Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-

A Kick In The Back To Art Critic Clarence Dewar-Sex And The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859)

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes despite your best intentions or at least the direction of your initial intentions you get waylaid by something that you had not expected, something that came out of left field, some undead thing, what do the kids call it some zombie beast thing, let’s call it some undead thing and that will suffice, in middle of the night. I had originally intended this piece to be a homage to the sensuality of the art of Arthur Garfield Dove, a key pioneer in bringing serious sexuality to serious art. (I will only do this three-name moniker thing once which drives my plebian blood pressure through the roof making an exception to Dove because maybe he was living on that boat in the Hudson River with his mistress, fellow artist Helen Torr, or was tied up with farm chores once he broke from his upper middle-class existence and got the heave-ho from dear old Dad but only once nevertheless). Then one Clarence Dewar, you have heard that name before in this space, as a so-called art critic for Art Today mentioned by me as a foil for those rubes who think that all 20^th century was the search for the sublime. (Nobody not even Mr. Dewar could believe that 21^st century art as it evolves in the age of the Internet has anything to do with sex or eroticism except a few crazed curators trying to move up the food chain at the MoMA.)

I first took Mr. Dewar over the coals, no, rapped his knuckles like some wayward schoolboy when he argued that Jackson Pollack’s Number 31 from 1949 was the epitome of the sublime in the last half century of the 20^th century. I had assumed he was just clueless about the real import of the painting as the clarion call to sexual liberation before that was fashionable in staid post-World War II America as the Cold War heated up. I thought that maybe he had attended too many classes and dinner parties with his acknowledged mentor Clement Greenberg whose rants over the search for sublime whatever that is or was and removing the fight for line from form were some stone tablets from the hills (maybe Joseph Smith’s upstate New York tablets hills although Smith could be excused having been born during the Second Great Awakening when art was about Jesus and the brethren which disoriented lots of country folk).

(It bears repeating every chance I get to note that sycophant Dewar got his ass kicked out of a publication Sam Lowell was acting as art and cinema editor for out in alternative newspaper universe San Francisco back in the 1970s for retailing (read plagiarizing) the latest words from the mountain by Clement Greenberg as his own. Acting essentially as a shill and flak-catcher for the well-known wily Greenberg who used up a whole generation of boys that way and never got a scratch on him although today at least his opinions, his words from the mountains are used to wrap fish remains in.)       

Then I talked to Sam Lowell about this latest troll. (We have already had enough, more than enough about the high-brow ones like one Arthur Doyle (middle name Gilmore omitted on purpose) and the swarm of born-again evangelicals who inundated this space, this sacred space with about twelve million quotes from the Bible basically in order to justify calling me Keil, the devil’s servant. I am worried about their reemergence since now I have to go back into the 19^th century art scene for fear that this fool Mr. Dewar’s nonsense will have unleashed those dopes again) Sam laughed said not to worry Clarence hadn’t had an original though since he was born, maybe before. This did not make me laugh because in addition to that Sam claimed that Clarence had been nothing but Greenberg’s poodle, his go-fer and flak-catcher. What did make me laugh was when Sam told me he had known Clarence back in the 1970s and had had to fired him for plagiarism. For taking whatever was on Greenberg’s mind on any given day and either just did a thin re-write or cut the title off from a Greenberg piece in some other publication and sent it in as is. Sam said if Clarence wanted to go low we would discredit him with that otherwise we would meet him on our own self-selected ground of sex and eroticism as the driving force for 20^th century art.

First I threw the wrecking ball around that sublime silliness in Mr. Dewar’s interpretation of what Pollock was trying to release and then Sam put the whammy of whammies on him with the evidence that Pollock was according to recent high tech testing either having sex with somebody or himself (okay masturbating I was trying to avoid writing that in case the Primitive Baptists got wind of it and started going crazy again ranting against me using protecting their kids from such usage as cannon fodder for their weak foolishness) and had used a condom which became part of the painting out in that lonely shed on Long Island. Then when Mr. Dewar tried to play lawyer for Edward Hopper and his brilliant Nighthawks talking bullshit, Sam’s term, but I agree, about all the lonely people, about the loneliness of urbanization I had to yank him up again for being not just a poor example of an art critic but maybe having read whatever Hopper’s press agent had to say to prettify the fact that Hopper was a dirty old man who spent more time with some young honey in a well-known house of ill repute (okay whorehouse) than with his wife, Jo, who nevertheless told a candid world Eddie, her Eddie was hot for buxom young things in a fit or righteous anger. (Thereafter she refused to let her Eddie do any nudes-except her- an unwise decision since as Sam noted, and John Updike did too many years ago, that in sweet revenge he portrayed her as some old-time bent whore who had best been put out to pasture years before. Check Hooper’s Girlie Show for his revenge on Jo. Oh yes, and as another prime example of the scandalous fact that he had flunked doing faces classes under either William Merritt Chase, you can hear me grind my teeth writing this, or Bob Henri.)            

The current uprising of this fool, sending us back to the dangerous waters of the 19^th century art scene, is a post-mortem taking issue about Whistler’s The White Girl and our (Sam is included here) contention that Whistler was pimping his girlfriend to get out from under a mountain of debt. Mr. Dewar made the outrageous claim that Whistler was just conforming to the theories of his friends in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood comparing The White Girl to Brotherhood leader Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Bocca Baciata. Jesus I though Sam was either going to have a stroke, or go to New York to see Mr. Dewar with murder and mayhem in his heart

Whistler may have been friends, may have had a few drinks at the Cock &Bull down by the waterfront in London on the Thames  where the liquor flowed and with the right connections you could feast on the flavor of the month lanadum which fueled more cultural careers than you could shake a stick at, name the artist, poet, in Rosetti’s case artist-poet and drugs were driving half their insights. Did poor crazy Ruskin Turner’s big-time patron in so that in the end he was blathering about all serious 19^th century being the search for the sublime. Drove a guy like art critic Bill Hazlitt straight to the nut house, straight to Bedlam talking about the need to go back to heroic historical paintings like the great David. Are you kidding?  But the drugs then, and now too check Grady Lamont’s admissions to illegal and extensive drug use before he hit the twelve- step road, weren’t for everyone.

Whistler and the brothers may have even shared, ah, what did they call them oh yes muses, wink, wink, models, for sure Fanny Cornforth who was free with her charms as long as they lasted before the drink and some sour DNA genes did her in. What they did no share, could not share was a vision about sexuality. Whistler as Sam and I have made clear in our studies of the predecessors of the 20^th century glut of sex and eroticism in serious art was about hustling his favorite muse of the month covering them in symphonies of colors, white, green, black, Sam, by the way says sym-phonies of color, language but frankly except The White Girl where he used an ancient from the days of the Whole of Babylon hsy symbolic trick with the wolf’s head and fur to draw attention to his wares his stuff is NOT sexual, is some drug-induced hazy mist at dusk or dawn nonsense. (By the way the Whole of Babylon, unlike pimp daddy James advertised her own wares, made her own way and didn’t need some humpty dumpty middleman to promote her cause.)           

Rosetti and the brethren though reeked of sex, reeked of the liberating spirit they found in early Renaissance painters before punks, Sam’s term not mine, like DaVinci and that no good bastard Raphael tried to suppress bringing everybody back to the crazy Mother Mary. Baby Jesus, Holy Family noise that crippled art for centuries except for Popes and the like who could afford the graft for real art, nudes and Grecian urn priapic material in their private apartments. The Brothers’ hero par excellence Botticelli and work like his divine Venus who Sam swears, this long before I knew him and while he was working his way through three marriages and three divorces, he had a “hippie chick” girlfriend who looked exactly like her, including the forever long hair and braids. Including those luscious ruby red lips that even I appreciated when Venus made a stop at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a few years ago (and Sam pissed me off by staring at the painting for about an hour which wasn’t so bad but went on and on about that hippie chick, not a good move, not at all).

That is the rub, that is the clincher as to why a drug-infested pimp like Whistler could never make the cut, could never get into the Brotherhood for love nor money. Look at his so-called muses, look at their skinny pre-Angela Joie sullen sunken pinkish lips, even when he was hustling. Had no sense how important the lips were to sexuality and sensuality back in Botticelli’s golden age time. Then look at Bocca Baciata, or for that matter half a dozen Rosetti paintings using Fanny Cornforth, she with those big full ruby red lips not seen since Botticelli went through his paces. That should take care of one holy goof Clarence Dewar and his craziness, his half-baked theories. As Sam says on occasion though, enough.            

Iris DeMent -- He Reached Down

When The World Believed In Fairy Tales And Other Assorted “Fake Legends”-Woody Allen’s “Magic In The Moonlight” (2014)-A Film Review   

By Will Bradley

Magic In The Moonlight, starring Emma Stone, Colin Firth,      

Blessed be the niche writers. That at least is what I got for an answer from site manager Greg Green when I asked him why I was “chosen” to review the film under review Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight. Apparently, and contrary to stated publication policy established by Greg and the then newly established Editorial Board set up to oversee the assignments and their distribution, I am now in the “legend-slayer” niche (and blessed) ever since I started taking up the cudgels again recently with reviews of fake legend Spider Man and real legend Jack Reacher.    

I am okay, and very much so, with the legend-slaying assignment which have been my entryway into getting my by-line ad freedom from free-lancer stringer status. But I will be damned if I know what legend I am supposed to be slaying in this frothy little 1920s based romance a la late Woody Allen after he stopped overusing the New York urban themes of his earlier career. My problem is that Moo Shi Beef or whatever alias Stanley Nevins, the famous magician who every aspiring magician even now bows down to, was using at the time when he was fooling everybody with parlor pink magic tricks in Paris and its environs was already a well- known charlatan and cultural appropriator (the Chinese garb and moniker of a well-born Englishman) who Lex Marshall had long ago exposed as a fraud and flim-flam artist who made his real money selling dope imported from China to his select clientele. Moo Shi Beef (sorry if I offend anybody but no insult is intended since Stanley worked the rackets under a bunch of names all Chinese as part of his scam but also to ease the way to get the dope he was peddling into England under an import-export license issued by a minister in high places who was being bribed by him. 

The female part of this legend-busting expose was the famous, or rather infamous Sophie Baker the well-known medium who bilked half the nobility, the male nobility although I am sure if she ran out of men she would have gone to the women’s side, of Europe before she was done. Although she never was fully exposed since she had secret lover in Scotland Yard and maybe another at Interpol I do not believe that recently anybody had thought of her as a legend. It turned out I was wrong that she was subject to a female cult of worshipers, especially among the Roma people and that her exploits are the stuff told to their children as an example of what it was like when the world could easily be hoodwinked by a beautiful if harebrained fraud. A whole generation of fortune-tellers, spiritualists, mediums, and grifters worked their rackets based on the little booklets she wrote on the subject after she retired to some castle in Nice.    

That was later though, after both Moo Shi, hell, I will call him his silly English name Stanley, and Sophie had passed their prime. This film is really the story of their brief affair (they were supposed to get married after Stanley had in a drunken stupor proposed to her but she backed out after some prince beckoned with castles and diamonds and Stanley could only offer the loot gathered from card tricks and magic travelling circus magic tricks) after Stanley, Stanley of all people although this was before Lex lowered the hammer on his operations to prove that Sophie was a fraud. See Stanley along with the Chinese magic tricks gag had a big reputation as a debunker of others, of being the last rational man in the Empire. Basically a snob and stuffed shirt. But that was part of his grift, his cover which is why Lex had to dig deeply to expose him and Lex always considered him a very worthy opponent for just that reason. She was brought in to break up Sophie’s scam, her seance silliness that half the English nobility and gentry were paying big dough to be thrilled by.  

Maybe it was that two kindred had so much blarney in common but from the first minute they met anybody who was around then could see that they would go under the silky sheets before long despite the eyewash they were feeding each other. And so it went back and forth, back and forth under the night they got drunk and wound up under those already mentioned silky sheets. I already have told that they would have a brief affair and no marriage despite Stanley’s proposal once Sophie went to serious gold-digger work on that dubbed prince. What I didn’t tell you is that Stanley’s fortunes rose for a while until Lex dumped his evidence on the world and he wound up selling life insurance on cold calls back in Bristol. We already know Sophie’s upscale fate. What I want to know is why was I brought into this low-rent scene when I could be taking dead aim at Tony Stark’s silly Avenger operation which desperately need to be exposed. For now.

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   *Writer's Corner- The "Uncollected Writings" Of James Baldwin- A Guest Review

Click on the title to link to a National Public Radio segment on a review of uncollected writings by the American writer James Baldwin.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129281259

Markin comment:


The gut-wrenching, no-holds-barred, truth-telling of the real racial story in this country by James Baldwin has been highlighted in this space recently. I have re-posted one such review that speaks to the continuing validity of that voice, that "voice of the voiceless" that James Baldwin still provides a quarter of a century after his death.

*****

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

*Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-James Baldwin's "Another Country"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for James Baldwin's Another Country

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

Another Country, James Baldwin, Dial Press, New York, 1962

Recently, in a blog entry, I went on my “soap box” to speak about those now seemingly endless references, by black and white liberals alike, to the ‘good old days' of the black civil rights movement and how far the black liberation struggle has come here in America so that even one (harried and vilified) black man can be President of the United States. This sentiment is codified by the ‘post-racial’ aura (or rather, in truth, the ‘benign neglect’ aura) that surrounds the subject of race lately. By reference to the the good old days these liberals have simply appropriated the catch words of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, names, forever, associated with the high-water marks of resistance to black segregation back in the early 1960s to their own uses. Moreover, to embellish the myth they have created a Martin Luther King who apparently was nothing short of the black ‘messiah’ rather than a man made of clay, a great deal of clay, and in turn have emasculated Malcolm X, the real “truth to power” speaker on race of the era, into a harmless icon suitable for framing.

The author under review, James Baldwin, fortunately, would have none of that. He, in a less overtly inflammatory and more literary but nevertheless powerful way, was in that Malcolm X “truth to power” mode. And, my friends, some of his books, including Another Country make my case, and his case, far more eloquently than this writer ever could. Here is a man hard, hard church-brought up as only fundamentalist churches can distort a child, preacher father-raised and beaten-down for doing things, right or wrong, racially put upon incessantly whenever he stepped outside the Harlem prison-ghetto where he was sentenced yet who did not duck the hard, hard truth that native son he might be but ‘invisible’ native son was the real program for those with black skin.

Another Country is another of those multi-themed Baldwin efforts, the now familiar ones of interracial marriage, adultery, bi- and homosexuality, the blindness of white racism, and the hard, hard fact of trying to be seen while black, poor, and gay in America (and elsewhere, for that matter). The sexual and interracial scenes center on the relationships of various black and white characters of various sexual preferences who inhabit New York's 1950s bohemian Greenwich Village (with a little Left Bank, Paris vignette thrown in), or who want to. The most impressive aspect of this piece is the very strong sense that one gets that while the white characters are sympathetic to the blacks, in their own narrow way, they were clueless to the "another country" aspect of black existence. I have , repeatedly, made the point that that "invisibleness", except now in certain high profile quarters, afflicts the perceptions of whites today as well. Thus, one can well afford to read this work with that continuing premise in mind rather than read it comfortably as some pre-"post-racial" screed. Thanks, James.

The Legend-Slayer Cometh-Again-Crushing The Press Agents Hype Of The Myth Of Teenage Mutant-Marvel Comic’s “Spider Man” (2012) A Film Review

DVD Review

By Will Bradley

You never know in the fake news legend-slaying racket when some ordinary citizen gets the royal treatment, and everything comes up roses. You also never know when fake news legends are going to rear their ugly heads as now when I have to dissect, maybe deflate, no, matter untangle, is a better word, the legend of a teenage mutant named Spider Man. I have been off helping fellow journalist Sarah Lemoyne do a wide-ranging series on B- film noirs from the 1940s and 1950s (remember the queen of the Bs Gloria Grahame and you will get an idea about what B-films were all about) which should begin publication later this year.

Since after demolishing the fake news Legend of “The Shadow,” aka Lamont Cranston, a New York playboy who while idling the daylight hours waiting for nightfall so he could hit the nightclub circuit hired for big money John Kerr who used to work for the Times but who left the business to make a ton of money hyping whoever wanted to be hyped like Cranston I had some time my hands I agreed to help Sarah doing the research and watching the movies. Then out of nowhere Greg Green who runs the show here, is the site manager, asked me to check out the strange legend and stranger doings of one Jack Reacher. No sooner had I done so then this punk kid from New York, a mere teenager reared his ugly head and wanted everybody to bow down to his prowess.

As I have mentioned before, with the seeming exception of real hero Reacher who shuns publicity, likes life “off the grid,” all these fakes get by through hiring well-paid press agents, publicity people, flak-catchers. I am not sure where the kid got the money, maybe a trust fund left by his deceased parents, by the way when not in costume his name is Peter Parker, hired Stanley Klee, yes, Stan the famous press agent who worked miracles if you like for all kinds of ordinary citizens who wanted to bask in the glow of a group of vigilantes called the Avengers, a grouping funded by a guy named Tony Stark. When I heard that name Stark as I had with Reacher initially until I found out he was the real deal I immediately became fearful that this was another “deep state” operation where anybody who question anybody about anything was doomed to the ash heap. The jury is still out on that proposition but I press on.     

Like I said in the old days legends were created usually out of whole cloth by those well-paid press agents who beat the drums for whoever was paying the tab (and expenses too). But at least they were adults, could sign a contract, had left puberty way behind. This kid, egged on by the cynical Stark who seems to be behind almost every alleged “save” of the world, couldn’t wait until he grew up, needed to show his metal early on. Here is a kid who unlike say Superman who at least changed in a telephone booth or in a men’s restroom changed into his uniform in some dumpster-filled back alley. Jesus. 

I will let my ire at even having to do this silly piece about what really were glorified high school hijinks and give you the lowdown, give you the straight stuff. I will say I had a problem though getting the story straight since Parker either changed press agents or somebody was working a scam and pretending to be Spider-Man but the story I got was that after his parents died he went crazy (after the usual period of sorrow to show he was human, a little) and tried to figure who killed his scientist father and mother. 

The old man had been trying to solve the riddle of the universe along with another scientist who used the name Connor, a one-armed bandit who craved working with two arms. They had worked for a Big Pharma operation interested in regeneration of limbs. Peter claimed to have documentation left by his father which would solve that little riddle.       

After some serious experimentation the formula actually worked, for a minute, on Connor whose missing limb came back. Too hasty though way too hasty since they had been rushed by a weirdo supervisor into production without enough testing. Connor turned into Lizard Man and this is where the legend stuff starts at least this is as far back as I can go to get the story straight. Weirdo Connor goes crazy and Peter Parker apparently finding some back alley as a dressing room becomes the knight-savior who saves Gotham once again. (By the way hasn’t Gotham been saved about seventeen time from everything from dinosaurs to weird aliens, the outer space kind okay the others are okay for our purposes. Doesn’t a place like Toledo or Peoria need of some protection). Lizard Man wants to change evolution and make humanity a lizard swamp. Naturally with the help of a young woman he, Peter, is interested in they create an antidote and everybody including Connor gets well courtesy of Big Pharma.

Baloney, pure fable, which even a guy like Stan should have known would not fly. Jesus, being saved from a lizards’ swamp by a teenage mutant looking to make the “bigs.” Are you kidding. I hope the kid didn’t pay too much to his press agent for this noise.    

The Girl With The Gun Simple Eyes-With Robert Mitchum And Jane Greer’s The Big Steal In Mind

By Zack James

Duke Halliday had a funny feeling that he had seen her before, had seen her maybe one time when he was in Acapulco over by the ocean on other side of Mexico from where he was now landing in Vera Cruz on the eastern side of this benighted sweat-filled dusty road bracero country. Yeah she had come up on him from behind speaking some low-slung Spanish to a bracero that he had pushed aside, pushed aside hard and she had made her apologies for the whole gringo race to that besotted bracero and then levelled off and told Duke “what was what” in proper schoolteacher or something English. (Duke, trying to get a word in edgewise, tried to explain without success and with an on-going sneer continually on her face which meant she brooked no back talk while she was talking that the particular bracero he had “shoved” had attempted in broad daylight and on the crowded docks to heist his wallet. Had he the chance Duke would have told her that any member of any nationality anywhere would have received the same shove under the circumstances. Although he did not tell her that a big-shouldered burly guy like him was used to shoving for any reason under the sun, drunk or sober, just to let whoever challenged him think twice about the matter.)   

Those silent thoughts over she had not gotten half way through her schoolmarm berating an errant student when he had had that funny feeling that while her hair was darker (the result of some man-made elixir), she was a little more shapely but not bad in all the right places and had a couple of small crow’s feet showing around the eyes she was the spitting imagine of Kathie, Kathie who had tried to kill him, kill him good as they were heading to Baja California and the good life. Left him on the side of the road after having just crashed through a police blockade and with two big slugs in his almost heart leaving him for dead and for taking the fall on those big shoulders alone, the big step-off fall if it came to that. That evil schoolmarm rattling last heard by Duke in Miss Johnson’s eight grade English class had thrown him off a bit on some small reflection because no way was Katie, a she-devil, a woman take any man’s measure and make him run through hoops, her hoops either a schoolmarm or much for language beyond the customary swear words and a few “come hither” phrases that when she was in heat or wanted some hard work done, like killing, maiming or armed robbery which would bring a guy running like a lap dog, including him.       

That funny feeling maybe not so funny because when he had seen her the last time she had already broken his spirit so bad that it would have taken emergency surgery, maybe more to put the broken pieces together. The story flashed through his now increasingly fevered brain almost as quickly as it happened. In those days he had been a private eye, a shamus, and a pretty good one with a partner who maybe wasn’t so good but who covered his back, mostly. Yeah Duke had been known for taking no prisoners when he got on a case. Left no untidy pieces and was as anybody could tell from a quick look at him that he was built for heavy lifting, could handle himself in a tight corner, and could give and take a few swift punches.

Those calling cards are what brought him to the attention of Whit Sterling, Whit the big-time mobster out in Reno. Whit had as most guys, guys including big-time mobsters a woman problem, had it bad for a piece of fluff named Kathie. Nothing but a work of art femme fatale and nothing but big trouble from the first day she came out of some ditch in some Podunk looking for the next best thing with that come hither look of hers and the guys fell right in line. No heavy lifting for that gal, none. She had for kicks skipped out on Whit with a chunk of dough, about forty thou, not much today, not much then maybe either but being a big-time mobster meant no sweet pussy was going to do a dance of death on him. Not if he expected to stay on top of the totem pole. And so he sent Duke to find her, bring her back if possible, bring back that fucking forty thou though even if he had to waste her. That waste her being perhaps necessary since she carried a very un-ladylike .32 and had used it on some long-ago lover whom she shot dead as a doornail and walked. Walked when the jury believed that she had been raped by that guy. Had clipped Whit too for good measure when she was in the process of her escape, with that quick forty thou which would keep her until the next guy she needed anted up.

The trail to Kathie naturally led south to warm sunny cheap living Mexico. Duke had had no problem finding her, as if she had left bread crumbs to lead him to her. Once he got a look at her, no, smelled that jasmine something scent she was wearing and which he could smell/feel a block before she entered the café where an informant told him she hung out he was a goner. And she seeing those broad shoulders, that clefted chin, those arms and hands that looked like they could handle just about anything-except a woman’s gun took dead aim at her new protector. They hit the sheets that first night, she almost raping him before they got to the bed, and they ran around for a while in Mexico before heading north until Whit got nervous and hired another private eye to ferret them out. In that confrontation Kathie killed that trailing shamus after he knocked Duke out. Needless to say, Duke was not going to take the fall for her, not on murder one. Whit or no Whit.   

Duke figuring it was his hard luck that he had picked a gun simple gal dropped out of sight, went underground really but he didn’t figure that Whit might have hard feelings about Duke taking his daily rate plus expenses money, and his woman too. But Whit was built that way and one of his minions found Duke doing short order chef duty in a dinky café diner outside of Pacifica. Brought him in to see Whit once he made Duke see reason with a fistful of brass knuckles and a jackroll, and Kathie. Yeah Whit was a piece of work, had found Katie and somehow had been taken in once again by here after she gave him back that forty thou to square things-for a while. But bringing oil and water together was not good this time as Duke and Kathie linked up again to do in Whit (both agreeing for their own reasons that Whit had to be done in or else neither life was worth a penny). Duke though what they hell had his claws in him since she took that well-used .32 out of her back aimed and without a blink fired. Almost a professional hit. Duke thought, though later when it was too late that he would have at least given the guy a way out as slim as that was. Yeah, Kathie placed two neat slugs into Whit’s heart as they were leaving. Never even looked back.         

As they headed out in Whit’s automobile for freedom in the Baja they ran into that police roadblock which they ran and Duke sensing he was in for a rough tumble if he ever crossed Kathie decided that he would turn himself in. Needless to say, Kathie did not like that idea and placed two neat slugs in what she though was Duke’s heart while she was driving to boot. The commotion though cause the car to crash and Duke jumped out trying to get the hell away. Kathie lay with her head over the steering wheel, maybe dead, maybe alive. That was the last he saw of her, the last time he had been in trouble over a woman after he squared himself with the coppers on the Whit and private eye beefs.      

Now that he looked at her a second time Duke could see that although she looked very much like Kathie, and giving a few pounds and years gone by this was not her, although she did have that gun simple look in her eyes that he had come to fear but it may have just been coincidence. As for her, as for Joan, she too had some sneaking feeling that she had met Duke before, had met him up in Reno one night when she was feeling frisky after a few drinks, after winning a few bucks at the gaming tables and feeling like she wanted a man that night had picked a guy with broad shoulders, with big hands that knew where to be put with a willing woman, and the ability to fend off any guy whom she didn’t want to deal with once she gave him her best come hither look. He who called himself Jeff then had told he had been built strictly for one- night stands which was fine by her that night as they hit the sheets without even knowing last names, also that night okay with her. A second look at this guy said behind those sleepy blue eyes and that granite chin was long-time serious affairs not one- night stands and not all had ended well. Still given what her predicament was just then trying to get a couple of thou back from the last guy who threw her over for some cheap laughing eyes Spanish whore who probably would give him a sexually transmitted disease those big shoulders, those hands and those fighter eyes would come in handy in case she ran into trouble with Jim, Jim Fiske if that was his real name.           

Duke looked her up and down and licked his chops and she took note that he ate her up, a conquest and she wasn’t even wearing her jasmine something scent that was guaranteed to get from a guy whatever she wanted from sex to heavy-lifting. So their dance in a dance began. He asked her if she wanted a drink, she accepted, and they went into Senor somebody’s cantina. They drank for a few hours, talked the talk and headed to her place (he didn’t have a place since he was just off the boat) and hit the sheets just the way they both figured when they compared notes in the morning.

Here is the funny part, the part that would glue them together for the duration. Joan had a photograph of that last guy she had tangled with, the guy who had run out on her on her bedroom table face down. When Duke turned the frame over and saw one Jim Fiske he flipped out. Pulled out his revolver and carefully aimed it at Joan. She in turn turned around and pulled out her own gun. A draw. That was when upon inquiry Duke found out that Joan and this Fiske had been lovers. Fiske was the guy who had taken a powder on her. More importantly to Duke this Fiske had waylaid him when he worked for Wells Fargo and taken some quarter of a million in cash from the bags strapped to his wrists. Then Joan told her two- bit story. Comparing notes, they decided to work together, after another run under the sheets to seal the deal, seal the deal by request from Joan on this one (Duke was not sure that he cared for her sexual aggression, but she had little tricks that he liked that usually only whorehouse whores knew).     

They gathered information that Fiske had hit the highway for Mexico City where he probably would try to convert the cash he had stolen from Duke which any way one looked at it was hot as a pistol since one did not usually act so foolishly as to rob a Wells Fargo armored truck or its employees. They rented a car and headed west stopping along the way to give a description of the dapper Fiske who had the look of a solid gringo and not some stinking bracero. They had some trouble in a small town, really just a trading post and a cantina, over cashing a check. That is where Duke started buckling a little once Joan took out her little snub-nosed gun and forced the proprietor to cash the check. Duke just stood there with his jaw hanging until she told him to wise up and that they had better vamoose.       

Having been given a description of Jim’s car they hit a little town and noticed a car fitting Jim’s description being worked on in some stinking garage, or what passed for a garage in sunny Mexico outside the big cities. They waited around for Jim to show to pick up the car and a couple of hours later he did show up. With a look of surprise on his face at seeing Joan he sized Duke up and figured that at best in a mix he would get the worst of it and so he “cut” them in on the robbery dough not knowing that Duke was the guy whom he had robbed. They travelled together uneasily until they hit the outskirts of Mexico City where they went up a private road and entered a big hacienda where Senor Blanco was waiting for Jim to deliver the hot money to fence. Jim took a cool one hundred thou in the transfer and was glad to get it. Duke figured he was a goner, could never work security again. 

When the trio got outside though before Jim could say to Joan for them to move on together without Duke Joan coolly put two slugs between his eyes. He fell like a tree. Joan just as coolly went over to the fallen Jim and swooped up the dough. Coolly asked if Duke was up for the road ahead. Not sure juts then that he had not played out this scene already he walked toward her and took the gun out of her hand. Then took her arm as they walked out into the sunset but the look on his face said he would spend many sleepless nights watching over his shoulder for the other shoe to fall. Jesus these gun simple women would kill him yet.   

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   *Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-James Baldwin's "Another Country"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for James Baldwin's Another Country


Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin


Book Review

Another Country, James Baldwin, Dial Press, New York, 1962


Recently, in a blog entry, I went on my “soap box” to speak about those now seemingly endless references, by black and white liberals alike, to the ‘good old days' of the black civil rights movement and how far the black liberation struggle has come here in America so that even one (harried and vilified) black man can be President of the United States. This sentiment is codified by the ‘post-racial’ aura (or rather, in truth, the ‘benign neglect’ aura) that surrounds the subject of race lately. By reference to the the good old days these liberals have simply appropriated the catch words of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, names, forever, associated with the high-water marks of resistance to black segregation back in the early 1960s to their own uses. Moreover, to embellish the myth they have created a Martin Luther King who apparently was nothing short of the black ‘messiah’ rather than a man made of clay, a great deal of clay, and in turn have emasculated Malcolm X, the real “truth to power” speaker on race of the era, into a harmless icon suitable for framing.

The author under review, James Baldwin, fortunately, would have none of that. He, in a less overtly inflammatory and more literary but nevertheless powerful way, was in that Malcolm X “truth to power” mode. And, my friends, some of his books, including Another Country make my case, and his case, far more eloquently than this writer ever could. Here is a man hard, hard church-brought up as only fundamentalist churches can distort a child, preacher father-raised and beaten-down for doing things, right or wrong, racially put upon incessantly whenever he stepped outside the Harlem prison-ghetto where he was sentenced yet who did not duck the hard, hard truth that native son he might be but ‘invisible’ native son was the real program for those with black skin.

Another Country is another of those multi-themed Baldwin efforts, the now familiar ones of interracial marriage, adultery, bi- and homosexuality, the blindness of white racism, and the hard, hard fact of trying to be seen while black, poor, and gay in America (and elsewhere, for that matter). The sexual and interracial scenes center on the relationships of various black and white characters of various sexual preferences who inhabit New York's 1950s bohemian Greenwich Village (with a little Left Bank, Paris vignette thrown in), or who want to. The most impressive aspect of this piece is the very strong sense that one gets that while the white characters are sympathetic to the blacks, in their own narrow way, they were clueless to the "another country" aspect of black existence. I have , repeatedly, made the point that that "invisibleness", except now in certain high profile quarters, afflicts the perceptions of whites today as well. Thus, one can well afford to read this work with that continuing premise in mind rather than read it comfortably as some pre-"post-racial" screed. Thanks, James.

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   *Notes of  A Righteous Son- James Baldwin’s “Notes Of A Native Son”

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for James Baldwin's "Notes Of A Native Son."

Book Review

Notes Of A Native Son, James Baldwin, The Dial Press, New York, 1963

Recently, in a blog entry, I went on my “soap box” to speak about those now seemingly endless references, by black and white liberals alike, to the ‘good old days' of the black civil rights movement and how far the black liberation struggle has come here in America so that even one (harried and vilified) black man can be President of the United States. This sentiment is codified by the ‘post-racial’ aura (or rather, in truth, the ‘benign neglect’ aura) that surrounds the subject of race lately. By reference to the the good old days these liberals have simply appropriated the catch words of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, names, forever, associated with the high-water marks of resistance to black segregation back in the early 1960s to their own uses. Moreover, to embellish the myth they have created a Martin Luther King who apparently was nothing short of the black ‘messiah’ rather than a man made of clay, a great deal of clay, and in turn have emasculated Malcolm X, the real “truth to power” speaker on race of the era, into a harmless icon suitable for framing.

The author under review, James Baldwin, fortunately, would have none of that. He, in a less overtly inflammatory and more literary but nevertheless powerful way, was in that Malcolm X “truth to power” mode. And, my friends, some of the essays in this book make my case, and his case, far more eloquently than this writer ever could. Here is a man hard, hard church-brought up as only fundamentalist churches can distort a child, preacher father-raised and beaten-down for doing things, right or wrong, racially put upon incessantly whenever he stepped outside the Harlem prison-ghetto where he was sentenced yet who did not duck the hard, hard truth that native son he might be but ‘invisible’ native son was the real program for those with black skin.

And why is James Baldwin a truth-teller, a “talented-tenth” truth-teller who has something to teach us today in racially “benignly neglectful” America. Well, read about his Harlem of the 1930s and 40s. Sound familiar? Read about his going “South” in those days, not the Route 95 urban corridor South but the outskirts. Sound familiar? Read the title essay about a proud black man (James’ father) beaten down by the deeply internalized pathologies that race and poverty create. Hell, even read his little puff piece about protest social novels where he takes his literary distance from his “Native Son” father, Richard Wright. Yes, a few more James Baldwins are on the order of the day. Let the liberals have their old timey memories. Just stay out of James’ way.

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- James Baldwin's “The Fire Next Time”-That’s Right- Not Water- The Fire Next Time

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time".

That’s Right- Not Water- The Fire Next Time

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

“The Fire Next Time”, James Baldwin, Vintage International, New York, 1962, 63

Now I have been, as is my wont when I get “hooked” on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at “Go Tell It On The Mountain”, "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone", and "If Beale Street Could Talk." Frankly those works, while well written and powerful, did not altogether remind me why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid. The Baldwin black liberation manifesto (and, maybe, white liberation as a by-product), "The Fire Next Time", "spoke" to me then and after forty years still "speaks" to me now in so-called "post-racial" Obama time.

Back in the early 1960s I used to listen to a late night talk show on the local radio station in Boston. Many times the host would have Malcolm X on and the airwaves would light up with his take on white racism, black nationalism and the way forward for the black liberation struggle- and away from liberal integrationism. Now in those days I was nothing but a woolly-headed white, left liberal "wannabe" bourgeois politico kid who believed in black liberation but in the context of working within the prevailing American society. I was definitely, and adamantly, opposed to the notion of a separate black state on the American continent if for no other reason that it would look something like the then existing ghettos, writ large, that I was committed to getting rid of and a set up for black genocide if things got too hot. And I still am. So, on the one hand, I admired, and I really did, Malcolm X for "speaking truth to power" on the race question while on the other disagreeing with virtually every way he wanted to achieve it.

Now that scenario is the predicate for James Baldwin's assuredly more literary, but seemingly more hopeful, way of getting the thread of the Malcolm X message about white racism out while posing the possibility (or, maybe, necessity) of joint struggle to get rid of it. In my recent re-reading of "The Fire Next Time" I was struck by how much of Baldwin's own hard-fought understandings on the question of race intersected with The Nation Of Islam, Malcolm at the time, and Elijah Mohammad's. Oddly, I distinctly remember debating someone, somewhere on the question of black nationalism and using Baldwin's more rational approach as a hammer against the black nationalists. I probably overdrew his more balanced view of a multiracial American then, if not now.

Still, Jimmy was onto something back then. Something that airy-headed kids like me, who thought that once the struggle in the South was won then the struggle in the North could be dealt with merely by a little fine-tuning, were clueless about. Don't smirk. But do note this: while only a fool or political charlatan, would deny that there have been gains for the black population since those civil rights struggle days the pathology of racism and, more importantly, the hard statistics of racism (housing segregation, numbers in the penal system, unemployment and underemployment rates, education, and a whole range of other factors) tell a very different story about how far blacks really have come over the last half century. A story that makes "The Fire Next Time" read like it could have been written today. And to be read today. Thanks, Jimmy.

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50^th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

By Lance Lawrence

[In the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff admit that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late daughter (she died in 1996)  whom he never really recognized for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys from North Adamsville who we met through Pete Markin who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip off. We had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and essays) when one Saturday night we held a part and in walked Jan then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days she stayed (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful from that crass rejection by her father. Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac in features and frankly from what I read of his style too.    

I also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall and later Greenwich Village night. I was just a little too young to have appreciated his Howl which along with the elegant Kaddish (for his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem.

This piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsburg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed some terms I took for granted every reader was at least vaguely familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee spoons. That cat reference actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat, the family pet.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg and his Peter although they were in friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. I had been some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and maybe in some older sets still in use  Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read him anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope. All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some stone- cold crazy asylum and I for him when he went under the ground. Lance Lawrence]

***********

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison ‘what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares) crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of best mind some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Hipster turned her on to a little sister and the some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night, one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs,   who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Book Review

Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1995

Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.

“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac’s major works, “Desolation Angels”, essentially a series of ‘real world’ job-related reflections on his time as a forest ranger in Washington state, and his subsequent “decompression” from that isolating job by travel abroad and in America with his mother in his well known spontaneous writing method at a time when he was trying to keep body and soul together, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Kerouac’s better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of his book of essays “Desolation Angels”.

Sometimes one, including a frustrated writer like Kerouac who was on to something but could not get published in the early 1950s, just has to get away from it all. And what better job that a ranger in a far off mountain range where one can think, save money, and contemplate the nature of the universe. For a while at least. Then, a social being like Kerouac (at that time) needs to get back to civilization. In this case the “wilds” of San Francisco then to Europe and North Africa. And then, along the way, has to under some mysterious internal compulsion has to fulfill his self-appointed obligation to take care of ‘mere” (his mother) by transporting her across the country by bus to start a new life. That is the outline of the mental and physical travelogue that Kerouac, a master of this kind of descriptive writing, takes us on. In addition there are cameo appearances by many of the “regular” who we have come to know through this “Legend” saga, including the above-mentioned Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. This one rates just below “On The Road”.