Once Again Despite The Tweeter Firestorm-In Honor Of The 150^th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of Sorts  

Book Review

By Alden Riley

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, Roberts Brothers, 1868

I have to admit I am a bit exasperated over the “firestorm” from Twitter and other sources over my original book review honoring the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which I just found out has been made into a yet another film adaptation for a modern 21^st century audience far removed from the semi-nomadic existent back in the day before cellphones and Facebook. Sometimes you just can’t win in any quarters that is for sure. I wouldn’t mind if the prairie fire came from one comment but even side issue stuff raised some ire. Jesus. First, I mentioned- “I thought things were supposed to change around here with the changing of the guard, otherwise known at least among the younger writers as the purge and exile of the previous site manager Allan Jackson and his replacement by Greg Green after a bitter internal fight with no holds barred and no prisoners taken in the fall of 2017.”

Although as a free-lancer, a stringer I did not have a decisive vote in the vote of no confidence that replaced Allan Jackson, in the interest of the seemingly obligatory statement of transparency an old friend of some of the writers here from high school and anti-war Vietnam War soldier days, with Greg I do know from various sources, reliable sources, that among the younger writers their actions were seen as a fight to the death. That Allan had to go, that Greg had to take over the whole site manager operation and that a guiding hand Editorial Board had to be established so one person could not wield an iron hand over the whole operation in the future. All of this over the to me pretty harmless policy decisions of Allan to spent plenty of time in 2017 and 2018 commemorating the 50^th anniversaries of the many historically important events of that era beginning with the Summer of Love, 1967. 

At some point, maybe rightly if the extent of coverage projected by Allan is any indication the younger writers ire, who like myself at best knew of those events second or third hand rebelled, got some aid from old-timer Sam Lowell, also an old friend of Allan’s from high school days who decided it was time to “pass the torch” they were able to remove Allan from his post. According to Sam Lowell, who after all as “the father we never knew” of the rebellion should know, the talk around the water cooler was to fight to the finish, to sent Allan packing, no regrets. So now readers who have a partisan interest in defending the actions of the younger writers are up in arms arguing that their “gentile” actions were merely to force Allan to retire. I am done with the silly issue and Sam has agreed to reply to anybody who still feels that terms like “purge” and “exile” were exaggerations of what went on.      

Next up in the batting order a simple statement about Greg’s early stewardship and the pitfalls of following a legendary figure at this publication like Allan Jackson after his purge and exile-“Then Greg, I think to show he was his own boss, his own operator came up with the silly, silly even to Will Bradley who originally presented the idea before thinking better of it, that to appeal to a younger, eventually non-existent audience, that the publication would feature film reviews of Marvel/DC comic book characters gone to screen, serious analysis of rap and current pop music, and review graphic novels. …”

I came on board shortly before this change of leadership while Greg was handling the day to day operations and Allan was making policy decisions, so I had a chance to see what Greg was trying to do to make his own mark, to become his own legend here just as he had been for many years over at American Film Gazette. In the beginning of the Green regime through Senior Film Editor Sandy Salmon I was getting some very good films, books, and music to review. Assignments like the Hammer film noir series pitting my take against Seth Garth’s, commemorating the various anniversaries of books like The Great Gatsby that had heretofore been staples of the Western literary canon and all kinds CD reviews from classic rock to world music.

Then the world caved in. Somehow Greg thought that what was needed to spruce up the publication, to appeal to a younger audience in the 21^st century rather than the hard-core Generation of ‘68 devotees who have sustained this publication since their own youths back in hard copy days through the current on-line version was to review comic book character films, video games and such, and rap and techno-music in its various mutations. A bad decision which even Greg knew was true as he retreated back to some more civilized material. The blow-back from readership was this seemingly orchestrated sycophantic echo about how I was being too hard on Greg for a momentary mistake, a good faith effort to reach a new audience, to try something new and that it had been,  and I will quote from one irate tweet “bad taste” to bring up that serious error of judgment now that Greg has righted the ship. Ho hum. 

I certainly have been around long enough in the publishing business now to know how to weather such storms but the next “fire storm,” really a tempest in a teapot to quote Sam Lowell on some internal controversy, a one- man crusade really was too much. Here is what I “wrongly” said- “Then Allan Jackson whom we all though had perished, gone to pot, dope pot, was working for Mitt Romney out in Utah Mormon country, running a whorehouse with an old flame in East Bay or living with an old former hometown corner boy turned “out” drag queen in San Francisco depending on which rumor you believed at the moment, showed up to do a series of encore presentations of material he had produced over the years in order to get back that older audience which had sustained the publication through good times and bad.”

Of course, the one-man crusade was one Allan Jackson, now a contributing editor doing encore presentations at this publication under the good graces of his old friend Sam Lowell and Greg. Apparently Allan does not have Greg and Sam’s good graces and let the whole shady rumored past year or so go to ground. No sooner had he seen my comments that he ripped out a few thousand word “essay” on my “libelous” statements concerning his whereabout after he got that proverbial boot in 2017. If anybody, and I worry about what you have been doing with your precious time if you have, has not seen Allan’s encore presentation introductions which are as self-serving as anything I have seen of late then a brief summary of his slights is in order. Under Allan’s tutelage all rumors were allegedly untrue or half-truths (a nice dodge when you are on the defensive, especially those unfamiliar with the intentionality rule in libel cases to tar the writer that scurrilous “half-truth” tag).

Allan didn’t try to weasel out of what everybody knew was true, that he had been purged and gone into exile like a beaten cur. Gone far away to try to “rebrand” himself where he was not well known. What he has argued, unconvincingly, is that he merely went West to seek work after he had been “blackballed” by some phantom network emanating from this publication along the East Coast. I have recently been given by our legal department five affidavits from publishers in New York and Boston who almost overnight after hearing of Allan’s untimely, their common term, ouster offered him jobs with increases in salary and less responsibility just to have his name on the masthead (and not on some other publication and mercifully not on ours). He allegedly needed money for his various ex-wife alimonies and the onerous college tuitions for his slew of good kids still in the higher education pipeline and has declared (at the notoriously accurate office water cooler) that no East Coast publisher would touch him with a ten- foot pole. In an age of the casual off-hand lie this is a whooper.   

We can dismiss the Mitt Romney press agent rumor out of hand since I looked at the archives for 2008 and 2012 and noted that Allan had skewered him and his white underwear fetish, his inability to keep to one single answer for more than ten minutes before flipping earning the sobriquet “Mr. Flip-Flop,” and his undying hatred for those who have not gouged the populace and not emulated his scorched earth policies at Bain Enterprises. At least I thought I could discount that rumor until I found out from Sam Lowell, who knows Allan like a book, when he went up to Olde Saco, Maine to offer Allan that Encore Presentation gravy job, that he told Sam that when he had landed in Salt Lake City out in the Utahs he approached the editors of the Salt Lake Tribune for a job to tide him over for a while. Here is the totally cynical part when you think about it. He intended to use that position to springboard himself onto Mitt’s campaign when he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate seat ancient Orrin Hatch was vacating. That is neither here nor there job-wise but his “pitch” was that since he had been an expert skewer of Mitt he would be the perfect guy to deflect any hard-ball stuff that those unruly ruffians might throw Mitt’s way. Yeah, cynical is right.

A man, any man, any woman for that matter has the right to have an affair with whoever they want and not have it published throughout the land. The rumor about Allan running a whorehouse, a high-end whorehouse for high-end Asian businessmen with a kinky streak, for a taste for a walk on the wild side, with an old flame, a woman who goes by the name Madame La Rue whose real name I have known for a while but will stick with her alias since my beef is with Allan not her was essentially true. From “an unnamed but reliable source who has asked to remain anonymous since he or she is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter” I found out that Allan landed in Half Moon Bay south of Frisco, the site of Madame’s house of ill-repute as Fritz Taylor put it in his ironic tone with the clothes on his back and not much else and Madame lend him a bunch of money, so-called lent him the money. Back in the day and I am not sure if it was before they split or after Allan (while still married to wife number two) had fronted Madame the dough to buy an old worn-out mansion on the shoreline, fix it up, grease some palms and other start-up costs-with no strings attached and no requirement to pay back. Nice, very nice. So Madame was just paying back that unrequired pay-back. That is the public story-the real story is that Allan acted as “master of ceremonies” at the place to earn his keep. I don’t know about you but that sounds an awful like pimp to me. Frankly I think Madame got the worse of the bargain for her outlay but I will keep mum about that since I am told they had started up their old torch while he was there before she booted him out for some unexplained reason.

Seth, Jack Callahan (who has done yeoman’s service funding this publication in the dark red ink days), Si Lannon, Sam, all Allan’s friend, his corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville had the usual pre-Stonewall “fag” “light on his feet,” ‘fairy” vocabulary and social distain before they got enlightened about LGBTQI matters. The one person who I have not put in that mix but who was in the thick of the gay-baiting of certain people (and of each other as well accepted ritual in those hard macho days) is Timmy Riley. Timmy Riley who maybe as a defense mechanism of his own preferences suppressed himself as long as he was in the Acre, and before Stonewall at what cost we will never know. Timmy though turned into Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who subsequently has run the famous drag queen club in Frisco for many years. What people did not know was that Allan at some point when Timmy was down in the streets lend him the money to buy the Kit Kat Club in North Beach and from there he zoomed along to fame and fortune. So the story-the public story is that after Madame threw Allan out he went to Timmy with some sad tale and Timmy lend him some money. (All of this money supposedly to pay that damn alimony and those blood-sucker colleges, Allan’s expressions). The real story is that Allan, while living above the club in one of Timmy’s spare rooms declared himself “master of ceremonies” downstairs at the club. Yeah, right we can read between the lines.            

Remember boys and girls all these critics of my review have said not word one about the impact, or lack of impact, of the Ms. Alcott’s book on me, or the world of literature. And before I mention what they have said, or not said there is yet another firestorm they had been more than happy to enflame. This is the offending section-“The only thing I knew about Louisa May Alcott, and this second-hand through Sandy Salmon when he was Senior Film Editor and I was his associate editor was that her father, Bronson Alcott, was a wild man, had run amok at Brooks Farm, the holy of holies in the pre-Civil War Transcendentalist movement, you know Emerson, Thoreau and other Buddha-like figures who ran around Cambridge, mainly Brattle Street telling naked truths naked. Bronson has run through whatever dough he had from his inheritance and had fathered, some say illegimately, a bunch of children by various female denizens of that isolated farm including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife and had had an affair with Herman Melville’s brother. Such things are hard to pin down but all I know for sure is that he claimed Louisa May and three other young women as his children. Lacking DNA testing who knows. So old Bronson was a certified wild man no doubt…”

I need not stand on the silly defense that the information I got about the old wild man Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s beloved if looney father, was gathered from Sandy Salmon, my boss. I refer the reader, and especially those readers who have decided out of some serious naivete to defend this lout, Sol Sandburg’s classic and some say definitive book on Bronson Alcott and the whole Brook Farm ménage In The Time Before Hippie Times; The Brook Farm Commune. Reading the book made even my jaded ears ring. Sure there were serious things going on in the ante bellum period in America, up in cold New England where the least of it was that they stopped believing in the eternal Father, Son, Holy Ghost trifecta, stopped believing in God if you really delve into the Universalist doctrine without flinching. Started a whole movement called if you can believe this the Transcendentalist movement which let’s face it would draw as many wooly-headed minds as intellectual giants like Thoreau and Emerson. The streets of Cambridge were filled with cranks con-men and drifters of no repute who were ready to listen to anybody except maybe Martin Van Buren about how to break out of the nine to five rat-trap circa the 1840s.

This mayhem was a perfect foil for a flake like Bronson Alcott (who also had several aliases to cover his various bigamous marriages both before Brook Farm and after so when I pose the question of who were actually Bronson’s prodigy I wasn’t blowing smoke although the four Alcott sisters, including literary Louisa May, seen to have been his legitimate daughters-all others including the bastard raised by Nathaniel Hawthorne are different stories). No money, no standing, no anything yet he was able in those odd times to ingratiate himself with a ton of intellectual heavyweights and eventually have a soft landing at Brook Farm where he literally went amok, went crazy with laudanum, morphine, hemp (what we call marijuana), opium anything coming off the China sea Yankee clippers that could be ingested. Had those two billion affairs and whatever number of children and walked away with not so much as a by your leave when the place folded due to corruption, malfeasance and general hubris. Some say he was later kept by a woman who ran a whorehouse next to the Parker House in Boston since he was so dope-addled that he was unemployable and needed whatever alms would provide for the children he would claim as his own. A shabby, shabby man and Sol Sandburg nailed the bugger, put him in the deadbeat hall of fame. This is the guy all those irate tweeters have been defending unto death for the sake of Louisa May’s reputation. But enough.  

Like I said a minute ago nothing about the fucking book, not word one about what to their young impressible lives and I can only conclude, male or female, these tweeters have had nothing better to do with their time that throw cyberspace bombs my way to cover the very hard fact that except for an occasional Seven Sisters Lit major nobody has read the book since about 1960, maybe 1950. That said, that truth uttered why did nobody bother to froth-mouthed respond to my take on the book’s place, or non-place, in the expanded Western canon. In the interest of completeness I will retail what I have written previously in the forlorn hope somebody might pick a real literary fight in L.M. ‘s defense:    

“Here is where things get weird though Sandy who knew Allan Jackson when they both were much younger and had worked the free-lance stringer racket we all go through before getting our so-called cushy by-lines at American Film Gazette asked him what sources I should go to for a look at the lingering influence of the book on modern girls and young women. Told Sandy to tell me to ask my sister, Ellen, when she had read the book and what she had thought of it. Here is the honest truth Ellen had never heard of the book, didn’t know who or what I was talking about and when I told her the outline of the story she laughed, smirked and laughed again saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such old-time melodramas. Failing that avenue I figured that I would work my way back so I mentioned the book I was reviewing to my mother who told me that my grandmother had read her the book at night before bed but she didn’t remember much except there were four sisters who grew up and got married or something like that and were good wives except one who died young of some strange disease. She said ask my grandmother. Bingo. Grandma quoted me chapter and verse without hesitation until I asked how the book influenced her. She told me those were different times, more restrictive times even against her growing up times in the 1930s so she would have to pass on the influence question. She was only a little shocked that my sister knew nada about the book and my mother only a little more. So I am going to take a stab and say as a 150^th anniversary honor-women you have come a long way since those homebody marriage child-rearing times.  

I had to think awhile, had to ask Seth Garth who is good at this kind of question and his old flame Leslie Dumont, both fellow writers here what was it about the novel that would have appealed to young girls and women up at least until my grandmother’s growing up times. And why when I later asked some other female contemporaries they came up as blank as my sister on even having heard of the book. Leslie said it best, or at least better. Those were male dominated times and so even the least amount of spunk, independence by say Jo, who is the character in the book who pretty much represents Louisa May’s profile was like a breath of fresh air even to young girls and women who knew the score, knew they would be driven back into the cave if they got too brave. Seth, who was more than willing to defer to Leslie’s judgment took a more historical approach saying there was nothing in the plotline that dealt with eternal truths so that such a novel would have a limited life-span except in the groves of academia where a couple of generations of Ph.ds could get worked up about the social meaning of it all.  

That is about it except to briefly trace the story line, or lines since there are actually two main threads, the almost universal family-centered expectations for women and Louisa May’s struggle to get somebody to survive into strong independence co-managership of the family along with a thoughtful husband. Oldest sister Meg is pretty conventional, beautiful and domestic preaching to the younger sisters’ choir about the need to be civilized and good God-fearing wives. Jo, Louisa May’s character is strong-willed and thoughtful and will make the marriage that Alcott thought should be appropriate for her times and class (and the unspoken truth was to end the shameful lusts and lechery of one Bronson Alcott). Beth is something of a cipher, musical but early on sickly who died young from the after effects of horrible scarlet fever so no real lesson can be drawn from her life. (Funny how these Victorian novelists, male and female, have to have some frail sickly female character hovering in the background.) Amy, the youngest, is the closest to the character that let’s say my daughter could relate to if she ever finished reading the book which she adamantly refused to finish after reading about a third of it and declaring the thing  utterly boring even the Amy character who struggle for artistic self-expression is very similar to her own feelings about what she wants out of life. As Sam Lowell has stated on many occasions-a slice of life circa the 1860s-that is the “hook.”      

When At First You Practice To Deceive- Once Again, He’s Been A Bad Boy-John Heard And Goldie Hawn’s “Deceived” (1991)-A Film Review














DVD Review



By Laura Perkins



Deceived, starring Goldie Hawn, John Heard, 1991



I believe every woman when she gets married, or these days becomes part of a “significant other” relationship, wonders deep in her mind whether the man she is marrying is who he says he is. Has not been if it came right down to it a psycho murderer like the hubby in the film under review Deceived. (Men can make their own judgments going the other way, but I am talking specifically about women here.) This is not normally how I would start a film review but the subject matter in this one strikes close to home so I felt compelled to open up with this line of inquiry. When Greg Green assigned this film to me, a film I did not see when it was first released in 1991 and so did not know what it was about, who or what was being deceived, and I mentioned how I wanted to start the review he balked, although finally he let it pass through under some kind of catharsis theory, mine. Even my long-time companion Sam Lowell balked at my strong statement against the whole male half of the human race perversely interested in marriage or its facsimile. But I prevailed.



The reason for my strong reaction to the plotline of this film was that long before Sam and I got together I had been married, mercifully for a short time, to an American pyscho type like Jack Saunders, Frank Sullivan, Daniel Sherman or whoever he was, played by seemingly rationale John Heard, although he didn’t have a predilection for murder if he didn’t get his way in the world. (That was my first marriage my subsequent one although not successful was more a matter of a parting of the ways, of two ships passing in the night too long.) I had met a man through a close friend, who in the end would be almost as shattered at I by the experience as I was, back in the 1960s during the Vietnam War when many weird things were happening not all of them fitting into the “newer world” we were seeking. We fell in love, he, Francis, his real name, and me, at least I did, and we were married shortly after we met and subsequently moved to Washington, D.C where he claimed he had a job offer from a high ranking governmental official. (I won’t give specific details and names since this is not about them and they were totally unaware of what was happening.). This after Francis allegedly had been honorably discharged from the military through these connections since he had otherwise been scheduled in that hated year 1969 to go to Vietnam as an infantryman (as I would later learn through Vietnam veteran Sam really “cannon-fodder).



We went to Washington where I had assumed he was working for that governmental agency and while times were tough as they can be for newly marrieds I thought things were going okay. Then we had a burglary in our small apartment and almost all our items of value were “stolen.” We filed a police report but nothing ever came of it, burglary then, maybe now too, a fact of life in big cities and small, mostly unsolved. Then a few weeks later the other shoe dropped when I got a call from a collection agency in Silver Springs up on the border in Maryland telling me that Francis had forged a company check while he was working for them and that they were going to prosecute if they were not made whole in the matter (their legally-based expression). Which we did pay back after Francis came home and told me that the government job had fallen through and he was afraid to tell me. Had gotten the collection agency job on the fly in order to have money coming since we were just scraping by since I was only working in a department store at the time. Having no particular reason to be in Washington where neither of us had roots we headed back to Albany and stayed with my parents for a while.



That was when the final straw broke. During all those several months down in D.C. Francis’ mother was getting calls from the FBI looking for Francis who they claimed was AWOL (as part of his lies he had told me that he had to go to Fort Dix to be discharged after his connections pulled their “strings”). Francis said nothing to me about it until one day his mother called up and told him that she had given them our address so he could straighten things out with them. That is when he told me that he indeed was AWOL, had been all along since he did not want to go to Vietnam (and weirdly had worried that he would die if he went over there and had never been married). Francis in a moment of candor also told me that he had staged the Washington burglary to get money for us to live on since he was broke and the collection agency job didn’t pay much. He also admitted to many other lies about his life and achievements. On the advice, solid advice, of my pious parents I filed quickly for divorce on mental cruelty grounds and started a long and expensive process to have the marriage annulled by the Catholic Church so I could marry again without flak from the Church (in those days I was a serious practicing Catholic). After the FBI came to my family’s house and took Francis away I never saw him again although he called several times trying to get back together. Jesus. I would go a number of years without male companionship due to that horrible series of deceptions so don’t tell me I don’t know about such men. That I am being crazy for stating that every woman also harbors such deep concerns when she starts a serious relationship.



As dear sweet Sam says in his reviews here’s the story-line. Young artsy Adrianne, played by Goldie Hawn, meets and marries Jack Saunders in New York City (as already telegraphed he had other aliases but let’s stick with this name), an art curator played by John Heard and they have a child. They go along for several years until the wheels begin to fall off for reasons never made clear except greed and avarice on Jack’s part when forgeries and missing items start happening in his department with him as a prime suspect after a curator had been murdered for no known reason. To get out from under he tells Adrianne he needs to go to Boston for an auction. That is a turning point since a fellow worker of Adrianne’s on hearing from her that Jack was in Boston mentioned that she thought she had seen him entering a hotel bar. He talks his way out of that even when Adrianne finds out things that place him in the city during that period. Shortly after this Jack “dies” in a car accident.



That is a tripping point for when Adrianne goes to try to collect on Jack’s Social Security contribution she is shocked to find he was not really Jack Saunders who had died a number of years before but his closest friend Frank Sullivan. Then Adrianne becomes a snoop, a detective tracking down the real deal including finding Frank’s mother who tells her that Frank was a bad son (an understatement under the circumstances). Presto Jack/Frank pops up at his mother’s New York apartment after luring Adrianne there. Tells her some cock and bull story about being blackmailed by a guy named Daniel Sherman and he needed to “die” to get out from under but this Sherman was looking for a very valuable ancient necklace to make things go away.



This is all bullshit since Jack/Frank is also Daniel with another family out in the suburbs to boot. He wants that damn necklace for whatever reason and he will kill if he has to even though allegedly he doesn’t want to hurt Adrianne or their daughter. Given his murderous track record, the curator, the hitchhiker who took his place in that car accident, his mother, and who knows maybe even beloved Jack Saunders Frank is a sure bet to kill Adrianne for that freaking amulet. And he almost does except by an interesting and inevitable sleight of hand Adrianne does him in by her own deception. This film has too many moving and unresolved moving parts to be a highly recommended thriller but is first-rate evidence for my contention that every woman worries about what kind of hell she might be getting into when she goes down the aisle. Remember my story if not this one.    

In Search Of Heroes Of The Great American Hispanic Night-Mi Hombre Senor Zorro-The ‘Z’ Man Of My Youthful Dreams-Antonio Banderas’s “The Mask Of Zorro” (1998)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

The Mask Of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins and assorted sleaze-ball Spanish dons and their senoras and senoritas, 1998

I have made no secret here or in private conversations that in my youth, my childhood really, I was crazy to watch the Zorro half hour on 1950s black and white television. For a reason that only a few people knew then, mostly family, and excluding my corner boys, some of who work for this publication, and whom I grew up with in the heavily working- class Irish and some Italian neighborhood of the Acre in North Adamsville a suburb south of Boston. I suppose every family has its family secrets, its skeletons in the closet like some looney grand aunty up on the batty attic, a brother, a hermano in home speak, who has spent more time in jail for various armed felonies than on the outside, that some cousin was in the vernacular of the day in our family at least was “different” meaning then a “fairy, fag” you know what I mean and today proudly LGBTQ, a young female relative who also in the code words of the day had to travel to “Aunt Emmy” for a while, meaning that she was pregnant out of wedlock and had to leave town to avoid family disgrace and dagger neighborhood dowager grandmother eyes probably never to come back.

In my family the deep dark secret which also reveals in passing why I loved Zorro as my youthful hero was that my mother was a Latina, Hispanic, you know from Mexico whose last name was Juarez, Bonita Juarez. No big deal right, now anyway although in the age of the long knives, in the age of Trump and all the animosities he has helped stir up, bring to the ugly surface of American life, that may no longer be true. But back then, back in 1950s growing up Irish-Italian Acre that was a no-no. The way around it devised by my parents was that sweet Bonita was “passed off” as Italian. An entirely respectable ethic designation in a town that drew Italians back around the turn off the 20^th century to work the granite quarries that dominated the topography of the landscape (that work died out with the exhaustion of the quarries to be replaced by a booming shipbuilding industries which by the 1950s has in their turn faded this time by off-shore outsourcing and eventual departure which explained a lot about the wanting habits of we corner boys in the 1950s while other working class towns were observing something of a golden age-also mainly gone now with globalization). While there were names, derogatory names, for Italians in some Irish working-class homes in the neighborhood there was enough intermixing to level things off.

Almost universally though since there were absolutely no Hispanic families in the whole town the normal terms of abuse applies-spics, wetbacks, braceros, and the like. My father could not stand for that and even his relatives in the neighborhood believed my mother was from Italy. She had come up to California from Mexico during World War II with her family to work the grape and melon fields and my father stationed at Fort Ord at the time met her at a USO dance and wooed her after that. Since Bonita’s English was halting she was forbidden to speak Spanish when others were around. The only way any corner boys knew that she was Spanish was in high school when in ninth grade my best friend Jack Callahan had been taking Spanish and had come to the house unannounced and heard her speaking that language and not Italian. Naturally asking what gives and I told him and from there to the rest of the guys who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. [In the interest of today’s seemingly compulsory transparency statement Jack Callahan has not only occasionally written in this publication but has been a substantial financial backer-Greg Green]

The corner boys when they found out since we were “brothers” today hermanos were pretty cool about the whole thing since she was my mother and that counted a lot even when we were at civil war with them, con madres. In general though it was not until many years later after Bonita passed away that people became aware of her nationality in a time when such things were more openly okay-even in the Acre.                    

Secrets aside I loved Zorro the same way my corner boys loved say white gringo good guys, avenging angels like Wyatt Earp or the Maverick boys from the television our main source outside of the movies from having characters we could identify with. Swashbuckling Zorro taking on all-comers, bad ass gringos especially but also batos locos paid soldiers and other scumbags and of course the oppressor hombres-the mainly Spanish dons who had the huge land grants from the Spanish kings when California was part of the fading Spanish Empire and later after formal independence and creation of a Mexican state who gouged the peasantry into the ground to maintain their freaking luxurious lifestyles. I would have to keep my devotion something of a secret although in general Zorro was a positive figure among the television-watching corner boys.

I was therefore very interested in doing this review of The Mask of Zorro when site manager Greg Green decided that enough was enough as Mexican Nationals, immigrants, citizens, hard-working peoples were being bashed for no good purpose by the Trump unleashed dark alt-right-Nazi-fascist-white nationalist cabal and had to be defended on all fronts including popular culture-including films. And in a very definitive way-beyond the obvious romance between Zorro, played by a youthful Antonio Banderas and his lovely senorita and soon to be marida and madre of his child, Elena, played by drop-dead beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones-this film shows a heroic and honorable side of the Mexican saga-of cultural super-heroes among the oppressed peoples of the world. 

Here is the way the thing worked on this one although one can take the production to task for not have more Hispanics, Latinos, etc. in key roles like Elena, who could have worthily been played by Penelope Lopez, and certainly Zorro, the elder, played by venerable and ubiquitous high-toned Brit actor Anthony Hopkins could have had a better casting. The elder Zorro has a running battle in the Mexican independence struggle with the soon to be departed Spanish viceroy, a real bastard whose name is legend so no need to give him some human surname over the way the peasantry and others were treated by him. More importantly over the elder Zorro’s wife and daughter since that msl hombre viceroy was smitten by her. Eventually the bastard was the cause of the mother’s death and the elder Zorro’s imprisonment leaving the field clear for him to raise that daughter, Elena, when going back to Spain in comfort and culture.    

Then fast forward twenty year later and the bastard returned with Elena and with the idea of turning via those well-off land grant Dons California into an independent republic by stealth and cold hard cash to the Mexican leader Santa Ana, known as a villain in U.S. history via the Alamo and Jimmy Polk’s Mexican War adventure. The one guys like young Abe Lincoln and Henry avid Thoreau couldn’t stomach. Enter a rejuvenated elder Zorro who nevertheless is too old to go mano a mano with the bastard and his hired thugs. Through serious trial and error he trains a new generation Zorro, played by Banderas, to lead the struggle against the returned kingpin oppressor and let the peasantry live off the their lands in some peace. Once our new Zorro finishes his basic training he is off and running to woo the lovely Elena, tweak the bastard, fight a million sword fights, woo the lovely Elena, fight a few million more sword fights, and well you know the “and” part by now. A most satisfying film which only rekindled my love of the sacred youthful character-thanks young and old Zorro.         

In Honor Of The 150^th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review

Book Review

By Alden Riley

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, Roberts Brothers, 1868

I thought things were supposed to change around here with the changing of the guard, otherwise known at least among the younger writers as the purge and exile of the previous site manager Allan Jackson and his replacement by Greg Green after a bitter internal fight with no holds barred and no prisoners taken in the fall of 2017. The idea was to let the younger writers spread their wings, learn to fly and not do dreary pieces like the 24/7/365 1960s nostalgia hippie revival regime under Jackson.  And for a while there was a breath of fresh air around the place, around the formerly hostile water cooler which drives the social life of many operations and this one is no exception. Then Greg, I think to show he was his own boss, his own operator came up with the silly, silly even to Will Bradley who originally presented idea before thinking better of it, that to appeal to a younger, eventually non-existent audience, that the publication would feature film reviews of Marvel/DC comic book characters gone to screen, serious analysis of rap and pop music, and review graphic novels.  Over the top silly stuff since that phantom audience wouldn’t touch a high-brow publication if they were paid to do so and even then it would be Seth’s six, two and even that would rouse them. They get their ideas, information, style elsewhere.

We younger writers in our turn rebelled at that fantastic imposition and Greg retreated mostly gracefully under the blowback and let us do our own thing. Then Allan Jackson whom we all though had perished, gone to pot, dope pot, was working for Mitt Romney out in Utah Mormon country, running a whorehouse with an old flame in East Bay or living with an old former hometown corner boy turned “out” drag queen in San Francisco depending on which rumor you believed at the moment, showed up to do a series of encore presentations of material he had produced over the years in order to get back that older audience which had sustained the publication through good times and bad. Invited by Greg via old geezer Sam Lowell and the Editorial Board. Something has happened to Greg since Allan’s return, maybe he is under the Svengali influence of the man but now we are all expected to write “outside the box” meaning material that we know damn little about and could care even less about. Hence I have been assigned to do a book review of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in honor of the 150^th anniversary of its original publication.         

There is where things have gone awry with Greg’s I am sure Allan-inspired approach. The only thing I knew about Louisa May Alcott, and this second-hand through Sandy Salmon when he was Senior Film Editor and I was his associate editor was that her father, Bronson Alcott, was a wild man, had run amok at Brooks Farm, the holy of holies in the pre-Civil War Transcendentalist movement, you know Emerson, Thoreau and other Buddha-like figures who ran around Cambridge, mainly Brattle Street telling naked truths naked. Bronson has run through whatever dough he had from his inheritance and had fathered, some say illegimately, a bunch of children by various female denizens of that isolated farm including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife and had had an affair with Herman Melville’s brother. Such things are hard to pin down but all I know for sure is that he claimed Louisa May and three other young women as his children. Lacking DNA testing who knows. So old Bronson was a certified wild man no doubt but that was hardly enough knowledge to help ‘the hook” of this famous book which in its time was a best-seller and a standard for young girls and young women’s bedside reading.

Here is where things get weird though Sandy who knew Allan Jackson when they both were much younger and had worked the free-lance stringer racket we all go through before getting our so-called cushy by-lines at American Film Gazette asked him what sources I should go to for a look at the lingering influence of the book on modern girls and young women. Told Sandy to tell me to ask my sister, Ellen, when she had read the book and what she had thought of it. Here is the honest truth Ellen had never heard of the book, didn’t know who or what I was talking about and when I told her the outline of the story she laughed, smirked and laughed saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such old-time melodramas. Failing there I figured that I would work my way back so I mentioned the book I was reviewing to my mother who told me that my grandmother had read her the book at night before bed but she didn’t remember much except there were four sisters who grew up and got married or something like that and were good wives except one who died young of some strange disease. She said ask my grandmother. Bingo. Grandma quoted me chapter and verse without hesitation until I asked how the book influenced her. She told me those were different times, more restrictive times even against her growing up times in the 1930s so she would have to pass on the influence question. She was only a little shocked that my sister knew nada about the book and my mother only a little more. So I am going to take a stab and say as a 150^th anniversary honor-women you have come a long way since those homebody marriage child-rearing times.   

I had to think awhile, had to ask Seth Garth who is good at this kind of question and his old flame Leslie Dumont, both fellow writers here what was it about the novel that would have appealed to young girls and women up at least until my grandmother’s growing up times. And why when I later asked some other female contemporaries they came up as blank as my sister on even having heard of the book. Leslie said it best, or at least better. Those were male dominated times and so even the least amount of spunk, independence  by say Jo, who is the character in the book who pretty much represents Louisa May’s profile was like a breath of fresh air even to young girls and women who knew the score, knew they would be driven back into the cave if they got too brave. Seth, who was more than willing to defer to Leslie’s judgment took a more historical approach saying there was nothing in the plotline that dealt with eternal truths so that such a novel would have a limited life-span except in the groves of academia where a couple of generations of Ph.ds could get worked up about the social meaning of it all.   

That is about it except to briefly trace the story line, or lines since there are actually two main threads, the almost universal family-centered expectations for women and Louisa May’s struggle to get somebody to survive into strong independence co-managership of the family along with a thoughtful husband. Oldest sister Meg is pretty conventional, beautiful and domestic preaching to the younger sisters’ choir about the need to be civilized and good God-fearing wives. Jo, Louisa May’s character is strong-willed and thoughtful and will make the marriage that Alcott thought should be appropriate for her times and class. Beth is something of a cipher, musical but early on sickly who dies young from the after effects of horrible scarlet fever so no real lesson can be drawn from her life. (Funny how these Victorian novelists, male and female, have to have some frail sickly female character hovering in the background.) Amy, the youngest, is the closest to the character that let’s say my daughter could relate to if she ever finished reading the book which she adamantly refused to finish after reading about a third of it and declaring the thing  utterly boring even the Amy character who struggle for artistic self-expression is very similar to her own feelings about what she wants out of life. As Sam Lowell has stated on many occasions-a slice of life circa the 1860s-that is the “hook.”      

Crossing The Color Line-When It Counted-Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Story-Chadwick Boseman’s “42”-(2013)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

42, starring Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford, 2013

Although the number of female sports reporters, including anchors and such, has grown exponentially since my pre-Title X in college days I admit I have never been a sports fan, never really followed, seriously followed in any case, the subject of the film under review, 42, baseball. Except to vicariously root for the New York Yankees whenever they raised their heads come World Serious times since I grew up around Albany in New York (that “World Serious” expression courtesy of Ring Larner via his You Know Me, Al  stories via Sam Lowell who was, is a baseball nut). That rooting for the Yankees a not unimportant factor in the lives of both Sam and I since we have been long time companions and Sam growing up in North Adamsville south of Boston a rabid Red Sox fan which has led to many an “armed truce” come rivalry time. (I was experienced in “armed truces” well before meeting Sam many years ago since Albany is a “divided” city, or at least my clan was, is between loyalty to Yankees and Sox).   

Since I am not a baseball fan, as defined by Sam and many others-meaning knowing all kinds of arcane information about every aspect of the game how do I wind up getting this assignment. Well let’s get back to Sam, that well-know long time companion who as film editor here back a few years before he retired would routinely do the sport films as they came up like the film adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural starring Robert Redford. Sam and I wound up watching this film not under the baseball hook but under my long-time “crush” on Harrison Ford every since early Star Wars and my interest in seeing Chadwick Bozeman who plays Number 42, Jackie Robinson in something other that comic book super-hero Black Panther.  

After watching the film, as is our wont, Sam’s old-time expression, we discussed the merits of the film. That is where I made my “fatal” mistake. I told Sam who was awash in the glory of seeing the first black man in major league baseball (not capitalizes as now) when major league baseball really was the king of the American pastime day-and later night when the lights came. Robinson helped integrate the sport AND help win the National League pennant for Brooklyn in 1947 AND win Rookie of the Year although the film was not really about baseball. Sure that was the tag line but the real deal was how for blacks since slavery times every step forward was something like a world-historic ordeal, was fought for with blood and guts by a few and then carried on by many. Since Sam had been assigned the film by site manager Greg Green (as he would have been even under recently sacked previous site manager Allan Jackson who was a boyhood friend of Sam’s and fellow baseball nut-Red Sox version) since he told me and Greg that he would have concentrated on the sports angle and somewhat downplayed the racial angle to have me to the review in order to say what I have just said above.

Greg hemmed and hawed for a while since he also is a member in good-standing of the baseball nut fraternity and wanted to highlight the incredible athletic ability and dedication that Jackie Robinson had which he believed added greatly to his ability to withstand the racial taunts and “assorted bullshit” his term, which Robinson had to withstand that first and later seasons for those “crackers,” my term who saw the game as another white preserve. A white preserve just as later, as today for that matter, blacks and others of color have had to break the white preserve on riding buses, voting, housing, employment, education you name it. All things that whites have taken for granted and not given it another thought. I include myself in that category as well.

I will now get off my soapbox since I have said what I wanted to say about my angle on the film and give you as Sam eternally said “the skinny” on the film some of which I have already telegraphed. Branch Rickey, played by Harrison Ford old time good old boy talking out of the side of his mouth, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, later to be the Los Angeles Dodgers which some of the diehards in Brooklyn have never forgotten or forgiven, for a whole series of reasons personal, professional and business-wise which get a work out in various scenes in the film decided baseball, or at least his team needed to be integrated to be successful and to cater to the fair number of blacks who attended Dodger games. As in the case of Rosa Parks later and others Rickey did not want to get just any black but one that represented the better aspects of the black race. Up steps Jackie Robinson who was playing excellent no money baseball in Negro League dungeons in the South and who would have continued to do so if Rickey hadn’t given him a call. That decision for good or evil would drive the rest of the film except for the off-hand romance interspersed between baseball scenes between Robinson and the woman who would become his wife and mainstay Rachel.            

Obviously, Rickey, and Robinson, knew that what they were facing was a daunting task from confronting those white preserve crowds to fellow baseball players, teammates and opponents, who heated the idea to fellow baseball owners to the Jim Crow conditions which precluded blacks in the South, and in the North too but less publicly blatant from white only facilities. The centerfold on this was Robinson’s grit on and off the field and Rickey’s drive to do the right thing. All of that gets thoroughly vetted throughout the film. Of course the great plays and the marching toward the pennant get worked in as well. Despite Sam’s thrill a minute at the baseball plays this one is a good close look at American sport in a day when football which has replaced baseball as the American pastime is knee-deep in controversy around black players and their allies “taking a knee” and putting a bright spotlight on the role of the police in the black community. What else is new.