Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- When Beat Was Neat-A Film Clip From The B-Film Classic “High School Confidential”

I ain’t saying that this low budget be-bop B-film’s (although with a solid A on the rock and roll intro with Jerry Lee Lewis sitting at the piano in back of a flat-bed truck flailing, yes, flailing away on his classic rock and roll song, teen angst-busting , teen alienation-busting song, High School Confidential,  heralding the hint, just the hint, of a possibility that we of the generation of ’68 might be getting ready for that big jail break we were sitting under some atomic bomb air raid school desk looking for a sign of) “beat” poetess  will make you throw away your personally autographed first edition City Lights copy of mad monk om om man Allen Ginsberg’s Howl  or even some torn-up paperback copy of Jeanbon (Jack) Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues or even some shotgun version of street gunsel mad poet Gregory Corso’s machine gun sonnets but she was a sister, a sister in the struggle to break out of squaresville, to break out of the void, to break from nine to five, to break from soda fountain giggle girl dreams, to break from seventy-six, count ‘em, forms of teen angst and sixty-six, count ‘em again, forms of teen alienation, to break from same old, same old, to, ah hell, just to break as portrayed by know nothing  Hollywood with its angst-less dreams and its alienation-less non-sorrows. So be-bop, be-bop sister, be-bop. 

 

I ain’t, furthermore, saying that everything the sultry sister (1950s sultry don’t touch me just listen tea-head, but what were we to know of that kind of sultry out in Podunk teen land, cashmere sweater, black skirt, maybe devil black stockings not shown, teen boy dreams sultry whatever her message, or even no message but bop) had to say had its head on straight. Or that if we, we meaning those fledgling angst-filled, alienation sorrowed  ‘68ers mentioned above, had heard her in some forbidden teenage night club (no liquor allowed, no petting allowed, no, no allowed enforced by burly  guys with direct access to parents/priests/teachers/cops/authorities and hence to some mischievous god),  a club filled with smoke, cigarette smoke and djinn smoke and weed smoke and maybe hash pipe smoke too although that might have been for more private moments, and maybe too train smoke and dreams, road dreams to see mystic vistas,  sitting with some cashmere sweater frill, not quite old enough to do the apparel justice, blonde maybe, red-headed for sure, in ancient landlocked celtic strongholds where some fierce blue-eyed boys stood waiting, holding forth against the squares, against the cubes, against the pentagonals,  against the angry young men, against the not angry young men, and ditto women, against the death-dealing old men, against the country club uncertain certainties, against that cold war hot war red scare night, against the break-out blockers as fierce as any New York Giants monster linebacker, that we would have understood half, hell, a quarter of what she said but like some mad dash shaman, oops, shaman-ess, it would have stuck, stuck to be mulled over, stuck for later times and so…be-bop, be-bop sister, be-bop. 

 

And I definitely ain’t saying that even if  all she said did have its head on straight that we, we meaning those fledgling ‘68ers mentioned above, had heard her in some forbidden teenage night club,  a club filled with smoke, cigarette smoke and djinn smoke and weed smoke and maybe hash pipe smoke too although that might have been for more private moments, and maybe too train smoke and dreams, road dreams to see mystic vistas,  sitting with some cashmere sweater frill, not quite old enough to do the apparel justice, blonde maybe, red-headed for sure, in ancient landlocked celtic strongholds where some fierce blue-eyed boys stood waiting, holding forth against the squares, against the cubes, against the pentagonals,  against the angry young men, against the not angry young men, and ditto women, against the death-dealing old men, against the country club uncertain certainties, against that cold war hot war red scare night, against the break-out blockers as fierce as any New York Giants monster linebacker, would have dug, yes, dug, in dig beat language dug, exactly what she had to say any more than when our time did come (when we shed teen know nothing-ness, Hollywood know nothing-ness,  parent know nothing-ness, cop know nothing-ness, priest know nothing-ness, authorities know nothing-ness), the time when we got our bloody jail break time signal, that we more than echo- listened to om om-antic New Jersey mad monk Allen Ginsberg (tea head, acid head, Buddha head) howl against that evil night, or to Jeanbon (Jack) Kerouac, sweet Lowell mill boy gone sour, sitting  in some hell-hole mere florida trailer park (or bungalow, maybe) sweating whiskey and hubris against his children, or to New Jack City Gregory Corso playing the lone ranger against the death night, but it would have stuck, stuck to be mulled over, stuck for later times and so…be-bop, be-bop sister, be-bop.   

 

 

***When Women Singers Held Sway In The 1920s Blues Night- “I Can’t Be Satisfied”-A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Memphis Minnie, the Hoodoo Lady, performing, well what else, Hoodoo Lady Blues.

CD Review

I Can’t Be Satisfied: Early American Women Blues Singers-Town And Country: Volume l-Country, Yazoo Records, 1997

Recently in reviewing another compilation of women blues singers from the 1920s I mentioned that I had sworn off, I had sworn on a stack of seven bibles, that I was off, finally off film noir femme fatales after watching (or rather, re-watching) Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, mainly Jane Greer, go round and round in the classic crime noir Out Of The Past. How could any rational man not think twice about following such femmes as Jane Greer’s Kathy who just happened to be a little gun happy (and a chronic liar to boot) and who put a couple in Robert Mitchum’s Jeff after he did somersaults to try to save her bacon about six times. That’s gratitude for you.

Well, like I said I am off, done, finished with those two-timing dames, and good riddance. Now I have time, plenty of time, and my health to speak of blues in the night wailing female torch singers who, as far as I know, do not carry or do not need to carry guns, to do their business. Of course it was not big deal to change my allegiances because since I was a kid I have been nothing but putty in their hands for any torch singer who could throw away my blues with some sorrow laden tune.

Maybe it was in some back-drop Harvard Square coffeehouse in long mist time 1960s when I first heard such voices, first among them, Billie Holiday, late, early, whatever Billie Holiday singing of some man on her mind, mostly some no good man, some no dough man, who maybe took a couple of whacks at her for no reason, or just took her last dough to bet on that next sure thing…and happiness. Or maybe earlier when some home background 1940s we won the war be-bop music filtered through the air of my own childhood house from the local radio station playing Peggy Lee all Benny Goodman’d up, or Helen Whiting, or, or well, you get the drift. Stuff that would stop me in my tracks and ask, ask where did that sorrow come from.

Later, several years later, it blossomed fully when some now half-forgotten (but only half-forgotten) girlfriend gave me a complete Vanguard Record set of all of Bessie Smith’s recordings. Ah heaven, and ah the student neighbors who had to listen for half a day while I played the damn set through. So get it, get it straight I am a long-time aficionado of the genre and commenting on this I Can’t Be Satisfied CD about classic women blues is a piece of cake.

Strangely, although the bulk of the “discovered” blues singers of the folk revival minute of the 1960s were male (Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, Skip James, et. al) back in the serious heyday of the blues in the 1920s and early 1930s women dominated the blues market, the popular music of the day. And the women featured in this compilation were the most well-known of the myriad torch singers that lit up the concert hall, speakeasies and juke joints North and South. Hattie Hart, Ruby Glaze, the divine Bessie Tucker, of course Lottie Kimbrough, Lizzie Washington, and Bertha Lee are all rightfully and righteously here.

What, no Memphis Minnie? Well yes she does Outdoor Blues here so stay calm. I have singled her out because to me her voice, her phrasing, her half breath between notes is what blues-style torch singing is all (and with plenty of double ententes too) . Now if I could just get a torch singer who was also a non-gun- toting femme fatale I would be in very heaven. Ya, I know I said I was off femmes but what are you going to do.

***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The 42nd Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company performing the bluesy classic, Piece Of My Heart.

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some fogged memory accompanying CD booklet of a wispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. In the time of our time. Belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing from somewhere beyond a no good man, no job, no roof over a head, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or down town “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay.
*******
Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then.

Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.

Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).

Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain is the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).

But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).

Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.

Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.

The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.

***Out In The 1930s Jazzy Be-Bop Night-A Girl Has Got To Do What a Girl Has To Do-“Baby Face”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1930s forbidden film classic, Baby Face.

Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, written by Darryl Zanuck, 1933

A girl has got to do what a girl has to do, circa 1933. That is the overarching theme of the film under review, Baby Face. And what a down in the dregs speakeasy life, pimped off on by a money-grubbing Prohibition father girl does then, and now for that matter, is the best she can. And the best she can is to use her sexual attractiveness, her feminine wiles, and her gold-digger’s heart to move up the social ladder. The film traces Baby Face’s (played by a young and fetching, fetching more before she gets her hair all marcelled, Barbara Stanwyck) hard grind up the social scale using those talents. Starting from an “easy rider” on a tramp train up to the high and rarified airs of the CEO of a bank she single-mindedly get what she wants, or what she thinks she wants.

Now this story of a girl doing the best she can is hardly a new one but what makes this film stand out is its rather explicit and upfront look at social reality and sexual themes. No question Baby Face is a kept woman, no question she will exchange her sexual favors for money, jewels, and maybe power, power over upscale men. These themes usually in the past have been kept under veil and this film, or rather films if you watch the two versions provided, is a no holds barred affair in the scramble to get out from under. The other version is a more sanitized offering, more up to Hollywood 1930s code.

The companion films would make for a good cinema student’s class project. Moreover, the underlining “philosophy” presented is rather startling for a “fluff” movie as Baby Face is early on exposed to a nutty professor-type (really a shoemaker and maybe no so nutty), a foreign nutty guy, who is touting the virtues of Nietzsche’ Will To Power and his various war of all against all notions. That in 1933 (as Hitler starts kicking some Nietzsche doors down in troubled Germany). So all this socially significant material in an hour and one half film. Whee!

***Out In The Be-Bop Rock 1950s Schoolboy Night- School’s Out, Man-"Blackboard Jungle"- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bill Halley and The Comets performing Rock Around The Clock, a song feature in the film under review, Blackboard Jungle, and the first time that be-bop rock served as the soundtrack for a film. Whee!

DVD Review

Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Vince Morrow, Sidney Portier, 1955

Film noir as a genre came in all shapes and sizes, mainly the best being the crime noir saga. Occasionally though other subjects received royal treatment, as here on the troubling rise of juvenile delinquency in the cities (and maybe elsewhere too) of America in the film under review, Blackboard Jungle. Although a re-viewing of this classic noir reveals some pretty ham-handed notions about the subject of JD's and about schools it still has some “socially redeeming qualities." For one, as the vehicle that connected film with the emerging be-bop rock sound being heard on the AM radio in the early 1950s, at least as heard in some places, through the use of Billy Halley and the Comets’ smash hit of 1955, Rock Around The Clock. Beyond that some of the performances, especially that of Sidney Portier, as a young alienated, “talented tenth” black student who could go either way, fame or crime also sticks out.

The plot of this thing though even for its red scare- moral uplift-we-had better-get-a-handle-on-these-troubled-youth-or-the-Russkies-will-beat us time seems well, corny. Corny because the characters from Glenn Ford’s worldly-wise but idealistic and frustrated young teacher to the white (represented by Vince Morrow), black (Portier), Spanish and other city ethnic group students are wooden when I compare them to my own similar working-poor neighborhood (minus the blacks) of the time. In short, youth here are merely misunderstood and with the right formula (some version of tough love and a peek at Ozzie and Harriet) they will, except those few rotten apples who we will put in stir for good, change their ways.

A little plot summary will give you an idea of what I mean. Ford, hires on in a deeply troubled urban (New York but could have been a lot of places, including on a smaller scale my hometown, North Adamsville) school beset by racial, ethnic, class and social tensions. He is just idealistic enough, like many before and after him, to try to make a difference despite the heavy odds against him. Of course the first rule of teaching, thugs or princes, is who rules the classroom. For much of the film that is an open question as he seeks allies among the motley crew of students, especially Portier. Of course not everybody makes it, student or teacher alike. The be-bop jazz-loving nerdish math teacher (played by Richard Kiley) and the Irish gang leader thug (played by Vince Morrow)to name two. But in the end the key figures have an epiphany and the uphill education struggle goes on.

Moral uplift and due regard for the efforts of generations of teacher to make a different aside you can see where the holes in the plot shine through. The hard reality is that, like at my school, the thugs were weeded out long before high school, or they ran the show, mostly the former. This brings to mind a character from my working class streets, "Stewball" Stu (we never called him that to his face because we would have been shivved but that is what we called him among our younger set because the guy was a heavy, heavy whiskey drinker, day and night, walking or driving). Stu dropped out, or rather was kicked out of school, in the ninth grade, I think. But he had a “boss” ’57 Chevy when they were the rage, about ten million girls around him (and no “dogs” either) and all kind of criminal enterprises running. The reason that he got kicked out of school? Oh ya, he threw a teacher, and not a small one out the window, fortunately it was only from the first floor. And they never did squat about it. So see that moral uplift stuff is good for the 1950s movies but just yawn stuff in the real world. Oh ya, Stu's luck ran out later, like sometimes happens but in the 1950s he was the be-bop max daddy king of the jungle. And no blackboard jungle either. Later, fortunately, more realistic troubled youth films were made, like the film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s works, and made without the heavy-handed cautionary tale.

***Out In The 1970s Be-Bop Rock ‘N’ Rock Night-When The Music’s Over- “The Last Waltz- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for The Band’s last stand, The Last Waltz.

DVD Review

The Last Waltz, The Band, various rock, folk rock and blues artists, directed by Martin Scorsese, United Artists, 1978

It’s funny sometimes how when you are hooked into certain musical vibes like going back in the day to classic rock ‘n’ roll things, things like remembrances of long lost bands, turn up in odd places. That is the case here with the Martin Scorsese documentary film, The Last Waltz, the filming of The Band’s last concert in 1976.

And here is the sequence of how I got there. I had heard, several years ago, that Bob Dylan was putting out as part of his now seemingly never-ending official boot-leg series, some work that he did with The Band back in the mid-1960s when he was “hiding” out with them after his motorcycle accident out in the Woodstock (ya, that Woodstock) area of upstate New York making all kinds of interesting music from a number of genres. I made a mental note to check it out but did not pursue the thought until recently. Then I headed to a local library to see if they had a CD of the work since they had other in the series (and in fact has a separate Dylan drawer for all of their CD collection of him). They didn’t have it, or rather it was out. So I went to the Dylan drawer to check on some other possibilities and there I found a set of five CD’s entitled the “Real Woodstock Sessions Boot-leg” series (or something like that). And that find contained (along with plenty of odd-ball outtakes and other miscellanea) some incredible versions of famous folk, folk rock, and country songs like Joshua Gone Barbados, Spanish Is The Loving Tongue, I Forgot To Remember To Forget Her, and stuff like that. All done in just kind of off-handedly way, Dylan and The Band off-handedly.

That is a rather circuitous way to explain the why of this review of The Last Waltz that I had seen when it originally came out in 1978 and have now re-viewed. What popped out at me in this second sighting was that these guys displayed in this two hour documentary that same kind of off-handed serious musicianship that I sensed in the boot-leg CD series mentioned above. No only did they rock, when rock was called for, but they could turn around musically (and instrumentally too) and do, well, a waltz. Hell, some of the instruments they were playing, and playing with professional abandon, I am not even sure I know the names of. And that explains Scorsese interest in doing this piece. He sensed a good story behind the rock and roll, a story of a band coming together when it counts-on stage. But also when, as band leader Robbie Robertson put it, it is time to move on after over a decade on the road. The road is a monster only the crazed, and Bob Dylan, can keep rolling along on. The Band got “off the bus” while they still had plenty of music left in them, just not together.


That said, all that is left is to pick out some highlights from some of the performers who showed up to bid adieu. Aside from a couple of numbers of their own The Band’s strength here was as “back-up” for a number of performers, most notably Neil Young on Helpless, Van Morrison on Radio, Joni Mitchell on Coyote, Bob Dylan on I Shall Be Released (along with the entire ensemble), Muddy Waters On Mannish-Child, and going back to their roots, Ronnie Hawkins on Who Do You Love. Nice stuff, nice stuff indeed if you are interested in knowing what it was like when men (and women) played rock and roll for keeps.

***Out Of The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Put The Lame Blame Frame On Frankie-I Wake Up Screaming- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir film, I Wake up Screaming.

DVD Review

I Wake Up Screaming, starring Victor Mature, Betty Grable, Carol Landis,

I have at this point reviewed a fair number of the crime noir films from the 1940s and 1950s. Some are classics like Out Of The Past, some are filled with simple crime doesn’t pay messages, some have femmes fatales that you would gladly commit armed robbery unarmed for just to get a whiff of their perfume. Others you would still be removing the bullets from your body, their bullets. Most, frankly, are just kind of run-of-the-mill like the film under review here, I Wake Up Screaming. Nothing exceptional here but the fact that the film has two, count ‘em two, femme fatales, well kind of, kind of femme fatales. And neither is bad, just misunderstood, but hell you would still give something to catch a whiff of that perfume mentioned above. Although maybe you would think twice about robbing banks unarmed for either.

Here’s the skinny. One wanna-be femme fatale starts out like many another country girl hitting the big city serving them off the arm in some hash house. Ms. Waitress (oops, waitperson, played by Carol Landis) is just waiting around to be “discovered” and plucked away from the eggs over easy. As luck would have it three, although only one counts, Frankie Christopher (played by ruggedly handsome, up-front-the dregs Victor Mature), men-about-town camp on her station and Frankie, a promoter of, well, let’s leave it as promoter, decides to take Ms. Waitperson from rags to riches, on the quick. He can see a meal ticket a mile away. And his preparations for the big strike work, work well, for a while.

What fouls things up is that one fine afternoon Ms. Waitperson is found by Frankie dead, very dead, in her apartment. And who fit the bill for the frame by his various actions toward the deceased is none other than Frankie. In a series of flash-backs the motives, actions, and responses of most of those involved are uncovered. And that is where Sis, femme fatale number two comes in; Ms. Waitperson’s sis (played by World War II soldier boys calendar heartthrob Betty Grable) who is her roommate, her confidante and her scolding younger sister is also in love with our boy Frankie (go figure, right) but is confused by the evidence against him. And Frankie is smitten by Sis as well so no fear things will get worked out. Hovering over the whole scene though are the bizarre actions of a relentless big- city cop trying to send Frankie to the chair for his own motives. Uncovering the cop’s motives is what drives the second half of the film. And that is all you need to know about this one. Oh, except as always the message is crime doesn’t pay, doesn’t pay even for bloody coppers. Got it.

***Writer's Corner-From The Pages Of "Socialism Today (September 2011)"-DASHIELL HAMMETT: HARD-BOILED WRITER, COMMUNIST FIGHTER-A Review

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History post on the crime noir writer, Dashiell Hammett.

DASHIELL HAMMETT: HARD-BOILED WRITER, COMMUNIST FIGHTER-A Review Socialism Today No.151 September 2011

EARLIER THIS year it was announced that 15 previously unpublished short stories by the US writer Dashiell Hammett had been discovered in a university archive in Texas, provoking much excitement among fans of the hardboiled detective fiction genre.

Hammett is regarded by many literary critics as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His most famous book, The Maltese Falcon, featuring the immortal detective, Sam Spade, was made into a film three times in the 1930s and 1940s. The best known version featured Humphrey Bogart, turning him into an international film star. His stories are still used by writers and film-makers today as a source and inspiration. The Coen brothers' film, Miller's Crossing, for example, lifts ideas from both The Glass Key and Red Harvest, books written by Hammett 80 years ago.

Hammett was also an antifascist activist and a member of the Communist Party of America. He went to jail rather than hand over evidence that could have been used against other activists during the anti-communist witch-hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Hammett was born in 1894, growing up in a working-class area of Baltimore. He left school at 13 and had a variety of jobs, including a freight clerk, a newsboy and a messenger for the B&O railroad. It was on the Baltimore waterfront that Hammett first came across socialist ideas, though he did not become active at that time. Instead, he made a contradictory career move when, in 1915, he joined the Pinkerton Private Detective Agency.

The Pinkertons carried out 'traditional' detective work but they were more often used as a private strike-breaking force by bosses. From the 1870s to the 1930s, labour movement activists were beaten up and many killed fighting for their rights. For example, in the 'Homestead' strike in Pittsburgh in 1892 pitched battles were fought between steel strikers and the Pinkertons, leading to 16 deaths.

Hammett worked for the Pinkertons until 1922, interrupted by service in the first world war. In 1920, he was sent to the Anaconda copper strike in Butte, Montana, in which copper workers led by the Industrial Workers of the World were battling for increased wages and the eight-hour day. Hammett revealed much later that he had been offered $5,000 by the mine-owners to murder one of the workers' leaders. In another incident, a striking miner was shot in the back, probably by a Pinkerton agent. The experience at Anaconda, together with his poor health - in 1919 he was a victim of the influenza epidemic that swept the world and was later struck down with bronchial pneumonia -seems to have been decisive in leading Hammett to leave the Pinkertons.

While recovering from illness, Hammett began writing the detective stories that made
his name. In the early 1920s, a key starting point for an aspiring writer was the short
story magazines. Many of these magazines, aimed at a working-class readership, were
printed on cheap pulp-wood paper, hence they became known as 'pulps'. Typically, they cost ten cents and were made to be read and then thrown away. Pulp fiction writers were paid by the word. The more a writer wrote, the more he or she got paid. Not surprisingly, the quality of much of what was produced was questionable.

Hammett's decision to start story writing coincided more or less with the appointment of a new editor at what was to become the most important of the detective pulp magazines, The Black Mask. Joseph Shaw, or Cap Shaw as he became known, transformed The Black Mask magazine into a pulp that featured a new 'hard-boiled' style of writing. Hammett became the master of this style and type of story.

Hardboiled detective fiction differed from earlier 'cosy' detective stories in that they tended to feature a more violent career "criminal than the lords, ladies, retired colonels, vicars and rich aunts who cropped up in stories typified by those written by Agatha Christie. Hardboiled stories tended to be fast paced, often narrated through the first person private investigator.

It was not accidental that the hardboiled detective story developed in the USA in the 1920s. Prohibition (the alcohol ban) had created an opportunity for gangsters to add to the huge profits they were already making from prostitution, protection rackets and gambling. Organised crime would often control or at least have a significant influence over the police and city politics. This was the America of Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. Violence and corruption were everywhere.

This violent backdrop provided the perfect canvas on which Hammett could write his stories. While the traditional detective fiction featured an eccentric 'thinking machine' like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, the hard-boiled detective had to be good with his fists and a gun. Hammett's short stories mostly featured an anonymous private detective known as 'the Op'. He is certainly intelligent but not exceptionally so. The people he encountered were often ordinary and spoke with the language of the street. Hammett's brilliance was in capturing the language of ordinary Americans and putting it on the page. This, together with a crisp style of short staccato sentences, gave a pace and authenticity to his stories.

While not politically active during the bulk of his writing career, many of his stories brilliantly expose the link between crime and the nature „ of capitalist society. As Hemet has Sam Spade say in The Maltese Falcon, "most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken".

In Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, the Op is sent to Clean up a town called Person-ville. The opening paragraph typifies Hammett's genius: "I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he'd done to the city's name.

Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richard-snary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better".
Personville/Poisonville is loosely based on Anaconda but is a metaphor for America: "Don't kid yourselves that there's any law in Poisonville except what you make for yourself. For Hammett, it was not just a case of cleaning up a town or removing a few bad eggs. Corruption and violence are structural in capitalist society.

In the 1930s, Hammett gave up writing and became more politically active. He joined the Communist Party (CP) although his membership was kept secret because the party leadership thought that he would thereby be able to reach a wider audience. Instead, he was involved in a number of CP front organizations. Hammett wanted to play a more active role and volunteered to fight against the fascists in the Spanish civil war by joining the International Brigade. The CP stopped him, however, preferring to use him as a spokesperson in the USA.

Unfortunately Hammett, like many CP members, loyally followed the 'party line', dictated by the Stalinist bureaucracy that had removed all vestiges of workers' democracy in Russia. He publicly supported the Moscow purge trials that were used by the Stalinists to attack Leon Trotsky and other opponents of Stalinism. He followed the CP line in condemning the second world war up until the Nazi invasion of Russia. Once Russia had been invaded, Hammett was among the first to volunteer for army service.

Hammett was not a 'bohemian communist' who joined the CP because it was trendy. At the height of the cold war, when hundreds of ex-communists and former sympathisers were desperate to distance themselves, he loyally stood by the party and his comrades.

Hammett was a trustee of the New York branch of the Civil Rights Congress, a CP front set up to provide legal and financial assistance for activists. In 1951, the McCarthyite witch-hunt was at its height. Hemet was subpoenaed to appear in court. Asked to name any contributors to the civil rights fund he refused. He was then asked to hand over the records of the fund. This would have meant giving the names of thousands of activists to the state, potentially leaving them vulnerable to the witch-hunt. Again he refused.

The court sentenced him to six months in jail. Hammett offered no defence. After his release, he was blacklisted. His books that had sold in their hundreds of thousands were removed from public libraries. Screenings of film versions stopped. He became a non-person, dependent on the support of a few loyal friends for accommodation and food in his final years, finally dying from lung cancer in January 1961.

Dashiell Hammett was a principled though at times mistaken socialist who believed in a better life for all. We should remember him for his courage in standing up to the American state and going to prison rather than reveal the names of his comrades. However, most of all we should treasure the marvelous legacy of his writing, which is as entertaining today as it was when he wrote it. O

Mick Whale

***Out In The 1950s Crime Night-The Rich, The Very Rich Are Different From You And Me-“Blackout”-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Turner Classic Movies entry for the 1954 film, Blackout.

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/68975/Blackout/

Blackout, starring Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Hammer Film Productions, 1954

There is a fall guy born every minute, especially fall guys who will jump through hoops when they are down on their luck. Especially when said hoops are held by foxy-looking young blonde dames (although they do not have to be blonde, okay). That is the premise that drives much of the film under review, Blackout. That boy meets girl story and the hard fact of life that the just rich, very rich, and super-rich are different, and in this case, very different from you and I.

Now here is the “skinny.” Casey (played by Dane Clark) is a down and out American looking, well, looking for something in the post-World War II and he figures London is just as good a place as any to land. Naturally a down and out guy has to figure things out and what better place to do so than at a bar, a bar that just happens to have a fetching and rich blonde damsel in distress, Phyllis (played by Belinda Lee), looking to get married and willing to pay for that status for her own reasons. He accepts, although as fate would have it he winds up with a case of blackout (hence the title of the film) dumped in some doorway groggy for his efforts (and befriended by a very independent starving woman artist who lives on the other side of that door, who is only tangentially connected with the nefarious doings going on). And the chase is on. Why? Phyllis’ rich, very rich, father has been murdered that very marriage night and guess who the prime suspect, the numero uno fall guy, is?

Needless to say, patsy or not, this calls for drastic action to recoup his honor (and to stay out of the slammer) by our boy Casey. But, as usual, everybody and their brother (or sister) has a motive, and an ax to grind including that fetching blonde who lured him in. Who to trust (or not trust) while evading the coppers in the black and white dreary streets and cooped-up apartments of 1950s London drives the plot. And what drives the main villain, by the way not the blonde beauty no way although she makes Casey think twice about it a couple of times, is the need to have plenty of dough. That is where that point about the rich being different, very different, comes in and you can watch the film to figure the why of that out.

***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The 41st Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death

A YouTube film clip of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company performing the bluesy classic, Piece Of My Heart.

Classic Rock : 1968: Shakin’ All Over, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989

Scene: Brought to mind by a the cover art on this CD of a Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night.

Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some yellow bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, even hanging around with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do. Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, autumns of drugs, winters of discontent, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim runner’s frame could not afford.

Moreover, now the chickens were coming home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though (his temperature rose every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually even now) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Peter Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Ruby although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message). Josh, throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. He got surprised one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace, mad Bessie Smith, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting work at the Monterrey Pop Festival each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl, ya just a wisp of a girl, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster. Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. What a night, what a blues singer.

Just now though Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that look in her that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August and still be okay but he had better grab Ruby now while he could.

***Out In The 1950s Be-Bop Night- Josh Breslin Comes Of Age- Kind Of

A YouTube film clip of Elvis Presley performing I Forgot To Remember To Forget.

CD Review

The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Roll: 1953-1955, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1997

Scene: Brought to mind by the black and white family album-style photograph that graces the cover of this CD. On this one we are treated to a photograph of a well-groomed boy and girl, teenagers of course, who else would listen to rock and roll in the be-bop 1950s night. Every parent, every square parent, and they were legion, who had any sense at all was banning, confiscating, burning, or otherwise destroying every record, 45 RPM or long-playing, that came through the front door with junior and missy. Reason? Said rock ‘n’ roll led to communistic thoughts, youth tribal hanging together (to the exclusion, no, to the denials of the existence of, parents), bad teeth, acne, brain-death, or most dreaded the “s” word, s-x.

But let’s leave the world of parents and concentrate on the couple in the photo, Josh Breslin, and his date, his first date, his first date ever, Julie Dubois, who are just now shuffling the records looking to see if Earth Angel by the Penquins is in the stack to chase away the awkwardness both are feeling on this first date. It turns out that both are crazy about that platter so they are reaching way back in their respective minds' recesses to come up with every arcane fact they know about the song, the group, how it was produced, anything to get through that next few moment until the next dance started.

Now Josh always thought he was cool, at least cool when he was dealing with his boy gang boys. But this girl thing was a lot harder than it looked, once he had exhausted every possible fact about Earth Angel and then had to reach way back in the mind’s recesses again when he tried to do the same for The Clover’s version of Blue Velvet. No sale, Julie didn’t like that one; she smirked, not dreamy enough. Then ditto when, Julie, seriously trying to hold up her end went on and on about Elvis’ Blue Moon cover. No sale, no way, no dice said Josh to himself and then to Julie since they had vowed, like some mystical rite of passage passed down from eternal teenager-ness, be candid with each other. Finally, Julie’s shuffling through the platters produced The Turban’s When You Dance and things got better. Yes, this was one tough night, on tough first date, first date ever night.

Maybe the whole thing was ill-fated from the beginning. Josh’s friend, maybe best friend, at Olde Saco Junior High, Rene Leblanc, was having his fourteenth birthday party, a party that his mother, as mothers will, insisted on being a big deal. Big deal being Rene inviting boys and girls, nice boys and girls, dressed in suits, or a least jackets and ties (boys), and party dresses (girls) and matched-up (one boy, one girl). Mrs. Leblanc was clueless that such square get-ups and social arrangements in the be-bop teen night would “cramp” every rocking boy and girl that Rene (or Josh) knew. But the hardest part was that Josh, truth, had never had a boy-girl date and so therefore had no girl to bring to Rene’s party. And that is where Julie, Rene’s cousin from over in Ocean City, came in. She, as it turned out, had never had a girl-boy date. And since when Mrs. Leblanc picked Josh up on party night and then went over to Ocean City for Julie, introduced then, and there was no love at first sight clang, Josh figured that this was to be one long, long night.

So the couple, the nervous couple, nervous now because the end of the stack was being reached when mercifully Marvin and Johnny’s Cherry Pie came up, both declared thumbs, both let out a simultaneous spontaneous laugh. And the reason for that spontaneous laugh, as they were both eager to explain in order to have no hurt feelings, was that Josh had asked Julie if she was having a good time and she said, well, yes just before they hit Cherry Pie pay-dirt. Just then Rene came over and shouted over the song being played on the record player, TheMoonglow’s Sincerely, “Why don’t you two dance instead of just standing there looking goofy?” And they both laughed again, as they hit the dance floor, this time with no explanations necessary.

***Fragments Of A Treasure Island (Cady Park) Dream #2- A Family Outing

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Wollaston Beach (called Adamsville Beach in the story). The photo in the entry appears to have been taken from a point not far from Treasure Island (Cady Park).

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:

Do you need to know about all the little family trips over to Treasure Island, a picnic spot down at the Merrymount end of Adamsville Beach that I have threatened to talk about when I mentioned how I “sold out” to my mother for a little Kennedy’s Deli home-style potato salad? Trips, that kind of formed the bookends of my childhood. Jesus, no. A thousand time no, and I say that having lived through them. My childhood memories overall can be best summed up in the words of the now long-departed black rapper extraordinaire, Biggie Smalls. He expressed it best and spoke a truth greater than he might have known, although he was closer to “hip-hop nation” than I ever could be, or could be capable of – “Christmas kind of missed us, birthdays were the worst days.” Ya, that’s the big truth, no question, but not the little Treasure Island truth, wobbly as it might come out. One such episode will give you an idea of what we (meaning me and my two brothers, one a little younger the other a little older than me) were up against but also, in the end, why although there were precious few wonderful childhood memories that are now worth the ink to tell you about, this one serves pretty well. Let me have my say.

******
There was a madness in this country in the 1950s. No, not the Cold War atomic-bomb-is-going-to-get-us-we-are-all-going-to-be-dead-next-week or “better dead than red” kind of madness although there was plenty of that, but a madness for the automobile, the sleeker, the more airplane-like, and more powerfully-engined the better. And, it wasn’t just, deafeningly mad as they were, those guys in the now almost sepia-faded photographic images of tight T-shirt wearing, rolled sleeve cigarette-packed, greased Pompadour-haired, long side-burned, dangling-combed , engineer-booted, chain-wielding, side of the mouth butt-puffing , didn’t care if school kept or not types bent over the hood of some souped-up ’57 Chevy working, sweating pools of sweat, sweating to get even more power out of that ferocious V-8 engine for the Saturday night “ chicken" run.

And it wasn’t even those mad faux James Dean-sneered, "rebel without a cause"-posed, cooled-out, maybe hop-headed guys either. And it was always guys, who you swore you would beat down if they ever even looked at your sister, if you had a sister, and if you liked her enough to beat a guy down to defend her honor, or whatever drove your sense of right. And, of course she, your sister no less, is looking for all she is worth at this “James Dean” soda jerk (hey, what else could he be) because this guy is “cute”. Go figure.

No, and forget all those stereotypes that they like to roll out when they want to bring a little “color” to the desperately color-craving 1950s. This car madness was driven, and driven hard, by your very own stay-at-home-and watch the television, water the lawn, if you have a lawn and it needed watering and sometimes when it didn’t just to get out of the house, have couple of beers and take a nap on Saturday afternoon father (or grandfather, I have to remember who might be in my audience now) who always said “ask your mother” to blow you off. You know him. I know you know him he just has a different name than mine did. And maybe even your very own mother (or grandmother) got caught up in the car thing too, your mother the one who always would say “ask your father. You know her too, don’t say no. I hope by now you knew they were working a team scam on you even if you didn’t have the kind of proof that you could take to court and get a little justice on.

Hell, on this car thing they were just doing a little strutting of their stuff in showcase, show-off, “see what I got and you don’t” time. Come on now, don’t pretend that you don’t know what I am talking about, at least if you too grew up in the 1950s, or heard about it, or even think you heard about it. Hey, it was about dreams of car ownership for the Great Depression-ed , World War II-ed survivors looking to finally cash in, as a symbol that one, and one’s family, has arrived in the great American dream, and all on easy monthly payments, no money down, and the bigger, the sleeker the better and I’ll take the heavy- chromed, aerodynamically-designed, two-toned one, thank you. That was how you knew who counted, and who didn’t. You know what I mean.

Heck, that 50s big old fluffy pure white cloud of a dream even seeped all the way down into “the projects” in Adamsville, and I bet over at the Columbia Point “projects” in Boston too that you could see on a clear day from Adamsville beach, although I don’t know for sure on that, and maybe in the thousand and one other displaced person hole-in-the-walls “projects” they built as an afterthought back then for those families like mine caught on the slow track in “go-go” America. Except down there, down there on the edge of respectability, and maybe even mixed in with a little disrespectability, you didn’t want to have too good of a car, even if you could get that easy credit, because what we you doing with that nice sleek, fin-tailed thing with four doors and plenty of room for the kids in the back in a place like “the projects” and maybe there was something the “authorities” should know about, yes. Better to move on with that old cranky 1940s-style un-hip, un-mourned, un-cool jalopy than face the wrath and clucking of that crowd, the venom-filled, green-eyed neighbors.

Yes, that little intro is all well and good and a truth you can take my word for but this tale is about, if I ever get around to it, those who had the car madness deep in their psyche, but not the wherewithal- this is a cry, if you can believe it today, from the no car families. Jesus, how could you not get the car madness then though, facing it every night stark-naked in front of you on the television set, small as the black and white picture was, of Buicks, and Chevys and Pontiacs and whatever other kind of car they had to sell to you. But what about us Eastern Mass bus dependents? The ones who rode the bus, back or front it didn’t matter, at least here it didn’t matter. Down South they got kind of funny about it.

As you might have figured out by now, and if you didn’t I will tell you, that was our family’s fate, more often than not. It was not that we never had a car back then, but there were plenty of times when we didn’t and I have the crooked heels, peek-a-boo-soles, and worn out shoe leather from walking rather than waiting on that never-coming bus to prove it. And not only that but I got so had no fear of walking, and walking great distances if I had to, all the way to Grandma’s Young Street, “up-town” North Adamsville if I had to. That was easy stuff thinking back on it. I‘ll tell you about walking those later long, lonesome roads out West in places like just before the mountains in Winnemucca, Nevada and 129 degree desert- hot Needles, California switching into 130 degree desert-hot Blythe, Arizona some other time, because it just doesn’t seem right to talk about mere walking, long or short, when the great American automobile is present and rolling by.

It’s kind of funny now but the thing was, when there was enough money to get one, that the cars my poor old, kind of city ways naïve, but fighting Marine-proud father would get, from wherever in this god forsaken earth he got them from would be, to be polite, clunkers and nothing but old time jalopies that even those “hot rod” James Dean guys mentioned above would sneer, and sneer big time, at. It would always be a 1947 something, like a Hudson or Nash Rambler, or who knows the misty, musty names of these long forgotten brands. The long and short it was, and this is what’s really important when you think about it, that they would inevitably break down, and breakdown in just the wrong place, at least the wrong place if you had a wife who couldn’t drive or help in that department and three screaming, bawling tow-headed boys who wanted to get wherever it was we were going, and get there-now.

I swear on those old battered crooked-heeled, peek-a-boo soled shoes that I told you about that this must have happened just about every time we were going on a trip, or getting ready to go on a trip, or thinking about going on a trip. So now you know what I was up against when I was a kid. Like I already told you before, in some other dream fragment, I was an easy target to be “pieced off” with a couple of spoonfuls of Kennedy's potato salad when things like that happened. Or some other easy “bought off” when the “car” joke of the month died again and there wasn’t any money to get it fixed right away and we couldn’t go more than a few miles. I blew my stack plenty and righteously so, don't you think?

So let me tell you about this one time, this one summer time, August I think, maybe in 1956, when we did have a car, some kind of grey Plymouth sedan from about 1947, that year seems to always come up when car year numbers come to mind, like I said before. Or maybe it was a converted tank from the war for all I know, it kind of felt like that sitting in the back seat because as the middle boy I never got to ride “shot gun” up front with Dad so I bore the brunt of the bumps, shakes, blimps, and slips in the back seat. I do know I never felt anything better than being nothing but always queasy back there.

This one, this beauty of a grey Plymouth sedan, I can remember very well, always had some major internal engine-type problem, or telltale oil- spilling on the ground in the morning, or a clutch-not-working right, when real cars had clutches not this automatic stuff, making a grinding sound that you could hear about half way around the world, but you will have to ask some who knows a lot more about cars about than I do for the real mechanical problems. Anyway this is the chariot that is going to get us out of “the projects” and away from that fiery, no breathe “projects” sun for a few hours as we started off on one of our family-famous outings to old Treasure Island down at the Merymount end of Adamsville Beach, about four or five miles from “the projects”, no more. It was hot as blazes that day that’s for sure, with no wind, no air, and it was one of those days, always one of those days, you could smell the sickly sweet fragrant coming from over the Proctor & Gamble soap factory across the channel on the Fore River side.

We got the old heap loaded with all the known supplies necessary for a “poor man’s” barbecue in those days. You know those cheap plastic lawn chairs from Grossman’s or Raymond’s or one of those discount stores before they had real discount stores like K-Mart and Wal-Mart, a few old worn-out blankets fresh from night duty on our beds, some resurrected threadbare towels that were already faded in about 1837 from the six thousand washings that kids put even the most resilient towel through in a short time, the obligatory King’s charcoal briquettes, including that fear-provoking, smelly lighter fluid you needed to light them with in those barbaric days before gas-saturated instant-lite charcoal. For food: hot dogs, blanched white-dough rolls, assorted condiments, a cooler with various kinds of tonic (a.k.a. soda, for the younger reader) and ice cream. Ya, and some beach toys, including a pail and shovel because today, of all days, I am bound and determined to harvest some clams across the way from the park on Adamsville Beach at low tide just like I’d seen all kinds of guys doing every time we went there so that we can have a real outing. I can see and hear them boiling in that percolating, turbulent, swirling grey-white water in the big steaming aluminum kettle already.

All of this stuff, of course, is packed helter-skelter in our “designer” Elm Farms grocery store paper shopping bags that we made due with to carry stuff around in, near or far. Hey, don’t laugh you did too, didn’t you? And what about hamburgers you say, right? No, no way, that cut of meat was too pricey. It wasn’t until much later when I was a teenager and invited to someone else’s family-famous barbecue that I knew that those too were a staple, I swear. I already told you I was the “official” procurer of the Kennedy’s potato salad in another dream fragment so I don’t need to tell you about that delicacy again, okay?

And we are off, amazingly, this time for one of the few time in family-recorded history without the inevitable- “who knows where it started or who started it” -incident, one of a whole universe of possible incidents that almost always delayed our start every time our little clan moved from point A to point B. Even a small point A to point B like this venture. So everything was okay, just fine all the way up that single way out of “the projects,” Palmer Street, until we got going on Sea Street, a couple of miles out, then the heap started choking, crackling, burping, sneezing, hiccupping, smoking and croaking and I don’t know what else. We tumbled out of the car, with me already getting ready to do my, by now, finely-tuned “fume act” that like I told you got a work-out every time one of these misadventures rolled around, and pulled out everything we could with us.

Ma, then knowingly, said we would have to go back home because even she knew the car was finished. I, revolutionary that I was back then, put my foot down and said no we could walk to Treasure Island, it wasn’t far. I don’t know if I can convey, or if I should convey to you, the holy hell that I raised to get my way that day. And I did a united front with my two brothers, who, usually, ignored me and I ignored them at this point in our family careers. Democracy, of a sort, ruled. Or maybe poor Ma just got worn out from our caterwauling. In any case, we abandoned a few things with my father, including that pail and shovel that was going to provide us with a gourmet’s delight of boiled clams fresh from the now mythical sea, and started our trek with the well-known basics-food and utensils and toys and chairs and, and…

Let me cut to the chase here a little. Of course I have to tell you about our route and about how your humble tour director got the bright idea that we could take a short cut down Chickatawbut Street. (This is a real street, look it up. I used to use it every time I wanted to ride my bike over to Grandma’s on Young Street in North Adamsville.) The idea of said "smart guy" tour director was to get a breeze, a little breeze while we are walking with our now heavy loads by cutting onto Shore Avenue near the Merrymount Yacht Club. The problem is that, in search of breeze or of no breeze, this way is longer, much longer for three young boys and a dragged-out mama. Well, the long and short of it was, have you ever heard of the “Bataan Death March” during World War II? If you haven’t, look it up on “Wikipedia.” Those poor, bedeviled guys had nothing on us by the time, late afternoon, we got to our destination. We were beat, beat up, beat down, beat around, beat six ways to Sunday, beat every way a human being can be beat. Did I say beat? Oh ya, I did. But Ma, sensing our three murderous hearts by then, got the charcoals burning in one of the fireplaces they provided back then, and maybe they still do. And we were off to the races.

Hey, do you really need to know about mustard and relish crammed char-broiled hot dogs or my brother’s strange ketchup-filled one on white-breaded, nasty-tasting hot dog rolls that we got cheap from Elm Farms or maybe it was First National, or my beloved Kennedy’s potato salad that kind of got mashed up in the mess up or "Hires" root beer, or "Nehi" grape, or "Nehi" orange or store–bought boxed ice cream, maybe, "Sealtest" harlequin (chocolate, strawberry and vanilla all together, see), except melted. Or those ever- present roasted marshmallow that stuck to the roof of my mouth. You’ve been down that road yourselves so you don’t need me for a guide. And besides I’m starting to get sleepy after a long day. But as tired, dusty, and dirty as I am just telling this story… Ah, Treasure Island.

***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Crime Noir Night- Stanley Kubrick Learns His Trade-“Killer’s Kiss”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the early Stanley Kubrick crime noir, Killer’s Kiss.

DVD Review

Killer’s Kiss, directed by (and just about everything else except maybe janitor) Stanley Kubrick, United Artists, 1955

I have at this point run through many crime noir films, some good, some bad, some with sweet femme fatales, others with very dangerous, watch out femme fatales, and you really better take my advise on that. Some, as here in one of Stanley Kubrick’s early film, Killer’s Kiss, feature just an ordinary woman (although here with a somewhat exotic past). And the young woman (played by Irene Kane), a dime-a-dance worker in a shady Times Square seen better days walk-up dance hall run by a very, very shady gangster-ish older guy (played by Frank Silvera), is central to the plot line here. Seems said gangster is smitten, very smitten by this blonde fluff, although for my money I would just let her go. There are a million others around. Such though are the effects that some women have on guys, even tough gangster guys. But see she has turned cold on him, especially when one been-on-the-ring-floor-just-one-too-many-times boxer (and convenient next door neighbor in their walk-up cold water flat New York tenement world, played by Jamie Smith), pays some attention to her after a rough night of being pawed at by the gangster. Needless to say the world is not big enough for a small-time gangster, a small-time smitten very possessive gangster, and an ex-pug with eyes on the same woman. That “tension” drives the plot unto the final battles on the lonely warehouse back streets of black and white 1950s New York.

Ya, I know, not much of a plot, not something to throw in the crime noir classics archives. Agreed. Not like fall guy Robert Mitchum and gangster Kirk Douglas fighting it out over Jane Greer, who has them both looking over their shoulders, in the classic Out Of The Past. But hear me out. This is an early Stanley Kubrick film, almost a cinema school effort in fact, where he does all the heavy conceptual lifting (writer, director, editor, etc, and just maybe the janitor too). What is missing in plot line, dialogue, and that kind of thing that makes other films noir classics is made up for here by the feel of it. The feel of 1950s black and white New York with its all-night eateries, its trashy back alleys, and its seedy apartment buildings. This is not be-bop Greenwich Village/Soho New York, this is not Big Apple fixed-up, up-scale million/billion dollar New York, but the heart of corner boy New York, where things flare up just like that. And that is how Stanley Kubrick learned his craft, used to great effect later-on the mean streets of New York.

***First Let’s Kill All The Lawyers-Not- Part Two- George Clooney’ “Michael Clayton”-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film Michael Clayton.

DVD Review

Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, Sidney Pollack, Tilda Swinton, Warner Brothers, 2007

Everybody, everybody probably ever since if not earlier that Richard III in Shakespeares’ play, I think, uttered the notion that lawyers should be done away with first to cleanse the kingdom of evil spirits has hated lawyers. Well every lawyer except your own lawyer, of course. Not the one who got you out of that DUI jam that time you had a little too much, or out from under that drug bust where you were just sitting in that living room, nothing more. Maybe, moving up the chain, when that nasty accident happened and you bailed out with some friendly legal help. And even further up the chain when you, big-time impersonal corporation you, got out from under that very nasty and costly class-action suit stemming from the very real hazardous (cancerous chemical) to somebody, many somebodys, health that you injured, grievously. And the difference between the low-end save your ass from jail example and the high-end keep your company solvent? Well the fixer man, of course. The fixer lawyer man here at the high end which drives this story line. You under no circumstances, no circumstances at all, want to tick off ( I am being nice here) the fixer man. And especially not a very vengeful and a street smart Michael Clayton, as played by hard-guy George Clooney. Wrong, always wrong.

Up in the rarefied air of the legal counsel's office of a large corporation (U-North) they (or rather she, Karen Crowder, played by Tilda Swinton) didn’t get that little nugget of wisdom straight (she must have missed that class in law school) and well, frankly, panicked once it became clear that the ace litigator of the company had gone off the deep-end and was ready to “spill the beans” in favor of the other side-the plaintiffs. Michael Clayton, brought in for just such “fixing,” got his hind legs up in the air when his services were not appreciated (and said ace litigator got killed). But here is where it all breaks down. See a fixer man is just that, he fixes things. He gets mucho dough for doing these kinds of things. He can be “bought off,” or neutralized. But not when you panic and try to kill him. Not Michael Clayton, hell, not a guy or gal two days out of law school. So let this be a cautionary tale. Please.

***From Out In The 1960s Be-Bop Night -The 'Real' Scoop on "Tri-Hi-Y"- An Investigatory Report- "Inside Edition" Move On Over

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the modern doings of one school's Tri-Hi-Y Club. Hey, don't shoot the messenger on this one. I just like to provide a ‘relevant’ link with my posts

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class of 1964, comment:

Today I have my investigative reporter's hat on. An unusual occurrence for me because my usual course is to just grab a thought, bear down on it, blast away and see what falls out, and then merrily walk away. Who, in the modern age, meaning here the age of the Internet and ‘instant’ thoughts, has the time, or wherewithal, to painstakingly separate fact, half-fact, quarter fact, mere whim, and simple caprice from fictions, lies, half-lies and your average off-hand utter duplicity. Just posing the question makes me dizzy, and provides the correct answer as well.

Of course, as we live in a litigious society, a society moreover still peopled with obsessively thin-skinned old time North Adamsville corner boys, their honeys, their wanna-be honeys, and assorted other characters best described in Runyonesque terms ready to pounce on every misspoken word, every ill-formed characterization, every far from pristine sentence, and, frankly, any published but perhaps only vaguely remembered episode then thorough investigation would seem warranted. And the beginning of wisdom.

I am still smarting, smarting more than somewhat, from the grilling, no, the raking over the coals, I got from Frankie Riley, the king hell king of the North Adamsville corner boy night in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor up in Norfolk Downs, now big-time Boston lawyer Francis X. Riley for those three people in the universe who have not seen one of his silly ads touting how he, or really some lowly subaltern in his office, will get you some justice in this wicked old world if you just call (or text)his law office. Of course, you may get your day in court, although always corner boy Frankie will take a big cut of the dough for you.

But forget the now Frankie because that is not what he was hot under the collar about. Frankie was upset, litigiously upset if I hadn’t been quick thinking and undercut him, because in one of my tales, tall tales if you like, I mentioned that he was not always tried and true to his high school sweetheart (really from junior high school), Joanna Moriarty. In other words he was a lady-killer, a ladies’ man. Now most guys fifty, yes, fifty years later, would take that as a compliment and a characterization that he was a fast ball hitter, or at least just let it pass. Not Frankie, in his now quasi-paranoiac state about offending anyone under any circumstances who might be a potential client he challenged me, me, The Scribe (and no one else better use that old-timey nickname, I warn you), on my statement. Fortunately one Professor Joanna Moriarty, now teaching at one of the local universities, read the post, and confirmed my accusation in great detail, adding in a couple of ‘misunderstandings' that even I was not aware of and I thought that I had heard them all. We, the three of us, had dueling e-mails over it for a couple of days. Then Joanna lowered the boom with a definitive blow, a blow that need not detain us here, and Frankie crumbled. In the end Frankie Riley, oops, Attorney Francis X. Riley, sheepishly walked away like a beaten cur.

Now this post is intended to be a light-hearted look at an old school organization, Tri-Hi-Y, if you remember that so-called service organization. I went to great lengths to give the big-time lawyer Frankie Riley example as a cautionary tale for those who still have some thin-skinned notions that you are exempt from my pen (well, keyboard). I have still not unraveled all the details about this club but that has not stopped me from pushing on. The facts, frankly, seem to get in the way on this one. But just in case I have a lawyer in the wings. Frankie Riley? Hell no, one of those subaltern lawyers who do all the real work in his office anyway.
****
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. That was good, if unheeded, advice a few thousand years ago. Apparently it is advice that we should have also heeded back in our school days. Those half-formed, take everything as gospel unless otherwise told, or else, North Adamsville High school days hid all sorts of things that, perhaps, couldn’t bear the light of day. Or those involved, or who knew what was really going on, were too frightened to “spill the beans.” Or were in so far in that public acknowledgement would have ruined them, their reputations, and even their lives. Sure, today there are plenty of brave whistle-blowers, from those working inside the government and corporations to military guys like Iraq whistle-blower, Private Bradley Manning, and Vietnam whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg. But back then just wimps, yes, let’s just say wimps and leave at that although I could bring up stronger language than that.

The subject today is the mysterious, seemingly nefarious, doings of Tri Kappa Phi, colloquially known as Tri-Hi-Y. I have, as yet, been unable to untangle the relationship between these two names but I suspect the latter is merely a classic front name. For those who do not know what a front group is I will give an example that might shed a little light on this mix and match name thing. The American Communist Party, Uncle Joe’s boys and girls, in their heyday didn’t always want to show their colors openly (or wanted to hide how few adherents they had when the deal went down). So, say they wanted to do something with nuclear disarmament or war, instead of saying sponsored by the Communist Party they would think up a name like- Citizen For A Peaceful World. And then get everybody and their brother (or sister) to sign up because who doesn’t want a peaceful world. Neat trick, right? I have a gut instinct that is what was going on here.

Ostensibly this was a girls' club devoted to public service. Innocent enough, no question. Hell, even a good idea if nothing else for your resume, if you were a girl, and as it turns out a certain kind of girl, and if you were going to college or maybe looking for some kind of governmental job where such service might be a boost to your chances. Yes, if I were a girl back then (or now, if you can believe that this group is still going strong as the link that I have provided in the headline indicates) and didn’t know the ‘truth' I would have given the organizations serious consideration. But see that is the hellish thing about front groups. There is a yawning gap between what they say they stand for and what they do really stand for. The old shell game that we should have been wise to since about second grade, or whenever it was we were taken for our dough at some hokey carnival chance game. A glance at page 17 of the 1964 (or, maybe, any year if that was not the reader’s graduation year) Magnet, the North Adamsville High School yearbook belies that story.

According to their own words as etched for all eternity on page 17, and I gladly, gleefully quote from that source, this organization was committed to furthering "pure thoughts, pure words, and pure actions" among the members. And we all know what the three pures they are referring to related to in 1960s America, hell in 1860s America, or double-hell in 2000s America. Sex. This, my friends, reads, to these old eyes at least, more like the program for the vestal virgins in the temples of pagan Greece than a program for a society then on the edge of a sexual revolution. That should have been the tip-off. I sincerely wish that I had paid more attention then, I really do. Now we live in a more skeptical age and would have had our antennae out when confronted with such shameless hyperbole. Then, naive as we were, we bought the story hook, line and sinker.

Look, I am a fair person, or try to be. In order to get a hook into this unfolding scandalous story and learn more about the group I, innocently, e-mailed the president of the organization in 1964, Millie Callahan. (There was not mystery, or “magic” to my getting that e-mail address, not in the hard-boiled information-heavy Internet age. I had previously been in touch with the savagely relentless head of our class committee who sent it along posthaste although she is not responsible for any uses that I might put the information to. Unless I need a “fall girl.”)

Now I knew Millie Callahan back in the day. Not the way I wanted to know her of course but I used to sit a couple of rows in back of her at 8:00 AM Mass at Sacred Heart Church in ninth grade and stare at her ass. Yes, she was a fox then, and probably still is now. That’s not the end of my knowing her though. She was also, long story short, the girlfriend all through high school, damn, of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin, one of my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys. And Phil, foul-mouthed or not, was not squiring around any three pures girls, no way. They were “doing it,” just like two high school kids were suppose to, if that is what they wanted to do. Enough of that though because on the e-mail front I got nothing. Nada, a resounding no reply.

I then pursued another avenue that I thought might be more fruitful. I e-mailed the woman, Lucy Platt, who was the chaplain of the group in her junior and senior year. (said e-mail address also delivered from my previously mentioned “confidential” source). I will not now even get into why a so-called girls’ service organization needed a chaplain, an un-ordained chaplain, I assume, if all they were doing was selling candy door to door or having bake sales and stuff like that but it does give one pause. Might she not have been a conduit for other matters? Certainly another avenue for investigation, maybe on the licensing question. (Don’t chaplains, men and women of the clothe, those who, as my saintly Irish grandmother used to say, “have the calling,” have to have licenses, or certification or something to show they are authorized, in this case, to “take confessions” from wayward girls. Non-observant three pures girls.) An additional reason I wanted to get her take on these allegations was that she was not just any fellow classmate but was then currently the secretary to the headmaster at North Adamsville High. Dear readers, she had access to the records! (If she hadn’t carelessly, or carefully, ‘disposed’ of them long ago).

I, good-heartedly, offered this ex-chaplain, (or maybe she still is, if she hasn’t been defrocked by now) the opportunity to place our correspondence under a confidential attorney-client blanket. (No, one thousand times no, not Frankie Riley, but a real lawyer, a hungry young lawyer in his office. Besides, Frankie probably has a “conflict of interest” problem here since, if I recall, Lucy Platt was one of his paramours when he was being tried and true to Joanna. I’ll have to ask her, Joanna that is.) I further suggested that she might fall under the priest- penitent immunity provisions concerning her testimony. Result - Stonewalled, no reply. Apparently, this is one secretary that went to the Rosemary Woods Secretarial School. Moreover, another closer look at the Magnet told the tale. The winsome smile and twinkle in her eye of her class picture on page 137, obviously a posed put-up job, did not jibe with her Cotton Mather-like visage on page 17 when she was doing her so-called chaplain thing. I then determined that I needed to investigate this matter all-out.

Right now, I admit, there are more questions than answers. Little did this pair, Minnie and Lucy, and their accomplices know that some forty -plus years later an intrepid, truth-seeking, justice-pursuing alumnus with some time on his hands was going to fall onto their little threadbare operation. Maybe even in the school administration after all the thing was a school activity so somebody in there had to know what was going on. Maybe it went higher up. Who knows? Isn’t it so very convenient though that Lucy wound up as school secretary right next to the records that any future investigator would, of necessity, need to have access to. I will continue to try to unravel this tangled story to the bitter end.

Here are some questions that I have right now though that you, my friends, can help me with. Why did a so-called "public service" group in a democratic, secular institution need a chaplain? What deep, dark secrets were being kept from us when those probably naively innocent girls confessed, well confessed what was just normal teen sexual activity, to the chaplain? Who knows, maybe blackmail, and maybe some of them, the real naïve ones, are still paying out.
Moreover, apparently, from the lack of response to my inquiries, members are sworn to secrecy unto the grave. Some kind of awful blood oath with horrendous consequences I am sure. Why? And here is another little tidbit to feast on. Why was the turnover rate in the organization so high, especially in senior year? (Here I did, painfully, record how many years each member participated. There were plenty of 1s and 2s (sophomore and junior years)in the activities section under their yearbook photos, and then a dramatic drop-off of 3s senior year. Was it impossible to keep to the public "three purities" slogan mentioned above with a straight face or did a number of members fall afoul of the cabal at the top when they threatened to go public? I suspect some cult operation but such things are tricky to pin down as we know from later experience. Are there any whistle-blowers out there? More, later. Tri-Hi-Y, indeed!