Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now 

 

 

Sam Lowell comment September 2014:

 

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale (reflecting the long-time need for international brother and sister solidarity sorely lacking these days), Which Side Are You On? (yeah, which side are you on when the deal goes down and you can’t hide and have to say yeah or nay), Viva La Quince Brigada (in homage to the heroic “pre-mature” anti-fascists from the United States who fought for the Republican side in the 1930s Spanish Civil War), Solidarity Forever(reflecting the desperate need to organize the  organized and reorganize the previously organized into unions) and others like Deportee ( in serious need of hearing these days where it is a toss-up between resident minorities here and the undocumented for who has gotten the rawest deal), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (reflecting the need to keep the fight for nuclear disarmament on the front burner with international tensions now approaching the Cold War of my youth levels), Blowin’ In The Wind (reflecting, well, reflecting that the new breeze a-borning for new generations has not happened), This Land Is Your Land (reflecting that this land is your land, that you or your forbears created the wealth, your land if you have the chutzpah to grab it back) while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future.

Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your red-bannered, seek a newer world, turn the world upside down heart     imagination then or drives it now looking back in retrospect could have gone straight back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated. Many have put their particular brand on when the whole thing ebbed, fell down of its own hubris but all agree from my inquiries no later than say 1975. I personally, having been on the streets of Washington that week, date the ebb from May Day 1971 when we attempted to shut down with numerically and politically inadequate forces the government if it did not shut down the war, the Vietnam War for those who need a name to their wars, and got nothing but teargas, police batons, and agonizingly huge numbers of arrests for our troubles.

Oh yeah and forty plus years of the short end of the stick of “cultural wars” still beating us down. Some have worked the defeats the other way not from the ebb of our experiments but the from high tide of reaction thinking of later when we all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” the beast which we work within these days. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists who blew the economy, the freaking world economy, all to kingdom    come, who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008 (those “royalists” later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent” come flash-in-the-pan Occupy movement that held out a flicker of hope before it died on the vine). Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later as I said the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue here in 2014 I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, an old-time communist (you know guys like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson) although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground (and one would be truly hard-pressed to name one musical one today in America unless they are hiding somewhere). Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in. Listen up:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, the late Peter Paul Markin always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Markin whom I met along with Sam Lowell when I first arrived out in California, out on a nameless hill, or if it had a name in that hilly San Francisco night I never found out what it was, looking for some dope or a place to stay in that order was the most political guy I had ever met then (maybe ever) and I had known some guys who helped form SDS back East in so I knew some “heavies.” Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him, under the influence of dope, the new acid rock musical dispensation, and the flowering of new liestyle  that had not been the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin had been so that I never got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act. Nor did I have anything that happened to me subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany, particularly that Army stint that gave him “religion” on the questions of war and peace but which I think, given his later fate, left something hollow inside him since I had been declared 4-F (unfit for military service) due to a childhood physical injury that had left one arm withered. (He is now buried in a nameless grave in a potter’s field down in Sonora, Mexico after he was found on a dusty back road with two slugs in him after what we had heard was some busted cocaine deal in either 1976 or 1977, probably the summer of the former from what a private detective hired by one of our friends to go down and find out what happened told him from the shaky information he had received down there from a guy, a doper, who claimed to know Markin.)  

I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned,” all doped up or in thrall to some ephemeral woman a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin with through his position for a candid world to hear (candid, his word). That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents, including many mutual friends of his, and ours, who acted out on that very idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering out in the Muir Woods, by some Big Sur tidal pool or, god forbid, out in rain-soaked Oregon) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock or even acid-etched Someone To Love songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-lived world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden. (We all called it “looking for the garden” in short-hand meaning the lost Garden of Eden which we were hung up on seeking, and not always in our dope-flamed moments either.) Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like million butterfly Woodstock, flying kites Golden Gate Park, pop bop Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common went things headed east, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side too, were arguing about.

Now, belated now, it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. Although like I said I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland after he got out of the Army and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments back then recently in preparing my remarks for this effort (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and in Maine although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin had mentioned to me that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit.

You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl and later caught hell, including recently, from later women companions when I mentioned the idea in a heated love argument), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle and that sly salacious run through Candy Man), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy and those manly appetites off-stage), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen but that later proved to be only marginally true even to me once I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88).

Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).

Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin had been  totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Add in heavy doses of peyotes or some other herbals known to produce that very effect and you have a pretty good case for what the group was trying to do out on those whirling dervish stages. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to go further and classify their efforts on those night as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them to hear such sounds, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen whatever he thought of their political perspective. The righteous headed to the “promise land,” yeah, back to the garden.  Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made some by sheer ignorance, some by willfully refusing to draw the lessons of the past and re-inventing the wheel yet again, by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, but were mainly made out of inexperience and a foolish naiveté.  Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy red neck President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaseling Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover (a truly demonic figure and treated like a rattlesnake even by people who liked him, or kowtowed to him), Mayor Richard Daley (evil, pure evil in a business suit and a serious representative of what old-timey poet Carl Sandburg called his city, Chicago, hog-butcher to the world   ne) and Hubert Humphrey ( insidious because he was such a toothless hack sucking up to whoever was in front of him when he had his poor boy wanting habits on but on that  joyous face it took longer to see he was evil as the rest)  spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And the sorely missed and mourned late Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough.

The Battle Outside Is Raging-Maggie Smith’s My Old Lady

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

My Old Lady, starring Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith,  Kristin Scott-Thomas, 2014

Oh sure every once in a while Hollywood or somebody puts out a quirky little film like the one under review, My Old Lady  (an unfortunate term for the title since my frame of reference for the term, and the central male character’s as well stems from the 1960s when the term was used as a term of endearment, I guess, for your wife or girlfriend who most certainly was not an old lady since we did not recognize anybody over thirty and we would not have, in my circle anyway, called dear old mother such a term). Quirky? Well yes because it addresses in a semi-comical way what we now all know is a truism. That the battle, the inter-generational battle, we 50 and 60 somethings fought against our parents (and all authority) in the 1960s and early 1970s (that dear old mother over thirty who we did not recognize in our universe) never did really end, at least in some households.      

Here is what I mean. Mathias (played by Kevin Kline), a broke, broken down refugee from the ‘60s, is heir to a luxurious apartment in Paris (there are other luxurious apartments in the world although not in Paris but that setting makes this film work a little better) left by his now deceased father whom, well, let’s say they didn’t get along. And Mathias has the three divorces and the shrink bills to prove it, prove he was unloved by his father. So our man spends his last Euros to get to Paris and sell the unit and maybe get his twenty-seventh “fresh start” in life (if those ex-wives don’t find out about his current good fortune). Problem, problem number one is that he cannot sell the damn thing while one Mathilde is alive and well (she a British national who has lived in Paris since Django Reinhart’s time played, played naturally, by that age old institution Maggie Smith who has lost a step or seven since her Prime of Miss Jean Brodie days).

See Mathias’ father and Mathilde were lovers (while both we married to others, Mathias’ mother committing suicide over the matter) and he set her up in the apartment giving her, under an old French custom, a life tenancy in the place. So our boy has to not only look at the actuarial tables but figure out a way to get the “old lady” out and big dough into his hands. Now. Oh yeah, did I say that the “old lady” had a daughter, Chloe, a fetching daughter (played by Kristen Scott Thomas of The English Patient fame) who also wants to stay since she grew up in the place and has no place else to go. Chloe naturally takes an instant hate to the reckless and feckless Mathias.

But you know what is going to happen, know as sure as you know the father was not a good guy (although Mathilde’s take on him is obviously different even if he left her high and dry after his wife killed herself). Hollywood or something will trot out the old tried and true boy meets girl formula and they will get together. Not only that but dear sweet Mathilde will get to finish her days in her old place. And maybe, just maybe that battle Mathias had with his father will be “resolved” when somebody tries to buy the place when he is Maggie’s age. Yes, quirky, quirky indeed.           

The Sex Lives Of Physicists-Steven J. Hawking’s The Theory Of Everything

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, 2014     

No question one the striking and permanent questions that humankind has ponders since the beginning of existence, put many different ways depending of what is known, is how the universe was formed. In the old days that was a “no-brainer” because of course God did the deed and that ended the question, perhaps. But when humankind put aside that part of the question the guys and gals who were still interested in how it was formed had a field day, and are still doing so waiting for the next big idea to take root. For now though people, or rather professional observers, physicists and astronomers, are hovering around the black hole theory and the rest of us are going along. And the film under review, The Theory of Everything, the bio-pic rather semi-bio-pic of the extraordinary physicist Steven J. Hawking based on a memoir by his ex-wife Jane goes a long way to acknowledging his efforts at pitching that theory to the scientific community.    

Of course that is not the only part the story that gets played out here since, except for nerds and geeks and their hangers-on, a story about a guy and a scientific theory would be a “snorer.” What makes this film’s plotline extraordinary is that Hawking (played by Eddie Redmayne) plugged on while suffering the debilitating effects of motor neuron disease which almost took his life and did take his voice and some other functions. So even if you are a little weak on your late unlamented attempts at understanding high school physics you can still appreciate the human struggle against all odds to survive that this ordeal thrown his way. (He was not expected to live more than a couple of years back in the 1960s when he developed the disease but as of 2015 he is still with us, hats off.)  

Better yet this film avoids the “snorer” problem that Hollywood dreads and which follows films about science guys by putting plenty of romance, even if awkward and geeky romance, in the story-line. Everybody can get into the boy-girl thing (or all the contemporary other relationship combinations which produce a romance) and wonder, star-gazing wonder if you like, how Hawking and his wife, Jane (played by Felicity Jones) got through the whole thing as well as they did, and for as long as they did. Wonder too if we are missing something in that star-gazing when we undercover stuff about the sex lives of those geeky physicists in this film. See this one.

 

  

You’re Innocent When You Dream-Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole’s How To Steal A Million

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

How To Steal A Million, starring Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Eli Wallach, 1966

I have often commented on the fact that no question the late 1930s, early 1940s were the golden age of screwball romantic comedies with such treats as It Happened One Night and Sullivan’s Travels just to name a couple. And I stand by that proposition as I review another screwball romantic comedy from the 1960s, How To Steal A Million. Maybe during the 1930s it was because movie audiences desperately needed a few hours off from the class struggle or just the struggle to get by day to day but this fatted calf 1960s effort lacks that pulling power despite the fine cast.

Here’s the story line and maybe you can figure out why the thing fell a little flat. Bonnet, a high end French art forger (although art forgers are not always French), is a little bored with ripping off the culturati with his fake paintings and decides to show the world a sculpture, a fake by his father of Cellini’s Venus in public in a well-known Paris museum. Daughter Nicole (played by fetching there is no other word for her, Audrey Hepburn) flips out at the idea since this stunt will get his a long stretch in the infamous French prisons, maybe Devil’s Island if that was the throw of the dice, but someplace harsh. The good Bonnet proceeds anyway despite Nicole’s trepidations. As it turned out various law enforcement officials and reputable art dealers are on his trail, especially one Simon Dermott (played by he of the Lawrence of Arabia blue eyes, Peter O’Toole). He is out to stop Bonnet in his tracks, and clean up the art world a little. And that was an admirable ambition until he saw the fetching Nicole and was, well, smitten right off (and nobody on this good green earth could blame him taking the fall).                    

Here’s the tricky part though, an American art collector Davis Leland (played by versatile actor Eli Wallach) is crazy to have that Cellini for his vaults and is bound and determined to get the object by fair means or foul. Along the way Leland plays with Nicole to use her to get what he wants. Nicole though is worried, worried to perdition, that dear old Dad is a goner so she tries, tries not very hard as the case turned out to have the dashing blue-eyed Simon cook up a plot to steal the statute from the museum and keep Dad out of the Bastille. And, well, smitten Simon takes the leap, falls for those brown moon-glow eyes.

The rest of film is filled with little off-hand capers (and kisses) as Simon goes low tech, very low tech by today’s security standards in order to steal the thing. And as such things go, cinematically anyway, Simon pulls the caper off. And guess who gets the fake Cellini. And guess who gets Nicole. And guess who is not going to be having a diet of bread and water. Sure there were some madcap moments but the tension that held the 1930s romantic comedies audience in thrall even though they too knew the boy was going to get the girl or vice-versa is lacking here. Still I wouldn’t mind having been in Simon’s shoes, wouldn’t have minded at all.           

For Father's Day-Semper Fidelis, Yeah, Always Faithful-For Lawrence James Jackman

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Frank Jackman freaked out as he jogged that early pre-dawn morning along the previously untrodden pavement before him, “freaked out” a term not now currently in use but an old expression picked up in the 1960s counter-cultural night out in the West, probably San Francisco, where many such terms were coined in the drug-filled blue-pink night. After the freak-out subsided, and still jogging to clear his thoughts, he began flash-thinking back to the long ago events that had caused this particular freak-out, that unfinished family business that never got resolved and for a long time now had been placed on hold in the deep recesses of his mind since he could no longer do anything about making things right.  Making things right like he had done with lots of other bad situations that he tried to make amends for as he got older, getting on an even keel after decades of statutory neglect with his old growing up town days, his old high school feeling left out and aliened days, his old corner boys petty crime and midnight shifter days, a few old flames that he had abandoned days, a few whom he had left high and dry, very high and dry days, a couple of ex-wives left in the lurch when he headed wherever he was heading and with who days, and a couple of his siblings short-changed days, and then honed in on the thought of that unresolved business that very well could have been resolved or at least put on an even keel too.

Then head down in thought still moving along out of some unconscious impulse he shed a tear in the darkest hour before the dawn on that unfamiliar roadway, a tear not learned in the West but learned in his po’ boy growing up in the East, shed a tear stumbling in the dark to find the sidewalk in front of him like some night-hunter before him for all that he had not done or said, not done or said to his father, Lawrence Jackman, in the long ago when he had the chance. Strange, freaking out, shedding that tear just that early morning since in the past he seldom thought of his father long gone to a sad unacknowledged grave thirty years before.

Once you hear the circumstances, once you hear what happened that morning as Frank related it to over drinks one night in Boston few days later, then you will probably agree that the freak-out and that shed tear were not out of order. Agree with me too since I knew his father, not well as in those days fathers were distant figures, when we were growing together in Carver, a town about thirty miles south of Boston.

This is the back story of how that freak-out spilled out of Frank’s inner workings and why that tear had been shed. Frank had, as he had for many years now, ever since his military service during the Vietnam War, been active one way or another in the anti-war movements against the hubris of American governmental foreign policy that crisscrossed his life. Been active as kind of a penance, an act of atonement for what he had had to do then, had to do because he got caught up in lots of things he did not understand, did not inquire about even as he had feelings deep down that the thing was wrong, that he was not built to be a killing machine against people who had done him no harm. But he had nothing in his life, schooling, way of living that would have directed the better instincts of his nature to another course then (and he was not alone once you hear the stories of the guys who got caught up in that war machine without really knowing how to resist the damn thing then, or wanting to in their patriotic working-class neighborhoods). He was damn well sure that he would get the message out loud and clear to forewarn new generations about the nefarious doings of the American government whenever he could. Other governments too but as the old Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che” Guevara, a hero of the Cuban Revolution and periodically an iconic hero to the young desperately in need of self-less heroic figures in their fights against a world they did not create, said of those radicals and revolutionaries who work in the States that they were in the “belly of the beast” and needed to slay that dragon first and foremost to insure the safety of the rest of the world.

Frank had paid attention to a call from various peace and social justice groups who set up a Facebook page for the event and who were sponsoring an anti-war rally in front of the White House on March 21^st to coincide with the 12^th anniversary of the start of the second Iraq War in 2003 in Washington, D.C. (he would let ride his feeling that the whole Iraq quagmire really had been a continuously on-going war since the first days of 1991 and let the “official” twelve years stand in mute commemoration). So he had once against travelled the well-worn road from his home in York, Maine to D.C. in order to participate once again, to “show the colors” as an old biker friend who had saved his bacon and that of others in ‘Nam, Jeff Crawford, who did not make it back to the “real world” after that experience winding up face down on a bloody road just south of Carlsbad, California after a botched liquor store robbery in 1976 always used to say while they were on guard duty about the biker gang that he hung with around in Ellsworth up by Bar Harbor. You just had to let people know you were even if small in number alive and well, and ready to raise in-you-face hell about the matter.

Of course in order to “show the colors” these days unlike in the old days when for a number of years after he had been discharged from the Army in order to show he had gotten “religion” on the issues of war and peace Frank would sojourn down to D.C. at the drop of a hat hitchhiking when that mode of transportation was less of a hassle, when you could thumb without being either picked up by the cops as a “vag” or in fear of getting pick up by weirdos and psychos. Later when the open roads were not save by some rickety long ass ride siting inevitably beside a snorer, a huge guy, or some mother with a kid on her lap bus. Now by plane though. And, truth too, he no longer slept on some young local D.C. volunteer’s living room floor in his old army sleeping bag (not from ‘Nam” days but of World War II vintage bought at an Army-Navy store in Cambridge when he knew he was going to be on many living room floors, or in the anteroom of some welcoming church, some Quaker meeting house or some Universalist or Unitarian church before they joined forces, or in Rock Creek Park if nothing was available but now a cheap but clean motel. This motel was locate just over the Potomac River from D.C. in Arlington, Virginia, one that he had not used previously.

Frank had since his retirement from a government job in the Boston area a couple of years before taken up again his old-time habit of running, really jogging to put a proper name to what it felt like to him as the youngsters passed him by with ease, even chucky kids, which he had started as a kid to get out of the house and to get out some of his home-life teenage angst and alienation frustrations but had not done so for a number of years before starting up again for the same reasons except put oldster in front of the reasons rather than teenager. He had jogged in D.C. previously but in a different location so as he left his motel that dark morning he was trending new ground although he had an idea that he wanted to head toward the Potomac to try and catch the running trails that he knew dotted the river.  

He had gotten up before six in the morning on the Saturday of the day of the protest, his usually tried to do his running when he his wobbly legs had some spring in them, and figured that he would head to the Memorial Bridge and into DC for a bit having seen a sign on a street close to the motel the afternoon before saying that the bridge was about a mile or so away. So he had started in that direction in the very dark before the dawn. As he picked his way through what seemed like a park he noticed to his left a strong white light illuminating something and as he approached his heart sank for the white light was jumping off of the famous iconic Iwo Jima Memorial to the fallen Marines of World War II (and other wars, excursions, interventions, invasions, and occupations) and that is when he freaked out.

At first Frank thought about how he had never been this close to the monument, had considered that he had not had previous occasion, and no desire, to see the sight (and seeing the monument up close made him cringe since this outfit had been involved in every nefarious war and skirmish since back in American revolution times as inscribed for all to see at the base). Frank knew it represented a big moment in the last stages of the Pacific War Theater of World War II and that it had ever since been forever etched in every schoolboy’s mind (now schoolgirls too, he figured) as a sign of gritty determination, and of another way of “showing the colors” since the whole point had been to capture the hill and plant the flag and thus show the Japanese who were kings of the hill. He also had previously only known the story of one of the soldiers planting the flag, a Puma Indian from out in Arizona, a Native American who was treated just like every other “injun” when he got back and wound up just another dead drunk in some stinking sullen arroyo out in the low desert.

Moving past that monument Frank began to well up thinking about his father, his poor bedraggled father, who had been a Marine too during World War II just like the guys in the white-lighted group statute, who had fought and survived in Guadalcanal in 1942. Had taken his fair share of hardships in other Pacific battles (as also separately noted on the base of that statute) and did his duty as he saw it. Did his duty as he saw it and like a lot of other fathers from World War II, hell, like Frank in ‘Nam, didn’t want to talk about it, said they did what they had to do and that was that.

Thought too about when his poor father told him a story from before the war when Frank was young and inquisitive and wanted to know how he got into the Marines and why he wound up in Boston. See his father was not from Boston, not from the North at all, he had been born and raised in coal country, born down in Hazard in Kentucky, Hazard of famous labor struggles and folksong. He had been working in the coal mines when Pearl Harbor happened. Lawrence Jackman had not thought twice about joining the Marines when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor rather than continue in the deadly coal fields, said he would rather take his chances against the Japanese than against the coal dust, and he never looked back. Toward the end of the war he had been assigned to a naval depot at Portsmouth, New Hampshire and one weekend had travelled to Boston where he attended a USO dance and met Laura Riley, Frank’s mother who was from Carver, about thirty miles south of Boston. So yeah, he never looked back. 

Although Frank though that morning something that he had never thought before, maybe Lawrence Jackman, his long underrated father, should have looked back since he never drew a break in this this wicked old world once he decided to stay in the North after the war at Laura’s insistence. Never got in on that golden age of American labor that a lot of families bought into, and were rewarded with a few of life’s goods like a private home, a decent automobile and some nice vacations and entertainments. See Lawrence was uneducated, barely finishing elementary school before he hit the mines to help his struggling nine children motherless family. The hard luck push was that the Boston labor market was in no need of very good coalminers, and so he was always shuffled off into some last hired, first fired unskilled jobs making no money, forced to live in public housing for long enough for the culture of poverty, for the never-ending “wanting habits” that accumulate down at the base of society to grip his kids. See he and Laura produced four close-in-age fast-growing sons who made one Lawrence Jackman continuously fret about feeding and housing his own. Add to that a deeply disappointed Laura Jackman who expected to rise when all the boats were rising in the 1950s and you had some explosive situations, you had some very tense times around the Jackman household. And as those four sons came of age they created endless heartaches for their father, a couple going to jail, another put in a mental hospital after too much craziness on the outside and Frank, well Frank was nothing but a corner boy and just smart enough to stay out of the state’s institutions but not smart enough to see that his actions were killing his father since his father had pinned his hopes on him.  Although Lawrence Jackman never wavered as a family man, took whatever life’s bitches had to offer him in sullen distant silence.     

Several years before, back in 2009 after Frank had received news from a family member that his estranged mother had passed away and thereafter he had taken a trip down to the Carver Heights cemetery to pay his last respects to her if not in life then in death. While there noticed that on his father’s adjacent grave site somebody, or rather some organization as he found out later, had placed an additional stone beside the traditional headstone denoting his service as a Marine in World War II. (He on a return trip would place a Marine Corps flag next to that stone as a physical token that Lawrence James Jackman had done his duty as he saw it and that someone beside the Marine Corps Association recognized that fact.) Reflecting the sadness of the moment Frank had shortly thereafter written a post hoc letter to his mother to be sent to family members in an attempt to finally reconcile with his mother, even if from beyond the grave. Filled with emotion during that period about what had gone awry in the nuclear Jackman family Frank had also written a belated obituary for his father to be passed around to those who knew him and to the family around Father’s Day trying to put paid to the grief he had caused that worthy man. This is what Frank had to say:

In honor of Lawrence James Jackman, 1920-1990, Sergeant, United States Marine Corps, World War II, Pacific Theater and, perhaps, for other Carver World War II veteran   fathers too.

I have always turned red, turned bluster, fluster, embarrassed, internal red, red with shame, red at this time of the year, this father’s day time of the year, when I have thought about my own father, the late Lawrence James Jackman. And through those shades of red I have thought, sometimes hard, sometimes just a flicker thought passing, too close, too red close to continue on, to think about the things that I never said to my father, about what never could be said to him, and above all, because when it came right down to it since we might as well have been on different planets, what could not be comprehended when said. But although death has now separated us by some twenty years I still turn red, more internal red these days, when I think about the slivers of talk that could have been talked, usefully said. And I, Francis Mark Jackman, will go to my own grave having that hang over my father’s day thoughts.

But just this minute, just this pre-Father’s Day minute, I want to call a truce to my red-faced shame, internal or otherwise, and pay public tribute, pay belated public tribute to Lawrence James Jackman, and maybe it will rub off on others too. And just maybe cut the pain of the thought of having those unsaid things hang over me until the grave.

See, here’s the funny part, the funny part now, about speaking, publicly or privately, about my father, at least when I think  about the millions of children around who are, warm-heartedly, preparing to put some little gift together for the “greatest dad in the world.” And of other millions, who are preparing, or better, fortifying themselves in preparation for that same task for dear old dad, although with their teeth grinding. I cannot remember, or refuse to remember, a time for eons when I, warm-heartedly or grinding my teeth, prepared anything for my father’s Father’s Day, except occasional grief that might have coincided with that day’s celebration. No preparation was necessary for that. That was all in a Frank’s day’s work, my hellish corner boy day’s work or, rather, night’s work, the sneak thief in the night work, later turned into more serious criminal enterprises. But the really funny part, ironic maybe, is grief-giving, hellish corner boy sneak thief, or not, one Lawrence James Jackman, deserves honor, no, requires honor today because by some mysterious process, by some mysterious transference I, in the end, was deeply formed, formed for the better by that man.

And you see, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that I was estranged from my family for many years, many teenage to adult years and so that my father’s influence, the “better angel of his nature,” influence had to have come very early on. I, even now, maybe especially now, since I have climbed a few mountains of pain, of hard-wall time served, and addictions to get here, do not want to go into the details of that fact, just call them ugly, as this memorial is not about Frank Jackman and his tribulations in the world, but Lawrence Jackman’s.

Here is what needs to be told though because something in that mix, that Lawrence Jackman gene mix, is where the earth’s salts mingled to spine me against my own follies when things turned ugly later in my life. Lawrence James Jackman, that moniker almost declaring that here was a southern man, as my name was a declaration that I was a son of a southern man, came out of the foothills of Kentucky, Appalachian Kentucky. The hills and hollows of Hazard, Kentucky to be exact, in the next county over from famed, bloody coal wars, class struggle, which-side-are-you-on Harlan County, but still all hard-scrabble coal-mining country famous in story and song- the poorest of the poor of white Appalachia-the “hillbillies.” And the poorest of the poor there, or very close to it, was my father’s family, his four brothers and four sisters, his elderly father and his too young step-mother. Needless to say, but needing to be said anyway, my father went to the mines early, had little formal schooling and was slated, like generations of the Jackman clan before him, to live a short, brutish, and nasty life, scrabbling hard, hard for the coal, hard for the table food, hard for the roof over his head, hard to keep the black lung away, and harder still to keep the company wolves away from his shack door. And then the Great Depression came and things got harder still, harder than younger ears could understand today, or need to hear just now.

At the start of World War II my father jumped, jumped with both feet running once he landed, at the opportunity to join the Marines in the wake of Pearl Harbor, had fought his fair share of battles in the Pacific Theater, including Guadalcanal, although he, like many men of his generation, was extremely reticent to talk about his war experiences. By the vagaries of fate in those up-ending times my father eventually was stationed at the huge Portsmouth Naval Depot up in New Hampshire before being discharged at the end of the war, a make-shift transport naval base about one hundred miles from Carver.

I have to interrupt my train of thought for a minute as I just chuckled to myself when I think about my father’s military service, thought about one of the few times when my father and I had had a laugh together. My father often recounted that things were so tough in Hazard, in the mines of Hazard, in the slag heap existence of Hazard, that in a “choice” between continuing in the mines and daily facing death at Tojo’s or Hitler’s hands that he picked the latter, gladly, and never looked back. Part of that never looking back, of course, was the attraction of Laura Riley (Carver High School Class of 1941), my mother whom my father met while stationed at Portsmouth after meeting at a USO dance in Boston. They married shortly thereafter, had four sons, my late brother, Jubal, killed many years ago while engaged in an attempted armed robbery, me, ex-sneak thief, ex-dope-dealer, ex-addict, ex-Vietnam wounded soldier, ex-, well, enough of ex’s, a younger brother, Prescott, now serving time at one of the Massachusetts state correctional institutions as a repeat offender, and Kenneth who drifted off one day at sixteen and never came back. Not a pretty picture but over for him now. Well, not quite, whatever my father might have later thought about his decision to leave the hellhole of the Appalachian hills. He was also a man, as that just mentioned family resume hints at, who never drew a break, not at work, not through his sons, not in anything.

I am not quite sure how to put it in words that are anything but spilled ashes since it would be put differently, much differently in this year of 2009 than in, let’s say, 1971, or 1961 but I have thought of it this way when I tried to write the sentiment I want to express here several years ago and could not quite it in words then:

“My father was a good man, he was a hard- working man when he had work, and he was a devoted family man. But go back to the point about where he was from, from down in Appalachia. He was also an uneducated man with no skills for the Boston labor market. There was no call for a coal miner's skills in Boston after World War II so he was reduced to unskilled, last hired, first fired jobs. This was, and is, not a pretty fate for a man with hungry mouths to feed. And stuck in the old Carver Housing Authority apartments, come on now let’s call a thing by its real name, real recognizable name, “the projects,” the place for the poorest of the poor, Carver version, to boot.

“To get out from under a little and to share in the dream, the high heaven dream, working poor post-World War II dream, of a little house, no matter how little, of one’s own if only to keep the neighbor’s loud business from one’s door Laura,  proud, stiffly Irish 1930s Depression stable working-class proud Laura, worked. Laura worked mother’s night shifts at one of the first Carver Dunkin’ Donuts filling jelly donuts for hungry travelers in order to scrap a few pennies together to buy an old, small, rundown house, on the wrong side of the tracks, on Maple Street for those who remember that locale, literally right next to the old Bay Lines railroad tracks. So the circle turned and the Jackman family returned back to the Carver of Laura’s youth.”

“I grow pensive when I think, or rather re-think, about the toll that the inability to be the sole breadwinner (no big deal now with an almost mandatory two working-parents existence- but important for a man of his generation) took on the man's pride. A wife filling damn jelly donuts, Jesus.

 “And it never really got better for my father from there as his four boys grew to manhood, got into more trouble, got involved with more shady deals, acquired more addictions, and showered more shame on the Lawrence Jackman name than needs to be detailed here. Let’s just say it had to have caused him more than his fair share of heartache. He never said much about it though, in the days when we were still in touch. Never much about why four boys who had more food, more shelter, more education, more prospects, more everything that a Hazard po’ boy couldn’t see straight if their lives depended on it, who led the corner boy life for all it was worth and in the end had nothing but ashes, and a father’s broken heart to show for it. No, he never said much, and I haven’t heard from other sources that he ever said much (Laura was a different story, but this is my father’s story so enough of that). Why? Damn, they were his boys and although they broke his heart they were his boys. That is all that mattered to him and so that, in the end, is how I know, whatever I will carry to my own grave, my father must have forgiven me.

“I am getting internal red again so I have decided that it is time to close this tribute. To go on in this vain would be rather maudlin. Although the old man was unlike me with the Army, he was always a Marine, and he was always closer to the old Marine Corps slogan than I could ever be - Semper Fi- "always faithful." Yes, I think some historic justice had finally been done, that expression is a good way to end this. Except to say something that should have been shouted from the Carver rooftops long ago- “Thanks Dad, you did the best you could.”

Now you know why Frank Jackman shed that tear, that tear for his lost youth, for all the things he did not do, did not say when he had the chance and so maybe you should shed a tear for Semper Fi Lawrence Jackman too.

 

In The Golden Age Of Screw-Ball Comedies-Carole Lombard’s Nothing Sacred

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Nothing Sacred, starring Carole Lombard, Fredric March, directed by William Wellman, 1937  

No question the laugh-hungry 1930s Great Depression audiences were entertained by films which represented the golden age of classic screw-ball comedies from the likes of directors Preston Sturgis, Frank Capra and William Wellman the director of the film under review Nothing Sacred, done in early Technicolor (the first such screwball comedy). No question as well that the subject of the media and its foibles, excesses and dishonesties, then and now, are a fit subject for screwball comedy in any age (although one has to go some to be Cary Grant’s The Front Page from that same period). And no question no screw-ball comedy is worth a damn if there isn’t a little romance thrown in to insure a happy ending for those laugh-hungry Great Depression audiences. That my friends is the trifecta.     

Here’s the scoop. Wally Cook (played here rather stiffly by Fredric March who usually played characters with a certain gravitas) a from hunger no-hold-barred field reporter for any newspaper USA in any town USA (although the actual setting in the film is New York City) got burned, got burned badly trying to stage a society charity hoax to run a story to the ground and make a name for himself in the big city. As a result he was relegated to the obits, literally the kiss-of-death for any hot-shot reporter on the make. By hook or by crook he inveigled the big boss to let him run with a story about a woman in Vermont, Hazel Flagg, (played by Carol Lombard also somewhat stiffly since she was known as a comedy star of sorts) who was allegedly dying of incurable radium poisoning (yeah this is before the atom bomb and all that). Wally swears he will have them (those city fervent newspaper readers) crying for more once he sets the story up, and jump the newspaper’s circulation up to boot. The boss buys into that proposition and Wally is on his way to the sticks.       

Things as they always do in screw-ball comedies, get tricky, get complicated once he gets to Podunk though. See Hazel has been misdiagnosed by her, well, stew-ball doctor and she is not dying. Thus she will miss that trip to New York City with all the trimming that she had dreamed about as a farewell to this world (NYC then, and now too although perhaps less so, a Mecca for those who have not been there before, especially small-town types). No problem though as Hazel decided to play “sick” and take Wally up on that trip offer. And off they go.    

Well New York City and its’ attentions to her are everything she expected, and more. But then things got sticky again. She fell for Wally, fell hard and didn’t know how to tell him she was not going to die. He has fallen for her too so that got things all mixed up until she hit on the “bright” idea of committing suicide, of fading from view before every New Yorker who could read found out she was a hoax. Eventually Wally found out about her real state, found out he has no problem with her “suicide” solution and they go off into the sunset to marital bliss. Sure the plot line had been done before, and since, but here it is all wrapped up in bows for you, wrapped up in good feelings if you were in that Great Depression audience needing a little escape from your own woes.