You Can’t Get There From Here- With The Appalachia Hills And Hollows In Mind

You Can’t Get There From Here- With The Appalachia Hills And Hollows In Mind

By Zack James

  

“Damn, those shacks we just passed by looked like they could have come out of some John Steinbeck or Erskine Caldwell novel from the dustbowl, tobacco road 1930s or something, ” Bradley Fox, shaking his head, mentioned to his companion, Sarah Simon, as they travelled down Highway 7 toward Prestonsburg, and “home.” That “home” rightly in quotation marks since Bradley Fox for whom this journey had been planned had never to his conscious knowledge been to that town in his life. Had for many years never even though to go there until his brother, Jamison, told him a story about how when he, Jamison, was young, about a year old, back in 1946 or so, their parents, Bolton and Delores Fox, had taken a trip from Riverdale in Massachusetts where Delores had grown up and which had been their residence after they got married when Bolton was discharged from the Marines, and gone down to Prestonsburg where Bolton had grown up to see if prospects there for work and living were any better than in post-World War II Riverdale. The textile mills which had sustained that town’s economy for most of the previous century were heading out, were heading south and would eventually leave for foreign shores as the century progressed and so staying pat looked like a wasted option. 

The intriguing part was that Delores had been pregnant with Bradley when this attempted move took place and so although he was only in the womb he had been “home” to the Appalachian hills and hollows before he breathed his first air breathe. What made the story all the more dramatic was that Yankee born and bred Bradley, or he liked to present himself to the world that way, always was ashamed, or if not ashamed then always hiding that element of his roots, from where his father came from. Like his father had had any say where he had come from. This distain would come out on anything from Bolton’s slightly southern drawl which would made Bradley’s friend laugh whenever they heard that (calling Bolton damn “reb” and other silly stuff until Bradley no longer brought friends around until high school when Bolton’s accent was seen as “cool” if not by Bradley then by his friends who thought-since Bolton was not their father-that Bolton was cool in the language of the time. 

His feelings of shame came out as well when Bradley was old enough to recognize that his father, when he was able to find work, got the short end of the stick, got into that last hired, first fired (or rather laid-off, pink-slipped which meant the same thing) syndrome which meant that there was never enough of life’s goods around in good times or bad. Bradley resented that, resented that because of those shortage his family abode looked like, especially in over-grown summer, those Dorethea Lange photographs he had seen in a magazine of some places down south, down in Appalachia, down not too far from where he and Sarah were heading on State Highway 7.  

Yeah times had been tough for Bradley, when he got “caught,” got caught out when Jack Kennedy whom he idolized for being everything his family was not decided to do something not only about improving the lives of black people down south, which he was okay with, but with the poor benighted “white trash” as well. The whole thing from what he gathered later had been started when guy named Michael Harrington wrote a book, The Other America, about poverty in white bread Appalachia and mentioned Prestonsburg, Christ, Prestonsburg of all places and him with a birth certificate which showed his father’s place of birth that very same place. That was not the worst of it though because nobody really needed to know, or probably gave a “rat’s ass” an expression that he and his boys used excessively then about where his father was born and raised and what his condition of life had been if some damned school do-gooders didn’t decide that the citizens, students anyway, should put together a clothing drive for the poor misbegotten residents of Prestonsburg and have that campaign announced day after day for several weeks over the P. A system at school making him feel like crawling under the seat in homeroom when that announcement for goods came over the loudspeaker.

So Bradley Fox had a serious history of denial about one half of his roots (the Delores half was pure Riverdale Irish and thus he could “pass” and unfortunately his father Bolton P. Fox went to an early grave being reconciled with his son over that silly stuff). It took a long time, too long, and too much estrangement, too many missed chances to right wrongs before he realized that simple truth that his father could not help where he had been born anymore that Bradley could be. By the time he realized that, realized that his father was good and honest man who never got break number one in his life it was too late. But that sense that he had committed a grave injustice to the man never stopped haunting him. And hence the trip south “home”

Maybe it was that father guilt, maybe it was Sarah continuously telling him over the previous decade that he needed to physically confront his fears and maybe it was that mountain music that lately he had been drawn too. The music of the Saturday night barn dance down in the hills and hollows with the mist coming down over the mountains to blanket the night, music to take the sting out of Willie’s White Thunder and to let those young lovers do their courting ritual in peace. Whatever combination prevailed one day a few months after Bradley had given up the day to day operation of his roofing company to his younger son he cell-phoned Sarah and asked her if she would be willing to go south with him. She made him laugh when she said that was her in the front of his house with the car motor running so get moving. And so they did. That didn’t stop Bradley as they headed south of the Mason-Dixon Line from feeling queasy, very queasy as they approached the Ohio River and entered into coal country with its beauty, starkness, and decay all mixed up. Then he saw those tar-paper shacks with their open air window and old papas sitting on the bent porch, kids and animals running every which way and he thought back to those photographs from his youth and started to get those old-time feelings of disgust. No this would not be an easy trip “home,” not easy at all.          

Foursome Anybody? –The Trials And Tribulations Of Sand-Bagger Johnson-Part Three

Sand-Bagger Johnson noticed that brisk raw Saturday morning Lucky Pierre as they were heading to the dreaded first tee at Pine Pond Golf course was eying his golf bag and had the look of fear and trepidation as he noticed that Sand-Bagger had Big Emma in there among the scattered collection of weapons as his disposal. Lucky Pierre, and not just him but wiry Zow (or Chou old time spelling) and out for the first time this season lanky Casey, who made up the foursome that day, had the look of doom upon their faces now that Big Emma was on the scene. They had all ridiculed the Sand-Bagger for “forgetting” to put the number one metal wood club (a.k.a “the driver” in some circles but he preferred the number designation) but now were visibly worried about their fates.   

(All names here are fictious to protect the innocent as well as the guilty-you know the guys who moved their ball in the rough even under summer rules, who take a club length and a half when they are only entitled to one club length and “forgot” about that booted shot on number six when they call out their five that should have been six. We will not even speak of the ultimate scam of the “gentleman’s seven,” or eight as the case may be, since no gentleman does that as a matter of honor but takes his manly eleven and be done with it.)       

This was to be the first time this season that this motley crew was to tee it up and to play a team best-ball match. As they stood at the blues on the first tee they all were in muted anticipation as Sand-Bagger flipped the tee in the air to determine the teams (an odd but long-standing tradition on the golf links going back to the time of Charles the First of England who was a horrible monarch and who eventually lost his head although more for state policy than anything else but from all accounts was a pretty fair linkster). The tee landed pointed directly at Zow. Immediately the wiry dude had a big smile on his face as he knew this match was “in the bag.” 

And as it turned out after a rough start Sand-Bagger and Zow brought home the bacon that day. As for Big Emma, well, you know sometimes just the threat of the big stick will rattle nervous guys. That was the case that day.

Summary for Casey-Sand-Bagger and  Zow pocketed an Abe apiece. 

"If Your White Your Right, If Your Black Get Back"-With Big Bill Broonzy’s , Black, Brown And White In Mind.

 

 

If Your White Your Right, If Your Black Get Back-With Big Bill Broonzy’s White, Black And Brown In Mind.

 

 

By Lester Lannon

Selena James had been clueless about life, about how the other half lived, about the horrors of black racial oppression that she had carefully avoided thinking about all though high school before she graduated and then began to attend Boston University (Class of 1964). She had managed to go through Riverdale High about fifty miles away from Boston without thinking of much except who would she have dates with on Saturday nights, whether she would be the head cheerleader for the championship Red Raiders football team come senior year and whether Captain Bill Clemens of that team would sweep her off her feet like he did to opposing defenses, and who would be taking her to the senior prom when that time came. And of course how far to let those dates and that Bill go with her in the back seat of some fogged up car (pretty far although that fact is not germane to the subject here so we will let that pass). Not an atypically high school student for the time although the news of the black civil right struggle and the unfathomable straitjacket of Mister James Crow were being shouted out in every newspaper, and on every radio and television.

Selena, a good student if not a great one, had applied to Boston University, NYU and Georgetown down in Washington (the latter mainly because her best friend Gloria Davis had applied and would wind up going there) in order to get freed from a dreary home life which with curfews, rule this and that, was driving her crazy although not enough to either forgo college which would have been a mistake or to go to State U and work her way through like her  second best friend Alfreda Barnes who faced the same dismal home life. So off to BU in the fall of 1960 Selena went with not much notion of the swirl that was just starting to send thunderbolts through the 1960s campuses.

Naturally Selena lived the chaperoned freshman dorms (or else her parents would have balked at sending her there-such were the concerns of parents in those times-now too from what I hear). What was not natural or fore-ordained was that her roommate would be Josie Dallas from Manhattan. Josie who was miles ahead of Selena socially but also something of a wild card in her concerns about what was going on in the world beyond whose sheets she would wind up under on any given Saturday night party night. Josie worried, along with Selena, about those sheets but from the beginning, from when they had met at Freshman Orientation and found out that they were slated to be roommates (even roommate selection was done by the administration then for freshmen looking to get a mix and unless there was some major differences not reconcilable then the roommates were glued to each other for the duration, for the year). But Josie had also been in high school, been at prestigious Hunter College High, a leader of the student support group providing materials and raising money for the student civil rights workers who were staging sit-ins and other actions down in forlorn Alabama and hellish Mississippi.        

Moreover through a high school boyfriend, Sam Lawrence, met under the arch at Washington Square one summer Sunday afternoon between junior and senior years she had imbibed the folk scene in the Village which was extending out to the colleges in the area. Sam, a sophomore at NYU, and a budding folksinger, had also been an ardent supporter of the black civil rights workers and had settled on a playlist that included covering many protest songs from the young musicians who were gathering in the Village to perfect their craft, work out the kinks, Sam called it. Once Sam and Josie got together Sam would, at first, drag Josie to all the big venues in the city, Geddes Folk City, Village Vanguard, The Jagged Rock, Mike’s across from the Village Vanguard (that’s the way everybody described the place once folk because big enough that not everybody could get into the big clubs and so places like Mike’s drew the overflow). That is when she first heard Blake Sams doing covers of an old black artist, Big Bill Broonzy. One that stuck out was White, Brown and Black with the puzzling line “if you are white you are right, if you are brown stick around, if you are black get back” in the lyrics. Sam explained to Josie that that whole color scheme, right or wrong, described far better than all the sociology books and political treatises the nature of the racial structure in America. The more she thought about that sequence the more she became committed to the civil rights struggle down south.

Once Josie realized after meeting Selena that she was clueless about the big race question tearing through America and about folk music too (she swore that the music that Selena had brought with her to listen to while studying would “rot her brain” and eventually Selena would go from listening to that music, called “bubble gum music” by Josie, when she was not around to shipping the records back home after freshman year) she decided to “tutor” her. That tutoring included a night at the Club Blue coffeehouse in Harvard Square when Blake Sams would be coming up from New York City to play his covers of Big Bill Broonzy (and others like Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and Josh White). That night Selena heard White, Brown and Black for the first time. While Selena did not understand all the intricacies of race relations she, like Josie before her, sensed that there was a deeper meaning in that song than all the stuff she was learning in the Modern Civics class that was required for freshmen.  

Oh yeah, it did not hurt that Blake Sams, the first Negro (the common proper term of usage at the time) she had known personally had asked her out on a date while he was in town. And from the way he asked her and his whole gentlemanly demeanor Selena did not think they would be only talking about race relations. Not at all. She would be able to hold her own now …..  

 

 

The Night Of Gloria’s Night-With One Huddie Leadbetter In Mind

By Lester Lannon

“You know Washington is kind of behind the times, kind of behind Boston, New York, and San Francisco on this folk revival that has been sweeping up college students around the country,” Selena Ryan told her friend, and the woman who was putting her up for the weekend, Gloria Davis as they walked up Wisconsin and 32^nd Street in Georgetown heading to the Pig& Calf Coffeehouse where they were to hear Billy Bottoms doing his covers of the great Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie songs. Truth to tell Gloria did not know who Billy Bottoms was, nor who Lead Belly or Woody Guthrie were either and while she did not consider herself a square when it came to such cultural affairs she was as likely to follow the trends of her college generation (she Georgetown, Class of 1964, and Selena Boston University, same year). The problem was, as Selena had put the matter in a nutshell, that in all of Northeast Washington, meaning college Washington, meaning either Georgetown or George Washington University both located only a stone’s throw from the Pig &Calf  that establishment was the only known coffeehouse which catered to the folk revival in the whole city. And so Gloria’s not knowing the previously mentioned names was not an oddity in itself but reflected the back-water nature of D.C. in this folk revival thing.     

The Pig & Calf moreover had only been established about six month before when Selena’s friend, Michael Greenleaf, who owned Mike’s across the street from the Village Vanguard in New York City decided that D.C. was becoming a center of attraction for college students and that setting up a coffeehouse with all the cheap date perks that had become associated with such establishments had become a financial possibility. Those students were coming into town to support the civil right workers working down further south and increasingly coming down on the Boston-Washington corridor to protest nuclear proliferation and other social issues at the Washington Monument and the White House. Hence Selena’s presence here this night the first chance she had gotten to check the place out since it opened. Bringing Gloria, her best friend from high school and something of a social butterfly at social butterfly Georgetown (except the School of Diplomacy), was meant to get the word out that while rock and roll was still cool a new form of music was coming down the lane. Or really as the playlist that Billy had sent Selena a few days before suggested an old form of music for new listeners was coming down the pike and combined with the political activism might have a long-term effect on the world.    

Selena had been shocked when Gloria didn’t know who Billy was, got a further shock when she didn’t know what a coffeehouse was, at least the latest incarnation of the institution that really went back to seventeenth century England as place for the advanced element to hang out and communicate with each other. Selena had spent about an hour earlier that afternoon explaining the evolving etiquette of the folk scene. Number one was to sip the damn coffee slowly to insure that you could keep your place at the table in places like the Pig& Calf where there was no cover charge. And hence the charm of such places in college towns when guys who didn’t have much money could take a date, a cheap date out and spent a couple of hours or more (depending on how fast that coffee was sipped) for no more that the price of a couple of exotic expressos (which allowed one to sip very slowly since they provided such a rush) and maybe a shared brownie or other pastry. Throw a couple of bucks in the “basket” (which could be a hat or tin cup) for the performer since this was their “pay” and done. Gloria, used to the more cosmopolitan dining out at decent restaurants with dates who had dough enough to spring for such fare had to laugh as Selena in all seriousness described the “etiquette.” But she was determined to be good-natured about the upcoming event and so let Selena rattle on.

As they approached the Pig& Calf Selena could see that Mike was at the door controlling the flow into the coffeehouse although unlike a Saturday night in Boston or New York there was no line going half-way up the street. (That had been how Mike had originally gotten his start across from the Village Vanguard as the folk revival picked up steam and lines formed in that establishment to get in and the overflow would head to Mike’s which was nice and with no cover. In fact in the Village directions to Mike’s place were identified as “Mike’s across the street from the Village Vanguard.”) Mike seated them up close to the small stage in front of the house at a table for two and Selena ordered two expressos for them (an item Gloria had never had before. They decided to hold off on the brownie until they were hungry later.).

A few moments later Billy Bottom came out with guitar in hand and sat down on a stool with a mic set-up in front and began to tune up his guitar to start his first set. Selena had failed to tell Gloria that despite his being a folk-singer and hence wearing the traditional flannel shirt, blue jeans, sandals, and longish hair that he had the sexiest bedroom blue eyes she had seen lately and a nice built too unlike the idea she had formed from what Selena had told her about male folk performers. She was fixated on what he was doing as he started strumming his first song- Woody’s Pretty Boy Floyd and she noticed that he was giving her a couple of peeks too and a wicked smile. That went on through the first set, mainly an alternating mix between Woody and Lead Belly ending with Huddy’s Good Night, Irene.     

After the completion of the first set (the first of three-traditional in one performer coffeehouses as Gloria found out that night) Selena, who had known Billy since her weekend trips to the Village when he played at Mike’s and had had a very brief affair with him before she latched on to Sam Levine, a local Boston poet, introduced them. After that Selena might have well have been on another planet for all the conversation that got directed her way.       

Nothing happened between Gloria and Billy that night but he was invited over to her apartment the next afternoon before Selena headed back to Boston. Ever ready with a song he played Lead Belly’s Bourgeois Blues about how in the old days blacks coming up from down south had found Washington an inhospitable town which made Gloria laugh. Well what else can one say except that Billy and Gloria eventually hit the sheets. Oh yeah, and Gloria took Selena’s place in conducting “classes” in coffeehouse etiquette for her gang of friends at Georgetown. And also while they were waiting in the line that went half-way up the street on Friday and Saturday nights to get into the Pig &Calf.      

The Privatization Of Space Gone Amok- Bradley Cooper’s Aloha

DVD Review

By Sam

Lowell  

Aloha, starring Bradley Cooper, Emily Stone, Bill Murray, 2015   

Now that NASA is “old hat” the privateers have circled in to create their own space odysseys, for good or evil (“old hat” after having done yeoman’s service in giving the world over fifty years of great space adventures and increased our knowledge of the universe I don’t know how many-fold). That “old hat” designation the result of in real life the lack of serious desire by Congress to keep funding governmental efforts. Enter the privateer off-hand billionaires looking for a hobby (billionaire plus being the necessary minimum to even get a look-see at a space project which entails expensive high-tech research and resources). That shift from governmental support to private use is what drives this film under review, Aloha.    

Of course, private or public, when you talk about exploring or exploiting space you need scads of high-tech savvy guys and gals to run the operation-and smooth the rails. That is where military contractor Brian Gilcrest, played by Bradley Cooper, comes in. He is the agent for our generic billionaire, played by Bill Murray, who is looking via a private-military combine to launch a crackerjack satellite in Hawaii. Gilcrest is to smooth the rails among the various indigenous leaders on Hawaii who are looking for a pay-off for disturbing their land and their heritage. Of course with a joint enterprise the military needs to provide an escort and does so in the person of Captain Allison Ng, played by super-photogenic Emily Stone.

In the end, actually maybe the beginning as well, this is really a romantic comedy about how Gilcrest and the Captain finally get under the sheets after playing cat and mouse (meaning giving each other endless meaningful glances). There are a number of abstruse side issues like Brian’s relationship with an Air Force wife ex-girlfriend and with the paternity of her oldest daughter (Brian’s in the end), the role of nefarious governmental agents in setting up the billionaires’ nefarious plans and the evil designs of that standard brand billionaire who wants to rule the world via the control of space. Ho-hum. The only not ho-hum is that dance between Brian and Allison but that isn’t worth the price of admission here. Thin gruel indeed with talents like Cooper, Stone and the mad monk Bill Murray.      

In Boston-The Great Music Venue Johnny D’s Is No More 

 

Johnny D’s Is No More

Click on link below to link to a WBUR tribute to Johnny D’s

 http://radioboston.wbur.org/2016/03/11/johnny-ds-jeff-buckley

Those of who frequented Johnny D’s in Somerville’s Davis Square section will miss the quirky vibes of the place from its inception as an outlier of country in the urban oasis back in the day when that genre had its minute in the Boston area before fading from more hubris than the legendary country singer Sleepy La Beef could shake a stick at. Many jazz aficionados got juiced up on jazz there during the brunches. Many more blues aficionados got strung out with the likes of Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson to Taj Mahal to James Montgomery (a long-time hanger-outer at the establishment). More importantly all the later genre of new  music which drew in the younger crowds (and did not draw me and mine) got their big first starts, or first big showcases, there. Adieu Johnny D’s.    

In Search Of Sam Spade-Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town-A Book Review

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Dashiell Hammett: Nightmare Town, edited by Kirby McCauley, Martin Greenberg, and Ed Gorman, 1999    

 

In an earlier review of some of Dashiell Hammett’s less familiar work to be mentioned below I noted that there was no question most crime detection writers, readers too, since the 1920s or so owe, whether they acknowledge the fact or not, a huge debt of gratitude to pioneer hard-boiled private detective crime detection writer Dashiell Hammett (Raymond Chandler and a few other associated with the Black Mask magazine too but let’s stick with Hammett here since we are reviewing a book about him and his early work). Owe it as well whether they followed his model or not (and most have done so one way or another whether creating detective books or creating for the screen detectives). His model of detectives who unlike previous models were made of ordinary clay, did their detection, their job as a business, as a livelihood rather than as an amateur sport while clipping stocks and bonds coupons, got in trouble with the public cops as much as work with them (or picked up their leavings when they dumped the case in the cold files), had a work-a-day code of conduct which was more or less followed, chased after a few windmills, and made almost every mistake in the book pursuing that blind-folded lady with the slightly- tipped scales. Grabbed a few dames, you know frails, in the a bargain.

In many ways Sam Spade, the private eye extraordinaire of The Maltese Falcon, who had a trial run in this compilation under review, Nightmare Town, in three short stories is the epitome of that model which Hammett developed. Working out of a fly-by-night no front office in Frisco town with his soon to be late partner Miles Archer Sam got mixed up in plenty of drama despite his low-key workaday manner. (Archer a partner that he hated, hated so much he had Archer’s name taken off the office door right after his murder and partner whose wife, to his subsequent regret, he was playing around with). Naturally when a dame, not Archer’s wife but a serious piece of work, entered into the picture there are bound to be problems, especially if she is a femme fatale like Brigid. But Sam bought the ticket, took the ride. Played his hand very close to the vest when the bodies started piling up and all led to the pursuit of some stupid bird, some stuff that dreams were made of.

But here is where Hammett broke the new ground. Sam was something of a windmill chaser, needed to see some justice for old Miles who fell in the line of duty when all was said and done. Worked that moral code closely too, that code that said if you are doing private detection as a business then you had better not be addled by some lying skirt and her confederates if only because leaving something un-avenged is bad for business, bad for the profession. Here’s the beautiful part though once he tagged Brigid as the body-counter, once he figured that playing along with her would be a lifetime of looking over his shoulder. He let her take the tumble, take the big step off since she tried to play him for a sap. Made the cops look silly too when they tried to frame him and he gave them the case all tied up in a bow without their help. Yeah, Sam had all the angles covered.    

 

Creating fictional detectives (or any characters that will draw an interest from the reading or film public) that break the mold did not come out of thin air but was a process started from Hammett’s first writings in the early 1920s when he got serious about writing stories as a profession (after being a number of things including soldier in World War I and a Pinkerton private detective himself. I recently reviewed a book, Dashiell Hammett: Lost Stories, that detailed through some long forgotten early stories (as of 2005) the history of those early efforts, how they acted as a catalyst to the later more famous work like those produced here and in the process provided a very impressive chronology of their literary history (and the ups and downs of Hammett getting his work published as well).               

 Most Hammett aficionados know that his reputation rests mainly on The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, three other novels, the Continental Op series and a bunch of detective stories in the famous Black Mask magazine and that output occurred in a relatively short span from the early 1920s to about the early 1940s and then he sort of fell off the earth as far as his new literary production went (he died in 1961). The stories in this compilation represent a further maturation of his work and of his characters, particular Spade and the Thin Man. In that earlier review the editor (Vince Emery) created charts throughout the book which featured what he called Hammett-isms, literary devices, mannerisms, commonly used expressions and the like Hammett used which showed something I had suspected is true of most writers who have published more than a couple of works-they stand by, one may say fall in love with, some tried and try concepts throughout their careers. These stories confirm a lot of those classic Hammett-isms noted by Emery.  

It is interesting to see even in these later stories how Hammett was writing about ordinary people for ordinary people. Making his detectives working stuffs like in the real world. Creating believable situations, moral and professional, that real detectives might confront (with a little literary license of course to spice up the drama). And created characters who placed him in the pantheon of American literature in the twentieth century. In the Lost Stories review I asked the generic question that any more specialized work begs-Do you need to this book?  There I said no. You needed to read the five major novels first and you had better make The Maltese Falcon the first one if you want to know what it was like to be present at the creation of the hard-boiled private detective, know what it was like when men and women wrote such works for keeps. Then when you became a Hammett aficionado grab that book. That is even truer here with Nightmare Town.