Deep In The Heart Of Cold War II-Chris Pine and Kevin Costner’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (2014)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, starring Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Kiera Knightley, 2014

[At the end of my last film review the 1989 version of Batman starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson (with Kim Basinger as eye candy and Batman aka Bruce Wayne aide) I noted that I was heartily sick of having to repeat older writer Phil Larkin’s by now almost patented but tired expression WTF to express some level of  displeasure. WFT apparently not enough though since I am once again stuck, maybe deeply stuck with another one of these turkey sequel action films, in this case fifth rendition, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, an idea whatever its original virtue which is now played out, now tired.     

  

Frankly I had expected after joining Phil in the belly-aching crowd that was central to that piece to be off this so-called action adventure stuff. Belly-aching plus a little fringe review at the end which Phil has become something of a past master at doing. Expected to be reviewing some old time black and white film from the 1940s or 1950s like Humphrey Bogart’s The Maltese Falcon which I had noticed was on site manager Greg Green’s assignment list. Those oldies my preferred reviews young as I am and new to the site as well for reasons explained elsewhere and as a result of having done a well-recognized good job on the first couple I did before that dog of a Batman review.

Those reviews seemingly were my undoing since Phil felt that as an older writer, as somebody who had actually seen the films when he was a wide-eyed kid spending ill-spent Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater growing up town double feature complete with small bucket of popcorn spread out to last the distance, he should have dibs on those properties. That was the routine in the old days when his growing up buddy, and for all I know movie companion, Allan Jackson the now deposed and exiled somewhere, I think Utah, former site manager gave him whatever assignment he hankered after. Not so with the new more democratic regime geared more to the younger writers and seeking to reclaim the lost younger audiences who have drifted away from this site established by Greg and the newly-installed Editorial Board set-up by him in the wake of the Jackson purge.          

That was how things were supposed to be until Phil started his

f--king campaign against his having to do these silly action adventures, especially when it got to be worn-out nothing but greed-head sequel time. Against me in particular, a kid, a “teacher’s pet” he called me. And it worked as I had to exchange reviews with him with him now doing Bogie’s Across The Pacific which could be easily parlayed into a double-header with the super-classic The Maltese Falcon as the real prize. Phil will probably get that assignment as well. That is the genesis of my relief campaign outlined in that dreadful Batman movie review which backfired in my face because no matter how much venom I threw at the thing Greg, backed up by what is increasingly looking like his toady Ed Board, told me personally that he liked the job I did on that one. WTF.        

One day Greg took me into his office and explained like I didn’t know from nothing what this film reviewing assignment procedure was all about, what he was carrying over from his many years first at the hard copy American Film Gazette and later when it switched over to an on-line version. Greg mentioned, and this astounded me, that he had looked at the Gazette archives and noted that over the many years of its hard copy and on-line existence that over forty thousand film reviews had been published. He was not sure how many writers had been involved in that process but he guessed at least one hundred when he had been around the operation. Although the Gazette took advertisements for current movies with few exceptions it did not, he did not assign, reviewers for current films. What the assignment board looked like was usually a hodge-podge of films related to some genre that was surfacing or resurfacing or some actor who had maybe passed away, or had rebooted his or her career, or some particular quirk of the time. Writers would, to increase their range, get a mix of assignments.   

Greg stated that frankly he was bringing that same routine over to this site with the caveat that this would include not only films but books, music, culture, politics, social commentary, the whole wider purpose of the site. He noted that although this site had only produced maybe a couple of thousand film reviews, another figure which astounded me, that apparently Jackson had the same attitude although he had centered the reviews on older films and documentaries. (Something I am told that the younger writers chaffed at and which was central to their grievances which brought Jackson low.) Greg assured me that I would eventually get my fair share of good material to write about. With that I accepted this turkey of an assignment and have temporarily called a halt to my belly-aching campaign. Kenny Jacobs]       

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Guys, writers, so maybe gals too although I don’t know many who took the Cold War into the winter night genre seriously, must have been gnashing their teeth when the ex-Soviet Union went down in flames around 1991 and 1991. (I have no first- hand experience since I was born in 1992.) Guys like Britisher Le Carre with his George Smiley series and here American Tom Clancy, or at least in theory Tom Clancy since this dog of film, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit , the fifth in the film series is merely based on the character of Jack Ryan and not something Clancy actually wrote. That gives you an exact idea of how lame this whole greed-head production is, how tired even the most fervent devotee of the genre must be to wade through this mush. Yeah, those guys must be have been crying in their beer once the very real tensions of a bi-polar world complete with serious nuclear weaponry in the balance (still around in the USA and Russia but less threatening right now in those quarters) turned into the still current uni-polar world dominated by American military power with not much to stop it.    

That post-Soviet faded tension is reflected in the hardly stellar plotline of this film once the mighty USSR was reduced to mere Russia size and less of a threat to American world order (which may be taking another curve of late with the Trump America First era but the film pre-dates that situation). Jack, dear good guy clean Jack, played by Chris Pine, after 9/11 signed up like a lot of guys in America to do serious damage to Islamic fundamentalists in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Jack took his beating in the former though and crippled up left the military for what would be a career on Wall Street based on his vast education in economic. The CIA though in the person of Tom Harper, played by visibly aging Kevin Costner, gets him to do some covert actions, to check for any dramatic changes in the world financial markets. Worked as a closed mouth “mole” until needed.

Our Jack does yeoman’s work for a while on the Street until  

some nefarious Russians, no longer able to wield their former military might have decided that melting down the world financial markets will restore some prestige to Mother Russia. Thus the chase in on. Jack a crackerjack trend spotter sees what those nefarious Russians are up to and takes action including the inevitable car chase/stand-off which entails a car bomb headed toward Wall Street. Surprise, surprise that car winds up in the East River without Jack of course and with the Russian plot crushed in the embryo. A little eye candy, sympatico by Kiera Knightley as Jack’s longtime live-in girlfriend gives the inevitable boy meets girl romantic twist a run. Sorry for my language but I have to say it- WTF.   

Down And Out In The City Of Angels-Danny Glover And Mel Gibson’s “Lethal Weapon 3” (1992)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

[This time unlike in my last review in this space when I did a nice job, according to site manager Greg Green, on Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s 1938 Bringing Up Baby now seen as a minor classic directed by Howard Hawks  I really can mimic old-time reviewer Phil Larkin’s now seemingly patented WFT. Why? Well it seems that the biggest way that you can get the attention of Greg and the Editorial Board (which Phil has lambasted to hell as Greg’s toadies but who are all working writers and so I take umbrage at his remarks that they are nothing but his voting fodder) is by belly-aching enough about the pick of assignments. At least that worked for Phil as mild-mannered and demur (if you can use that word describing a man) Greg Green bowed down to the onslaught and “switched” reviews with me now doing the one under review, Lethal Weapon 3, and Phil taking my justly earned plum assignment on the minor Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet classic Across the Pacific. I was going to use my take on that review as a lead-in to another film by this trio the major classic film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade-led The Maltese Falcon.

So it looks like this place is starting to be run the way that I am told since I don’t know directly I am a new kid on the block the same way when the old site manager the now justly deposed and exiled out in Utah, Nevada, Siberia some place like that Allan Jackson ran the show. Basically cry big enough crocodile tears and Uncle Greg will chase your blues away whether you are capable of doing the job or not. Which off of Phil’s last review of the 1989 version of Batman starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson is certainly in question. That is the one where Phil went off on popcorn-fattened and sugar-high soda filled young kids, their gullible parents, me as Greg’s goddam teacher’s pet which is all wrong, theater owners filling kids with fattening popcorn and cavity-producing sodas, Marvel comic screenwriters who couldn’t figure out a reasonable plot if they found one on the street, Captain America as a brainless twit, the Hulk as nothing but a ballooned-up mutant, Thor as nothing but a beauty queen, Ironman as a highly paid flunky and I don’t know what else since I stopped reading the thing when I knew there would be conveniently no plot summary. Hell Phil even took a swipe at eye candy Black Widow.

Guess what he wrote about three lines of real review. For that the bastard gets a minor Bogie plum on the way to the big Bogie one which I am sure he will argue for as I would to do the pair as a combo. So now you know why a young guy like me trying to break into the film reviewing business to prove to my parents that all that money they spent on college and graduate school wasn’t wasted is saying WTF. I won’t say I am a team player yet but I will soldier on as the older writers like to say all the time when they are behind deadline. Kenny Jacobs]             

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Funny after all I said about lame Phil Larkin above in the turf wars for good assignments I have to agree with him that these modern action films really are predictable. Really hard, if you want to know,   

to get a handle on since, again kudos to Phil, the plotline was done by some kid in elementary school whose father just happened to be the credited screenwriter on the leaden balloon. Harder still (and why I was going to go big on that Across The Pacific/The Maltese Falcon combination) why except for pure studio/theater owner greed and to fill production space these formula films have X number of sequels in this case three when the original idea if decent could not sustain further ramming. In the end all this one has going for it is a kind of play on the old older/younger buddy films from the likes of  Robert Redford and Paul Newman in vehicles like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. What the latter-day-saint moneybags producers forget is that those two stars were backed-up by scripts definitely not written by some credited screenwriter’s child.         

Since I am right now behind the eight ball with Greg and his esteemed Editorial Board sucking wind on this pig of a film I had better follow the old Sam Lowell commandment and write a decent plotline summary if I ever expect to see the light of day again.

To keep the hoary tradition alive here is the “skinny” whatever that means. Our worldly and wary seen it all City of Angels coppers, and buddies from all appearances, older sensible cop Roger, played by Danny Glover, and younger but more rash cop Martin, played by pretty boy Mel Gibson, are in deep doo-doo after failed bomb caper. Working the demoted streets they run into the proverbial street gangs and their armament, high-grade stuff not some junkie’s Saturday night special. Stuff that as it turns out can’t be purchased at Wal-Mart’s. Stuff that could only come from police confiscations. So this is strictly an inside job. Strictly rogue cop, or better ex-cop stuff.        

Things get heavy when Roger has to take down some dope-addled black kid with nothing but semi-automatic weaponry firing back at him in single shot mode. Christ taking down a kid, a friend of his son’s, and him, this is a weak sister sub-plot him, days away from a well-deserved retirement. So Roger and Martin bear down, get everybody they know involved in shaking the palm trees, do some dirty cop work to get info that might in post-Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter time, not get a very positive reception. So after the standard rough stuff, the standard million car chases going the wrong way on death Los Angeles super-highways, the standard drawn out shoot-out between unequal forces, they the unequal side,  they take down that rogue ex-cop. Take him down good. Guess what after this caper old Roger has some wind still in his sails and will not retire for a while. Just in case there had to be a Lethal Weapon 4 segue.

By the way what is not so weak sister in this mix is the usual dance around between pretty boy Martin and Laura, the woman copper running the Internal Affairs investigation, played by fetching Rene Russo. She is female-wise Martin’s twin and before you can close your eyes they are going round and round under the sheets. She, out in the streets though, gives as good as she gets taking a few for the cause. What I am wondering is why not let good old boy Roger retire and let Martin and Laura go buddy-buddy. I hope to high heaven this is enough to get me back in good graces. I am tired of running Phil’s tired WFT.    

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Batman, starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, 1989

WTF. Yeah WFT I am still standing although for the life of me I don’t why after the screed I ran through in the last film review I did if you could call it that Marvel Comics’ The Avengers. WTF too that I am still doing kids’ silly super-hero comic book airheads turned to the multi-plex screens all because everybody, boy or girl from the look of things, between the age of about eight to twenty-one no longer can sit through the twenty minutes it takes to read a comic book. Said kids will only sit through a couple of hours of swill, as long as the dialogue doesn’t exceed short sentences and grunts, there is kick-ass action every thirty seconds for no apparent reason, and there is an ample supply of vat- tubbed butter-drenched popcorn and gigantic refillable soda cups.

Although you and I both know if you have been following this race to the bottom of filmdom being forced on me with this brainless twit stuff that this is the first stages of a purge by the recently installed new leadership which seems to be making every effort to get rid of the old writers who held this operation together in the days when the assuredly purged, don’t believe that voluntary retirement stuff, Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin on this site) was made to fall on his sword. We who voted for his retention, meaning against the installation of the new pope Greg Green and his flunky Ed Board, are expected to follow suit. And assuredly as well the quickest way to get rid of senior writers is to give them assignments picking up the popcorn tubs and soda cups after a bunch of lazy kids who won’t read.          

Here is the latest step in the big step-off for this writer in this space (needless to say I won’t give them the satisfaction of quitting even if I do take that now obvious big step-off-no way). Greg Green has ordered me put on “probation” and hence this disciplinary assignment from hell  (yeah, yeah through the Ed Board but even those know nothing eight to twenty-one year olds know this has the earmarks of the “boss” making the decision and not some hireling nonsense). The reason? Well off that last review if not the first one there are a million possibilities. Start off with my WFT assorted languages that might offend those eight to twenty year olds who emphatically don’t read much less peep at screed-like film reviews. Even there PG parents don’t care as long as they don’t hear their precious Jills and Johnnies don’t use that language around the house. How very liberal. But strangely, or maybe not so strangely since “teacher’s pet” Kenny Jacobs mimicking me started using salty language that is not the reason. Although given this new crew’s kind of left-handed way of doing things since Allan’s purge now that they have wind in their sails that could be the disguised reason. Probably not though since in some weird modern let’s be hip and let everything but the very worse language slide through they are catering to that younger crowd which see the whole thing as picturesque. How very liberal.       

       

You might think that daring them to print that last damn review after skewering not only the film’s reasons for existence but basely calling the whole thing an empty shell would be the reason. After all a bad review, which by the way Alan Jackson cared less about which way the review went as long as it was well-written and less than three thousand words (so he didn’t have to pay a premium bonus number of words although in cyberspace being meaningless). This crew from what I have heard in order to grab some extra revenue is taking “advertisements” from the movie companies in this space. And the surest way to lose such lucrative emoluments is to have one of your writers declare their whole operation a house of cards. Call the whole thing a charade, an insult to the intelligence of amoebas and sea pods. However Greg mentioned to, I think, Lance Lawrence that these modern day studios still work on the old premise that the only bad publicity is no publicity. So no sale.      

You might think, and again be wrong, that skewering the characters and their personal identities would draw the line and put me beyond the pale. Calling patriotic Captain America a brawny brainless twit who would be hard-pressed to figure out how to use a spoon if he ever had occasion to use one. Ditto the Hulk except dumber when he goes off the deep end and turns into a green balloon-ish cretin. Calling beautiful Thor a wooden head, as wooden as those Valhalla Viking ships that faded from history fast for no known explanation except brain death. Sorrowfully calling Black Widow nothing but a commie bitch, eye candy for the jet set, and not to be trusted under any circumstances. Mutants, social misfits and rogues all. Even the brainy Ironman who in the end didn’t want to play ball, thought for at least a minute that going after a half dozen well-recognized thugs didn’t require making half of  humankind “collateral damage” in their wide-open wake, got all crazy and stuff.       

No, the reason if you can believe, this that I am on “probation’ is that as has been standard policy at this site since the old days when Sam Lowell, now really in retirement but of late muzzled, ruled the roost as official Senior film critic, a title now abolished in the new ‘democratic’ era that I did not give an adequate plot-line summary. What? What plot beyond kick-ass bad guys every thirty seconds in between gulps of soda or throated popcorn for the audience and don’t get any scratches on the uniforms or one’s person. Does it matter if the “enemy” is Hydra or Thor’s aunt? No, I think not and so there is the very real substance to my feeling that my days in this space are numbered. Once they say they have a pressing assignment for me out with the now exiled Allan Jackson out in Utah I can kiss my ass good-bye.    

That brings to the so-called plot-line of this Batman film from 1989. I am doomed anyway so once again I will say –what plot. Batman, played by mild-mannered Michael Keaton in between bouts of going under the Wayne mansion downy billow beds with investigative reporter Kim Basinger has a run-in or seven with the Joker, played by living maniac Jack Nicholson, who got caught short in an acid vat after killing his mobster boss which skewed his personality quite a bit although he was always a thug. In the end, ho-hum, the Joker takes the big fall, takes the trip six feet under. Any more plot line than that Greg Green can sue me. Enough said.     

The Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby (1938)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks, 1938  

[WTF-Hell now Phil Larkin has got me in a foul swearing mood.  (Phil in his youth bore the sobriquet Foul-mouthed Phil which may still be an appropriate moniker) The old time writer for this space and close friend of the recently departed to parts unknown and unlamented from what I have heard around the water cooler former site manager Allan Jackson is once again belly-aching about an assignment given to him by new manager Greg Green. Green had given him another Marvel Studio production The Avengers to review I assume because he did a good job on the first effort Captain America; Civil War.  Belly-aching at my expense which is why I am, again, doing a bracketed introduction. (Unlike Phil I still have put my screed in the traditional brackets to forewarn disinterested reader who could give a f—k about the internal disputes in an on-line publication operation to move on down the page to the story.)    

Quickly Phil’s first dispute was having to do a modern review of that Marvel comic production Captain America: Civil War mentioned above rather than the one Greg Green rightly assigned to me Humphrey Bogart’s lesser film Deadline-USA. He actually did an okay job on the film including what will be a classic line about Captain America having the brain of sea-pod despite his brawny exterior. I, in turn, this according to Greg himself, gave a very good account of myself on the Bogie article. That is what has me steamed this time when Phil once again assumed that somebody not born in 1930 or so could ever do justice, could ever have any insights into those by-gone productions like the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn playing somewhat against type sparkled up the screen with their antics and budding romance.          

Yeah that haughty, I am being nice to the bastard now, attitude has driven me to distraction young as I in this publication business. Phil has obviously not seen fit to read my previous introduction or decided to consciously ignore that information when I gave my “credentials” for be able, young as I am, to do a review on a Bogie film. I had been reared by black and white film crazed parents who from an early age carted me off to various film festival retrospectives both in college and later. I, in my turn, when I came off age would go myself, and later with various cheap date dates to my own slew of such features. I say again for Phil or anybody else I don’t need some certificate to prove that I can write intelligently about Bogie or about the golden age of screwball comedy. An age when the likes of Preston Sturgis, George Cukor, and the director here Howard Hawks made America laugh at itself for a few minutes in the heat of the 1930s Greta Depression and later the slogging through World War II that my grandparents and great-grandparents went through. WTF how hard is that to understand . Kenny Jacobs] 

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I had to laugh when I read Phil Larkin’s review of The Avengers since he gave it short shrift in the story-line department. Wrote the whole thing as some kind of ghoulish nightmare in about three lines so what he really wanted to write about was the “injustice” done to him-again. Which is maybe why Greg wanted me to do the Bringing Up Baby. Wanted to get more than three lines about the actual film he was reviewing. Of course with Baby, with any film you can do a sabotage job dismissing a film in a few words. You can also get the kernel of truth the film is trying to get at as well.

Here you have goof paleontologist Huxley, maybe vibes of Aldous, played by Cary Grant playing a little against type, fussing over finishing the construction of his pet project dinosaur bones getting that one last piece. Strangely just the day before he is to get married to his wet blanket assistant who only apparently wants him for his brain and fame potential. No way is Cary going to marry that person so let’s segue into later when to hustle some hard cash to finish up the project he winds up on a golf course trying to hustle dough from a rich matron’s lawyer. Enter poor little holy goof rich girl Susan, played by Katharine Hepburn playing pretty far from type and which ended up with poor box office haunting her career for a couple of years until she got all wistful and delightful in The Philadelphia Story. From that first meeting the pair exchange, mainly her exchange, a comedy of errors including a lot of dipsy-doodle around a dog and that last piece dinosaur bone. But you know as well as I do that through all the misadventures that holy goof Susan starts to grow on the good ancient bone goof Doctor. Of course there has to be one last pratfall by Susan to cement their mutual love with the poor innocent dinosaur taking a beating once more as if that millions of years ago extinction wasn’t humiliating enough. Short summary but more three lines to wrap up another Hollywood boy meets girl story that frankly was not hard for me to figure out or watch with interest. Touché Phil.         

Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

By Lance Lawrence  

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. Originally I had agreed with both men as far as Phil Larkin’s, what did, Si call them, yes, rantings about heads rolling, about purges and would have what seems like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime were  dubious at best. Now I am not so sure as I have heard other younger writers rather gleefully speaking around the shop water cooler about moving certain unnamed writers out to pasture-finally in the words of one of them.

In any case the gripe the former two writers appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too as Si pointed out while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stopping young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire.” (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks as definite proof that Allan was purged although maybe I should reevaluate everything he has said in a new light.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of this embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done. Lance Lawrence}    

Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweaty profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come. Some nights they were on fire at blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white, I swear, blew out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he was not in his prime.         

The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating father Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.

Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.  

They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their won and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade whiskey (or so he called it).

So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, pretty good right.  

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

By Lance Lawrence 

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. As far as Phil Larkin’s, what did Si call them, yes, rantings about older writers heads rolling, about purges and the like seem like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime and are dubious at best. The gripe the former two writers have about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too, as Si pointed out, while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stoped young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire” and bring in Greg Green and surrounded him with an Editorial Board. (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks around retire as definite proof that Allan was purged.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of these embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done.  Lance Lawrence] 

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Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart said when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after. 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.  

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[As noted in a review posted here (and in the on-line version of American Folk Gazette) on Woody Guthrie’s forever influence on generations of folk musicians if not other genres as well I agreed with Bart Webber in a previous article of his about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to a fourth article I have contributed in this space which has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Not directly, no not directly from this crew. No matter how tough Allan Jackson was, and he was, he spoke his mind and let the devil take the hinter post. So once again I plead once would have been enough, more than enough.

That brings me back to the additional point I in my last review that those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. I noted Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Moreover what originally appeared to me to be the rantings of a cranky old man (I am an old man but usually not cranky) by Phil Larkin, who in the interest of transparency is an old growing up friend, about a purge of older writers, or maybe a putting them on the back-burner seems more rational each day. Si Lannon]    

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A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s. After some thought I pinpointed the first time to a seventh grade music class (Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well) when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of music made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.

In thinking about when I first heard Pete Seeger sign I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time I heard the emerging folk minute. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene. In those days, the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush. Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized. Interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle. Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. 

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.            

By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[I agree with Bart Webber in a previous article about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to three articles I have contributed in this space which has pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Once would have been enough, more than enough.

Those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Disinterested readers who want to read the main piece without disruptions are nevertheless presented with this excess baggage under some theory that it is informative about such inner social media workings seems rather preposterous in this day in age. Si Lannon]    

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Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting west to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.