Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**********
Markin comment November 18, 2011:
Josh Breslin didn’t know what to expect this time as the streamlined subway car that he was riding was approaching the South Station stop on the MBTA Red Line in Boston. He half-expected to see some multi-colored hand-made poster proclaiming this stop as “Occupy Boston,” something with stenciled and silhouetted clenched fist, or something like that, proclaiming this newly sacred ground, this fetid, dank subway stop, in the name of the people. Hell, just like back in the old days, the old 1960s times of blessed memory, when no wall, no public wall anyway, was safe from revolutionary pronouncements, or off-hand midnight-crafted graffiti. He had certainly seen stranger signs plastered around the Occupy encampment the last few times that he had previously come over from his home in Cambridge on the other side of the river. Stuff from Thoreau and Gandhi, naturally, but also odd-ball wisps of wisdom about being kind, not being greedy, corporate greedy or otherwise, not being sexist, racist, homophobic and the whole litany of politically acceptable Don’ts scripted out since those ‘60s that seemed self-almost explanatory and in not need of proclamation in this microscopic social experiment, this exemplar of the “new world order,” leftist-style.
Ya, these times definitely call for some outlandish statement in bright day-glo colors something, he mused amused, to confuse the touristas who were making the Occupy site a “must see” stop on their vacation itineraries. Something to throw them off the scent when they asked their infernal questions- “What are the kids up to, why all the tents, why all the black flags (really not many but that black flag of anarchy, like the red one of communism, spooked people, made their deepest fears surface, and in the old days rightly so),” and on and on. Like he, Joshua Breslin, known far and wide back in the day under the moniker, Prince of Love, a magical mystery tour merry prankster, music-and-drugs-are- the-revolution, west coast communal living madman knew what was on the kids minds today, except they were getting the short straw in the game of who gets what in the social game.
Just then he reflected, flash-back reflected, that a lot of what he had seen and heard on those other occasions when he had crossed the river of late, maybe four or five by now, echoed some long ago, half-forgotten signs and totems from the times when he was searching for the blue-pink great American West night back in the late 1960s and had wound up in People’s Park in Berkeley out in wayward California. And had been wounded and tear-gassed, Prince of Love renown notwithstanding, for his efforts when things got twisted and the deal went down. Yes, this was just exactly what it was like and now he had a “theme” for the notes that he was feeling pressed to take on this trip now that he had a “feel” for the situation. Although this time, unlike back then, he was not expecting, not expecting in his on-coming dotage, to be wounded or tear-gassed. He frankly admitted to himself after his last visit to the camp site a few days before that he was not up those rigors now, those shake-them-off-and-come-back-swinging-youth- spunks that he had in great quantity as he headed barrel-assing out west from his old hometown, Olde Saco up Maine way.
The train then stopped jarring him in mid-thought, opened its air-pressurized doors, and its sullen passengers decamped for seven winds places. No, Josh noticed, no sign at the subway level anyway that occupyitis had expanded to the cavernous underground. On surfacing in the Dewey Square sunlight though, another mercifully warm late October day starting to break through, his ears were immediately accosted by the ranting, there was no other name for it, of “Syllable Slim,” a name that he had coined for this vagabond prince standing kitty-corner in front of him when he first heard him holding forth on the perfidies of the Democrats, democrats, Republicans, republicans and anyone else who held the whiff of power, or wanted it, at Park Street Station years ago. Now Slim was the “king” of the Dewey Square day and night having moved either uptown or downtown, Josh was not quite sure of the geographic relationship between the two subway stops, with a new audience to ignore, or try to ignore, him. What was also perfectly clear was, uptown or downtown, Slim would be hard-pressed to describe what was going on at his Occupy kingdom. His spiel did not depend on such trivials The city, any city with size, produces its fair share of drifters, grifters, and midnight shifters and they, like lemmings to the sea, have heard of the glad tidings emitting from Dewey Square (read: food, shelter, and no hassles-the famous “three squares and a cot” from “on-the-road” jungle camp lore) and have come forth. And Slim is their king.
Josh, by the way, was here, here on assignment, not much pay but an assignment anyway, his first since he “officially” retired from his onerous editorial duties a couple of years back to be able to sit back, kick back, and write that great sex/drug/political/musical/ hail fellows well met/digger commune 1960s explosion novel he had been putting off since, well, since he “got off the bus” in 1971 and headed back first to Olde Saco and then drifted down to various Boston area spots. See the pay part was required, no, demanded by Josh, in order to give his employer a real “feel” for the flavor of what was going on at Dewey Square to the “soccer moms and dads” who might be wondering what they were missing while waiting, SUV-waiting, for their little Ashley or Samson to finish up their suburban kids soccer league workouts, or one or another of twelve other possible organized kid to do things for their resumes, the kid’s that is. A few random notes to titillate the rubes, and move on. No sweat. He, moreover, was going to parlay those skimpy notes into working order for his now great Tom Wolfe-ish sociological sex/drug/political/musical/ hail fellows well met/digger commune 1960s explosion novel. And in Josh Breslin’s mind Syllable Slim was already slated, with a big intro, to lead off this 21st century magical mystery tour, merry prankster gig, warts and all. We merely get his leavings.
********
“Hey brother, can you help me put this tarp over my tent? It got cold as hell last night and the winds were blowing fierce,” yelled a cherub-faced male, almost too youthful to be here but such are the times, although it was later learned that he was now a few weeks-seasoned Occupy Boston grizzly veteran resident to a middle-aged man casually walking by. “Sure thing, let’s get to it” replied that passer-by. Was the passer-by some wayward tourist looking for the next thrill in the city night life, a career gawker, or just one many unnamed “volunteers” who have sprung from the woodwork (okay, okay suburbia) in response to the news that something more than nine-to-five and white picket fences might be in the air?
********
“Can you bring this hot pot of soup to the kitchen? Some lady, a lady who would not give her name and would not acknowledge anything but thanks, drove up on the Atlantic Avenue side and asked me to unload some stuff for her,” said one young woman in shorts, short shorts thereby showing off her firm athletic legs for one and all to see to another young woman dressed in long pants, maybe jeans, getting ready for colder climates. Shortly thereafter the “laundry lady” tooted her horn looking for help in unloading a trunk-load of everything from towels to sleeping bags. And our two young women again “hit” the Atlantic Avenue curb for this “angel.” See the angel’s kindly thing, her matronly, middle-aged, unnamed kindly thing, was to come by on Tuesday for dirty laundry and return on Thursday with everything Seventh Generation bright and clean. Said “laundry lady” is also unnamed like our tent-fixing passer-by and soup lady, but clearly one who has come out of the woodwork on the news of the glad tidings.
********
“If you want a meal, a nice hot meal, could you wash some dishes to help us out,” barked, barked above the din of the dozen assorted humans in line in front of him, a man who has daily volunteered to help out in the makeshift kitchen. A kitchen whose primitive dishwashing apparatus entailed the familiar rubber soul dish pan, some lukewarm water, a little oily from the leaving of some off-hand meal, joy detergent, and rinsing tub, dishcloth and done. Primitive like back in kid time doing after supper dishes before being released in the teenage be-bop dark streets night. And a couple of older guys, older guys who knew the streets and the lore of the streets backward and forward, stepped behind the tent and got to work on a stack while the third passed on the request. When the hot meals came on deck all three got a meal, no questions asked, but somewhere, somewhere deep inside his career vagabond heart that third man knew he was not built for this new world a-borning. Not for social solidarity dishes cleaned. Meanwhile our kitchen master chef, master of the artful tuna sandwich and of the slabbed peanut butter and jelly (grape just then) variety as well answers an older man’s inquiry about what was pressingly needed for the next day’s “menu.” That older man, a man who did not look like he had the means to do so, and could have very easily passed for a “resident” of this tent city, had been coming daily with perhaps one hundred dollars worth of whatever our master chef told him the kitchen needed. Angels, apparently, come in all sizes, shapes, and circumstances.
********
Jesus, the logistics of this encampment is simplicity itself. A few rows of tents, sleeping tents, mostly good firm weather-conditioned tents in all colors, mainly blue or the feel of blue though. Unlike those watered-down Army olive drab pup tents that I made do with out in ‘Frisco when Butterfly Swirl and I were a thing traveling up and down the West Coast in the summer of love, 1967. Of course then love drove the be-bop great western night and we probably could have made due with some newspapers under our heads. But that’s a story for another time. Then several tents at each end of the encampment for special tasks like media, the library, and the “information desk.” A few odds and end here and there but mainly kept up nicely, city urban vagabond nicely. Fit for any well-fed college student out on an urban adventure to place his or her head on, and not have mother worry too much. And at the far end, the end away from the subway station a huge granite gray slab of a building, something to do with the ‘big dig” project that created this space, officially the Rose Kennedy Greenway, in its aftermath. The side wall of that big slab now serves as the main poster board for any political messages that people have the energy (and magic marker) to proclaim. And in front of that wall a few chairs, a mike, and various other equipment for those who want harangue, humor, or hum the crowd. That fleeting chance at fifteen minutes of fame for the soul-weary, for the voiceless, and for the voiced-over. Let’s listen in for bit and jot down a few of the things said.
“Karl Marx was right, this capitalist system has got to go and we need to make a new world,” sing-songed a middle-aged man, seemingly some kind of college professor out doing missionary work this day, who then proceeded to spend his fifteen minutes expanding on his scheme to have Congress vote to limit the amount of profit each corporation can make, using some sort of exotic formula that only he had the pass code to unravel. I missed that idea when I read Marx long ago but maybe I missed one of the footnotes the probable source. Our professor didn’t. This place, every time I come, at least during the day is loaded down with professors and others from the myriad local colleges and universities that dot the Boston skyline and each brings his or her own panacea with them, usually some third-rate variation off of Marx or some other 19th century thinker dressed up to wake up the texting-enchanted modern listener.
“This place is a Potemkin Village,” chanted another younger speaker a little later to a wandering, wavering crowd audience of about seven. “The people who run this thing go home at night to their nice warm beds while we stay here and keep the faith, the real faith,” he added. This inflamed black flannel-shirted youth finished up with this epistle, “Besides half the tents are empty and the tents that have people in them are just drifters and bums who don’t know anything about what we are trying to do here. They are just trying to keep warm and away from getting hassled by the cops.” I had heard that sentiment expressed before, more than once, from political types and kind of dismissed it out of hand but this guy seemed to be speaking from some truth experience. I reminded myself to come back in a few minutes and talk to him when he was done. However when I went back about ten minutes later he was gone. But his plaintive plea stuck with me and I will have to keep on the trail of that strand.
********
Later that same day at the same wall-
“Man, play us a Hendrix tune on that thing, ‘cause you are smokin’, man” earnestly requested a young, red-bearded man, obviously a student, an ardent musical student from the look of him. “Okay man, if you play a little drum behind me,” came the reply from the reincarnation of Jimi, complete with tie-dyed headband to hold his head together. And for perhaps fifteen minutes they held it together like some aura out on the 1960s be-bop night, their fifteen minutes of fame on the Dewey Square main stage for their resumes. And the crowd that swelled to listen in knew they had heard some old phantom primordial from the womb sound, and liked it. Another group this time a guitar, harmonica, drum combination trying to bring a blues riff together sends most of the crowd wandering in all directions. Such are the hard facts of the fame game from Broadway to tent city. Hopefully some more harmonious society will have more room for the fringes of that game.
*********
“Say, can I have cigarette, man, I’m out?” said another older man weary, street weary, getting ready to enter a tent to catch a few winks. “I’m rolling Bull, okay?” answered a red-headed dread-locked young man. That cadging of cigarettes, factory-made or from the pouch, between and among the young is somewhat strange after the righteous lifetime drumbeats of foul smoking. Not all messages get through.
Such were, are, will be the random sights and sounds of the Occupy Boston encampment on any given day, or any given minute if you can be in seven places at one time, as the camp continues to organize itself in the tradition of the old westward pioneers seeking that great American west blue-pink night, and still are seeking it generations later.
********
“Hey man, don’t be cheap give me a fucking cigarette, I’m all shaky,” shouted out a razor- edged guy, obviously working off some hang-over, although not necessarily an alcoholic or drug one. “I’m down to my last one, what the fuck do you want from me,” came the surly reply. The tension spiked then passed away in the midday air. In that same midday air came this from one of the tents, voiced by an unseen man, a gruff-voiced man, not young “Fuck, give me my space, my free space, don’t be all around me.” And that voice too went to ground, unresolved.
*******
“This place is neat, three squares and a cot, and nobody hassles you and you don’t have to work for your grub, or nothing,” murmured a street veteran, shabbily-dressed, rough edge- bearded but of sober expression to no one in particular in a crowd of suburban tourists who have made the site at Dewey Square a place on their “must see” map. A young man came up to a clot of that same crowd to discuss the Occupy theme. A question was asked about the shabbily-dressed man’s comment. “Oh, ya, most of the residents are street people, a few of us like me stay to keep the peace but most of the politicos go home, or back to the dorms when the General Assembly is over. We opened the space to anyone who followed the simple rules of the camp so here we are.” One tourista smirked the smirk of someone who “knew, just knew” this thing was not going to work, not with bums, hell no. We shall see.
********
“Out of the tents, into the streets, Out of the tents, into the streets” yelled a tall dark-haired young man dressed in black, Black Bloc black, meaning black everything black, from boots to jacket, topped off with the de rigueur black bandana handkerchief covering the bottom part of his face as some kind of security blanket measure. This youth is known to me so that there is only a little affectation in his dress to be in touch with his anarchist heart. Others’ motives I am not as sure of as they flaunt their garb like wearing the “uniform” would cast away all sins and black purify their corrupted souls. Such act would guard against turning into a stinking bourgeois baddie like daddy.
This sight, the nightmare sight to every protective mother guarding her young against the travails of the world and the bane of every government seeing spook shadows behind the dress, is however here among the tents just another guy with a cause. He repeats himself several times as he tries to rouse the denizens of the new world tent city to come out and march on behalf of any number of causes, this one in solidarity with the shutting down of the Port of Oakland by Occupy Oakland on this early November day, the vanguard action city of the whole American movement and one that has been increasing under attack, under police attack almost nightly.
A few younger comrades also dressed in black, head-to-toe black as well, heeded his plea and stirred from their tents, stretching the stretch of the huddled or prone to ready themselves for the couple of mile walk on this cold but clear evening. Mostly the camp residents ignore the plea and go about their business of fixing tents, heading to the kitchen mess tent for supper or just pretend that our big-hearted black-attired anarcho-mad monk of an activist will gather his troops and leave. And here is where the funny part comes in as I think back to a guy I heard up on the “main stage” a few days back who kept yelling about this occupation site being a Potemkin Village. [Markin: For those not in the know about Russian history or are unfamiliar with the term it signifies all front, no substance. Allegedly one of Russian Empress Catherine the Great’s lovers back in the 18th century, Potemkin, ordered beautiful villages build with only the facades so his honey would have pleasant sights to see when they went riding by. Ya I know, lame but that is the story.] And today that seems true, at least to my eye, as the vast majority of the three hundred or so marchers were not resident “occupiers,” or had the now signature drawn-out slightly dazed sag look of occupiers. In any case we are off, as I have decided to express my solidarity with the sisters and brothers in Oakland (a place I know well from back in the day).
Naturally the black-suited sisters and brothers are up front leading this thing chanting solidarity slogans centered on the defense of Occupy Oakland ("From the East Bay to Back Bay-Defend Occupy Oakland"), the ubiquitous “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” that is something of a national anthem for the movement now, and to show the tenor of militancy this night this little beauty, “What’s the solution?: Revolution, What’s the reaction?: Direct action." All in a day’s work out in the protest march world though. What makes this one a little unusual is the march route. See the line of march on this one, perhaps reflecting some super-black dream kick, is deliberately planned to go helter-skelter, one assumes to “throw off” the bicycle police and other law enforcement types who are “guarding” the march.
Of course the only ones who are confused by all this are the few marchers who are rare rookies to this scene, trampling on others' shoes we travel zigzag (and they, the rookies zigzag) up the wrong way on Winter Street or Congress Street stopping already stopped rush hour traffic with our pleas for solidarity and a whole range of other concerns. Eventually we get to the State House on Beacon Street then march down to Charles Street and move against the waiting traffic before heading back to Boylston Street and then to Downtown Crossing for the now obligatory “die in” (a momentary sit-in, if you are not familiar with that term) a few “mic check” shout-outs and then more chanting back to camp. Done, finis, chalk up some more march miles on my protest-o-meter. A spirited march, a necessary march, no question, but I hope that I was just being jittery when I got that feeling in my spine at the end of the march that something was out of joint, that those who wish to “lead” a revolution, a black-encrusted revolution, were heading up the wrong street with their antics.
********
“You had better stay the fuck away from my woman, and stay way away,” threatened a young guy, a young white guy, not a street guy, not a student but just the kind of guy who drifts in and out of things. “Fuck you and your woman,” came the reply from a young Spanish-looking dude who had daggers in his eyes as the two nearly came to blows. Just then someone yelled “rainbow” and several people appeared to calm the situation down. Not too quickly calmed it down by the way.
This too is a part of the “new world a-borning” as not everybody is quite ready yet to shift gears, or just has too much, much too much, baggage from old bourgeois society to make the leap of faith just yet.
********
Voices overheard while waiting for a rally or march against or for something to start, a Free School University lecture to begin, a this or that meeting to proceed, a just plain old ordinary passing through the camp or the thousand and one other things waits at the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square.
“See, this is the way it works,” said a tall, red-headed curly-haired young man, dressed in an “approved” regulation Occupy resident garb, fatigue jacket, denim jeans, a rakish hat, and this warmish evening wearing shoes with no socks to a small, middle-aged, graying woman dressed in some outfit worthy of high hippie times in the summer of love, 1967 but who was having a hard time getting around the various concepts involved in participation in a General Assembly (GA) show-up, the central decision-making body of the Occupy movement, although she liked the idea in theory as she made plain to tell her “tour guide” at the start.
The red-headed youth, let’s call him Red for short although no inference should be drawn about his political allegiances from that, continued, “Somebody brings an idea they, or their group, want to have heard, discussed, and voted on by GA. Let’s say, for example, an action like having everybody turn in their saving and checking accounts at the big banks like Bank of America and transfer the money to credit unions or small neighborhood banks on a certain day. They come here, get their point put on the agenda and when their turn comes up they can motivate it. Then people can discuss it, discuss it from all angles, sometimes unto death practically, I’ve seen that at GA, and periodic “temperature checks” can be taken on the favorability of supporting such an action.”
“What’s a temperature check?” asked our somewhat bewildered ancient flower-child.
“That’s a sense of the meeting on some point and instead of the crowd yelling and screaming a response you just wiggle your fingers on one hand, or two, in the middle, or down. It doesn’t mean a thing about whether the thing, the idea being presented, will pass or not,” young Red answered, answered in the patient low-key monotone that he had either spent many moons perfecting in secret or came naturally to him. I suspect the latter from other times I have seen him give his spiels at GA. “After the proposal is presented then people can approach the facilitator, or the assigned “stack” person, and ask to speak on the matter, in turn.” Okay, so far?”
“After full discussion that can, like I say, take the whole evening there is a vote, a vote if there is a quorum left at GA by voting time. Sometimes there is not, more so recently. Then a bunch of procedures come into play that I don’t always understood about dissent blocks and mortal dissent blocks that can kill a proposal even before a vote if somebody thinks it is a small or big danger to what the Occupy movement is trying to do. And others agree after a vote, if it gets that far. Usually though that doesn’t happen because the stuff we deal with isn’t that weird. The quorum thing will more likely delay action on a vote and the thing is tabled until a later GA. If nothing gets in the way though it can be voted that night by consensus.
“What?” asked the starting to get glazed-eye woman, who seemingly no stranger to the in and outs of grassroots participatory democracy, is taken back by our Red’s use of the word.
“Okay, okay in the corporate world things get done by majority vote, right. So a lot of people can be losers even if the vote is close so to guard against that tyranny of the majority everything is done by consensus. Someone explained it to me this way and it made sense to me. You raise your hand in approval if you can live with the proposal. On the credit union thing that would be easy but on some other stuff maybe not.”
“So what if you don’t get consensus but have a majority? Our fair lady asks. “No go, go back and work on your proposal or give it up,” shot back Red, for the first time a little annoyed with a question like the idea of consensus was automatically the best way to do things in a democracy and how could anyone, especially an anyone who came from 1960s land, object. “Thanks, for your help” our hippie lady, our perplexed hippie lady on that last point, told Red as she meandered around the camp looking for the kitchen area, or maybe just to think over what had suddenly perplexed her.
***********
“How long have you been coming here?,” asked the white-haired old man, neatly although inexpensively dressed, a man who seemingly had seen many struggles in his time, not all of them political, but enough of them to know that he had some political thoughts hidden among those white hairs. “Oh, I started camping out here on Day 1 in September and stayed for a few weeks but then I had to go back to my dorm at Boston University because there was too much noise here at night for me to study and anyway I got kind of bored just hanging around a lot being gawked at by tourists and everybody else who wanted to see what was going on here at the beginning,” forthrightly answered a fetching young brunette who did not, frankly, look, strictly from appearances, like she belonged here for one day never mind weeks but that is the beauty of what has been churned up this fall by the tide of the Occupy movement in the face of overwhelmingly social discontent.
The wizened white-haired man moved slowly away to speak to others he had met, especially a couple of Veterans For Peace supporters whom he had come to know fairly well, at the site when the young woman reached out, tugged at his coat and said “Wait, I have more to tell you.” A little startled the old man stopped in his tracks and asked to hear more. She continued “I’ve seen you around camp before, talking to some people I know about the 1960s and about the funny stuff that went on then, and you look like you might have been a hippie or something so I think I can tell you stuff.” “What stuff?” answered the now red-faced old man waiting for the young damsel to pore out her heart about the indignities of life, boy-friend problems, some unknown addictions, or some such thing.
“I just didn’t leave because I couldn’t study or was bored although that was part of it. Mainly it was because I feel this movement has lost direction, lost direction in a big way, by spending all its time and energy here defending and winter fortifying the camp and getting isolated from trying to reach out to people. I’m studying about social movements in school and this one seems to be going away from what groups like the black civil rights movement and anti-war movements were trying to even if they made a lot of mistakes. My boy-friend and I almost broke up over it because he likes the camp life, he’s still here, and he doesn’t want any demands raised, period, and thinks that if we just show a good example people will gravitate to see things our way. He was furious when I said nobody was watching, or not enough were. We made up after I left and went back to my dorm room but I still think after over a month that the encampment has been here that I was right, although we avoid talking about it. What do you think?”
The white-haired man laughed, laughed good-naturedly explaining that he did not expect in his fairly frequent stops at Dewey Square that he would be performing Dear Occupy Abby services to the lovelorn. She gave half a smile to that notion. He continued, “We too made every mistake in the book back in the day, especially in going out of our way to alienate every possible person who disagreed with us until, like some light bulb going on, we finally got it that such things were self-defeating and changed tack. I too share your reservations about getting isolated out here in the middle of nowhere, even if it is the center of the Financial District, but an old radical, and old communist actually, told me back in the day that each generation must find its own ways to drive the struggle. And he was basically right. At least some of us did learn and I am living proof that not all mistakes are politically fatal. Things are still fresh yet so talk to your boy-friend, and keep talking about the need to break out of the camps. Okay?” She nodded the nod of the half-believer and walked away saying she hoped to run into our wizard again.
**********
“Hey, what time is the Women’s Caucus march starting?, asked, asked softly and politely, a young, maybe mixed spanishblackwhiteindian, woman dressed in what I would describe as modern young women casual elegant, student division, but what do I know of such North Face fashion trends, as I approached the tent full gravel walkway entrance that leads into the Occupy Boston encampment on the kitchen side. I answered softly and politely not out of instinct, or mannered effect, but from hoarsed-out chanting-“Whatever we wear, Wherever we go, Yes means Yes, No means No!” – “Consent in the sheets, Dissent in the streets!” – “We are unstoppable, another world is possible!,” words that rang in the streets that Sunday afternoon as the Women’s Caucus and their allies, including me, marched through Boston. A little change of pace from the generic national anthem-like “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” slogans of late, but necessary to show, show manly show, solidarity with the women of this encampment who have led the struggle against male chauvinism and sexual harassment in general-and, disturbingly, in the camp.
“Sorry, you just missed it, we are just finishing up,” I told her. She responded that she thought the thing started at two (another of those snafus that are intrinsic to makeshift social movements, even movements hard-drive driven by modern computer technology), it said so in the Occupy Daily Calendar and she had rushed over here to make it in time. “That is when the music and poetry was listed to start. In fact they are underway down at the main stage now. I’ll walk you down” “Oh, I hope I didn’t miss Letta Neely reading her poetry, that is really why I came. She speaks to me, speaks to me a lot” I replied that I was not familiar with this woman’s work. “Oh she is a sistah, a black beautiful lesbian sistah who writes about stuff I feel, feel deeply, being a mixed race, mixed-up, bi-sexual woman.” I gulped, and smiled, smiled inside, not at what she said but at what infinite number of words would have to go into righteously describing her with that added information, and her space. I gave up as we approached the main stage and listened to a woman who described herself as PuertoDom ( I hope I am spelling this right, Puerto Rican and Dominican, okay) reading her poetry. Very sharp, witty, and politically to the point poetry. Then Letta Neely came on. Check this out:
From Juba:poetry/by Letta Neely, Wildheart Press, copyright 1998
juba
for renita
u be a gospel song
some a dat
ole time religion
where the tambourine git goin
and the holy ghost sneak up
inside people's bones and
everybody dancin and shoutin
screamin and cryin
oh jesus, oh jesus
and the people start to clappin
and reachin back to african rhythms
pulled through the wombs of
the middle passage
and women's hats start flying
while the dance,
the dance they do gets hotter and holier
and just the music has brought cause for celebration
yeah, u be a gospel song, girl
like some a dat ole back in the woods, mississippi river kinda
gospel
and i feel the holy ghost when you is
inside me
and the tambourines keep goin
and folks is stampin they feet
and oh no,
it's the neighbor knocking on the door
askin is we alright
say we was screamin
oh jesus, oh jesus
and i heard us but i
didn't hear cuz
i was being washed in the gorgeous wetness of
your pussy
being baptized w/ole time religion
the oldest religion there
is
2 women inside the groove
of each other
we come here
we come
we come here
to be
saved
I an old white man who spend his 1960s drug-drenched be-bop nights summers of love chasing women (young girls really) and running away from my old working-class Olde Saco, Maine oceanside white bread roots am probably separated by entire gulfs of time, of age, of politics, of means streets, hell, of sexual preference, kind of, but know this, my new-found young mixed woman friend was right. Letta Neely is a sistah.
************
From The Occupy Boston Daily Digest:
Saturday, December 3
10:00am Occupy Movement Day of Action (Neighborhood specific locations);11:30am Occupy ICE – Ocupa la Migra;12:00pm **Corporate Negligence and Bhopal, India: An Ongoing Disaster (FSU);12:00pm Faith & Spirituality WG Meeting;1:00pm Unity Rally (Copley Square);2:00pm Winterizing meeting;3:30pm Women’s Caucus;4:00pm General Assembly (Copley Square);5:30pm Anti-Oppression Working Group meeting
6:00pm Alperovitz: America Beyond Capitalism (FSU Economics Forum – Offsite)
6:30pm Safety meeting.
Sunday, December 4
12:00pm **Teach-In on Secure Communities (FSU); 12:00pm Occupy Boston Women’s March; 12:00pm Davis Square Carolers; 12:00pm Faith & Spirituality WG Meeting
1:30pm Catholic Mass;2:00pm **Occu-Stock- Women Spoken Word (see Description for line up);2:30pm Peace Action Working Group Meeting;3:00pm POC Working Group Meeting (People Of Color);3:00pm Media Working Group Meeting;3:00pm (CANCELLED) Publicly-Funded Elections & Repairing Representative Government (FSU Discussion);3:00pm **Concert: Occu-Stock Concert -Erica Russo and Lauren DeRose;4:00pm Facilitation Working Group Meeting;4:00pm **Middle East and North Africa Solidarity Day;4:00pm Socialist Caucus WG Meeting;4:30pm Peace Vigil
5:30pm Queer/Trans Working Group Meeting; 6:00pm General Assembly; 6:30pm Safety meeting; 7:00pm MENA Solidarity Day Plan.
Monday, December 5
Take Back the Capitol;9:00am MAMLEO – Food Drive Drop Off;10:00am FOOD BANK DROP OFF12:oopm Health And Safety Improvement Festival!;2:00pm Community Wellness Working Group Meeting;4:00pm Radio Meeting;4:00pm Direct Action Meeting4:00pm Street Theater Working Group;5:00pm Facilitation;6:00pm Finance and Accountability Working Group Meeting;6:00pm Climate Action, Sustainability and Environmental Justice Working Group;6:00pm Food Tent Working Group Meeting6:00pm Houseless And Allies Community Working Group;6:00pm Outreach working group meeting;6:30pm Safety meeting;7:00pm Occupy Boston Social;7:00pm InfoTent Working Group Meeting
********
“Josh, I am feeling a little overwhelmed by all the meetings and events that I am committed to going to here when I come down for two or three days of heavy political work,” sighed Bonnie Bream (nee Stein) a long-time activist whom I had met a few decades ago while fighting the good fight over Ronald Reagan’s crazed war policies in Central America. Bonnie, then a bright young student at Harvard, was the darling of that movement because she threw herself, absolutely threw herself, into the work, including a couple of stints down in the fields of Nicaragua. I had seen her a couple of times since then down in D.C. or New York fighting the good fight against one or another Bush war policy but it had been a while when I ran into her a couple of weeks ago here on a Sunday afternoon. Like I say Bonnie is an activist, a hard-core activist, and that remained true even when I heard through the grapevine that she had moved up north with her husband to Maine in order to help him with his dream deferred, deferred in support of her social justice dream, of setting up a seashore restaurant in Belfast or Camden, I forget which one. As she told me when we met that first Sunday when she saw and hear about the Occupy movement’s encampment down here it was like lemmings to the sea, she had to come. And so she has come down to work a few days a week before trundling home to serve lobsters, clams, and whatever to hungry ocean-starved touristas in summer and “real food” to the townies off-season.
As she spoke those words I could see just the slightest air of resignation, of a certain tiredness maybe, a certain confusion, perhaps, about which way the winds were blowing here and the flat-out possibility that just too many damn things were going on and it was wearing people down. I had heard such inchoate mutterings before from some younger activists tired of the endless this or that cause marches. But when Bonnie Bream says stuff like that then you know there are some troubled waters stirring so I wanted to hear more.
She then went on, “I don’t mind the work. Or the too many committees with too few people, or two few same people on about six committees. You know I live for this stuff. I don’t even mind, if you can believe this Josh, the disorganized, haphazard way things are run, especially meetings that resolve nothing. But what bothers the hell out of me is when things that are scheduled don’t occur. Like this last Sunday. I knew it was going to be a big long day what with the Women’s Caucus march through the streets of Boston. That was fun, just like in the old days when we tried to roust the slumbering masses having their tea and coffee at Fanueil Market. And the music and poetry performances on the main stage after were great. But then one of the working group meeting which was scheduled failed to materialize, a socialist caucus meeting that I dearly wanted to attend since they had previously met on Fridays when I am not here was wrongly placed on the daily schedule, and then a peace vigil I planned on attending hoping to run into some old UJP [United For Justice with Peace, the local pre-Occupy umbrella activist organization] folks I used to run with never happened for reasons unknown to me. So I spent a lot of the later part of the day just talking the talk to the same people that I always see here on Sunday (or Saturday or Monday my three chosen days). Hell I could just have easily done that at some pokey UJP event.”
I had no answer to her plea just then, and said so. We then went on to other subjects, more personal subjects that need not detain us here. Except later when thinking about it as I was making my own exit from the camp to head home for the evening I stopped for a moment to reflect on this conversation. When the Bonnie Breams of this “new world” feel adrift in this big old amorphous movement then sunny days do not lie ahead.
*******
Five minutes ago the sidewalk along the Atlantic Avenue side of the encampment was deserted, a lonely yellow-jacketed cop shifting back and forth on his heels to make his duty time pass more quickly. Now the first sign of the day, “Tax The Rich,” along with it human holder, here a well-dressed, well-preserved older woman, a woman who looked like she has seen many battles for social justice in her time hit the sidewalk. And her action acted as a catalyst because then came a couple of young students carrying a banner-“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” one of the anthems of the Occupy movement, to stand beside her. They smile, she smiles, nothing more is needed as they banner understand each other completely.
Then a convoy of about twelve middle-aged and older Universalist-Unitarians from out in some suburban town, who have rented a bus for the occasion, begin filling in the sidewalk a little farther up the street with their “peace, this,” “peace, that,” “good-will toward all” signs. Upon investigation this group had made a solemn decision, as only U-Uers can, to come weekly to Boston to stand in solidarity with the efforts in Dewey Square.
A few minutes later, from out of nowhere, came a nomadic resident of the “village” with a plateful of cookies, chocolate chip perhaps, and offers them to those “working the line” on Atlantic Avenue.
********
Later, an older model automobile, frankly a heap, driven by a menacing-looking man in lumberjack jacket with fierce flashing eyes like some crazed survivalist stopped just in front of the Atlantic Avenue entrance to the encampment and yells out, “Hey, when do I put these sleeping bags, tarps, shovels, and pots? I can’t stay but I am with you, with you all the way.” Of such acts by such desperate looking men, revolutions are made, big-time revolutions.
Toward late afternoon the Atlantic Avenue traffic gets heavier, bumper to bumper, as people try to leave the city, and city cares behind. A guy in a big dump truck, a flat-top hair cut showing yells out, “Get a job” at a group of street people standing on the avenue. Later a pedestrian muttered to that yellow-jacketed cop on duty, who was still rocking his heels, about how he paid taxes and isn’t it a shame what these people are up to. The call of the day though goes to a guy, a light-skinned Cuban-looking guy in a late model cherry red sports car driving on the far right lane away from the encampment, who yells out, “Commies, go back to where you came from.”
Ya, I know not everybody got the news about twenty years back, not everybody gets what is going on now, and not everybody, despite the sleek street slogan of ninety-nine percent, is with the Occupy movement. But just remember that guy, that lumberjack jacket guy in that old heap, who gave what he had, and gave all the way.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Crime Noir Night-Fatal Attraction- “The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers"- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir, The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers
DVD Review
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Paramount Pictures, 1946
Ya, a woman can get under your skin, no question, no question at all, in 1940 or 2010 makes no difference. Now two guys tugging away is an even tougher story, especially when the dame is a heartless femme fatale like Barbara Stanwyck who plays the woman under their skins in the title of this crime noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Now Barbara Stanwyck was never my beaux ideal of a femme fatale, I run more to the Rita Hayworth hot-blooded Gilda-types (with that strand of hair over the eyes) but I could see where guys, normally sensible guys, would be running through hoops in order to win her favors. And she would give them the "kiss of death," that hard-hearted kiss of death mentioned above. Take no prisoners, none.
A little plot line of the story goes a long way to figuring out those charms, those decidedly not girlish, not 1940s girlish anyway, charms. Rebellious Martha, an orphan being brought up to be a lady by an old-school rich aunt wants none of it and keeps running away, aided and abetted by ragamuffin, wrong side of the tracks Sam, played by Van Heflin. As the film opens she is being brought back after one such caper, scolded by her aunt assisted by Kirk Douglas’s father, Martha’s tutor (Douglas plays Walter, the other love interest in this dance of death combination). When dear cruel auntie (played by Judith Andersen, who knew how to play that kind of role to a tee) tries to confront Martha just as she is getting ready to fly the coop again with Sam, with Walter swore to secrecy, she just happens to fall down the long flight of stairs. After less than one shed tear the trio (Martha, Walter, and his dear old money-grubbing dad) work up a story and stick to it, stick to it to well because to make it stick ultimately they have some unnamed vagabond lug eventually go the chair for their misdeed. Meanwhile Sam, figuring that Martha has gotten cold feet, blows town on the next train out, a circus train.
Fast forward eighteen years. Sam, passing through town, decides to see what has happened since he blew town. Well Martha and Walter have gotten loveless married (loveless on her part, naturally) to seal their part of the pact with death, Walter for crazed-out love, Martha to keep him on a leash. Martha who turns out to be a pretty good businesswoman basically runs the town now. But here is the kicker, guilt-ridden about how they obtained their ill-gotten gains our blessed married couple think Sam is here for a shake-down thinking he saw what happened that long ago night when auntie went crashing down the stairs. Of course Sam had no idea of the sort until things start to unravel around his new-found girlfriend, sweet, husky voiced Lizabeth Scott who has her own troubles with the law. The long and short of it is that Martha is still carrying the torch for Sam, Walter is getting more drunken crazy for Martha and sweet hard-luck Liz looks to be holding an empty bag when Martha puts her whammy on Sam.
There can be no happy ending here, right? Well, right but only part right. This murder most foul has put a death grip on Martha and Walter, a death grip that is triggered by Sam's reappearance but also that nasty little deal of creating a fall guy for their misdeeds. So you know, know just as well as I do that the fates are against them. As for Sam and Liz, well they get out with the skin of their teeth but they get out. Once again, you know the routine; crime doesn’t pay, one way of the other it eats away at you. Got it.
DVD Review
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Paramount Pictures, 1946
Ya, a woman can get under your skin, no question, no question at all, in 1940 or 2010 makes no difference. Now two guys tugging away is an even tougher story, especially when the dame is a heartless femme fatale like Barbara Stanwyck who plays the woman under their skins in the title of this crime noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Now Barbara Stanwyck was never my beaux ideal of a femme fatale, I run more to the Rita Hayworth hot-blooded Gilda-types (with that strand of hair over the eyes) but I could see where guys, normally sensible guys, would be running through hoops in order to win her favors. And she would give them the "kiss of death," that hard-hearted kiss of death mentioned above. Take no prisoners, none.
A little plot line of the story goes a long way to figuring out those charms, those decidedly not girlish, not 1940s girlish anyway, charms. Rebellious Martha, an orphan being brought up to be a lady by an old-school rich aunt wants none of it and keeps running away, aided and abetted by ragamuffin, wrong side of the tracks Sam, played by Van Heflin. As the film opens she is being brought back after one such caper, scolded by her aunt assisted by Kirk Douglas’s father, Martha’s tutor (Douglas plays Walter, the other love interest in this dance of death combination). When dear cruel auntie (played by Judith Andersen, who knew how to play that kind of role to a tee) tries to confront Martha just as she is getting ready to fly the coop again with Sam, with Walter swore to secrecy, she just happens to fall down the long flight of stairs. After less than one shed tear the trio (Martha, Walter, and his dear old money-grubbing dad) work up a story and stick to it, stick to it to well because to make it stick ultimately they have some unnamed vagabond lug eventually go the chair for their misdeed. Meanwhile Sam, figuring that Martha has gotten cold feet, blows town on the next train out, a circus train.
Fast forward eighteen years. Sam, passing through town, decides to see what has happened since he blew town. Well Martha and Walter have gotten loveless married (loveless on her part, naturally) to seal their part of the pact with death, Walter for crazed-out love, Martha to keep him on a leash. Martha who turns out to be a pretty good businesswoman basically runs the town now. But here is the kicker, guilt-ridden about how they obtained their ill-gotten gains our blessed married couple think Sam is here for a shake-down thinking he saw what happened that long ago night when auntie went crashing down the stairs. Of course Sam had no idea of the sort until things start to unravel around his new-found girlfriend, sweet, husky voiced Lizabeth Scott who has her own troubles with the law. The long and short of it is that Martha is still carrying the torch for Sam, Walter is getting more drunken crazy for Martha and sweet hard-luck Liz looks to be holding an empty bag when Martha puts her whammy on Sam.
There can be no happy ending here, right? Well, right but only part right. This murder most foul has put a death grip on Martha and Walter, a death grip that is triggered by Sam's reappearance but also that nasty little deal of creating a fall guy for their misdeeds. So you know, know just as well as I do that the fates are against them. As for Sam and Liz, well they get out with the skin of their teeth but they get out. Once again, you know the routine; crime doesn’t pay, one way of the other it eats away at you. Got it.
Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks, (1944-1968) R.I.P.
Markin comment:
Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.
My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project, a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos in no way was superior to “the projects” except that the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.
See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.
And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies. No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. Without putting too fine a spin on it, some kind of existential anti-hero.
So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were fashion-faded), engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown
That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to have your luck run out if there ever is one.
Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).
Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, in any case where out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.
Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.
My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project, a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos in no way was superior to “the projects” except that the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.
See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.
And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies. No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. Without putting too fine a spin on it, some kind of existential anti-hero.
So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were fashion-faded), engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown
That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to have your luck run out if there ever is one.
Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).
Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, in any case where out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Crime Noir Night- “Black Angel”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Black Angel.
DVD Review
Black Angel, starring Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, directed by Roy William Neil, Universal Pictures, 1946
Here is the skinny. Not all crime noirs are equal. The proof? Now over a score of reviews in this space on the genre. Some speak for themselves, some are unspeakable, and some like the one under review here, Black Angel, need a little prodding. In this case the prodding is in paying kudos to the director, Roy William Neil, for great photography in service of a lukewarm plot and so-so performances by the lead performers, very so-so in the case of veteran actor Peter Lorre as a night club owner with a past to hide.
Here is the story. Martin Blair (played by Dan Duryea) had a wayward wife as some men will, a frill songstress who liked jewels and lots of them from any source willing to provide them. Catherine Bennett (played by June Vincent) had a wayward husband, as some women will, who found his way to Martin’s wayward wife. Said wife along the way is foully murdered and Ms. Bennett’s husband fits the bill. Fits the frame neat, very neat, almost all the way to the electric chair. Except that Mr. Blair, a talented drunken piano player and Ms. Bennett a stay at home chanteuse team up as a song and, ah, piano duo, to figure out who really did commit the murder. All the portents point to Marko (played somewhat stiffly by Peter Lorre, no stranger to this type of role). But that is just a ruse. The real killer is well, see the film.
You can see where the problems are just by this rough outline of the plot. A plot that suspense disbelief- not- with anyone who has taken a glance at a newspaper and the likelihood that such a pairing would ring true. But such is Hollywood. The only thing that keep this one from the "has been" bin is the directing/ photography by Neil. Some of the shots just jump out, crime noir jump out at you. Too bad the plot line (which was based on a novel by the great crime story writer, Cornell Woolrich) didn’t add to those fine shots.
DVD Review
Black Angel, starring Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, directed by Roy William Neil, Universal Pictures, 1946
Here is the skinny. Not all crime noirs are equal. The proof? Now over a score of reviews in this space on the genre. Some speak for themselves, some are unspeakable, and some like the one under review here, Black Angel, need a little prodding. In this case the prodding is in paying kudos to the director, Roy William Neil, for great photography in service of a lukewarm plot and so-so performances by the lead performers, very so-so in the case of veteran actor Peter Lorre as a night club owner with a past to hide.
Here is the story. Martin Blair (played by Dan Duryea) had a wayward wife as some men will, a frill songstress who liked jewels and lots of them from any source willing to provide them. Catherine Bennett (played by June Vincent) had a wayward husband, as some women will, who found his way to Martin’s wayward wife. Said wife along the way is foully murdered and Ms. Bennett’s husband fits the bill. Fits the frame neat, very neat, almost all the way to the electric chair. Except that Mr. Blair, a talented drunken piano player and Ms. Bennett a stay at home chanteuse team up as a song and, ah, piano duo, to figure out who really did commit the murder. All the portents point to Marko (played somewhat stiffly by Peter Lorre, no stranger to this type of role). But that is just a ruse. The real killer is well, see the film.
You can see where the problems are just by this rough outline of the plot. A plot that suspense disbelief- not- with anyone who has taken a glance at a newspaper and the likelihood that such a pairing would ring true. But such is Hollywood. The only thing that keep this one from the "has been" bin is the directing/ photography by Neil. Some of the shots just jump out, crime noir jump out at you. Too bad the plot line (which was based on a novel by the great crime story writer, Cornell Woolrich) didn’t add to those fine shots.
From Out In The Be-Bop Blues Night-Singing The Blues For His Lord- The Reverend Gary Davis Is On Stage
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Reverend Gary Davis playing Children Of Zion on Pete Seeger's 1960 television show Rainbow Quest.
CD Review
Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of the Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here are the much-covered Samson and Delilah (most famously, I think, by Dave Van Ronk), Cocaine Blues (from when it was legal, of course), Twelve Keys To The City and the gospelly Blow Gabriel and Who Shall Deliver Poor Me.
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover Of This Album
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at he beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.
CD Review
Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of the Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here are the much-covered Samson and Delilah (most famously, I think, by Dave Van Ronk), Cocaine Blues (from when it was legal, of course), Twelve Keys To The City and the gospelly Blow Gabriel and Who Shall Deliver Poor Me.
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover Of This Album
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at he beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night, Circa 1970
The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night, Circa 1970
Markin comment:
I, once long ago, was asked, in earnest, what I meant by the blue-pink western skies that has formed the backdrop for several entries in this space of late. Or rather the way I would prefer to formulate it, and have taken some pains to emphasize it this way, the search for the blue-pink great American West night. Well, of course, there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my back (sometimes shoreline right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that the hitchhike road meant heading west.
So that night is clearly not in the vicinity of the local Boston Blues Hills or of the out west Berkshires here in ocean-fronted Massachusetts, those are too confined and short-distanced to even produce blues skies much less that west-glanced sweet shade just before heaven, if there was a heaven shade, blue-pink. And certainly not hog-butcher-to-the-world, sinewy Midwest Chicago night, Christ no, nor rarefied, deep-breathed, rockymountainhigh Denver night, although jaded sojourner-writer not known for breathe-taking, awe-bewilderment could have stopped there some place outside of Boulder for choice of great western night. Second place, okay.
But no, onward, beyond, beyond pioneer, genetically-embedded pioneer America, past false god neon blue-pink glitter Las Vegas in the Nevada desert night to the place where, about fifty miles away from sanctified west coast, near some now nameless abandoned ghost town, nameless here for it is a mere speck on the map you would not know the name, you begin, ocean man that you are, if you are, and organically ocean-bred says you are, to smell the dank, incense-like, seaweed-driven, ocean-seized air as it comes in from the Japanese stream, or out there somewhere in the unknown, some Hawaii, or Guam, or Tahiti of the mind, before the gates of holy city, city of a thousand, thousand land’s end dreams, San Francisco. That is where the blue-pink sky devours the sun just before the be-bop, the bop-bop, the do wang-doodle night, the great American Western star-spangled (small case) night I keep reaching for, like it was some physical thing and not the stuff of dreams.
And the scenes below stand (or fall) as moments in support of that eternal search.
Scene One: A First Misstep In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night
Let me tell this story, okay, this story about a couple of guys that I picked up hitch-hiking out on the 1960s highway. I’ll get to what highway it was later because it could have been any highway, any American or European, or maybe even African or Asian highway, if those locales had such highways, at least highways for cars back in those days. Anyway it’s their story, these two guys, really, and maybe around the edges my story, and if you are of a certain age, your story, just a little anyway.
Some of it though just doesn’t sound right now, or read right, at least the way they told it to me but we will let that pass ‘cause it has been a while and memories, mine in this case, sometimes seize up even among the best of us. Ya, but this part I do remember so let’s just subtitle this one a segment on that search for the blue-pink great American West night and that makes this thing a lot of people’s story. Let’s get to it right now by picking up where they and I intersect on the great American 1960s road:
Two young men were standing pretty close together, talking, up ahead at the side of a brisk, chilly, early spring morning 1969 road, a highway really, a white-lined, four-laned, high-speed highway if you want to know, thumbs out, as I came driving down the line alone in my Volkswagen Beetle (or bug, hey, that’s what they were called in those days, you still see some old restored or well-preserved ones around, especially out on the left coast), see them, and begin to slow down to pick them up. I would no more think not to pick them up than not to breathe. A few years earlier and I would have perhaps been afraid to pick up such an unlikely pair, a few years later and they would not have been on that road. But the thumbs out linked them, and not them alone on this day or in this time, with the old time hitchhike road, the vagabond road that your mother, if she was wise or nervous, told you never ever, ever to take (and it was always Ma who told you this, your father was either held in reserve for the big want-to-do battles, or else was bemused by sonny boy wanting to spread his wings, or better yet, was secretly passing along his own long ago laid aside blue-pink highway dreams).
This pair in any case, as you shall see, were clearly brothers, no, not brothers in the biological sense, although that sometimes was the case, but brothers on that restless, tireless, endless, hitchhike road. My hitchhike road yesterday, and maybe tomorrow, but today I have wheels and they don’t and that was that. No further explanation needed. I stopped. From the first close-up look at them these guys were young, although not too young, not high school or college young but more mid-twenties maybe graduate student young. I’ll describe in more detail how they looked in a minute but for those who desperately need to know where I picked them up, the exact locale that is, let me put your anxieties to rest and tell you that it was heading south on the Connecticut side of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border of U.S. Interstate 84, one of the main roads to New York City from Boston.
Are you happy now? Not as sexy as some of those old-time Kerouac-Cassady late 1940s “beat” roads, but I believe their ghosts were nevertheless hovering in the environs. Hell, now that I think about it, would it have mattered if I said it was Route 6, or Route 66, or Route 666 where I picked them up. I picked them up, that was the way it was done in those halcyon days, and that’s the facts, man, nothing but the facts.
Hey, by the way, while we are talking about facts, just the hard-headed fact of this pair standing on the side of a highway road should have been enough to alert the reader that this is no current episode but rather a tale out of the mist of another American time. Who in their right mind today would be standing on such a road, thumb out, or not, expecting some faded Dennis Hopper-like flower child, or Ken Kesey-like Merry Prankster hold-out to stop. No this was the time of their time, the 1960s (or at the latest, the very latest, about 1973). You have all seen the bell-bottomed jeans, the fringed-deerskin jackets, the long hair and beards and all other manner of baubles in those exotic pre-digital photos so that one really need not bother to describe their appearances. But I will, if only to tempt the fates, or the imaginations of the young.
One, the slightly older one, wispy-bearded, like this was maybe his first attempt at growing the then de rigueur youth nation-demanded male beard to set one apart from the them (and from the eternal Gillette, Bic, Shick razor cuts, rubbing alcohol at the ready, splash of English Leather, spanking clean date night routine, ah, ah, farewell to all that). Attired: Levi blue-jean’d with flared-out bottoms, not exactly bell-bottoms but denims that not self-respecting cowboy, or cowboy wanna-be would, or could, wear out in the grey-black , star-studded great plains night; plaid flannel shirt that one would find out there in that bronco-busting night (or in backwoodsman-heavy Maine and Oregon in the time of the old Wobblies or Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion); skimpily-sneakered, Chuck Taylor blacks, from the look of them, hardly the wear for tackling the great American foot-sore hitchhike road which makes me think that these are guys have started on something like their maiden voyage on that old road; and over one shoulder the ubiquitous string-tied bedroll that speaks already of ravine sleep, apartment floor pick-your-space sleep, and other such vagabond sleep certainly not of Holiday Inn or even flea-bag motel sleeps; and over the other shoulder the also ubiquitous life’s gatherings in a knapsack (socks, a few utensils, maybe underwear, and then again maybe not, change of shirt, a few toilet articles. Not much more than that but more than the kings (and queens) of the roads, 1930s ancestor forbears carried, for sure , ask any old Wobblie, or bum-hobo-tramp hierarch- take your pick-who took that hard-scrabble, living out of your emptied pocket road).
And the other young man, a vision of heaven’s own high 1960s counter-cultural style: long-haired, not quite a pony tail if tied back and maybe not Easy Rider long but surely no advertisement for Gentleman’s Quarterly even in their earnest days of keeping up with the new tastes to corner the more couth segments of the hippie market; cowboy-hatted, no, not a Stetson, howdy, Tex, kind of thing but some Army-Navy store-bought broad brimmed, sun-bashing, working cowboy hat that spoke of hard-riding, branding, cattle night lowing, whiskey and women Saturday town bust-ups, just right for a soft-handed, soft-skinned city boy fearful of unlit places, or places that are not lit up like a Christmas tree; caped, long swirling cape, like someone’s idea of old-time film Zorro stepping out with the senoritas; guitar, an old Martin from the look of it, slung over one shoulder, not protective cased against the winds, rains, snows, or just the bang-ups of living, but protective in other ways when night falls and down in the hills and hollows, or maybe by a creek, heaven’s own strum comes forth. Woody Guthrie’s own child, or stepchild, or some damn relative. I swear.
Welcome brothers, as I open up the passenger side door. “Where are you guys heading?” This line is more meaningful than you might think for those who know, as I know, and as these lads will know, as well, if they spent any time on the hitchhike road. Sometimes it was better, even on a high-speed highway, to not take any old ride that came along if, say, some kind–hearted local spirit was only going a few miles, or the place where a driver would let you out on the highway was a tough stop. Not to worry though these guys, Jack and Mattie, were hitchhiking to California. California really, I swear, although they are stopping off at a crisscross of places on their way. A pretty familiar routine by then, playing hopscotch, thumbs out, across the continent.
These guys were, moreover, indeed brothers, because you see once we started comparing biographical notes, although they never put it that way, or really never could just because of the way they thought about things as I got to know them better on the ride, were out there searching, and searching hard, for my blue-pink night. Christ, there were heaven’s own blessed armies, brigades anyway, of us doing it, although like I said about Jack and Mattie most of the brothers and sisters did not get caught up in the colors of that night, like I did, and just “dug” the search. Jack and Mattie are in luck, in any case, because on this day I’m heading to Washington, D.C. and they have friends near there in Silver Springs, Maryland. The tides of the times are riding with us.
And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story or at least this part of it, am I heading to D.C.? Well, the cover story is to do some anti-war organizing but, for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a women who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here, although that theme might turn up again sometime. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novels section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you will find here.
I’ve got a kind of weird story to tell you about why Jack and Mattie were on this desolate border stretch of the highway in a minute but let me tell a little about what they were trying to do out on that road, that west road. First, I was right, mostly, about their ages, but Jack and Mattie were no graduate students on a spring lark before grinding away at some master’s thesis on the meaning of meaning deconstuct’d (although this reference is really an anachronism since such literary theories were not then fashionably on display on the world’s campuses, but you get the drift) or some such worthy subject in desperate need of research in a time when this old world was falling apart and the bombs were (are) raining (literally) on many parts of the world.
In one sense they were graduates though, graduates of the university of hard knocks, hard life, and hard war. They had just a few months before been discharged, a little early as the war, or the American ground troops part of it, was winding down, from the U.S. Army after a couple of tours of duty in ‘Nam (their usage, another of their privileged usages was “in-country”). I swear I didn’t believe them at first, no way, they looked like the poster boys for the San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967. Something, something big was going on here and my mind was trying to digest the sight of these two guys, “good, solid citizens” before the “man” turned them around in that overseas Vietnam quagmire who looked in attire, demeanor, and style just like the guy (me) who picked them up.
Ya, but that is only part of it and not even the most important part, really, because this California thing was also no lark. This is their break-out, bust-out moment and they are going for it. As we rode along that old super highway they related stories about how they came back from “in-county,” were going to settle down, maybe get married (or move in with a girlfriend or seven), and look forward to social security when that distant time came. But something snapped inside of them, and this is where every old Jack London hobo, every old Wobblie, every old bummer on the 1930s rail highway, hell even every old beat denizen of some Greenwich Village walk-up was a kindred spirit. Like I said, and I am sitting right in the car listening to them with a little smirk on my face, the boys are searching that same search that I am searching for and that probably old Walt Whitman really should take the blame for, okay. I’ll tell you more, or rather; I’ll let them tell you more some other time but let me finish up here with that weird little story about why they were at that god forsaken point on the highway.
Look, everybody knows, or should know, or at least knew back then that hitchhiking, especially hitchhiking on the big roads was illegal, and probably always was even when every tramp and tramp-ette in America had his or her thumb out in the 1930s. But usually the cops or upstanding citizenry either ignored it or, especially in small towns, got you on some vagrancy rap. Hey, if you had spent any time on the hitchhike road you had to have been stopped at least once if for no other reason than to harass you. Still some places were more notorious than others in hitchhike grapevine lore in those days, particularly noteworthy were Connecticut and Arizona (both places where I had more than my own fair share of “vagrancy” problems).
So I was not too far off when I figured out that Jack and Mattie were on their maiden voyage. Thumbs out and talking, the pair missed the then ever-present Connecticut State Police cruiser coming from nowhere, or it seemed like nowhere, as it came to a stop sharply about five feet away from them. The pair gulped and prepared for the worst; being taken to some state police barracks and harassed and then let go at some backwater locale as the road lore had it. Or getting “vagged.” Or worst, a nice little nasty trick in those days, have “illegal” drugs conveniently, very conveniently, found on their person.
But get this, after a superficial search and the usual questions about destination, resources, and the law the pair instead were directed to walk the few hundred yards back across the border line to Massachusetts. Oh, I forgot this part; the state cop who stopped them was a Vietnam veteran himself. He had been an MP in ‘Nam. Go figure, right. So starts, the inauspicious start if you think about it, in one of the searches for the blue-pink great American West night. Nobody said it was going to be easy and, you know, they were right. Still every time I drive pass that spot (now close to an official Connecticut Welcomes You rest stop, whee!), especially on any moonless, starless, restless, hitchhiker-less road night I smile and give a little tip of the hat to those youthful, sanctified blue-pink dreams that almost got wrecked before they got started.
***********
The 1960s asphalt-driven, white-lined, hitchhike road, the quest for the blue-pink great American West night, the eternal midnight creep over laden trucks with their company-seeking, benny-high, overwrought teamster drivers, and the steam-driven, onion-filled meatloaf-milk-heavy mashed potatoes-and limpid carrots daily special diner truck stop are all meshed together. You could say that there was no hitchhike road, and no blue-pink dreams, if the old-fashioned caboose (sometimes literally) diner was not part of the mix that glued things together out on that lonely highway. No, I do not speak of the even then creeping family-friendly one-size-fits-all but still steamed meats-milky starches-sogged vegetable franchise interstate restaurants that dot the roads from here to ‘Frisco but back road, back hitchhike road if you were smart, back old-time route one, or sixty-six or twenty road where you had a chance for pushing distance and for feeling America in the raw. Hey, I have a million diner stories, diners with and without truck stops, diners famous and obscene, diners of every shape and composition to tell about. Or rather I have about three basic diner stories with a million steamed meat-loaf-mashed taters-carrots (okay, maybe string beans, steamed, for a change-up)-bread pudding for dessert variations. I want to tell you one, one involving a girl, and involving the great American night that drives these scenes. The other variations can wait their turns for some other time.
Car-less, and with no hope for any car any time soon, but with enough pent-up energy and anger to built a skyscraper single-handedly I set out for the open roads, thumb in good working order, bedroll on one shoulder, life’s worldly goods in a knapsack on the other. It was that simple in those days. Today, sadly, it would take my rental of a major U-Haul truck, for starters. As always in those days as well, and some of you may know the spot if you have ever been in Boston (or, better, Cambridge) there was (and is) a then old abandoned railroad yard that was turned into a truck depot near the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike where most of the truckers, the big diesel-fuelled ones, the doubled-wheeled one, picked up or unloaded their goods for further transport. That was the place to check first if you were heading west on the off chance that some mad-man trucker was looking for company on that white-lined, hard scrabble road, and did not mind bedraggled, bearded, long-haired, hippie boy company, at that. As luck would have it I caught a guy who heading out to Chicago with a load of widgets (or whatever, even these guys didn’t know, or want to know, what was on the manifest half the time, especially if they were running “heavy”).
Now there were a million and one reasons that long-haul drivers back then would take hitchhikers on board, even hippies who represented most of what they hated about what was happening in, and to, America in those days (in the days also before the trucking companies, and the insurance companies, squashed that traveling idea and left the truckers to their own devises), some maybe perverse but usually just for sheer, human companionship, another voice, or more usually someone to vent to at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour, especially at night when those straight white lines start to get raggedy looking. This guy, this big-chested, brawny, beef-eating teamster guy, Denver Slim by name (really, I heard other truckers call him that at truck stops when they gave each other the nod, although as described he was neither slim nor, as he told me, from Denver), was not different except the reason, at least the reason that he gave me, was that I reminded him of his goddam son (I am being polite here) who he loved/hated. Loved, because that is what a father was expected to feel toward kin, son kin especially and hated because he was showing signs or rebellion (read: becoming a hippie). I, needless to say, was a little queasy and sat close to the door handle for a while until I realized that it was more about love than hate. Old Denver Slim just didn’t get what was happening to his world, especially the part, the huge part, that he had no control over.
Hey, I had countless hitchhike rides in all kinds of vehicles, from the Denver Slim big wheels to Volkswagen Bugs (look that up) but the common thread was that there were some interesting (if disturbing and hopeless) stories out there. Let me fill you in on Denver Slim’s story both because it helps explain what is coming up in my own quest and the hard, hard fact that there was a malaise, a palpable malaise, in the land and his story is prima facie evidence for that notion. Denver Slim had gone, like a million other members of my parent’s generation, through his childhood in the Great Depression (Chicago) and did his military in the throes of World War II (Corporal, U.S. Army, European Theater, and proud of it). After the war he started driving trucks, finally landing a unionized teamster jobs as over-the-road long-haul driver based in Chicago. As was not unfamiliar then (and maybe not now, either), he married a local women he knew from the old neighborhood, had several children, moved out of Chicago proper to a suburban plot house (“little boxes,” from the description he gave) and bought into the mortgaged, green-grassed lawn, weekly mowed (when he was not on the road), television-watching, neighbor-averting (except for the kids' sake when young) routine that was a blueprint for America 1950s life in the lower middle classes.
Here is where Slim’s story gets tricky though, and interesting. Of course being on the road, being mortgaged up to the neck on the road he was never home enough to make the word family stick. He, as he admitted, when talking about his son Jamie, the rebellious son (read: becoming a hippie), didn’t really know the kids (the other three were daughters whom he , as he said, wouldn’t have known anyway past the age of ten or so the way things work in girl world). But here is the kicker, the kicker for me back then although I get it better now, much better. The wife, Ruth, the ever-loving wife, had along the way taken a boyfriend and, off and on, lived with that boyfriend. Slim went crazy at first about it but somehow got through it and accepted that situation. Oh, you though that was the kicker. No, that was just the prelude to the kicker. Here it is. Denver Slim, old proud soldier-warrior, old mortgaged-to-the-neck teamster, old work and slave on the road for the kids that he doesn’t know has a girlfriend, and had said girlfriend way before his wife took her lover. A beautiful family values story out of the age of the Ozzie and Harriet Show, right? But this is the real kicker for your harried hippie, old salt of the earth Denver Slim in relating the story gets a little lovesick for his honey (no, not his wife, the girlfriend, silly) who lives in Steubenville, Ohio.
And that, my friends, is where we are heading and so instead of getting a ride through to Chicago ( a place when I knew how to catch a ride west, no problem, almost like out of Boston) I am to be left off, and good luck, at the diner truck stop just outside of Steubenville, Ohio. Christ, I never even heard of the place before, never mind trying to get a ride out of there, get out of there at night as it looks like is going to happen by the time we get to the stop. Well, such is the road, the hitchhike road, and I hope old Slim had a good time with his honey, maybe, maybe I hope that is.
Markin comment:
I, once long ago, was asked, in earnest, what I meant by the blue-pink western skies that has formed the backdrop for several entries in this space of late. Or rather the way I would prefer to formulate it, and have taken some pains to emphasize it this way, the search for the blue-pink great American West night. Well, of course, there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my back (sometimes shoreline right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that the hitchhike road meant heading west.
So that night is clearly not in the vicinity of the local Boston Blues Hills or of the out west Berkshires here in ocean-fronted Massachusetts, those are too confined and short-distanced to even produce blues skies much less that west-glanced sweet shade just before heaven, if there was a heaven shade, blue-pink. And certainly not hog-butcher-to-the-world, sinewy Midwest Chicago night, Christ no, nor rarefied, deep-breathed, rockymountainhigh Denver night, although jaded sojourner-writer not known for breathe-taking, awe-bewilderment could have stopped there some place outside of Boulder for choice of great western night. Second place, okay.
But no, onward, beyond, beyond pioneer, genetically-embedded pioneer America, past false god neon blue-pink glitter Las Vegas in the Nevada desert night to the place where, about fifty miles away from sanctified west coast, near some now nameless abandoned ghost town, nameless here for it is a mere speck on the map you would not know the name, you begin, ocean man that you are, if you are, and organically ocean-bred says you are, to smell the dank, incense-like, seaweed-driven, ocean-seized air as it comes in from the Japanese stream, or out there somewhere in the unknown, some Hawaii, or Guam, or Tahiti of the mind, before the gates of holy city, city of a thousand, thousand land’s end dreams, San Francisco. That is where the blue-pink sky devours the sun just before the be-bop, the bop-bop, the do wang-doodle night, the great American Western star-spangled (small case) night I keep reaching for, like it was some physical thing and not the stuff of dreams.
And the scenes below stand (or fall) as moments in support of that eternal search.
Scene One: A First Misstep In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night
Let me tell this story, okay, this story about a couple of guys that I picked up hitch-hiking out on the 1960s highway. I’ll get to what highway it was later because it could have been any highway, any American or European, or maybe even African or Asian highway, if those locales had such highways, at least highways for cars back in those days. Anyway it’s their story, these two guys, really, and maybe around the edges my story, and if you are of a certain age, your story, just a little anyway.
Some of it though just doesn’t sound right now, or read right, at least the way they told it to me but we will let that pass ‘cause it has been a while and memories, mine in this case, sometimes seize up even among the best of us. Ya, but this part I do remember so let’s just subtitle this one a segment on that search for the blue-pink great American West night and that makes this thing a lot of people’s story. Let’s get to it right now by picking up where they and I intersect on the great American 1960s road:
Two young men were standing pretty close together, talking, up ahead at the side of a brisk, chilly, early spring morning 1969 road, a highway really, a white-lined, four-laned, high-speed highway if you want to know, thumbs out, as I came driving down the line alone in my Volkswagen Beetle (or bug, hey, that’s what they were called in those days, you still see some old restored or well-preserved ones around, especially out on the left coast), see them, and begin to slow down to pick them up. I would no more think not to pick them up than not to breathe. A few years earlier and I would have perhaps been afraid to pick up such an unlikely pair, a few years later and they would not have been on that road. But the thumbs out linked them, and not them alone on this day or in this time, with the old time hitchhike road, the vagabond road that your mother, if she was wise or nervous, told you never ever, ever to take (and it was always Ma who told you this, your father was either held in reserve for the big want-to-do battles, or else was bemused by sonny boy wanting to spread his wings, or better yet, was secretly passing along his own long ago laid aside blue-pink highway dreams).
This pair in any case, as you shall see, were clearly brothers, no, not brothers in the biological sense, although that sometimes was the case, but brothers on that restless, tireless, endless, hitchhike road. My hitchhike road yesterday, and maybe tomorrow, but today I have wheels and they don’t and that was that. No further explanation needed. I stopped. From the first close-up look at them these guys were young, although not too young, not high school or college young but more mid-twenties maybe graduate student young. I’ll describe in more detail how they looked in a minute but for those who desperately need to know where I picked them up, the exact locale that is, let me put your anxieties to rest and tell you that it was heading south on the Connecticut side of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border of U.S. Interstate 84, one of the main roads to New York City from Boston.
Are you happy now? Not as sexy as some of those old-time Kerouac-Cassady late 1940s “beat” roads, but I believe their ghosts were nevertheless hovering in the environs. Hell, now that I think about it, would it have mattered if I said it was Route 6, or Route 66, or Route 666 where I picked them up. I picked them up, that was the way it was done in those halcyon days, and that’s the facts, man, nothing but the facts.
Hey, by the way, while we are talking about facts, just the hard-headed fact of this pair standing on the side of a highway road should have been enough to alert the reader that this is no current episode but rather a tale out of the mist of another American time. Who in their right mind today would be standing on such a road, thumb out, or not, expecting some faded Dennis Hopper-like flower child, or Ken Kesey-like Merry Prankster hold-out to stop. No this was the time of their time, the 1960s (or at the latest, the very latest, about 1973). You have all seen the bell-bottomed jeans, the fringed-deerskin jackets, the long hair and beards and all other manner of baubles in those exotic pre-digital photos so that one really need not bother to describe their appearances. But I will, if only to tempt the fates, or the imaginations of the young.
One, the slightly older one, wispy-bearded, like this was maybe his first attempt at growing the then de rigueur youth nation-demanded male beard to set one apart from the them (and from the eternal Gillette, Bic, Shick razor cuts, rubbing alcohol at the ready, splash of English Leather, spanking clean date night routine, ah, ah, farewell to all that). Attired: Levi blue-jean’d with flared-out bottoms, not exactly bell-bottoms but denims that not self-respecting cowboy, or cowboy wanna-be would, or could, wear out in the grey-black , star-studded great plains night; plaid flannel shirt that one would find out there in that bronco-busting night (or in backwoodsman-heavy Maine and Oregon in the time of the old Wobblies or Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion); skimpily-sneakered, Chuck Taylor blacks, from the look of them, hardly the wear for tackling the great American foot-sore hitchhike road which makes me think that these are guys have started on something like their maiden voyage on that old road; and over one shoulder the ubiquitous string-tied bedroll that speaks already of ravine sleep, apartment floor pick-your-space sleep, and other such vagabond sleep certainly not of Holiday Inn or even flea-bag motel sleeps; and over the other shoulder the also ubiquitous life’s gatherings in a knapsack (socks, a few utensils, maybe underwear, and then again maybe not, change of shirt, a few toilet articles. Not much more than that but more than the kings (and queens) of the roads, 1930s ancestor forbears carried, for sure , ask any old Wobblie, or bum-hobo-tramp hierarch- take your pick-who took that hard-scrabble, living out of your emptied pocket road).
And the other young man, a vision of heaven’s own high 1960s counter-cultural style: long-haired, not quite a pony tail if tied back and maybe not Easy Rider long but surely no advertisement for Gentleman’s Quarterly even in their earnest days of keeping up with the new tastes to corner the more couth segments of the hippie market; cowboy-hatted, no, not a Stetson, howdy, Tex, kind of thing but some Army-Navy store-bought broad brimmed, sun-bashing, working cowboy hat that spoke of hard-riding, branding, cattle night lowing, whiskey and women Saturday town bust-ups, just right for a soft-handed, soft-skinned city boy fearful of unlit places, or places that are not lit up like a Christmas tree; caped, long swirling cape, like someone’s idea of old-time film Zorro stepping out with the senoritas; guitar, an old Martin from the look of it, slung over one shoulder, not protective cased against the winds, rains, snows, or just the bang-ups of living, but protective in other ways when night falls and down in the hills and hollows, or maybe by a creek, heaven’s own strum comes forth. Woody Guthrie’s own child, or stepchild, or some damn relative. I swear.
Welcome brothers, as I open up the passenger side door. “Where are you guys heading?” This line is more meaningful than you might think for those who know, as I know, and as these lads will know, as well, if they spent any time on the hitchhike road. Sometimes it was better, even on a high-speed highway, to not take any old ride that came along if, say, some kind–hearted local spirit was only going a few miles, or the place where a driver would let you out on the highway was a tough stop. Not to worry though these guys, Jack and Mattie, were hitchhiking to California. California really, I swear, although they are stopping off at a crisscross of places on their way. A pretty familiar routine by then, playing hopscotch, thumbs out, across the continent.
These guys were, moreover, indeed brothers, because you see once we started comparing biographical notes, although they never put it that way, or really never could just because of the way they thought about things as I got to know them better on the ride, were out there searching, and searching hard, for my blue-pink night. Christ, there were heaven’s own blessed armies, brigades anyway, of us doing it, although like I said about Jack and Mattie most of the brothers and sisters did not get caught up in the colors of that night, like I did, and just “dug” the search. Jack and Mattie are in luck, in any case, because on this day I’m heading to Washington, D.C. and they have friends near there in Silver Springs, Maryland. The tides of the times are riding with us.
And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story or at least this part of it, am I heading to D.C.? Well, the cover story is to do some anti-war organizing but, for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a women who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here, although that theme might turn up again sometime. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novels section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you will find here.
I’ve got a kind of weird story to tell you about why Jack and Mattie were on this desolate border stretch of the highway in a minute but let me tell a little about what they were trying to do out on that road, that west road. First, I was right, mostly, about their ages, but Jack and Mattie were no graduate students on a spring lark before grinding away at some master’s thesis on the meaning of meaning deconstuct’d (although this reference is really an anachronism since such literary theories were not then fashionably on display on the world’s campuses, but you get the drift) or some such worthy subject in desperate need of research in a time when this old world was falling apart and the bombs were (are) raining (literally) on many parts of the world.
In one sense they were graduates though, graduates of the university of hard knocks, hard life, and hard war. They had just a few months before been discharged, a little early as the war, or the American ground troops part of it, was winding down, from the U.S. Army after a couple of tours of duty in ‘Nam (their usage, another of their privileged usages was “in-country”). I swear I didn’t believe them at first, no way, they looked like the poster boys for the San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967. Something, something big was going on here and my mind was trying to digest the sight of these two guys, “good, solid citizens” before the “man” turned them around in that overseas Vietnam quagmire who looked in attire, demeanor, and style just like the guy (me) who picked them up.
Ya, but that is only part of it and not even the most important part, really, because this California thing was also no lark. This is their break-out, bust-out moment and they are going for it. As we rode along that old super highway they related stories about how they came back from “in-county,” were going to settle down, maybe get married (or move in with a girlfriend or seven), and look forward to social security when that distant time came. But something snapped inside of them, and this is where every old Jack London hobo, every old Wobblie, every old bummer on the 1930s rail highway, hell even every old beat denizen of some Greenwich Village walk-up was a kindred spirit. Like I said, and I am sitting right in the car listening to them with a little smirk on my face, the boys are searching that same search that I am searching for and that probably old Walt Whitman really should take the blame for, okay. I’ll tell you more, or rather; I’ll let them tell you more some other time but let me finish up here with that weird little story about why they were at that god forsaken point on the highway.
Look, everybody knows, or should know, or at least knew back then that hitchhiking, especially hitchhiking on the big roads was illegal, and probably always was even when every tramp and tramp-ette in America had his or her thumb out in the 1930s. But usually the cops or upstanding citizenry either ignored it or, especially in small towns, got you on some vagrancy rap. Hey, if you had spent any time on the hitchhike road you had to have been stopped at least once if for no other reason than to harass you. Still some places were more notorious than others in hitchhike grapevine lore in those days, particularly noteworthy were Connecticut and Arizona (both places where I had more than my own fair share of “vagrancy” problems).
So I was not too far off when I figured out that Jack and Mattie were on their maiden voyage. Thumbs out and talking, the pair missed the then ever-present Connecticut State Police cruiser coming from nowhere, or it seemed like nowhere, as it came to a stop sharply about five feet away from them. The pair gulped and prepared for the worst; being taken to some state police barracks and harassed and then let go at some backwater locale as the road lore had it. Or getting “vagged.” Or worst, a nice little nasty trick in those days, have “illegal” drugs conveniently, very conveniently, found on their person.
But get this, after a superficial search and the usual questions about destination, resources, and the law the pair instead were directed to walk the few hundred yards back across the border line to Massachusetts. Oh, I forgot this part; the state cop who stopped them was a Vietnam veteran himself. He had been an MP in ‘Nam. Go figure, right. So starts, the inauspicious start if you think about it, in one of the searches for the blue-pink great American West night. Nobody said it was going to be easy and, you know, they were right. Still every time I drive pass that spot (now close to an official Connecticut Welcomes You rest stop, whee!), especially on any moonless, starless, restless, hitchhiker-less road night I smile and give a little tip of the hat to those youthful, sanctified blue-pink dreams that almost got wrecked before they got started.
***********
The 1960s asphalt-driven, white-lined, hitchhike road, the quest for the blue-pink great American West night, the eternal midnight creep over laden trucks with their company-seeking, benny-high, overwrought teamster drivers, and the steam-driven, onion-filled meatloaf-milk-heavy mashed potatoes-and limpid carrots daily special diner truck stop are all meshed together. You could say that there was no hitchhike road, and no blue-pink dreams, if the old-fashioned caboose (sometimes literally) diner was not part of the mix that glued things together out on that lonely highway. No, I do not speak of the even then creeping family-friendly one-size-fits-all but still steamed meats-milky starches-sogged vegetable franchise interstate restaurants that dot the roads from here to ‘Frisco but back road, back hitchhike road if you were smart, back old-time route one, or sixty-six or twenty road where you had a chance for pushing distance and for feeling America in the raw. Hey, I have a million diner stories, diners with and without truck stops, diners famous and obscene, diners of every shape and composition to tell about. Or rather I have about three basic diner stories with a million steamed meat-loaf-mashed taters-carrots (okay, maybe string beans, steamed, for a change-up)-bread pudding for dessert variations. I want to tell you one, one involving a girl, and involving the great American night that drives these scenes. The other variations can wait their turns for some other time.
Car-less, and with no hope for any car any time soon, but with enough pent-up energy and anger to built a skyscraper single-handedly I set out for the open roads, thumb in good working order, bedroll on one shoulder, life’s worldly goods in a knapsack on the other. It was that simple in those days. Today, sadly, it would take my rental of a major U-Haul truck, for starters. As always in those days as well, and some of you may know the spot if you have ever been in Boston (or, better, Cambridge) there was (and is) a then old abandoned railroad yard that was turned into a truck depot near the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike where most of the truckers, the big diesel-fuelled ones, the doubled-wheeled one, picked up or unloaded their goods for further transport. That was the place to check first if you were heading west on the off chance that some mad-man trucker was looking for company on that white-lined, hard scrabble road, and did not mind bedraggled, bearded, long-haired, hippie boy company, at that. As luck would have it I caught a guy who heading out to Chicago with a load of widgets (or whatever, even these guys didn’t know, or want to know, what was on the manifest half the time, especially if they were running “heavy”).
Now there were a million and one reasons that long-haul drivers back then would take hitchhikers on board, even hippies who represented most of what they hated about what was happening in, and to, America in those days (in the days also before the trucking companies, and the insurance companies, squashed that traveling idea and left the truckers to their own devises), some maybe perverse but usually just for sheer, human companionship, another voice, or more usually someone to vent to at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour, especially at night when those straight white lines start to get raggedy looking. This guy, this big-chested, brawny, beef-eating teamster guy, Denver Slim by name (really, I heard other truckers call him that at truck stops when they gave each other the nod, although as described he was neither slim nor, as he told me, from Denver), was not different except the reason, at least the reason that he gave me, was that I reminded him of his goddam son (I am being polite here) who he loved/hated. Loved, because that is what a father was expected to feel toward kin, son kin especially and hated because he was showing signs or rebellion (read: becoming a hippie). I, needless to say, was a little queasy and sat close to the door handle for a while until I realized that it was more about love than hate. Old Denver Slim just didn’t get what was happening to his world, especially the part, the huge part, that he had no control over.
Hey, I had countless hitchhike rides in all kinds of vehicles, from the Denver Slim big wheels to Volkswagen Bugs (look that up) but the common thread was that there were some interesting (if disturbing and hopeless) stories out there. Let me fill you in on Denver Slim’s story both because it helps explain what is coming up in my own quest and the hard, hard fact that there was a malaise, a palpable malaise, in the land and his story is prima facie evidence for that notion. Denver Slim had gone, like a million other members of my parent’s generation, through his childhood in the Great Depression (Chicago) and did his military in the throes of World War II (Corporal, U.S. Army, European Theater, and proud of it). After the war he started driving trucks, finally landing a unionized teamster jobs as over-the-road long-haul driver based in Chicago. As was not unfamiliar then (and maybe not now, either), he married a local women he knew from the old neighborhood, had several children, moved out of Chicago proper to a suburban plot house (“little boxes,” from the description he gave) and bought into the mortgaged, green-grassed lawn, weekly mowed (when he was not on the road), television-watching, neighbor-averting (except for the kids' sake when young) routine that was a blueprint for America 1950s life in the lower middle classes.
Here is where Slim’s story gets tricky though, and interesting. Of course being on the road, being mortgaged up to the neck on the road he was never home enough to make the word family stick. He, as he admitted, when talking about his son Jamie, the rebellious son (read: becoming a hippie), didn’t really know the kids (the other three were daughters whom he , as he said, wouldn’t have known anyway past the age of ten or so the way things work in girl world). But here is the kicker, the kicker for me back then although I get it better now, much better. The wife, Ruth, the ever-loving wife, had along the way taken a boyfriend and, off and on, lived with that boyfriend. Slim went crazy at first about it but somehow got through it and accepted that situation. Oh, you though that was the kicker. No, that was just the prelude to the kicker. Here it is. Denver Slim, old proud soldier-warrior, old mortgaged-to-the-neck teamster, old work and slave on the road for the kids that he doesn’t know has a girlfriend, and had said girlfriend way before his wife took her lover. A beautiful family values story out of the age of the Ozzie and Harriet Show, right? But this is the real kicker for your harried hippie, old salt of the earth Denver Slim in relating the story gets a little lovesick for his honey (no, not his wife, the girlfriend, silly) who lives in Steubenville, Ohio.
And that, my friends, is where we are heading and so instead of getting a ride through to Chicago ( a place when I knew how to catch a ride west, no problem, almost like out of Boston) I am to be left off, and good luck, at the diner truck stop just outside of Steubenville, Ohio. Christ, I never even heard of the place before, never mind trying to get a ride out of there, get out of there at night as it looks like is going to happen by the time we get to the stop. Well, such is the road, the hitchhike road, and I hope old Slim had a good time with his honey, maybe, maybe I hope that is.
Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Crime Noir Night- The Rich Really Are Different –“ Fear In The Night”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Fear In The Night.
DVD Review
Fear In The Night, DeForest Kelley, Paul Kelly, directed by Maxwell Shane, Paramount Pictures, 1947
Okay here is the familiar rote. Not all crime noir is top shelf, top shelf like Out Of The Past or The Maltese Falcon. By now that proposition has been pretty well established after more than a score of crime noir reviews in this space. Still some of these things can be sleepers, of a sort. Take the film under review, Fear In The Night. On the face of it looking at the unfamiliar cast, the no-name director and the B-movie quality of the production one would throw this one in the has been bin. And mainly that would be right, except that the story line possibilities, never fully exploited, save it for the justly deserved extinction of many of the films in this genre.
Let me show you. A bank clerk (played by Deforest Kelley), an average just trying to get ahead in this wicked old world 1940s marble building bank clerk, has a terrible dream, a nightmare really and cannot figure it out, cannot figure out why he would have, dream or not, murdered an unknown stranger. Moreover in the fresh light of day he cannot figure it out when many parts, too many parts, of the dream wind up being reality. So said clerk takes his problem to a very convenient brother-in-law who just happens to be a homicide detective (played by Paul Kelly). After a ton and one half of skepticism the detective finally sees that this is one bank clerk who is in serious trouble. And solving this riddle is what makes this thing kind of twist and turn a little before the real bad guy is caught.
And the real bad guy, or rather his maniacal plan of operation, is what could have made this thing jump better than it did. Seems a Mayfair swell, a very jealous Mayfair swell, with a young wandering wife finds out she has been keeping company with someone else on his time. So he, the Mayfair swell Mr. Belknap by name, sees red but knowing that crime doesn’t pay or rather that he doesn’t want to pay for the crime sets our bank clerk up, sets him up big-time, through hypnosis. That little off-beat technique makes all the difference in the world. And the theme that could have better explored the social tensions in this film as we know all too well as of late- the rich don’t want o pay for nothing from taxes to their crimes-never gets it full workout. Why? Well, easy on that one. Something that also has become a mantra in this space. Crime, well crime in crime noir, doesn’t pay. Just ask our Mayfair swell.
DVD Review
Fear In The Night, DeForest Kelley, Paul Kelly, directed by Maxwell Shane, Paramount Pictures, 1947
Okay here is the familiar rote. Not all crime noir is top shelf, top shelf like Out Of The Past or The Maltese Falcon. By now that proposition has been pretty well established after more than a score of crime noir reviews in this space. Still some of these things can be sleepers, of a sort. Take the film under review, Fear In The Night. On the face of it looking at the unfamiliar cast, the no-name director and the B-movie quality of the production one would throw this one in the has been bin. And mainly that would be right, except that the story line possibilities, never fully exploited, save it for the justly deserved extinction of many of the films in this genre.
Let me show you. A bank clerk (played by Deforest Kelley), an average just trying to get ahead in this wicked old world 1940s marble building bank clerk, has a terrible dream, a nightmare really and cannot figure it out, cannot figure out why he would have, dream or not, murdered an unknown stranger. Moreover in the fresh light of day he cannot figure it out when many parts, too many parts, of the dream wind up being reality. So said clerk takes his problem to a very convenient brother-in-law who just happens to be a homicide detective (played by Paul Kelly). After a ton and one half of skepticism the detective finally sees that this is one bank clerk who is in serious trouble. And solving this riddle is what makes this thing kind of twist and turn a little before the real bad guy is caught.
And the real bad guy, or rather his maniacal plan of operation, is what could have made this thing jump better than it did. Seems a Mayfair swell, a very jealous Mayfair swell, with a young wandering wife finds out she has been keeping company with someone else on his time. So he, the Mayfair swell Mr. Belknap by name, sees red but knowing that crime doesn’t pay or rather that he doesn’t want to pay for the crime sets our bank clerk up, sets him up big-time, through hypnosis. That little off-beat technique makes all the difference in the world. And the theme that could have better explored the social tensions in this film as we know all too well as of late- the rich don’t want o pay for nothing from taxes to their crimes-never gets it full workout. Why? Well, easy on that one. Something that also has become a mantra in this space. Crime, well crime in crime noir, doesn’t pay. Just ask our Mayfair swell.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)