of clay, and fled. But here is the main point in the end it required just too much of a leap of faith to sail into the mystic with the mystics. For those like me, and there were many others like me, we had our mystical moment but when the deal went down we had to look elsewhere to other names to “seek the newer world.” World historic names, names like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, no one, except, maybe, those now professed non-inhalers and vanguard neo-con cultural dead-enders, would confuse with mysticism.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
Okay, blame this foam-flecked entry totally on old wanna-be “gonzo” journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe and his infernal 1960s classic countercultural expose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’ll explain the ‘wanna-be’ part in some book review, or in some of other place where talking about and discussing the "new journalism (1960s-style, including the likes of Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion)” is called for. But, at least for now, I want to explain the why of that ‘where the blame should be placed’.
And why does Brother Wolfe (or is it really Brother Wolf?) earn this blame? Well, frankly, merely by telling this acid-etched (literally) story about the late author Ken Kesey (most famous for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion), his California-gathered (naturally, right?) tribe of Merry Pranksters, their then rural California coastal communal arrangements (or non-arrangements, or dis-arrangements, as the case may be), and their antics, including a collectively produced and massively-filmed cross-country “bus” ride “further in” that cemented their zany experiences. No kidding- you were truly either on the “bus” or off the “bus” if you got entangled with this crowd.
Oh, did I mention, as well, their deep-end “edge city” drug experiences, especially the then little known acid (LSD) trips? Those drug experiments, important as they were to the story line of the book, are, however, not what have me up in arms though. Hey, experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with sometime (sex, the karma sutra, zen, sex, abstract primitivist painting, free-form verse, sex, hitchhiking the universe, sex, etc.) was de rigueur in those halcyon days. I wouldn’t waste my breath, and your time, recounting those kinds of stories. Everybody did drugs back then, or was….un-hip. And almost no one, hip, un-hip, cloven-footed devil, or haloed angel wanted to be thought of as un-hip, un-cool.
The others, those who today claim memory loses on the subject, or some story along those lines, just lie. Or were cloistered somewhere, and such circumstances are better left untold. Or, and here is my favorite, didn’t inhale. The number of guys (and gals) who NOW say that they didn’t inhale exceeds the total youth tribe members of the 1960s, by far, especially those with wayward children of their own. Unless, of course, my numbers are off, slightly. I, in any case, need not go through that scene again. Read Wolfe’s book or watch Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, or ask your parents or…ouch, grandparents.
Today, however, I am excised on another point. Wolfe mentioned, repeatedly, the quasi-religious, mystical nature of the Kesey-gathered Merry Prankster tribal experience. And central to that, as to all such mystical communal experiences, is the emergence of some kind of “messiah” figure, or at least a chief mystic who guides the group’s actions, including the inevitable breakout into the real wide world when that time comes. Then, the breakout time, is when the power struggle really begins as the increased number of acolytes gather round and begin the long process of the selection of the “ins” and “outs”. To speak nothing of the very serious question of who is to “guard” the wisdom tablet (maybe, literally, a tablet in this case). Or who conducts the ceremonials to adhere the devotees. This is well-trodden ground, in any case.
And what in hell am I mad about that little quirky business for? Kesey was hardly the first guy or gal, and will hardly be the last either, to come down off the mountain to spread the “good news,” if only among the elect-at first. Hear me out though. I am sick and tired, utterly sick and tired, after a life time of listening, or really, half-listening to the latest screeds of the “god-seekers”, secular or religious. And of the side show carnival guys claiming for the umpteenth time they have the “new message” about human redemption. And of the about the 287th, or so, rendition of the story line of those who succumbed to some “conversion” religious experience. Enough, right? Well, perhaps, but what I want to blurt out is that, damn, I think Wolfe, and through him, Kesey were basically right that this was a time, the 1960s that is , when we, and I include myself in this as well, were looking for the “new messiah.”
For starters though, just in case the reader is caught up short on the term “new messiah”, forget all the rough and tumble organized traditional religious stuff. That was a non-contender, then anyway. Hell, that was what we were running away from, and running as hard as our wobbly, drug-filled heads would force our legs to take us. (The three of us who have "confessed" to such activity in those days, excuse me. I don’t know in what condition the others were in during their runs.) No, any “church” had to be in some freshly-mown meadow, or among the squirrel-infested pines, or at the edge of the earth on some place where ‘our homeland’ the ocean, the sand and our sense of the vastness of space met. And any “preacher,’ of the “good book” or, for that matter, of the virtues of demonology had to wear multi-colored, flowing home-spun robes, or some discarded army-navy store uniform, or some sheepskin vest, or maybe nothing. But, please, no collars around your neck, or ours. There were plenty of candidates looking for the job, looking to be heard, looking to be listened to and looking for those who were looking, for awhile anyway, until they ran out of steam, ran off with their sweeties, or with the cash box.
What we were looking for, at least what I think we were looking for was someone, once the traditional politicians proved to have feet of clay, or were mired in mud and blood up to their necks, or were blown away, to lead us to the “Promised Land.” That’s right the “Promised Land,” not some old quirky, queasy, hard scrabble, no air place that we all knew, or all of us that were “hip” knew, was not where we were at then. You know sometimes it was as simple as finding someone who had an answer or two. If they had a plan, or maybe had the whole thing mapped out, so much the better. Mainly they just didn’t have to shout about it to the whole square world and bring the squares in to corner it, corral it, organize it, and make it a thing that not even your square, square parents could love.
And that, my friends, is where someone like Ken Kesey got some play, got his edge. His simple Western- bred (American Western-bred) ways, his obvious literary talents that acted as a magnet for those who saw no real difference between mad scientist Kesey and ‘mad scientist’ McMurphy (in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), and his strong branding personality held the Prankster commune together. For a while. Until he too proved to have feet of clay, and fled. But here is the main point in the end it required just too much of a leap of faith to sail into the mystic with the mystics. For those like me, and there were many others like me, we had our mystical moment but when the deal went down we had to look elsewhere to other names to “seek the newer world.” World historic names, names like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, no one, except, maybe, those now professed non-inhalers and vanguard neo-con cultural dead-enders, would confuse with mysticism.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Poet's Corner- Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After"-In Honor Of Those Who Fought To "Seek A Newer World"
To Those Born After
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.
*******
Markin comment:
To Those Who Come After
History in the conditional is always a funny tricky little thing. You can get wrapped up it in so bad that you begin to deny the hard reality of what really happened, what really bad happened usually. On the other hand you can do as most historians do and just plod along assuming because X, Y, or Z happened that was that. That’s the facts, jack and that’s it. Obviously to resolve this thing, or rather to get a real sense of the possibilities, some combination, some mix and matching needs to be placed in the maelstrom. And it is under that sign that I wish to understand Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, his great big tied-up with ribbons and bows valentine to future generations really, To Those Who Come After, that I have posted above.
Of course it is a matter of generations, no question. And what that generation could have, or could not have, done, and done differently to sway the funny little rhythms of history. For his, Bertolt’s generation, if they only could have held out against the imperialist imperative onslaught of World War I, or at least not gone alone like sheep until almost the very end. More germane, if they could have carried out to completion one of those big-time revolutionary possibilities in Germany that they had in the early 1920s. Or ceased their, Communists and Social-Democrats alike, willfully myopic view that the Weimar regime would hold out against the bootjack of Hitler’s storm streets without having to unite for an all-out fight to the death against the Nazi menace.
Moving forward to my parent’s generation, the generation that scarecrow survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and went on to survive, or wait on the survivors, of the D-Day and Pacific bloodbaths of World War II. If only they could have seen clearly enough that that Roosevelt guise was sheer deception to save his class in power (even if he had to fight them, the economic royalists, the one percent of his time, tooth and nail to do it) and create their own party, a workers party, after the tremendous class battles of the mid to late 1930s when they had the bosses on the run, a little anyway. Or hadn’t bought, bought hard into that white picket fence post-war dream and let the red scare dark night wash away whatever big (or little, but I think big) spark got them through the dustbowl miseries and war shellshock.
Once again moving forward to my generation, my disposable income record store soda fountain be-bop high school confidential night with some undiagnosed teen angst mixed with teen alienation generation, the generation of ’68, who didn’t want, well, didn’t start out wanting to anyway, buy into that red scare night white picket fence dream. If we could have just, a big “could have just” I agree, not thrown everything out with the bathwater and read some history we could have realized that it wasn’t just about us. Well, one way or the other, the Vietnamese taught us that lesson, that lesson about perseverance, about a sense of history and about using every tool around to get free. Or, closer to home, if we could have remembered where we had come from, most of us anyway, and dug our working class heels in sooner we could have left some kind of social movement worthy of the name instead of leaving future generations to start from scratch.
And moving on to our children’s generation. Oh, well, history records many retrogressions in the uphill struggle.
And now on to the generation that I am really directing this little “history” lesson to, the real subject of my “to those who come after,” those who roughly are students today, and are moreover the heart and soul of the Occupy movement that has suddenly jumped up onto the historic stage giving them a chance to change the course of history- on their terms. And, by the way incidentally giving to me (and others) from the generation of ’68 a second chance to make things right. Each generation I am firmly convinced must (and will) find its own ways to fight the monster. But know this, know this from first-hand experience, there is a monster on the loose out there, and that monster has a name, the American imperial state just now being captained by one Barack Obama. Whoever the captain is though the monster remains and that is where the “to the death” fight is.
And this is where Brother Brecht and I can share the same sentiments about being ill-equipped in our times to face those hard realities, to worry over half-measures, to not stay the course we knew we had to stay. So forgive us for not doing better, not doing a lot better. But forgive, or not, go slay that damn dragon.
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.
*******
Markin comment:
To Those Who Come After
History in the conditional is always a funny tricky little thing. You can get wrapped up it in so bad that you begin to deny the hard reality of what really happened, what really bad happened usually. On the other hand you can do as most historians do and just plod along assuming because X, Y, or Z happened that was that. That’s the facts, jack and that’s it. Obviously to resolve this thing, or rather to get a real sense of the possibilities, some combination, some mix and matching needs to be placed in the maelstrom. And it is under that sign that I wish to understand Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, his great big tied-up with ribbons and bows valentine to future generations really, To Those Who Come After, that I have posted above.
Of course it is a matter of generations, no question. And what that generation could have, or could not have, done, and done differently to sway the funny little rhythms of history. For his, Bertolt’s generation, if they only could have held out against the imperialist imperative onslaught of World War I, or at least not gone alone like sheep until almost the very end. More germane, if they could have carried out to completion one of those big-time revolutionary possibilities in Germany that they had in the early 1920s. Or ceased their, Communists and Social-Democrats alike, willfully myopic view that the Weimar regime would hold out against the bootjack of Hitler’s storm streets without having to unite for an all-out fight to the death against the Nazi menace.
Moving forward to my parent’s generation, the generation that scarecrow survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and went on to survive, or wait on the survivors, of the D-Day and Pacific bloodbaths of World War II. If only they could have seen clearly enough that that Roosevelt guise was sheer deception to save his class in power (even if he had to fight them, the economic royalists, the one percent of his time, tooth and nail to do it) and create their own party, a workers party, after the tremendous class battles of the mid to late 1930s when they had the bosses on the run, a little anyway. Or hadn’t bought, bought hard into that white picket fence post-war dream and let the red scare dark night wash away whatever big (or little, but I think big) spark got them through the dustbowl miseries and war shellshock.
Once again moving forward to my generation, my disposable income record store soda fountain be-bop high school confidential night with some undiagnosed teen angst mixed with teen alienation generation, the generation of ’68, who didn’t want, well, didn’t start out wanting to anyway, buy into that red scare night white picket fence dream. If we could have just, a big “could have just” I agree, not thrown everything out with the bathwater and read some history we could have realized that it wasn’t just about us. Well, one way or the other, the Vietnamese taught us that lesson, that lesson about perseverance, about a sense of history and about using every tool around to get free. Or, closer to home, if we could have remembered where we had come from, most of us anyway, and dug our working class heels in sooner we could have left some kind of social movement worthy of the name instead of leaving future generations to start from scratch.
And moving on to our children’s generation. Oh, well, history records many retrogressions in the uphill struggle.
And now on to the generation that I am really directing this little “history” lesson to, the real subject of my “to those who come after,” those who roughly are students today, and are moreover the heart and soul of the Occupy movement that has suddenly jumped up onto the historic stage giving them a chance to change the course of history- on their terms. And, by the way incidentally giving to me (and others) from the generation of ’68 a second chance to make things right. Each generation I am firmly convinced must (and will) find its own ways to fight the monster. But know this, know this from first-hand experience, there is a monster on the loose out there, and that monster has a name, the American imperial state just now being captained by one Barack Obama. Whoever the captain is though the monster remains and that is where the “to the death” fight is.
And this is where Brother Brecht and I can share the same sentiments about being ill-equipped in our times to face those hard realities, to worry over half-measures, to not stay the course we knew we had to stay. So forgive us for not doing better, not doing a lot better. But forgive, or not, go slay that damn dragon.
Not Ready For Prime Time AARP Songs- The Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four from the animated movie Yellow Submarine.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 and thus already past sixty-four, comment:
Many of my fellows from the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.
When I'm Sixty-Four - The Beatles
When I get olded, loosing my hair,
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me the Valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine
If I stay out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
You'll be older too,
And if you say the word I could stay with you.
I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday morning go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight,
if it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave
Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form,
Mine for evermore,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
Beatles, Class of 1964, counterculture, generation of '68, Rock and Roll, The Rolling Stones
88888888888
Ancient dreams, dreamed.
Ya, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.
Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window apartment project hang your hat dwelling, small, warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching as he, that older brother, goes off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time of his time, in this cold war dust particles in air night.
A cloudless day, a cloudless Korean War day, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too have been to foreign places, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.
Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb unnamed shelter blast fears, named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hatred stalinite jews killed they killed our catholic lord and what did they do anyway fears against the glass glistening flag-pole rattling dark school yard night, alone, and, and, alone avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, AND deaths in barely marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards.
Endless walks, endless sea street seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat to make hard the making way for the uptown drug store, Rexall’s drug store, heist stolen valentine, ribbon and bow valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet.
Walks, endless waiting bus stop non-stop walks, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one lane snow-drift hassles, pass trees are green, coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times gone now, for one look one look that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school, man), handy man, breatheless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name brunette. That will come, that will come.
City square standing, hunched, hated, low-head hated, waiting, standing, going in, coming out, coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.
A bridge too far. Bicycle boy churning through endless heated streets, names all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifters petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, hard against the named seas, against those changes that kind of hit one side ways all at once like some mack the knife devilish thing
Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later though, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-boring but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path
Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval ,watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Who would have figured that one.
Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets . Diana, blonde Diana cashmere-sweatered,tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out, nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of coded submarine races, ah, to dream, no more than dream walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no know even forty years later. Wow.
Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small filtered, natch, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.
Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, Hubert, trickey dick war-circus then.
Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.
The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not ancient robert frost to guide you.. Just look at blooded Kent State, or better blooded Jackson State. Christ.
Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.
Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monkton, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarkederos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam trickey dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.
He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.
Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.
A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggered time, right.
White flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.
Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.
One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 and thus already past sixty-four, comment:
Many of my fellows from the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.
When I'm Sixty-Four - The Beatles
When I get olded, loosing my hair,
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me the Valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine
If I stay out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
You'll be older too,
And if you say the word I could stay with you.
I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday morning go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight,
if it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave
Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form,
Mine for evermore,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
Beatles, Class of 1964, counterculture, generation of '68, Rock and Roll, The Rolling Stones
88888888888
Ancient dreams, dreamed.
Ya, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.
Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window apartment project hang your hat dwelling, small, warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching as he, that older brother, goes off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time of his time, in this cold war dust particles in air night.
A cloudless day, a cloudless Korean War day, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too have been to foreign places, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.
Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb unnamed shelter blast fears, named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hatred stalinite jews killed they killed our catholic lord and what did they do anyway fears against the glass glistening flag-pole rattling dark school yard night, alone, and, and, alone avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, AND deaths in barely marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards.
Endless walks, endless sea street seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat to make hard the making way for the uptown drug store, Rexall’s drug store, heist stolen valentine, ribbon and bow valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet.
Walks, endless waiting bus stop non-stop walks, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one lane snow-drift hassles, pass trees are green, coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times gone now, for one look one look that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school, man), handy man, breatheless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name brunette. That will come, that will come.
City square standing, hunched, hated, low-head hated, waiting, standing, going in, coming out, coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.
A bridge too far. Bicycle boy churning through endless heated streets, names all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifters petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, hard against the named seas, against those changes that kind of hit one side ways all at once like some mack the knife devilish thing
Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later though, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-boring but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path
Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval ,watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Who would have figured that one.
Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets . Diana, blonde Diana cashmere-sweatered,tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out, nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of coded submarine races, ah, to dream, no more than dream walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no know even forty years later. Wow.
Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small filtered, natch, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.
Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, Hubert, trickey dick war-circus then.
Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.
The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not ancient robert frost to guide you.. Just look at blooded Kent State, or better blooded Jackson State. Christ.
Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.
Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monkton, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarkederos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam trickey dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.
He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.
Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.
A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggered time, right.
White flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.
Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.
One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Dipping Into The Late Great Folk Scene Minute, Circa 1966
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Woody Guthrie performing his alternative national anthem, This Land Is Your Land.
The Greatest Songs Of Woody, Woody Guthrie and others, Vanguard Records, 1988
Scene: Brought to mind by the classic Woody Guthrie song and hobo national anthem, This Land is Your Land.
“Hey Josh did you hear that the senior class is going to turn the school gym into a coffeehouse on the night of October 7th and have Ramblin’ Jack Elliot as the featured performer to raise money for their Olde Saco High School Class of 1966 Senior Prom. Cool, right?” yelled Jimmy Jones across the boys’ locker room divider to his best friend and fellow track runner, Josh Breslin. Josh, non-committedly, yelled back just as Jimmy turned on the shower to wash the day’s five mile run sweat away, “Ya, cool.” That particular response reflected (and hid) two important facts. One, Josh, wasn’t exactly sure what a coffeehouse was (other than a place to get coffee which he did not drink because all the latest studies indicated that caffeine consumption was bad, track runner bad, for your performance) and, two, he had not the slightest idea who or what a Ramblin’ Jack Eliot was.
All Josh knew for sure was that a long-legged, short-skirt-wearing (showing those long gams to great effect), long straight black-haired, often peasant blouse wearing Kitty (Kathleen) Saint Just, a girl in his junior English class that he was seriously interested in, very seriously interested in, was seriously into music, although exactly what kind of music he was not sure of except not his jump Rolling Stones be-bop rock ‘n’ roll after she gave him a weird look when he mentioned it one time after class. And most assuredly not Bob Dylan’s music, not his Like A Rolling Stone music that he also jumped to. Same weird look. What he was exactly sure of was that she would, having an older brother, Laurent, in the senior class be attending the concert. And Josh Breslin, handsome Josh Breslin or not, desperately wanted to be sitting next to Kitty, drink of coffee in hand or not, at that concert.
There was only one solution-Billy Monroe, Jimmy Joe’s son and his fellow classmate. For those over the age of twenty-one, for the squares, in the Olde Saco Main Street night, who do not know who Jimmy Joe is without more identification here is his cachet. Jimmy Joe Monroe owes the teenage boss Friday night (hell, and Saturday night too) hang-out on Main Street, Jimmy Joe’s Diner (and another one on Atlantic Avenue but that one doesn’t count because that is for people who want full dinners and stuff like that, not dogs and burgers like real people). And son Billy is the numero uno whiz kid for all kinds of music, and has been since about the fourth grade when he turned everybody on to Jerry Lee Lewis and his High School Confidential which blew Olde Saco Junior High wide open one school dance night. But that’s a story for another time.
Right now Josh needs Billy for a “refresher” course on ABC coffeehouse scenes and singers. So Josh hightailed it over to the Colonial Donut Shoppe (hey. they serve other stuff too not just joe and crullers) where Billy held forth after school. (For those, let’s face it, squares who wonder why Billy doesn’t hang out at Jimmy Joe’s with all the teeny-bopper girls, where have you been, haven’t you heard word one about teen alienation and from whom one is alienated numero uno from, Christ.) He caught Billy’s eye and told him of his dilemma.
Billy laughed, laughed loudly, but with no harm in the laugh. He couldn’t believe that Josh was clueless about the old-timey folk scene that had had its minute in New York and Boston about five years before but was now like, well like, ancient history. Josh was surprised to hear that Bob Dylan had made that scene, had been a big-wheel in it, and then blew it off like some bad karma once he moved on to real music, rock music. So Billy gave him the rundown on what a coffeehouse was, no big deal just a place for coffee and, kind of like Millie’s Diner up the road near the old mill where his father used to work and have his coffee and, except darker lit and strictly for kids. Josh thought, sounds kind of cool.
As for the Ramblin’ Jack part this was a little more screwy. It seems there was a big dust-up between Dylan and guys like Ramblin’ Jack over what to be true to. Both had started out kicking around songs by a guy named Woody Guthrie, a folk troubadour Billy called him, songs like This Land Is Your Land, Do Re, Mi, Hobo’s Lullaby and Depression songs, stuff like that. Strictly old-timey stuff. But Ramblin’ Jack stayed true blue and that is why he is working the faux coffeehouse high school prom fund-raising scene in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and sixty-six for coffee and crullers. “Got it now, Josh?,” murmured Billy. Ya.
Josh didn’t think anything of it other than as so much air like Darwin’s theory of evolution and other stuff in school until he called one Kitty Saint Just up on the phone and asked her to go with him to the senior class coffeehouse fund-raiser. She hemmed a little until Josh got the bright idea to mention that Ramblin’ Jack would probably be singing Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, and some other songs which he Billy-rambled off. “Oh, Josh, you know about Jack Elliot?,” purred Kitty into the phone. “Well, yes, sure,” answered the now fox-wise Josh.
Dated, no problem, dated up pick me up at seven and as a bonus Miss Kitty is requiring the pleasure of his company this Saturday afternoon to come over to her house and listen to Ramblin’ Jack, Joan Baez, early Dylan (as she made very clear in her offering), Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Dave Von Ronk and a bunch of other names he did not recognize. And it did not matter that he did not recognize the names because all he had to do was chant the Woody name and he was home free. Ya, this land is my land. Thanks Woody Guthrie whoever you are.
Folk revival, woody Guthrie
The Greatest Songs Of Woody, Woody Guthrie and others, Vanguard Records, 1988
Scene: Brought to mind by the classic Woody Guthrie song and hobo national anthem, This Land is Your Land.
“Hey Josh did you hear that the senior class is going to turn the school gym into a coffeehouse on the night of October 7th and have Ramblin’ Jack Elliot as the featured performer to raise money for their Olde Saco High School Class of 1966 Senior Prom. Cool, right?” yelled Jimmy Jones across the boys’ locker room divider to his best friend and fellow track runner, Josh Breslin. Josh, non-committedly, yelled back just as Jimmy turned on the shower to wash the day’s five mile run sweat away, “Ya, cool.” That particular response reflected (and hid) two important facts. One, Josh, wasn’t exactly sure what a coffeehouse was (other than a place to get coffee which he did not drink because all the latest studies indicated that caffeine consumption was bad, track runner bad, for your performance) and, two, he had not the slightest idea who or what a Ramblin’ Jack Eliot was.
All Josh knew for sure was that a long-legged, short-skirt-wearing (showing those long gams to great effect), long straight black-haired, often peasant blouse wearing Kitty (Kathleen) Saint Just, a girl in his junior English class that he was seriously interested in, very seriously interested in, was seriously into music, although exactly what kind of music he was not sure of except not his jump Rolling Stones be-bop rock ‘n’ roll after she gave him a weird look when he mentioned it one time after class. And most assuredly not Bob Dylan’s music, not his Like A Rolling Stone music that he also jumped to. Same weird look. What he was exactly sure of was that she would, having an older brother, Laurent, in the senior class be attending the concert. And Josh Breslin, handsome Josh Breslin or not, desperately wanted to be sitting next to Kitty, drink of coffee in hand or not, at that concert.
There was only one solution-Billy Monroe, Jimmy Joe’s son and his fellow classmate. For those over the age of twenty-one, for the squares, in the Olde Saco Main Street night, who do not know who Jimmy Joe is without more identification here is his cachet. Jimmy Joe Monroe owes the teenage boss Friday night (hell, and Saturday night too) hang-out on Main Street, Jimmy Joe’s Diner (and another one on Atlantic Avenue but that one doesn’t count because that is for people who want full dinners and stuff like that, not dogs and burgers like real people). And son Billy is the numero uno whiz kid for all kinds of music, and has been since about the fourth grade when he turned everybody on to Jerry Lee Lewis and his High School Confidential which blew Olde Saco Junior High wide open one school dance night. But that’s a story for another time.
Right now Josh needs Billy for a “refresher” course on ABC coffeehouse scenes and singers. So Josh hightailed it over to the Colonial Donut Shoppe (hey. they serve other stuff too not just joe and crullers) where Billy held forth after school. (For those, let’s face it, squares who wonder why Billy doesn’t hang out at Jimmy Joe’s with all the teeny-bopper girls, where have you been, haven’t you heard word one about teen alienation and from whom one is alienated numero uno from, Christ.) He caught Billy’s eye and told him of his dilemma.
Billy laughed, laughed loudly, but with no harm in the laugh. He couldn’t believe that Josh was clueless about the old-timey folk scene that had had its minute in New York and Boston about five years before but was now like, well like, ancient history. Josh was surprised to hear that Bob Dylan had made that scene, had been a big-wheel in it, and then blew it off like some bad karma once he moved on to real music, rock music. So Billy gave him the rundown on what a coffeehouse was, no big deal just a place for coffee and, kind of like Millie’s Diner up the road near the old mill where his father used to work and have his coffee and, except darker lit and strictly for kids. Josh thought, sounds kind of cool.
As for the Ramblin’ Jack part this was a little more screwy. It seems there was a big dust-up between Dylan and guys like Ramblin’ Jack over what to be true to. Both had started out kicking around songs by a guy named Woody Guthrie, a folk troubadour Billy called him, songs like This Land Is Your Land, Do Re, Mi, Hobo’s Lullaby and Depression songs, stuff like that. Strictly old-timey stuff. But Ramblin’ Jack stayed true blue and that is why he is working the faux coffeehouse high school prom fund-raising scene in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and sixty-six for coffee and crullers. “Got it now, Josh?,” murmured Billy. Ya.
Josh didn’t think anything of it other than as so much air like Darwin’s theory of evolution and other stuff in school until he called one Kitty Saint Just up on the phone and asked her to go with him to the senior class coffeehouse fund-raiser. She hemmed a little until Josh got the bright idea to mention that Ramblin’ Jack would probably be singing Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, and some other songs which he Billy-rambled off. “Oh, Josh, you know about Jack Elliot?,” purred Kitty into the phone. “Well, yes, sure,” answered the now fox-wise Josh.
Dated, no problem, dated up pick me up at seven and as a bonus Miss Kitty is requiring the pleasure of his company this Saturday afternoon to come over to her house and listen to Ramblin’ Jack, Joan Baez, early Dylan (as she made very clear in her offering), Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Dave Von Ronk and a bunch of other names he did not recognize. And it did not matter that he did not recognize the names because all he had to do was chant the Woody name and he was home free. Ya, this land is my land. Thanks Woody Guthrie whoever you are.
Folk revival, woody Guthrie
Saturday, January 7, 2012
When The Class-War Was Red Hot- Farrell Dobbs’ “Teamsters Rebellion” (The 1934 Minneapolis Truckers Strikes For Union Recognition) - A Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archive for an online copy of his important Lessons of the Minneapolis Strikes.
Book Review
Teamster Rebellion, Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) the American working class has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin big time. What with job losses (and jobs not coming back), paying for bank bail-outs, home foreclosures, effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay we pay), mountains of consumer debt, and student loan debt as a lure for the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the American Dream. In short, it is not secret that the working class has faced, is facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of its material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those very 1930s and struggle, struggle as a class against the imperial capitalist monster that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. And that is where the late labor leader (and, for a time, revolutionary socialist) Farrell Dobb’s little book on his (and his comrades) experiences in organizing the truckers of Minneapolis, Teamster’s Rebellion, can help inspire new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, to get out from under. Specific conditions may be different just now from what they were in Dobbs’ 1934 Minneapolis but after re-reading this little organizing gem there was something very, very current about what our forebears faced down there and then.
I write this little review with a special purpose, a purpose driven by the rise of the Occupy movement, in mind. Although the Occupy movement is right now as I write going through some growing pains there are some disturbing trends that I have witnessed since its inception. The main trend for my purposes here includes a rather standoffish attitude toward the working-class, especially the organized working-class, as central to the struggle for a more equitable society rather than as just another numbered victim of American imperialism’s relentless assault on, well, if not the ninety-nine percent then some large percentage of the population. And that is where the lessons of the 1934 Teamster’s strikes comes in as a helpful antidote to that notion. As well as very helpful guide to what Occupy already does fairly well-organize auxiliary aspects of the class struggle like kitchens, libraries, speakers’ bureaus and the like.
A few highlights will illustrate my point. Minneapolis was a notorious anti-labor commercial town (flour, copper, farm goods, etc.) for generations leading up to the 1930s. It had a well-organized, ruthless, and, when necessary, armed business-centered Citizen’s Alliance that mostly kept out the unions for generations. Therefore a central demand, yes a front and center in your face demand, of the working-class there was for independent union recognition by the bosses (they recognized only their own “company” unions, or better, dealt with each individual worker separately). That was the first order of business for those militants, including the leading revolutionary militants (mainly Trotskyists in this situation but others as well). Along with that desire was the idea that those allies (inside workers who loaded the trucks, etc.) of the truckers should also be organized in one industry-wide union rather than the old craft union idea of separate unions for each category of worker (in short, to break the old “divide and conquer” strategy of the bosses and comfort zone of the labor skates).
Now this scenario may not immediately strike any current Occupy sympathizer as particularly germane for today’s struggles but that view would be short-sighted. For what Minneapolis (and the other main class battles of the 1930s in places like San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit) demonstrates is the social power of the working class to hit the economic royalists (the name coined for the one- per centers of that day) to shut the capitalist down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch the two “p’s.” And that is why it is profoundly mistaken to assume that the working class is only along for the ride like everybody else in Occupy. The various recent West Coast port actions is a somewhat skewed way (the longshoremen refused to cross the community picket lines rather than directly shut the ports themselves but the effect was the same-ports shutdown for a period) demonstrate that same proposition.
Beyond that central premise that is bed-rock to understand this book is filled with all kinds of information that is also important to know for any major show-down struggle with the bosses. Such class-war actions have to be carefully planned using every resource available (not just some happenstance thing put together at a whim, or less). So reading about the soup kitchens, the hospital, the make-shift garages (to transport roving pickets, a necessity in the many-sited trucking industry), provisions for entertainment, and a labor daily newspaper to counteract the bourgeois biases of the press sounded awfully familiar to me, and should to you. Some parts Occupy has got right, got right right from the start.
What, disturbingly, has not been right or has been some what blurred today is a clear understanding of the relationship between the bosses and their state (the cops, National Guard, mayors, governors, courts, prisons, etc.) and we the risen people. The militants (beyond the hard “reds”) in Minneapolis probably had some illusions in those institutions starting out, although probably less than those today, a few generations removed from those hard class battles. They soon “learned” about the cops in their three-stage (three separate strike actions from February to August 1934) fight. Learned about cops mostly at the wrong end of a night-stick (or tear-gas grenade) in the famous “Battle of Deputies’ Run”. About the courts and their rough, very rough “justice.” About the militia and who it serves. About the lying bourgeois newspapers and their scare tactics. About who were, and were not, the so-called “friends of labor” from Roosevelt on down. And even about the treachery of the labor skates, particularly the head of the very Teamster Union they were trying to join, Daniel Tobin.
What they also learned though, and we can learn as well, is that through combining together in solidarity in large numbers, through being politically clear-headed, through keeping independent of the main political parties, and most of all having the determination to fight for what you want you can win sometimes in this wicked old world. Read this little book and see if you agree.
Book Review
Teamster Rebellion, Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) the American working class has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin big time. What with job losses (and jobs not coming back), paying for bank bail-outs, home foreclosures, effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay we pay), mountains of consumer debt, and student loan debt as a lure for the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the American Dream. In short, it is not secret that the working class has faced, is facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of its material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those very 1930s and struggle, struggle as a class against the imperial capitalist monster that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. And that is where the late labor leader (and, for a time, revolutionary socialist) Farrell Dobb’s little book on his (and his comrades) experiences in organizing the truckers of Minneapolis, Teamster’s Rebellion, can help inspire new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, to get out from under. Specific conditions may be different just now from what they were in Dobbs’ 1934 Minneapolis but after re-reading this little organizing gem there was something very, very current about what our forebears faced down there and then.
I write this little review with a special purpose, a purpose driven by the rise of the Occupy movement, in mind. Although the Occupy movement is right now as I write going through some growing pains there are some disturbing trends that I have witnessed since its inception. The main trend for my purposes here includes a rather standoffish attitude toward the working-class, especially the organized working-class, as central to the struggle for a more equitable society rather than as just another numbered victim of American imperialism’s relentless assault on, well, if not the ninety-nine percent then some large percentage of the population. And that is where the lessons of the 1934 Teamster’s strikes comes in as a helpful antidote to that notion. As well as very helpful guide to what Occupy already does fairly well-organize auxiliary aspects of the class struggle like kitchens, libraries, speakers’ bureaus and the like.
A few highlights will illustrate my point. Minneapolis was a notorious anti-labor commercial town (flour, copper, farm goods, etc.) for generations leading up to the 1930s. It had a well-organized, ruthless, and, when necessary, armed business-centered Citizen’s Alliance that mostly kept out the unions for generations. Therefore a central demand, yes a front and center in your face demand, of the working-class there was for independent union recognition by the bosses (they recognized only their own “company” unions, or better, dealt with each individual worker separately). That was the first order of business for those militants, including the leading revolutionary militants (mainly Trotskyists in this situation but others as well). Along with that desire was the idea that those allies (inside workers who loaded the trucks, etc.) of the truckers should also be organized in one industry-wide union rather than the old craft union idea of separate unions for each category of worker (in short, to break the old “divide and conquer” strategy of the bosses and comfort zone of the labor skates).
Now this scenario may not immediately strike any current Occupy sympathizer as particularly germane for today’s struggles but that view would be short-sighted. For what Minneapolis (and the other main class battles of the 1930s in places like San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit) demonstrates is the social power of the working class to hit the economic royalists (the name coined for the one- per centers of that day) to shut the capitalist down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch the two “p’s.” And that is why it is profoundly mistaken to assume that the working class is only along for the ride like everybody else in Occupy. The various recent West Coast port actions is a somewhat skewed way (the longshoremen refused to cross the community picket lines rather than directly shut the ports themselves but the effect was the same-ports shutdown for a period) demonstrate that same proposition.
Beyond that central premise that is bed-rock to understand this book is filled with all kinds of information that is also important to know for any major show-down struggle with the bosses. Such class-war actions have to be carefully planned using every resource available (not just some happenstance thing put together at a whim, or less). So reading about the soup kitchens, the hospital, the make-shift garages (to transport roving pickets, a necessity in the many-sited trucking industry), provisions for entertainment, and a labor daily newspaper to counteract the bourgeois biases of the press sounded awfully familiar to me, and should to you. Some parts Occupy has got right, got right right from the start.
What, disturbingly, has not been right or has been some what blurred today is a clear understanding of the relationship between the bosses and their state (the cops, National Guard, mayors, governors, courts, prisons, etc.) and we the risen people. The militants (beyond the hard “reds”) in Minneapolis probably had some illusions in those institutions starting out, although probably less than those today, a few generations removed from those hard class battles. They soon “learned” about the cops in their three-stage (three separate strike actions from February to August 1934) fight. Learned about cops mostly at the wrong end of a night-stick (or tear-gas grenade) in the famous “Battle of Deputies’ Run”. About the courts and their rough, very rough “justice.” About the militia and who it serves. About the lying bourgeois newspapers and their scare tactics. About who were, and were not, the so-called “friends of labor” from Roosevelt on down. And even about the treachery of the labor skates, particularly the head of the very Teamster Union they were trying to join, Daniel Tobin.
What they also learned though, and we can learn as well, is that through combining together in solidarity in large numbers, through being politically clear-headed, through keeping independent of the main political parties, and most of all having the determination to fight for what you want you can win sometimes in this wicked old world. Read this little book and see if you agree.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Out In the Be-Bop 1960s Night- When Olde Saco Rocked, Rocked Into The Night
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Otis Redding performing his torch classic I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.
CD Review
1965: The Beat Goes On, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Scene evoked by the cover art that graces the front of this CD. The cover illustrates an example of 1965 teen jail-break concert, or better, some local teen queen bee club, where a local cover band, complete with mopped-hair and Nehru jackets, amped-up to the high heavens is trying to make its own musical break-out.
Ya, Olde Saco, Maine is rocking tonight. School’s over for the summer, mercifully over, and everybody who is anybody, anybody in the teen world, what other world is there, is out in the sea breeze night. Hell, Josh, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, freshly-minted junior-to-be at Old Saco High come the fall earlier in the evening even counted a bunch of walkers and others touristas who don’t really count out this night. This Friday night just before the French-Canadians from up in Quebec (the locals call them “cubies,” to draw a distinction between the foreigners and the homegrown varieties of French Canadian including Josh himself whose mother is a LeBlanc) descend on the town come July and take up all the air, the Maine soft fluffed beach sand, and the whiskey clubs with their arcadian dreams, and liquor stinks.
Ya, he chuckled to himself they sure don’t count, not tonight. And not down at the Surfside Club where the local favorites from up in Bangor, the Rockin’ Ramrods, are holding their first concert, well, dance really since they fronted for The Kinkies down in one of Boston’s Fenway night clubs a few weeks back. Now, for the squares, what the Surfside is about is a teen night club where no liquor is served, no official liquor okay. And only people eighteen to twenty-one can get in. Period, well, kind of period.
See last summer after the Beatles hit the shore the guy who owns the Surfside, Lenny LaCroix, decided he could make more dough, lots more dough, using his club on Friday and Saturday nights to let the teeny-boppers bop (hey, that is how he explained it to one and all in the Olde Saco Tribune). Before that he used to have a fox-trot and whisky crowd, mainly whisky, foul up the place for a few hours before heading off to watch late night television or something. And so almost every week since then every eighteen to twenty-one year old within fifty miles including those tweedy Colby girls and Bates guys came thundering down the newly opened Maine Turnpike to listen to what was what on the local music scene. But mainly to be seen, and see. Officially, okay
Hold on a minute. How does one Joshua Lawrence Breslin, who by no stretch of the imagination can fit the eighteen year old minimum either by looks or by stance, fit in. Well, that is where the old ancient human game, hell maybe Adam and Eve invented it, who you know, who you know in the Old Saco teen night scheme of things comes into play.
See the king hell king of that night is none other than usually day and night whiskey-soaked “Stewball” Stu (although nobody, nobody alive anyway, calls him to his face, not if they want to stay alive anyway) who has been the king of the car-crazed night here as long as anyone can remember. Why? Let us just say ‘57 cherry flaming hellfire red “boss” Chevy and be done with it. And Josh, having inadvertently done Stu a good turn turning over some local Lolita that Stu was interested in, has been riding “shot gun” on most Friday and Saturday nights in that '57 chariot for the past couple of years.
And the very long in the tooth (over 21) Stu is nothing but the guy who turned the owner of the Surfside, Lenny, on to the idea of evicting the sloe-gin fizz crowd and making his joint a teen club. Besides Stu, at the best of times an oily mechanic to normal people (read: non-teens), is nothing but a magnet for the legion of honeys who love ’57 Chevys, or rather love being seen in that kind of vehicle, and what that does to them in lots of ways. Best of all if Stu, who sometimes can be a hard and cruel king, is open-armed welcome his boy Josh is welcome too. So tonight is no different from a million other nights that way. Strictly Friday routine.
So this night Josh is making his usual trek over to Stu’s “house,” really just a mucked-up trailer cum ad hoc garage, hell, let’s just call it a dump and be done with it, down at the corner of his own wrong side of the tracks street, Albemarle, and Main. That trip is required protocol now since mother Delores (nee Leblanc, and no nonsense French-Canadian in such matters) put her foot down (or rather both feet) last spring and declared Stu and his car persona non grata and persona non car. No big deal this night though as the stars have come out and Josh dreams his usual dream, his usual Friday night salacious dream of “scoring” a bevy of babes at this hoe-down teen night club scene so that he will have one for each night in the week like his mentor, Stu. He arrives at Stu’s, they pass their usual grunt greetings, and they are off into the ocean air, wave-flecked night.
First stop. Or rather first pass through. Jimmy Jacks’ Diner (the one on Main and Atlantic, the teen girl magnet and guy hot car hang-out one, not the lame senior citizen blue plate special before six joint over on West Grand, hell no) to see who may be out and about early, who is not going anywhere near some hot teen club, and who, or what, crazed who is looking for Stu to go mano y mano with him on some dawn Squaw Rock “chicken” run. Ya, some crazed yahoo from the sticks or something who hasn’t heard that Stu and his Chevy are immortal. But this night “no dice,” nothing, nada and so it is off to the pier to scout things out there on the pilgrimage.
Scouting the pier is a much part of the Friday night summer ritual as breathing, no question. See this is like Stu’s coronation, or reaffirmation of his kinghood. And also see that the honeys who hang around the pier are those who, unlike Josh and his cachet, have no chance of sneaking into (or staying) the Surfside and so they must cool their act on the amusement park boardwalk. That little problem, however, does not stop them from getting in line, a line six deep at times, to oh, oh, oh, Stu’s Chevy and hope, hope that maybe tonight he sees their teeny-bopper charms. And Stu, normally a girl stoic at least out front, loves this adoration from, well from girls his own age, his socially developed own age. Josh though thanks his lucky stars Stu is that way ever since that local Lolita turnover, thanks his lucky starts everyday. Even if the Stu aura has never brought him any luck with those silly, screaming skee ball sticks. Even on a lonesome Monday night.
But even an adored king knows that hanging around parent and cop heavy boardwalks is ill-advised, especially ill-advised, when one Officer “Pete” is aiming dead-eye at Stu and getting his pencil and citation book out ready to pounce on some lame town ordinance to ticket Stu. They are off, although more than one pair of sad-eyed, mini-skirted sticks is moaning and groaning about the leaving. Jesus, Stu really is the king hell king.
Arriving at the Surfside (on East Grand just after the Acey-Duecey Club where all the lamo, old-time motorcycle guys and their “sweeties” hang trying to jump-start their youth dreams) Stu parks in the spot that Lenny has set aside for him as is appropriate for royalty. Stu and Josh go in. And, as usual, they split up and take their respective spots around the bandstand. For a while now Stu and Josh have agreed, no, Stu have proclaimed that once inside the club it is every man for himself and Stu wants no high school junior-to-be messing with his time. Period.
Stu, of course, gets his usual looks from the local shapes (no amusement boardwalk stuff here either, pure honey) who know that a look from Stu means a ride in that ’57 Chevy if not tonight then sometime. But see Stu’s fifteen minutes of fame is strictly local, the girls from the colleges, the ones that Josh eyes and spies, think Stu is, if you can believe this, nothing but a high school drop-out and/or hoodlum. At least that is what one such college girl had just told Josh, while they were slow dancing to Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, when he tried to lash-up to Stu’s star with a freshman girl, Laura, from Colby.
And see, maybe, she, Laura, was right, well right from her Colby perspective, because just before midnight Stu (with a hot red head, definitely a shape, in short green mini-skirt whom Josh had seen around town working in one of the summer hash houses) came up to Josh and for the umpteenth time told him that he had to find his own way home because, well, just because. Just then that Colby girl, maybe sensing that Josh wasn’t some Stu clone, jumped right in and said she would make sure that Josh got home. And the way she said it had Olde Saco Rock jetty beach front ocean “parking” and checking out the dawn written all over it. Ya, Olde Saco rocked that night.
CD Review
1965: The Beat Goes On, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Scene evoked by the cover art that graces the front of this CD. The cover illustrates an example of 1965 teen jail-break concert, or better, some local teen queen bee club, where a local cover band, complete with mopped-hair and Nehru jackets, amped-up to the high heavens is trying to make its own musical break-out.
Ya, Olde Saco, Maine is rocking tonight. School’s over for the summer, mercifully over, and everybody who is anybody, anybody in the teen world, what other world is there, is out in the sea breeze night. Hell, Josh, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, freshly-minted junior-to-be at Old Saco High come the fall earlier in the evening even counted a bunch of walkers and others touristas who don’t really count out this night. This Friday night just before the French-Canadians from up in Quebec (the locals call them “cubies,” to draw a distinction between the foreigners and the homegrown varieties of French Canadian including Josh himself whose mother is a LeBlanc) descend on the town come July and take up all the air, the Maine soft fluffed beach sand, and the whiskey clubs with their arcadian dreams, and liquor stinks.
Ya, he chuckled to himself they sure don’t count, not tonight. And not down at the Surfside Club where the local favorites from up in Bangor, the Rockin’ Ramrods, are holding their first concert, well, dance really since they fronted for The Kinkies down in one of Boston’s Fenway night clubs a few weeks back. Now, for the squares, what the Surfside is about is a teen night club where no liquor is served, no official liquor okay. And only people eighteen to twenty-one can get in. Period, well, kind of period.
See last summer after the Beatles hit the shore the guy who owns the Surfside, Lenny LaCroix, decided he could make more dough, lots more dough, using his club on Friday and Saturday nights to let the teeny-boppers bop (hey, that is how he explained it to one and all in the Olde Saco Tribune). Before that he used to have a fox-trot and whisky crowd, mainly whisky, foul up the place for a few hours before heading off to watch late night television or something. And so almost every week since then every eighteen to twenty-one year old within fifty miles including those tweedy Colby girls and Bates guys came thundering down the newly opened Maine Turnpike to listen to what was what on the local music scene. But mainly to be seen, and see. Officially, okay
Hold on a minute. How does one Joshua Lawrence Breslin, who by no stretch of the imagination can fit the eighteen year old minimum either by looks or by stance, fit in. Well, that is where the old ancient human game, hell maybe Adam and Eve invented it, who you know, who you know in the Old Saco teen night scheme of things comes into play.
See the king hell king of that night is none other than usually day and night whiskey-soaked “Stewball” Stu (although nobody, nobody alive anyway, calls him to his face, not if they want to stay alive anyway) who has been the king of the car-crazed night here as long as anyone can remember. Why? Let us just say ‘57 cherry flaming hellfire red “boss” Chevy and be done with it. And Josh, having inadvertently done Stu a good turn turning over some local Lolita that Stu was interested in, has been riding “shot gun” on most Friday and Saturday nights in that '57 chariot for the past couple of years.
And the very long in the tooth (over 21) Stu is nothing but the guy who turned the owner of the Surfside, Lenny, on to the idea of evicting the sloe-gin fizz crowd and making his joint a teen club. Besides Stu, at the best of times an oily mechanic to normal people (read: non-teens), is nothing but a magnet for the legion of honeys who love ’57 Chevys, or rather love being seen in that kind of vehicle, and what that does to them in lots of ways. Best of all if Stu, who sometimes can be a hard and cruel king, is open-armed welcome his boy Josh is welcome too. So tonight is no different from a million other nights that way. Strictly Friday routine.
So this night Josh is making his usual trek over to Stu’s “house,” really just a mucked-up trailer cum ad hoc garage, hell, let’s just call it a dump and be done with it, down at the corner of his own wrong side of the tracks street, Albemarle, and Main. That trip is required protocol now since mother Delores (nee Leblanc, and no nonsense French-Canadian in such matters) put her foot down (or rather both feet) last spring and declared Stu and his car persona non grata and persona non car. No big deal this night though as the stars have come out and Josh dreams his usual dream, his usual Friday night salacious dream of “scoring” a bevy of babes at this hoe-down teen night club scene so that he will have one for each night in the week like his mentor, Stu. He arrives at Stu’s, they pass their usual grunt greetings, and they are off into the ocean air, wave-flecked night.
First stop. Or rather first pass through. Jimmy Jacks’ Diner (the one on Main and Atlantic, the teen girl magnet and guy hot car hang-out one, not the lame senior citizen blue plate special before six joint over on West Grand, hell no) to see who may be out and about early, who is not going anywhere near some hot teen club, and who, or what, crazed who is looking for Stu to go mano y mano with him on some dawn Squaw Rock “chicken” run. Ya, some crazed yahoo from the sticks or something who hasn’t heard that Stu and his Chevy are immortal. But this night “no dice,” nothing, nada and so it is off to the pier to scout things out there on the pilgrimage.
Scouting the pier is a much part of the Friday night summer ritual as breathing, no question. See this is like Stu’s coronation, or reaffirmation of his kinghood. And also see that the honeys who hang around the pier are those who, unlike Josh and his cachet, have no chance of sneaking into (or staying) the Surfside and so they must cool their act on the amusement park boardwalk. That little problem, however, does not stop them from getting in line, a line six deep at times, to oh, oh, oh, Stu’s Chevy and hope, hope that maybe tonight he sees their teeny-bopper charms. And Stu, normally a girl stoic at least out front, loves this adoration from, well from girls his own age, his socially developed own age. Josh though thanks his lucky stars Stu is that way ever since that local Lolita turnover, thanks his lucky starts everyday. Even if the Stu aura has never brought him any luck with those silly, screaming skee ball sticks. Even on a lonesome Monday night.
But even an adored king knows that hanging around parent and cop heavy boardwalks is ill-advised, especially ill-advised, when one Officer “Pete” is aiming dead-eye at Stu and getting his pencil and citation book out ready to pounce on some lame town ordinance to ticket Stu. They are off, although more than one pair of sad-eyed, mini-skirted sticks is moaning and groaning about the leaving. Jesus, Stu really is the king hell king.
Arriving at the Surfside (on East Grand just after the Acey-Duecey Club where all the lamo, old-time motorcycle guys and their “sweeties” hang trying to jump-start their youth dreams) Stu parks in the spot that Lenny has set aside for him as is appropriate for royalty. Stu and Josh go in. And, as usual, they split up and take their respective spots around the bandstand. For a while now Stu and Josh have agreed, no, Stu have proclaimed that once inside the club it is every man for himself and Stu wants no high school junior-to-be messing with his time. Period.
Stu, of course, gets his usual looks from the local shapes (no amusement boardwalk stuff here either, pure honey) who know that a look from Stu means a ride in that ’57 Chevy if not tonight then sometime. But see Stu’s fifteen minutes of fame is strictly local, the girls from the colleges, the ones that Josh eyes and spies, think Stu is, if you can believe this, nothing but a high school drop-out and/or hoodlum. At least that is what one such college girl had just told Josh, while they were slow dancing to Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, when he tried to lash-up to Stu’s star with a freshman girl, Laura, from Colby.
And see, maybe, she, Laura, was right, well right from her Colby perspective, because just before midnight Stu (with a hot red head, definitely a shape, in short green mini-skirt whom Josh had seen around town working in one of the summer hash houses) came up to Josh and for the umpteenth time told him that he had to find his own way home because, well, just because. Just then that Colby girl, maybe sensing that Josh wasn’t some Stu clone, jumped right in and said she would make sure that Josh got home. And the way she said it had Olde Saco Rock jetty beach front ocean “parking” and checking out the dawn written all over it. Ya, Olde Saco rocked that night.
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