A Review: The TV Documentary, Night Will Fall
January 28, 2015
A Review: The TV Documentary
Night Will Fall
by
R.E. Prindle
The Plan
The Dachau Blues
Dachau blues, those poor jews
Dachau blues, those poor jews
Dachau, Dachau blues
Down in Dachau blues
Still cryin’ ‘bout the burnin’
Back in world war two’s
Don Van Vliet- Captain Beefheart
And His Magic Band
The time is over for the hysteria of the discovery of the Nazi death camps in the aftermath of WWII. As shocking as their discovery was, seventy years after we have had time to reflect and come to a sounder understanding. The death camps were only one of a whole series of astounding catastrophes post 1917. Thus the import of the Army films exhibited under the title Night Must Fall last night (1/26/15) had more of a historical relevance than the horrific shock value of seventy years past. You can only milk the cow until it’s dry.
Yes, the slaughter of the Jews was horrific but no more horrific than the slaughter of the German people by the allies in the closing days of the war and its aftermath. Remember the Germans were supposed to be the children of darkness while the Western allies and the Holy Soviets were supposed to be the children of light. We were not supposed to do things like that. We can see clearly now.
Not only were the Soviets criminally at fault but the Western allies equally so. France has nothing to be proud of while Jewish and American reprisals were no less reprehensible. Let us be sensible.
If there were only one book to read concerning the horrors the German population had to endure at the hands of the ‘humane’ allies that book would be Hellstorm: The Death Of Nazi Germany, 1944-47, Aberdeen Books, 2010.
For those who enjoy accounts of sadism as well as for those of us who would know to better understand: Hellstorm, p. 4-5.
Thus it was, that on the night of October 26, as Nemmersdorf and other communities nearest the front slept in imagined security, the unthinkable occurred. After punching a hole through the German lines, the Red Army suddenly burst into the Reich. Within hours, the Soviets widened the gap and swarmed over the countryside. After several days of desperate fighting the Wehrmacht regrouped, launched a furious counterattack, then eventually drove the [Soviets] back across the border. What German troops found upon reclaiming the lost ground, however, was staggering.
“[T]hey tortured civilians in many villages…’ reported one German officer, “nailed some on barn doors and shot many others.” Along the road “treks” of fleeing refugees had been overtaken by the communists, the people pulled from their carts, then raped and murdered on the spot. It was at Nemmersdorf, though, where stunned soldiers first viewed hell on earth. Recorded a physician with the army, Lt. Heinrich Amberger: On the road through Nemmersdorf, over the bridge…I saw where a whole trek of refugees had been rolled over by [Soviet] tanks; not only the wagons and teams, but also a goodly number of civilians, mostly women and children…[T]hey had been squashed flat by the tanks. At the edge of the road and in the farm yards lay quantities of corpses of civilians who evidently had been murdered systematically.”
Added another horrified witness:
In the farmyard further down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position. Beyond it stood a barn and to each of the two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two woman, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead, all murdered in a bestial manner, except only a few who had bullet holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in.
Every female including girls as young as eight, had been raped.”
And that’s only page 4, it goes on for another three hundred pages. Well, you might say, the German had it coming; the Nazis employed slave labor etc., etc. etc.
Europe After Proposed Scrubbing Of Germany Per Kaufman
This may be true but then I suppose one has heard of the Soviet gulags where millions and millions, whole nations, were worked to death under the most miserable conditions, supervised by Jewish commandants and guards. But, perhaps they were only following orders. There is no Nazi atrocity that could not have been learned from the Soviet Union from 1917 to the end of the war. Millions were murdered in the years immediately following the Soviet takeover in 1917 in the Soviet Union, Hungary and even Germany. Had the Revolution succeeded in Central Europe as it had in Eastern Europe tens of millions more would have been slaughtered and that largely at the hands of the Jews.
It should always be remembered that Weimar Germany was a battlefield between the Judaeo-Communists and the various German volkist parties that coalesced into the NSDAP. The Stormtroopers fought Judaeo-Communists in the streets for over a decade before the Nazis assumed control of the government in 1933 and suppressed the Reds. The invasion of the Soviet Union was merely a continuance of that war.
Nor did the Jewish war against the Germans end in 1933, it had just begun. The international Jews outside Germany declared war on Germany. This war was carried on most effectively from the United States of the Roosevelt dictatorship; he was given war powers on assuming office.
The Jews accused the Germans as being savage beasts? But how innocent were the Jews? Ans. They weren’t.
Jewish atrocities in Russia, Hungary, Germany and other places after 1917 to, say, 1921 have all been suppressed. If holocaust deniers are supposed to be bad they are nothing to Jewish deniers of their atrocities. I have no doubt that the books concerning the horrible atrocities committed by Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly have been removed from the Library of Congress. One sometimes reads veiled references to the crimes against humanity (a big phrase thirty or forty years ago) but the grimness of that horrible period would dwarf anything that happened at Dachau. Even today the Jews are calling for the genocide of the entire Aryan race.
In Russia Jewish abattoirs were busy all day long as Russians were pushed in one door hacked to pieces and the gore shoved off that gruesome assembly line out the door at the other end. Russians were crucified in one giant pogrom on endless miles of telegraph poles, the blackened skin of their hands flapping in the breeze because the skin had been loosed by chemicals.
No, no, you won’t find it easy to read about their atrocities but some few books are out there if you look hard enough. Of course, the Jews say that those are all lies. Yes, the Nazi atrocities did occur but in many ways they were payback, maybe even in emulation of what had gone before.
As indicated, the Jews were at war with the Germans all through the Weimar years finally declaring war in 1933 when under Roosevelt’s aegis they flowed back into power in DC. Brandeis, Frankfurter, Baruch, Untermyer and the rest. They ran Roosevelt. They demanded and did get sanctions against Germany. Roosevelt famously called for quarantining the aggressors. He just neglected to identify the true aggressors.
Congress frantically tried to hamstring Roosevelt and the Jews by passing very strict neutrality legislation. Roosevelt just ignored it, inventing excuses for his aggressions.
Listen to the German indignation at FDR. That’s not just balderdash. They were constantly provoked from DC. Whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not the Germans were under constant assault from 1917 to the end of 1945. It wasn’t just the Nazis, the Jews led a chorus of hate against not only the Nazis but the whole German people, both before and after the war.
In Part IV of my review of Wendell Wilkie’s One World, Chumps Playing Stud, I begin assembling the various steps of Jewish propaganda during the thirties and forties as they jockeyed for a position for the control of Roosevelt and through him the United States while whipping up German hatred for the ‘just’ war. FDR was their dupe.
A key document in their Germanophobia was a book, pamphlet really, issued under the name of Theodore Nathan Kaufman entitled ‘Germany Must Perish!’ Kaufman was a petty criminal from Newark, New Jersey. Newark- New-Ark- was a leading Jewish colony at the time fully insulated from the United States. There is no way Kaufman could have written Germany Must Perish. The scope and range of knowledge would have been quite beyond his limited education.
Just as the composition of Undercover in 1943 supposedly written by an Armenian immigrant Arthur Derounian and assigned to a corporate name, John Roy Carlson, Germany Must Perish must have been written by AJC writers and sent up as a trial balloon to see how Americans would react to the idea of the extermination of all Germans.
The book, or pamphlet, it is only forty pages, called for the eradication of Germany from the map and the genocide of all Germans though sterilization so that the entire German nation would disappear from the earth forever within one generation. Something like the extermination the Amalekites of old. Old habits die hard.
That the ideas were being bruited around in Jewish councils is evident from post-war efforts to implement the plan by the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. Between the Soviet atrocities committed by Russians and Jews in the East and Allied criminality in the West also centered around Jewish wishes Germans were fortunate to survive. As I indicated the crimes are fully documented in Goodrich’s book Hellstorm. The hellstorm was just as horrible as the so-called holocaust if not moreso.
Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish, now denigrated as the work of an eccentric with no effect is a complete misrepresentation of the facts. Germany Must Perish received national exposure via Time Magazine and numerous city newspapers.
German intelligence picked up on the book and a reply was issued by Joseph Goebbels agency titled The War Goal Of World Plutocracy. Note the enemy identified. Wolfgang Diewerge to whom Plutocracy is attributed says this:
At almost the same time that the two chief warmongers Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting on the president’s luxury yacht “Potomac”, singing pious songs and praying for the victory of Bolshevism, leading personages in the United States and England received a small long package that contained a miniature black coffin.
Upon opening it, they found a card telling them: “Read the pamphlet ‘Germany Must Perish!’”
The day after this announcement they received a 104-page booklet with a red cover, with “Germany Must Perish!” in gold lettering.
The coffin might be interpreted as a warning to the recipient while the red cover gives away the political position of the sender. So this was a very serious campaign by master propagandists not a nitwit criminal like Kaufman. The Jews had not a few very capable propagandists including the Grand Master of Propagandists the recently deceased Sigmund Freud, his nephew Edward Bernays, Albert Lasker, Gustavus Myers, and others.
The Kaufman campaign began in 1941 when the US was not at war with anyone and supposedly neutral. Did the Germans sit up and take notice? Why shouldn’t they? As Goebbels said, If Germans must die then Jews must die. It became of a question of who would act first. The Germans did.
If they were to be exterminated then they would exterminate the exterminators. How smart was it of the Jews to provoke the Germans? Yes, the scenes in Night Must Fall were horrendous but no less so than the Soviet Jewish abattoirs in Russia in the wake of 1917. No less so than the post-war crimes planned by international Jewry at war’s end. No less so than the current Jewish campaign for the genocide of Whiteness.
Henry Morgenthau was rabid and actually tried to implement the Kaufman plan. Power shifted to the Jews after the Nazi defeat. Fortunately Roosevelt died just after being elected to his fourth term. Harry Truman, his successor was compelled to replace the rabid Morgenthau in 1946 in order to get some sanity into postwar plans.
While we viewers were warned to be prepared for outrageous gruesomeness in this propaganda piece, ‘suppressed’ for seventy years, the film was quite mild. Of course over the last seventy years we have been conditioned to much worse. Much more horrific was the 1958 exposure when the Jews commandeered all three networks to show a really horrible exposure of Auschwitz. As the time slot was appropriated on all three networks there was no escaping it other than turning off the TV which few did. Yes, I, we, were shown what it was unnecessary for us to see. I don’t know about others but I was hardened by the film resenting the people who gave me no escape, the intellectual Jewish Nazis.
As if that were not horrible enough a stream of movies was released including 1964’s holocaust porn flick The Pawnbroker. That foul movie drove the ice pick deeper into our skulls. Starring Rod Steiger in a great if offensive performance this slimy film was meant to sicken and crush our resistance and nearly did me in. My resentment deepened while it elicited no sympathy for the Jews in me. I found their obsession evil. My resentment only grew.
Then the incredible sadistic brutality of movies since then propagated by these same Jews has succeeded in desensitizing one for whatever horrors were intended to be shown last night. Actually it wasn’t clear what the movie intended to show. Mostly filmed in Bergen-Belsen all that was shown was massive starvation. Starving people to death is a slow process. Actually American and German soldiers were miraculously thin themselves indicating that no one was eating too well while being very active and under great stress. Even in their great coats the Germans had flat stomachs and prominent waists. Not round at all. Apparently food was scarce.
Many of the scenes seemed staged so a certain sense of falseness crept in, it quite obviously was intended as a propaganda piece. The movie seemed more to celebrate the introduction of hand held movie technology more than anything else. One long scene was a movie of a cameraman filming whatever. Originally filmed in black and white it was breathlessly announced that color film came later.
Fairly tame stuff for myself having been indoctrinated with the real/reel thing all my life. At this point, who really cares? I’m sated.
Standard Oil And The Fate Of America
January 15, 2015
America Made A Wrong Turn
by
R. E. Prindle
A Summary
John D. Rockefeller
Contrary to over a hundred years of American history writing industrialists were the innovators while socialists, Communists and Progressives were the reactionaries unable to adjust to innovation. It is time to set the record straight. It was a very serious error when the reactionary agents forced the breakup of the Standard Oil Co. and the trusts. Contrary to the fearful notions of men like Louis Brandeis and Woodrow Wilson small companies are not more efficient than big companies. It is quite the opposite as John D. Rockefeller proved when he brought order out of the chaos of the emerging oil industry. Unfortunately the reactionary ideal of smallness was to forestall the future and cripple America. A second major error perpetrated by historians over the same last hundred years or so is the notion that innovators who became wealthy impoverished the majority by ‘owning’ the wealth. Using that notion as a starting point let us briefly review the progress of the nineteenth century concentrating on the US. The distance between the founding of the US in 1793 and the nineteenth century seven years later is immense. The US was founded at the very tail end of the post-medieval world. Between 1793 and 1800 a whole new psychological outlook came into existence, a change in scale. The world was seen with completely new eyes as the Aryan intellect began the remarkable unfolding shouldering the post-medieval world aside.
Andrew Carnegie
While in Europe there were two thousand years or more of continuity by 1800 the US was a virtual tabula rasa, a new beginning. Still, the US citizen moved to the ancient rhythms until very close to the Civil War. Scientific developments had been accruing in Europe and England for a couple hundred years and as the nineteenth century advanced the unfolding of the Aryan intellect virtually exploded. Discoveries in physics and chemistry were enormous resulting in steam, electricity, photography and at the end of the century a host of related discoveries that made the alchemists look like pikers. Reality had exceeded magic with much more to come. Not least of these was the invention of the railroad that would be the engine that drove industry in the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War numerous shortlines led from one city to the next but they were small easily comprehended operations that the average person’s mind could encompass while no truly large fortunes came into existence. To be a millionaire was nearly miraculous. There was ferment and excitement but the connection to the medieval mentality was not yet broken. However, as though a wizard had waved a magic wand, a new world began to form in the wake of the Civil War. It was a very rapid transformation from the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow to the fabulous steel mills turning out hundreds of thousands of steel rails to carry the giant iron locomotives hauling a half mile of fully laden rolling stock of Carnegie. Suddenly there were great multi-millionaires, tens and even a couple hundred millions of dollars. It boggled the post-medieval imagination. Seeing only the millions the awed populace asked where those millions had come from. They hadn’t been there before. The only conclusion those overawed brains could come to was as there was only so much money in the world the rich had stolen it from the masses leaving them poor. This was a very serious error made more dangerous by the constant reporting that, say, five percent of the population owned seventy-five of the country leaving only twenty-five percent to be divided among the impoverished ninety-five percent. The idea of it rocked their senses. Soon they feared the ninety-five percent would be standing naked without two nickels to rub together.
Henry Ford
Most of those very rich people had made their fortunes in railroads. To take then the first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific/Central Pacific as an example: the UP/CP was an enormous undertaking uniting the three thousand miles between the East and West coasts. Financing such an enormous undertaking was the problem. The whole idea of the stock company was new. There were no established rules, indeed, really, no one knew what they were doing. It was all done on the fly. Even the New York Stock Exchange was in its infancy, hence all the wild stories about Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk and Daniel Drew. The period was probably the loosest the world had ever seen or could imagine. Laissez faire in spades until the industrialists like Carnegie, Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan began to impose order. So, before the UP/CP let us assume that the net worth of the US was X dollars in 1865. In 1869 with the completion of the two lines adding enormous value to the country what was the new value? X2? X3, X4, X5 or maybe X6? The wealth to be divided had been increased exponentially. The steel industry had gone from the village blacksmith to the enormous rolling mills of Carnegie steel. Steel wheels had to be made, hundreds of miles of rolling stock. Because the UP/CP went where only open vistas had existed the land was opened to settlement, acreage was available to all, working stiffs or not. Where there had been no millionaires there were thousands of millionaires. There were men with twenty or thirty million who had been penniless ten years earlier. While unskilled labor did less well than skilled labor or the white collar caste the US was still famed for paying the highest wages in the world. Why do you think they came, for religious freedom? No, no, it was the money. This was made possible by the development of the railroads and industry. One must understand the colossal reorganization of society that entailed. A mere forty-five years earlier Lewis and Clark had taken years to slog across the continent and back risking their lives in the process. By 1870 one could ride in comfort from NYC to San Francisco in a few days. This was a transformation of the way life was lived. While White society was sophisticated compared to that of the stoneage Indian through whose territory the roads were driven White society was still primitive compared to today. Financial institutions and knowledge of finance were in a raw state. True, the US government contributed hugely including millions of millions of acres of free land to the roadbuilders yet the railroads couldn’t have been built any other way. The financing had to come from somewhere. As there was no adequate financial system financing had to be done on the run. That is the money followed the added value not preceding it. Something, as it were, had to have been created from nothing. Looked at another way, twenty years after the gold rush with a huge Civil War intervening, the South devastated and under martial law, the Bay Area had been populated and the job was done. The University of California was created in Berkeley, and even Berkeley had been created, while Stanford was in the works. These were sensational achievements. After all, the Mexicans in their hundreds of years had built only a few Missions. While chronic fault finders such as the Jewish writer Gustavus Myers blackened the reputations of the creators and belittled their achievements the builders truly built well. And out of the building the result was unparalleled prosperity and well being for the majority if not for the less qualified few. The next question was the nature of bigness.
2.
John Henry he said to his captain
Now, a man ain’t nothin’ but a man,
But before I let that steam drill drive me down
I’ll die with this hammer in my hand.
Lord, lord
Die with my hammer in my hand.
Trad.
Prior to the Civil War all was on a small scale. Longfellow could celebrate the village smithy under his chestnut tree and it’s a homely and pleasant image. Life was on a very human level unlike the life bigness would create that would require serious reevaluation of reality by the people. Carnegie steel mills with their regimented specialized work forces were a far cry from Longfellow’s blacksmith. In point of fact no blacksmith could compete with a rolling mill. The difference was magnificently told in the story of John Henry the steel driving man of song. As mighty as John Henry was he was no competition with a steam drill. He died of a burst heart with his hammer in his hand. Undoubtedly he was buried with his hammer beside him. Nothing pictures the industrial change so well. With bigness went organization such as was never seen before and consolidation that overawed the people in its bigness. The rather simple minded jurist Louis Brandeis who would be a major influence in the US government from Wilson through Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-bigness critic preaching the efficiency of smallness. Brandeis may or may not have been a wizard lawyer but he knew nothing of business or manufacturing.
Franklin and Eleanor
It would seem that all America trembled before the sight of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the most efficient business structure the world had ever seen. He created the model for what was to follow. The contest between what had been and what was was too great an adjustment for the human mind on such short notice. Remember this was happening just as the concept of evolution and the onset of modern psychology were also disturbing the human mind in a very profound way. Within a decade or so the whole of reality was turned upside down or upside right depending on how you look at it. This terrified those unable to make the leap from the horse and buggy mentality to that of the internal combustion engine. The ancient and the modern required two different mindsets. The transition has not yet been made by the majority. For instance, over half of the US population still… still rejects the concept of evolution. The casual imprecision of the horse and buggy mind set within its wide parameters of precision was replaced almost overnight with the need for precision with little or no tolerance for personal idiosyncrasies. Thus when Henry Ford introduced the precision assembly line utilizing the Taylor scientific measurement of motion among its system repeated for as long as an item came down the assembly line at a measured speed it was really too much for the sloppy horse and buggy mentality. The workers didn’t understand why their minds rebelled but their reaction was one of rejection. They were reactionaries as were those of the Wilson-Brandeis school who reacted negatively to the mere thought of bigness. In the coming global economy, which could be seen on the horizon, in which bigness was absolutely necessary, combinations or trusts as they were called were the wave of the future. While Wilson and Brandeis envisioned a country of locally sized or regionally sized at best circumstances called for nationally sized combinations preparatory to international or global organizations.
J.P. Morgan
The industrialists led by J.P. Morgan were preparing for just that development. In other words Rockefeller was anticipating twenty-first century competitive circumstances. Indeed Ford Motors was a global corporation before globalism entered popular parlance. Bigness should have been encouraged rather than inhibited. The muckraking journalists propagandized the breaking up of Standard Oil, that is reducing it to smaller units and that was a very wrong turning. The ideal of smallness prevented the US from assuming its potential role so cherished by the reactionary Liberals as the savior of the world, the manifest destiny that George Bush tried to impose on the world by force. America made a wrong turn as the century passed. The bigness should have been understood and encouraged but perhaps the transition was so sharp that the American mind or at least the reactionary Progressive mind was paralyzed by fear at the sight of Leviathan or the Titanic while the really progressive minds of the Rockefeller type were caught up in a backlash they didn’t know how to resist. Yes, I know that the new truly revolutionary economic order had its faults but then model 1.0 to use computer terms is always less perfect than subsequent models. The bugs have to be worked out. In automobile terms one cannot expect Ford’s Model T, the best selling car of the era to compare to twenty-first century models of any make from the least to the most expensive. Things have to evolve.
3.
Just as technology went from the horse and buggy state to assembly line production so the financial system was passing from a very primitive state through several changes of scale to a more contemporary stage. Forms had to be created to deal with the needs of each successive increase of scale. Before the Civil War the stock market consisted of a few dozen equities while the bond market was non-existent except for a few government issues. The number of shares in equities were not in the millions or billions as today. More of the order of a few tens of thousands, the excesses of cornering a stock or crashing it by short selling, price manipulation, was not prohibitively expensive so that in a laissez faire unregulated market what could be done was done. But as the scale of transactions increased so new rules had to be made with each increase in scale. When what could have been done could no longer be done, well, it wasn’t. As there was no existing plan of action, no sound economic theory, management of the economy had to be done on the fly. There were capable men to step in and bring order out of chaos. The leader who emerged was the now much reviled J.P. Morgan. Like Rockefeller and Ford, Morgan was a great man. At the time the economy and the government were two separate entities, interlocked but not merged. Morgan did a good job. Since the merger of the government and the economy nothing has improved, it has gotten worse. Under Morgan the national debt was non-existent while today the trillions of debt that government merged with the economy has created is pure absurdity. Anyone who thinks one penny of that debt will be returned is an amusing fantasist. As the scale of business increased so necessarily did the amount of currency in circulation. Thus when the Republic was founded money was scarce to non-existent, people at the most were land rich. There were no millionaires. With each successive change in scale more millionaires were created with, for the time a novelty, fortunes of two hundred million having come into existence. In today’s values that would represent billions, still fortunes such as Carlos Slim’s and Bill Gates mounting into the tens of billions are greater. The people having become accustomed to great fortunes are no long irate. Since the novelty of huge fortunes has passed the outcry against these accumulations is much muted. There an now hundreds of billionaires and nearly countless thousands of millionaires. When John Roskab in the twenties said that everyone should be rich his prophecy has been nearly realized. But, then, the thought of that much wealth in the hands of the few made grown men and women shiver. The idiotic response of the time was to take the money away from them; that is gang up on them under government auspices and steal it from them through taxation. This was done under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the thirties and forties when tax rates shot up to the 90% range. Further, business was saddled with an ‘excess’ profits tax. Reaction is one thing but this was total criminal insanity while undermining the prosperity of the masses. Every time the scale of business bumped up the amount of money required to finance the new growth increased geometrically. If companies were not allowed to generate the increased need internally then it would have to come from the government or be borrowed from banks. In the move to destroy the old Morgan order, the new socialist order created the Federal Reserve to do what Morgan had done. Federal Reserve officers are appointed not made by rising to the top through competition. Hence under Morgan there was no national debt while today it is laughable to even talk of the debt. The pressure is still against bigness and wealth creation. Hence America has been castrated in the now newly created global economy. America cannot now be the leader. The jump in scale is now enormous while the amount of capital to bring the global economy into existence is totally lacking. The global economy is now in the same state as when the necessity to build the transcontinental UP/CP railroad was made but the means of financing it were virtually non-existent. Then the US gave the railroad men millions of acres to open up settlement of virgin lands allowing a sort of boot strap operation; today the only recourse is to print money creating an even greater debt than can never be repaid. It’s like, why even joke about it? Meanwhile from the transition from the Morgans to the Federal Reserve the US government is in such an insolvent position that it cannot even collect enough taxes to meet immediate expenses. Hence it is in the position of increasing the national debt by more trillions each year. Thus it was a sorry day for posterity when our forefathers were overwhelmed by the face of success and began the retreat to failure. The US gave up its preeminent role in the world even as it achieved it. The moral is, think big and rich not small and poor.
The Charlie Hebdo Moslem Outrage
January 8, 2015
The Charlie Hebdo Moslem Outrage
by
R.E. Prindle
As we are all aware Moslem bigots murdered the staff of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. There are French and there are Jews and there are Moslems. Speaking for his Jewish community, as he says, Laurent-David Samama in the above Jewish Daily Forward article makes some inexplicable comments demonstrating a cognitive disconnect on the Jewish relation to the crime at the very least:
Like all French citizens, my particular community- the French community- is reeling from the news. Concerned as we have been for years about the spiraling communal tensions, the anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and the steadily mounting anti-Muslim sentiment, this hits an especially raw nerve.
——–
The majority [of Jews] is now increasingly attracted by radical speeches offering solutions to the problem of French anti-Semitism
Mr. Samama is apparently not living on this planet or he is incapable of evaluating the situation. What problem, one might ask, is there concerning French anti-Semitism. There is no problem among the French concerning anti-Semitism as defined by the Jews. There is only the hatred of Jews instilled in Moslems by Jewish atrocities in Palestine. There are no French Jews; there are only Jews living in France.
As such it they who have created the problem of ‘French anti-Semitism’ by promoting Muslim immigration in France, Europe and the Americas.
The incredibly obtuse statement- anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and mounting anti-Muslim sentiment- is such an oxymoron as to stun the objective intellect. Anti-Semitic attacks in France are made exclusively by Moslems, no French are involved. That war is exclusively between Jews and Moslems. No French involved. If the Jews cannot be reached in Palestine then Moslems will attack them wherever they are vulnerable. So Jews and Moslems- it is an intra-Semitic problem, not Europe and the Americas.
As to the war between the Moslems and the French only one mental system can survive, the Scientific, or secular in Mr. Samama’s language, or the Moslem religious bigotry which is no different than Jewish religious bigotry and both are deadly to the West.
The hypocrisy of Mr. Samama’s comment “Leaders and religious representatives of [the Jewish community in France] are calling for peace and unity at a time when France is divided over the question of Islam.” is unbelievable.
Oh, please. Having created the ‘disunity’ the wise benevolent Jews are calling on ‘divided’ France to come together under their direction. We know that song and dance.
France is not divided over the Moslem ‘question.’ The Moslems and France are at war as the Charlie Hebdo murders clearly indicate. It is the Moslem way or the highway. Perhaps it would be better if all Jews did leave France, Aliyah sounds good to us, rather than complicate and becloud issue.
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Ben-Day Dots
December 21, 2014
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Ben-Day Dots
by
R.E. Prindle
Winsor McCay
Over the years I have come to wonder why Tarzan was such an immediate success. The premiss on the face of it is absurd. While fascinating it requires such a huge suspension of disbelief as to be staggering. Perhaps that is why such a significant percentage of his contemporary readers were revolted by ERB’s work. He had to put up with a tremendous amount of abuse although his acceptance was greater than his rejection. Something had to prepare the way for that acceptance nevertheless.
Little Nemo
The discovery of the unconscious that became prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century certainly opened the way for the strange and bizarre. It is not a coincidence that spiritualism and the paranormal became prominent at that time. Along with those came the rise of science fiction and fantasy. Tarzan is fantasy fiction while the Mars series of Burroughs is fantasy sci-fi.
Monsters like Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde established themselves in the popular imagination. Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda and the Graustark knock off by George Barr McCutcheon entranced ERB to the point of distraction. Jules Verne, of course, and the Oz stories of L. Frank Baum. When it came to the Mars stories ERB was merely the best exemplar of what by 1911 was an established genre.
Little Nemo
The public mind was being softened to accept not only the incredible but the impossible.
Printing improvements made both half tone and color illustration less costly and easier to produce. Is it any wonder that ERB’s period is one of astonishing illustrators. Remember that ERB tried to be a cartoonist himself before he took up writing. His goal was judging from his drawings to be a political cartoonist.
Thus one can only presume he followed book illustrators avidly. Arthur Rackham was knocking them dead while Denslow’s and John R. Neill’s Oz illustrations must have wowed the envious Burroughs. N.C. Wyeth must have blown his mind.
More importantly than the book illustrators though were the emergent four color Sunday Funnies of the newspapers in 1895. They were so exotic and strange even in my childhood but at the time they must have seemed incredible. Of course I had no idea what made them seem exotic. In fact, I had never heard of Ben-Day dots until the fabulous personality posters of the Sixties exploited them.
According to Wikipedia on the subject:
The Ben-Day printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., is a technique dating from 1879. Depending on the effect, color and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping. Magenta dots, for example, are widely spaced to create pink. Pulp comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used Ben-Day dots in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as green, purple, orange and flesh tones.
The Sunday Funnies thus must have had an astonishing effect on contemporary minds. As the comics Bill Hillman has reproduced on his site, ERBzine, indicate ERB was an avid follower of the genre. His earth borer used by David Innes in the Pellucidar series was most likely cadged from a comic strip.
Seeking relief from those long weary job hunting days of the first decade ERB sought relief by hanging around the Chicago Public Library. He was a card carrying member too. Who knows what volumes he borrowed or browsed through on the spot. The Library would have had its racks of the country’s newspapers on display including those of NYC. Thus ERB would have been familiar with the comic strips of Winsor McCay, The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. Himself an avid dreamer, very familiar with nightmares, ERB must have relished McCay’s work.
Little Nemo
As it so happens McCay’s two most famous strips have a prominent place in the history of comics. In fact, just recently the Taschen Publishers issued a one volume complete collection in four color Ben-Day dots of the Little Nemo strip. At a size of 20 x 14 the strips are magnificently displayed. The accompanying 150 page text by Alexander Braun is a wonderful history of the period pointing out many developments that undoubtedly influenced ERB forming a background to his writing. Braun has a touch of genius too. Many strips of the The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend are included in the ancillary volume, some full page.
The Rarebit Fiend strip began a little earlier than the Little Nemo strip of 1905. Thus both strips were running during 1905-09, the period of ERB’s deepest despondency. I will show how both strips are reflected in ERB’s writing.
To take the Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend first. Rarebit refers to the culinary dish Welsh Rarebit frequently referred to as Welsh Rabbit. The dish is simply melted cheese on bread although it can be a fondue. In the strip the dreamer overeats before bedtime producing a nightmare. The dreamers are all different while some of the nightmares are quite astonishing.
Burroughs’ emulation appears in Jungle Tales Of Tarzan in the story Tarzan’s first nightmare in which Tarzan overeats having the subsequent nightmare. My first reaction to the story was that Burroughs had been reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. While he may have been I think McCay’s strip was a stronger or more immediate influence.
The Little Nemo in Slumberland influence appears in ERB’s first serious effort, Minidoka, put in a drawer and not published until 1998 by Dark Horse Comics.
The consensus seems to be that Burroughs wrote this short work c. 1905. The reasoning seems to be that because Burroughs wrote the story on stationery from this period that that proves it was written at that date. However ERB was an inveterate collector, read packrat, until he says he overcame the disease in the early twenties. So he says. So ERB was reluctant to throw anything away. The stationery proves nothing.
I have maintained that ERB wrote Minidoka c. 1908-09 based on internal evidence. We can now add the evidence of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland strip. As the title implies this strip also revolves around dreams. It has a haunting surrealistic feel filled with strange characters and dream effects.
As I say, ERB haunted the Chicago library from 1905 to 1911 when he began writing The Princess of Mars. Thus he would have heard of the strip which was quite famous while following it at least periodically.
Minidoka reflects a Little Nemo quality. Little Nemo would then have been the catalyst that got Burroughs writing as he tried to emulate it in prose. As usual ERB combines a multitude of influences. He even states that the work is written in Ragtime Talk which meshes quite well with McCay.
Minidoka in itself can qualify as surrealistic before surrealism as does Mccay. That would not be extraordinary as the period from, say, 1880-1910 had a unified outlook not unlike the Sixties music scene when all bands played around a central motif.
As the work couldn’t have been written without McCay influence that places its probable composition date firmly in the 1908-10 range.
I heartily recommend the Taschen Little Nemo as an example of the current bookmaker’s art as well as for the astounding work of Winsor McCay. This rather astonishing video is available demonstrating McCay’s drawing expertise while showing him as the film creator of animation. He not only influenced Burroughs but Walt Disney said his own work would not have been possible without McCay.
A 1998 Japanese made movie called Little Nemo’s Adventures In Slumberland is available on Netflix. Ray Bradbury, no less, provided the story line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcSp2ej2S00 There are numerous other videos too.
Henry Ford And Albert Lasker
December 17, 2014
Henry Ford And Albert Lasker
by
R.E. Prindle
Gunther, John: Taken At The Flood, The Story Of Albert D. Lasker, 1960, Harper, NYC
Hoover, Herbert: Memoirs Of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression 1929-1941, 1952, MacMillan Company, NYC
Weir, Alison: Against Our Better Judgment: 2014, Self-published.
Schmidt, Sarah, The Parushim: A Secret Episode In American Zionist History, http://ifamericansknew.org/history/parushim.html
Tugwell, Rexford: The Brains Trust, 1968, The Viking Press, NYC
Woeste, Victoria Saker: Henry Ford’s War On The Jews And The Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, 2012, Stanford U. Press, Palo Alto
In 1924 Harold Gray sat down and drew the first panels of his new comic strip. A comic strip that outlived him. Yes, Little Orphan Annie made her first appearance in the newspapers. It was in 1948 that I spread the newspaper out on the floor and made my acquaintance with the little orphan girl and her dog Sandy. I myself had just gotten out of the orphanage so there was an instant bonding.
I hadn’t been reading the strip for too long before the most fascinating character of the comics ever made his appearance. Daddy Warbucks stepped on stage. Warbucks, what a name. Did he make his incredible fortune making munitions in WWI? If so, it was only implied.
Warbucks was tall and slim, supremely confident with an incongruous joyish attitude. I mean this guy killed people who got in his way as a matter of course. Imagine trying to reconcile murder with business as usual in a young boy’s mind. He had his own private army with two killer sidekicks. The sinister looking Asp and the jovial giant East Indian, Punjab. If your transgression was mild Punjab waved his cape over you and you disappeared. If you made Warbucks angry The Asp pulled out his stiletto and you heard a splash. The Asp always killed near water. Daddy knew how to manage his affairs.
The Dangerous Duo
Warbucks was fabulous. He had his own grotto where he moored his own private submarine. He had unlimited cash so he was able to maintain his own secret service. I wasn’t aware enough then but now I think that Daddy Warbucks was modeled on the great industrialist Henry Ford. Henry didn’t have a submarine, but he owned a fleet of Great Lakes ore ships, sort of his own personal navy, with a big F-O-R-D blazoned on the sides you could read a mile or more away. He even had his own personal river up which his ships delivered the ore from his own personal iron mines.
His estate was upstream a bit on the River Rouge, his river, just above the incredible turn around basin he dug so his ships could go back out on the lakes to pick up more iron ore to keep his Model Ts chugging out the other end of the most astonishing factory in the world. One time he unloaded the ore into his huge River Rouge factory and 24 hours later a brand new Model T rolled out the other end. Daddy Warbucks had nothing on Henry Ford.
While the rest of us had to settle for our little electric train sets Henry owned his own personal real life railroad, locomotives, cars and all, real smoke. Henry was pictured sitting on the coal from his own mines in his own coal car playing the harmonica as he chugged on down the line. How cool was that?
Better yet, like Daddy Warbucks, he had his own secret service, the Service Department of Ford Motors led by his own intrepid Edgar Hoover, Harry Bennett. I’m tellin ya, that guy Henry was on the spot, heck, he was the spot. During the twenties he needed a secret service what with kidnappers, bootleggers, the Jewish Purple Gang, the Italian Mafia, and numerous other free lancers going around, labor fanatics waving bombs in the air, it paid to sniff things out.
Shots flying here and there, rough times in Detroit City. All Henry wanted to do was make his cars, not battle in a war zone. And then when the Jews began to war with him he sent his force out to gather incriminating evidence of their activities against him.
Of course the Jews reviled him for defending himself with his Service Department although of course they had no room to talk being awash in paramilitary and terrorists groups themselves. They even had their own personal shadow government conspiring for a quiet takeover of the country. Henry took them a step further pointing out that they had an international government working toward a takeover of Europe and the Americas. He was right too.
2.
All US histories have excised the Jewish influence on politics and social affairs. To mention them is to be defamed as an ‘anti-Semitist.’ Jewish histories written by Jews for Jews are quite explicit. They are seldom read either by Jews or gois. Copies are sent free to libraries however they are seldom and quite often never checked out, even have the presentation slips inside. If they are read they tell a clear tale of Jewish activities.
In point of fact there was and is an international Jewish government.
In the nineteenth century the government was run from France by the Alliance Israelite Universelle. During the first years of the nineteenth century the US was disregarded as a fledgling country while the ocean transit was difficult in small sailing ships. However as the century progressed the country blossomed, large capacity steel ships replaced the wooden ones and failed revolutions like that of 1848 displaced Jews sending them to the US. With the industrial development after the Civil War it was realized that Jewry could be more effectively directed from the US with much better security. Hence beginning in the 1870s the European Jewish population began to be transferred to the US while in 1898 the Alliance Israelite Universelle was shipped from Paris to New York City transferring the Jewish world capital to the latter city. International Jewish activities began to multiply.
A big one was the International Order of B’nai B’rith in the US. It was organized in 1843 but having branches throughout Europe by 1900. The Vienna branch was a key lodge as it was joined by Sigmund Freud in 1895. He remained a lifelong member. Freud was beginning his psychological career at that time. Nineteen years later his system of psycho-analysis was the standard of the emerging discipline.
His influence on world affairs through his association with B’nai B’rith would be increasingly felt throughout the twentieth century. He was essential to forming the Jewish ideology through the death of Roosevelt in 1945.
Now, the Jews had been awaiting a messiah to redeem them for two thousand years. The last bona fide messianic candidate, Sabbatai Zevi failed them in 1666. Unwilling to place their hopes in a single individual the Elders then evolved the notion that the Redemption would come from the whole people. The years set for the Redemption or Jewish Revolution were from 1913 to 1928. As Ford understood, the events in all countries of Europe and North America were coordinated. The two key events of the plan were the assumption of the control of US currency in 1913 through the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia of 1917. Both countries were seemingly secured although the US Redemption was about to be consummated but was aborted by FDR’s death in 1945.
The history of the Jews in the US from 1900 to 1945 then is the progression or realization of their goal. The first key event of their plan was the fortuitous election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Had Theodore Roosevelt not split the Republican vote by his Bull Moose third party candidature William Howard Taft would have been reelected and the Republican program perfected.
As it was the American public clearly did not want Wilson as President as his vote was half that of the combined Roosevelt-Taft total. He got in by a fluke proceeding to begin elaborating a socialist government he called the New Freedom. His administration was a virtual partnership with the Jews who assumed a position of power in his government through 1920.
One of the first acts Wilson performed in 1913 was to sign into law The Federal Reserve System. In recent years it has been publicized to an increasing extent that the Federal Reserve is not an agency of the US government; it is a private corporation wholly owned and operated by nine international Jewish banks in both the US and Europe with a Rockefeller interest being the tenth thus forming a minyan.
The US monetary affairs had previously been managed by the J. P. Morgan interests also from NYC. The Jews thus switched that responsibility from the Morgans and also beyond the control of the US president who had no authority over it or influence on it. When the Fed engineered the Crash of ’29 Herbert Hoover the president bitterly remarked that the Fed had been placed outside of governmental and presidential control specifically to prevent such debacles while guaranteeing that under the Fed they could never again happen. Woody blew it there, bless the Democrats.
In preparation for WW1 the remaining components of the Jewish government were transferred from Germany to the US.
Now, the Federal Reserve is responsible for the currency of the US so that the Fed actually issues the currency then loans it to the government, that is the citizens, for their use at interest. Thus the Jews earn interest on every dollar in circulation. As the currency standard for the world you will understand how many trillions are now out at interest. At the time the upcoming war would expand the currency in circulation exponentially thus providing huge interest to the Jews. This is a key point because Jewish activities during the redemption would require more money than the Jews could ever have raised on their own. While so-called Jewish charity did raise a few millions that was nothing compared to their financial needs. Remember the Jews were supporting dozens of committees and congresses such as the American Jewish Committee at enormous expense as well as hundreds of synagogues along with their rabbis
Organized crime provided huge sums while Prohibition was a positive godsend. All those criminals are buried in consecrated ground. Today a museum in Las Vegas has been built to enshrine the activities of Jewish criminals. No stigma attached.
Organized crime was important to the Jewish program but so were legal activities. Thus it was that in 1916 Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court of the United States. This was a break with the past as formerly the court was all Anglo. As imperfect as his appointment was, the fact that Brandeis was a Zionist was even more important. Zionism was and is in conflict with what was then the American system now almost completely eroded.
Perhaps it was not known to Wilson that Brandeis had the dual identity, or perhaps he did and was complicit. An objector to Brandeis’ appointment described him as ‘a man who had certain high ideals in his imagination, but who is actually unscrupulous in reaching them.’ What the objector was describing is what is known as a justified sinner; that is one who is ‘saved’ in Christian terms at birth and thus can be as unscrupulous as he likes to satisfy his desires without sacrificing his guaranteed redemption. The objector might as well have been describing the whole Jewish belief system, essentially the end justifies the means.
The drum roll began to establish a reputation for Brandeis as the greatest living jurist and the purest man alive. Actually Brandeis was a ringleader of both Zionism and the Jewish Revolution. Using his status as a Supreme Court justice one of the first things he did was buy a professorship at Harvard for his lieutenant Felix Frankfurter. The drum roll then began to portray Frankfurter as one of the wisest legal scholars backed by his professorship at Harvard.
Thus he and Brandeis became two secular saints of both societies.
Frankfurter then began recruiting a cadre of acolytes to further Jewish objectives. Over the next twenty years Frankfurter assembled the cadre that became important when Roosevelt brought the Jews back to DC. No sooner installed than Frankfurter filled the Dept. of Agriculture with his acolytes. Thus in one fell swoop he completed the program fostered by Aaron Sapiro that was temporarily frustrated by Henry Ford from 1924-27.
A key event in the establishment of Jewish supremacy was the trial of Leo Frank from 1913-15.
3.
The Leo Frank Affair
The Leo Frank affair is a very important event in the Jewish calendar. They never tire at bringing it up while it had long ranging repercussions.
For those unfamiliar with the story Leo Frank was a Jewish businessman living in Atlanta Georgia. While his personal life is carefully avoided he is depicted as a Jewish secular saint who never did nobody no harm. Contrarily he was described as a sexual pervert. He employed young girls to make his pencils. By young girls we are talking child labor, pre-pubescent and pubescent. So our secular saint was exploiting young children to line his pockets. The temptation of all those young girls may have been too strong for his resistance. On this occasion he called fourteen year old Mary Phagan to the factory on a Saturday when he was alone in the office, all others being absent, to pick up her paycheck. Probably the amount was 1.86 or some such ridiculously low figure as that.
None saw Mary pick up the check obviously, but she was discovered in the basement on Monday murdered. Frank tried to pin the crime on a Negro janitor. Of course there was no hard evidence as to who had committed the crime but Frank was condemned as the perpetrator.
Why call the girl back to get her paycheck on Saturday after all the others? Frank was tried in an American court of law and found guilty. Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, considered the conviction and death sentence as an anti-Semitic act somewhat like the blood libel. Frank had been convicted solely because he was a Jew in Marshall’s eyes. Marshall then began to organize a committee to free Frank.
Marshall was the president of the AJC, the AJC was the most important Jewish organization at the time as it is now. It has always kept a low profile or semi-secret existence. My wife’s aunt who was very active in Jewish affairs and the civil rights movement had never heard of the AJC until I told her about it which I find stunningly remarkable.
Mr. Marshall was a lawyer as well as president of the AJC. In his lawyer guise he frequently accuses opponents of being ignorant of the law, yet on page 295 of his Champion of Liberty he says ‘…I am morally convinced that the young man is innocent.’ I have no idea what legal standing being morally convinced of innocence is but I rather imagine, slight.
On p. 297 he writes: It is desirable to eliminate from consideration of the case, that Frank is a Jew. The important thing to consider is, that he was a respected industrious, law-abiding citizen…’
The question is a legal one not a question of the status of Frank’s reputation. In fact there was some question as to whether Frank was a sexual pervert. Certainly his desire to be alone with Mary in his factory, a poor defenseless very young girl, might tend to confirm the opinion. I am morally convinced this was so.
Marshall sets the wheels in motion in his attempt to reverse the conviction. In his reply to the letter from Judge Irving Lehman he further goes on to write, p. 295: “Obviously it would be most unfortunate if anything were done in this case from the standpoint of the Jews. Whatever is to be done must be done as a matter of justice and any action that is to be taken should emanate from non-Jewish sources.”
So, Mr. Marshall is falsely going to act on justice rather than the fact that Frank is a Jew. He is going to conceal the fact while getting non-Jewish persons to front for him. He apparently believes that if Frank were not a Jew the murder would be let drop. On the other hand he seems to feel that Frank has been convicted solely because he is was a Jew not a rapist murderer. Apparently overlooking the dead child he believes a Christian would never have been convicted. Thus it is not a matter of justice but a question of the religion of the murderer but we’re not going to talk about that.
While recruiting a Christian front group to mislead the actual actors Marshall also recruits, one might almost say commands, a Jewish cadre of activists. Now, Marshall was convinced or said so that the Frank case was the most important case since the Dreyfus Affair in France of the 1890s. Dreyfus was a Jewish spy in the French army who was originally convicted but after a furious publicity campaign by the Jews using French front men they had the decision reversed a few years later. It was then that the important French novelist Emile Zola was recruited as a front issuing his famous J’ accuse letter. One guesses that the Dreyfus campaign was the model for the Frank case.
Of the variety of Jews recruited to act behind the front one was the advertising executive from Chicago, Albert Lasker. Today both Marshall and Lasker have been obscured by time and may for practical matters be considered forgotten. Yet both men had significant roles during this time. Lasker as a young man entering his twenties at the turn of the century took a job with a Chicago advertising firm Lord and Thomas. At the turn of the twentieth century advertising had nowhere near the importance or prominence that it has today. Lasker joined the firm just as the advertising industry was about to develop. Lord and Thomas, the founders, were men of the nineteenth century not having yet learned of the psychological learning developing under their noses. Advertising was more educative at the time and less propagandistic. Lasker would develop newer methods based on propaganda and psychology.
We are not too concerned with his work on the Frank case although its work would require a leave of absence from his agency that would continue through the Aaron Sapiro legal battle with Henry Ford. Lasker was much involved in Sapiro’s attempt at a Jewish food monopoly.
4.
The question that is never addressed by goi historians and not fully disguised by the Jewish historians is what were the Jews doing after emancipation. The two key American agencies after 1913 were the American Jewish Committee and the Order of B’nai B’rith while Freud’s psychoanalytic Order played in the background. One should not underestimate the Freudian conspiracy and its activities in Central and Eastern Europe.
Organization stepped up after the inauguration of Wilson in 1913. Brandeis and Frankfurt would be key players from Wilson through FDR. Alison Weir gives some indication of the basic Jewish attitude in her Against Our Better Judgment in her discussion of a Jewish revolutionary group called the Parushim of 1913 and on.
This was a Jewish guerilla group formed as an order with elaborate oaths. As reported by Miss Weir:
Quote:
“You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be compelled to heed at any time in any place and at any cost. And ever after until our purpose shall be accomplished you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life- dearer than that of family, or school, or nation.”
Unquote.
Horace Kallen the author of the Order made Louis Brandeis, before his Supreme Court appointment, an honorary member. Brandeis’ acceptance may have been more political in nature while as an honorary member he may not have felt bound by the oath, nevertheless as a Supreme Court justice he had pledged himself to an authority higher than the ‘nation’ and actually US law. Of course he had pledged himself as a Zionist to that end. Judaism uber alles.
Whether or not Lasker had pledged himself to the Parushim, as an ardent Jew and Zionist he also would have the same attitude as Brandeis and Frankfurter. After his activities in the Leo Frank case Lasker devoted several years to Jewish activities, the Lord and Thomas interests being managed by his surrogates.
Bearing the Parushim oath in mind, in 1924 Henry Ford used his newspaper to expose the activities of Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer organizing North American agricultural cooperatives leading to the Jewish goal. According to Ford’s researchers, a competent corps of men, Sapiro was aided in devising the co-op movement by Bernard Baruch, Lasker and Eugene Meyer.
As noted Sapiro had been recruited by the co-op plans deviser, David Lubin. The first step in the plan had been the organization of the Jewish orange growers of Sacramento. Lasker had been called in to promote the sale of oranges which he successfully did, thus it seems that he would have known both Lubin and Sapiro and probably was clued to the plan thus there should be no surprise that he was subsequently involved as Ford’s articles indicated.
Bernard Baruch, the King of the Shadows, served as a commodity expert in the Wilson administration thus he would have been very useful in forming these co-ops of commodities. Working from the shadows Baruch had more power than one would believe. As an instance FDR had to take him into account because as FDR said, he owned sixty congressmen. That almost amounts to a shadow government. Of course you will never learn that from Baruch’s autobiography.
Eugene Meyer was president of the Federal Reserve which would have been very useful although gaining information on him has been difficult.
One must believe that Ford’s exposure made Sapiro’s co-op organizing difficult although his influence was in decline after David Lubin’s death in 1919. Apparently Lubin’s direction was essential. Thus Ford’s exposure was effective regardless of any results of Sapiro’s lawsuit. However the agriculture issue was not settled by Sapiro’s defeat.
As noted Brandeis was given terrific influence over American political affairs when Wilson appointed him a Supreme Court justice. Like Baruch he was a major influence in forcing Jewish affairs forward leading a double life.
Brandeis, in whose honor Brandeis University was is named, bought a Harvard professorship for his disciple Felix Frankfurter. The drum roll then began to blazon Frankfurter as well as his master as the greatest legal minds the world had ever seen. Frankfurter himself began to indoctrinate decades of students, Jew and goi alike in the goals of Parushim. Thus the oaths terms ‘on behalf of the Jews, my [own] people, and of mankind’ were inserted to include not only Jews but any of the goyim Frankfurter might seduce. Plus Frankfurter could control to a great extent who was at the top of their class and who was at the bottom.
Brandeis and Frankfurter were rewarded in 1933 when Roosevelt was inaugurated. Frankfurter immediately filled the Dept. of Agriculture with his disciples, none of whom were farmers. One of the first acts of the Roosevelt administration was the passing the Agricultural Adjustment Act- the AAA. Thus although temporarily derailed in the mid-twenties by Ford, in 1933 the Jews obtained more under Roosevelt than they could have by the laborious and patient work of Sapiro, Baruch, Lasker and Meyer.
Of course the AAA was declared unconstitutional in 1935 by the Supreme Court confirming Ford’s opinion of the plan but that was nullified in after years by its implementation step by step anyway.
It is probable that Ford never met Albert Lasker but their lives touched indirectly.
Exhuming Bob 31d: A Review Of Victor Maymudes’ Another Side Of Bob Dylan
November 16, 2014
Exhuming Bob 31d
A Review Of Victor Maymudes’
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
I’ve got a tangled mind,
I’ve got a broken heart,
I got a gal somewhere,
I guess she thinks I’m dead.
I’d go back home if
I could clear my head.
Cryin’, cryin’, all of the time,
I’ve got a broken heart,
I’ve got a tangled mind.
-As sung by Hank Snow
In Exhuming Bob 31c I said I was waiting for a copy of Al Aronowitz’s book Bob Dylan And The Beatles. It arrived and I read it. Like Victor’s book it is a first hand account of Dylan. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Al like Victor wanted to be Bob. Dylan epitomized their hopes and vision of themselves. Couldn’t be improved on.
However not being Bob the next best thing was to be as close to being his shadow as possible. Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly, both men were glorifying Dylan at the same time during those magic years of the Sixties Bob. Al once asked Bob why he wanted to perform. Bob replied simply: I want to be exalted.
There may be a key to Dylan. He wants you and I, the country, the whole world to make him feel exalted and he achieved that goal in spades. In that context one can only imagine how crushed Bob’s feelings must have been when he was booed and booed and booed when he went electric in 1965. No exaltation there.
As a side note Murray The K in his book says that one reason Dylan was booed, especially at Forest Hills was because he was switching to rock and roll which the folkies considered pimple music. Murray who MC’d part of the show was also booed but because he was considered a bubble gum disc jockey. So Dylan was perceived as switching from serious folk to teeny bopper rock n’ roll.
It must have been a period of profound fear that perhaps he would be rejected and never be exalted again. It must have been quite similar to when he did his Little Richard act during assembly to an uncomprehending student body and faculty back in Hibbing. The principal wanted to pull his plug that day just as Alan Lomax would want to take an axe to the cables in ’65.
Bob persevered, overcame resistance, or elected a new body of fans, and then crashed in ’66 from the strain. He laboriously and falteringly rebuilt his career after ’66. And this is important, he would make his audience exalt him no matter what he did. I saw his October ’14 Portland show and he had taken electricity to a new level of voltage. I would have said he took electricity out of Arkansas but I don’t know how many have heard or remember Black Oak Arkansas’ When Electricity Came to Arkansas. Dylan remembered it because his sound was close to lifted from that performance; spectacular for the early seventies.
Dylan’s show was fabulous; perhaps the finest rock show I’ve ever seen. The band was the thing. Dylan’s performance truly being peripheral. He no longer sings per se but gargles along in tune with the band; if you catch his drift not bad at all. As a composer and conductor is where he excels.
Bob however has been in pain all his life. He acquired a tangled mind, tangled up in blue. Never a fashion plate, for the show he came out in some godawful gauche and need I say outre version of a Southern planter’s suit while he acted as though we of the audience were slaves on his plantation down in Dixie. As is well known Bob studied the Southern plantation systems in the New York City public library while he was waiting for stardom to strike him. Apparently he learned his lessons well. So, I’m from Dixie too. I got it.
Although from a distance he looks pretty frail he stood at the mike and in front of a wall of sound that Phil Spector would have envied lectured us on how he wasn’t as stupid as us living humdrum lives, the very idea of which he had renounced from the first time he heard Accentuate The Positive on the radio before he could walk.
Something happened along the way as Bob hasn’t accentuated the positive since he was five.
Perhaps Victor and Al had also been slapped down hard along the way becoming those of the ‘abused, misused, strung out one’s or worse’ Bob materializes in his song The Chimes Of Freedom. Back in the old days he says that was the audience he was reaching for and that’s the audience he got. It was that appeal that brought the ones who felt abused and misused into his sphere. Either I outgrew the feeling or Bob left the hall in ’66 for another show. He forgot about us after that.
Victor and Al, as I say, obviously knew the feeling, bonding to Dylan like a Siamese twin.
Al, by the way, corroborates everything Victor said. He really did say into a tape recorder rather than write in text. So in Chapter five Victor relates how he and Bob turned on the world. Victor must have been sidelined after the August ’65 meeting with the Beatles because the period from August ’65 through the ’66 motor bike accident he merely summarizes his relationship few details. No mention of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick or even Bobby Neuwirth. Nothing about the ’66 tour on which he was the road manager.
In point of fact after picking up Neuwirth in SF Bobby replaced Victor as Bob’s sidekick and confidant. It was the arrival of Neuwirth that completed the fearsome putdown act of him, Dylan and Grossman.
While Neuwirth is a hazy figure in the biographies, Al Aronowitz gives the fullest profile of Neuwirth that I have read. According to Al Neuwirth was an excellent performer and prolific songwriter. Dylan had first met him in Boston where he sang in the folk clubs around Harvard. Unfortunately Bobby was a psychopath which prevented him from ever recording successfully or having a career. Al says that there were efforts to get him on record. Twice he recorded material but snuck into the studios and destroyed the tapes. The record for David Geffen that he did complete is quite a story among Al’s great stories. After running up studio costs of nearly 200,000 dollars he delivered product that Geffen said would sell only six copies. He appears to have been a prophet. If the record was actually ever released try to find a copy now. Perhaps a key to Neuwirth’s psyche is the song of Don Gibson he recorded for Geffen , A Legend In My Time. Key lyrics,
If tears and regrets
Were gold statuettes
I’d be a legend in my own time.
In his way then his relationship to Dylan was the same as Victor’s and Al’s. Neuwirth could see or sense that Dylan would get the gold statuettes, be a legend in his own time, tears and regrets Bobby’s lot. Dylan had the ego and the drive. Neuwirth had the fear of success (there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all, perhaps that line of Dylan’s was written with Neuwirth in mind) or perhaps as accurately, fear of failure. Probably also he realized he would never equal or surpass Dylan. Paralyzed his will. While Bob could and would realize his dream of success Neuwirth could never have been able to measure up to that. Like Victor and Al then Neuwirth lived his fantasy through Bob.
There was no place for Neuwirth in Bob’s life after the ’66 accident so he drifted off doing other people. According to Al he drifted around attaching himself to people with money. Al admired him greatly, considering him much hipper than Dylan. His account, his thumbnail of Bobby, is really worth reading. Al has been neglected as a source by the biographers but both his own career and account are significant Not a lot of copies of his book around though, mine came with Al’s autograph although made out Michael Gross whoever he may be.
So, during this crucial year in Bob’s life Victor seems to have been marginalized but he still makes himself central to Bob’s life showing him how to be cool.
Victor says, p. 115:
Bob and I searched for an identity in the clothes that we bought; granted, it was only after Bob started to have an income that we really dove into fashion. He and I would go shopping at thrift stores together, searching for new identities when the one we were using started to get picked up by those around us. This cat-and-mouse game pushed us to wear increasingly outre clothes. We would try on every odd ball outfit we could find, trying to stay one step ahead of our social group. On tours around the country, we would seek out the salvage clothing stores and pick out the wild stuff. I found polka-dot shirts with Bob, and I made that a big deal. Polka-dots would become our contribution to the fashion of the sixties I look back on it now and I think it’s pretty funny how ridiculous we looked and how everyone around us took us so seriously. Bob and I shared this together, but I didn’t have the spotlight on me the whole time as he did.
Note he heavy use of I, we, us. Sounds like they were joined at the hip with Victor in control guiding Dylan on the path to higher achievement. Al wanted to be Bob and in his way so did Victor but they chose different paths. Probably because Victor was six years older he assumed what is really a patronizing attitude. Must have irritated Bob.
In this year covering mid ’65 to ’66 then Dylan had three intense buddy associates to deal with, Victor Al and Bobby, all three of varying types of servility. Of the three Aronowitz would last the longest while Victory and Bobby were followed by Robbie Robertson, who, by the way was born Jaime Robert Klegerman. He was the son of a Jewish father and a Mohawk mother, an interesting combination.
Bob treated these guys quite contemptibly. Both Victor and Al have very bitter memories and both were dismissed in the rudest of manners. I don’t know the situation with Robertson but I imagine he and Bob aren’t talking either.
And then Victor may have been perceived by Albert Grossman as a troublemaker. Anent that, Victor on p. 127:
I called Albert the “brain” based on the fact that he looked like a potato and the only muscle he used was his brain. For me, he was a very powerful person. I respected him like my big brother. But we had our issues because I would tell Bob the truth, about anything. Even if it was just my hunch someone was trying to manipulate him I would make sure Bob was aware of what was going on. Albert felt threatened by my transparency, and my criticism of his management.
Albert was an asshole who bent over for quarters when dollars were flying by
And then Victor says he clued Dylan to how Grossman was appropriating revenues from song rights. Little wonder that Grossman felt threatened or any surprise he fired Victor after the accident thus ending that relationship for several years.
If we are to believe Victor about this first phase of Dylan’s career he was the guiding light for Dylan. Thus he makes it sound as though he nearly was the author of Dylan’s success. He wouldn’t have been Bob without Victor by his telling.
Nevertheless Bob always came out on top and Victor, Al and Bobby and Grossman were left in the dust. Bob began his career with a tangled mind, beginning his second phase in the same mental state.
Victor and Bob
Exhuming Bob 31e follows.
Exhuming Bob 31c
A Review
Victor Maymudes’
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
It becomes clear at this point in Victor’s memoir, Chaps. 4 & 5, that he has such great admiration for the ‘genius’ of Dylan that he begins to meld his personality into Dylan’s person and persona. Being six years older and considering himself more worldly wise thus a guide to the younger more naïve Dylan he feels actually superior to Bob, or at least compensate for his felt inferiority. He thus becomes protective and paternalistic. Dylan must have found the attitude annoying.
In Chapter 4 that concerns Dylan’s 8/22/64 meeting with the Beatles in New York City, he actually does displace Dylan assuming his role.
This meeting is perhaps the most famous incident in rock and roll history. This ‘summit’ meeting arranged by the journalist Al Aronowitz of whom more below is when Dylan is said to have introduced the Beatles to marijuana. The below is Victor’s gloss on the story.
Victor’s relationship with Dylan has almost supernatural aspects. While he realizes that Bob has the gift and he doesn’t his admiration and perhaps envy is so great that as time goes by he seems to be melding his persona into Bob’s almost to the extent that he becomes an incubus attempting to inhabit Bob’s mind and body almost like an internal double.
Aronowitz arranged the meeting between Dylan and the Beatles but his account is truncated on the website. The Blacklisted Journalist offers only a teaser of the story referring you to his book Bob Dylan And The Beatles, now out of print. A used copy is costing me 75.00 and it had better be worth it. I will probably rewrite this section when I receive it; but for now Victor’s version and, really, this is Victor’s story.
This is a great moment for Victor and he does it justice in the telling. He borrowed Bob’s muse to write it. You should probably read Victor’s account for the full flavor. It will suffice here to show how Victor elbowed Bob out of the story.
His account begins with their arrival at the Delmonico Hotel where there is an immense crowd blocking the entire street and gathered beneath the windows of the Beatles’ suite. If you were checking in as a guest at that time it would have been one of the major events of your life, if the police had allowed you through to check in. The roar as Victor describes it begins as persistent white noise like the ocean surf as Dylan’s group approaches mounting in volume to a tremendous roar at the hotel door.
On the Beatles’ floor, which is sealed off, the glitterati being more privileged than the hoi polloi replicate the scene below as they crowd the hallway. PP&M, the Kingstons, everybody is there, everybody. Probably Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. It staggers the mind that four unknown musicians could create such an uproar. One imagines the glow of importance on Victor’s brow as he surpasses all the glitterati to enter the Beatle’s suite with Bob and Al. One of the chosen.
Introductions finished, the pot comes out. This is the first time the Beatles were to get high on pot although with a knowing wink Victor explains that they have smoked some inferior stuff before with little TCP content.
Bob undertakes to roll a joint but bungles the job. Now here’s were Victor takes over Bob’s role. He reaches over and takes the papers and weed from Bob’s hands. I would have fired him on the spot. Victor then rolls perfect numbers for all concerned. Bob takes a couple swigs from a bottle and then passes out on the floor. From that point on in Victor’s account he is the show; he has become Bob or Bob has become him. The Beatles are suitably impressed becoming Victor’s great friends.
For a brief moment Victor and Bob were one in Victor’s mind.
His account is a fully detailed extended account well worth reading. I will compare it later with that of Aronowitz.
Aronowitz himself was a journalist, the music and entertainment reviewer with the New York Post. He seems to have had Victor’s need to become those he reviewed. He had a long and illustrious career breaking Billie Holliday among others in music and the movies as he says. When the Beatles landed, recognizing the next big thing he moved in on rock and roll. Being able to deliver Dylan to the Beatles was his big coup hopefully establishing him with the two biggest pop acts ever.
After the Beatles-Dylan encounter however his career went into decline. As he says on the Blacklisted Journalist neither Bob nor Victor would talk to him anymore. It seems as though the whole rock world rejected him. Perhaps he appeared to be an opportunist from another era or generation and wasn’t wanted. And then he did something to cause him to be blacklisted as a journalist.
2.
Victor and Bob
Chapter 5 concerns Bob, Victor, Paul Clayton and Pete Karman’s cross country tour from New York, down through the South and out to San Francisco.
Victor gives a very nice sketch of Paul Clayton one of the premier folk musicians and musicologists of the period. I will highlight the visit to Carl Sandburg here as Victor gives the fullest and best account that I have read.
Carl Sandburg was of course the Chicago poet- Chicago, Hog butcher to the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads…city of big shoulders, etc. etc. as well as the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Abraham Lincoln. Also he was the compiler of the American Song Book, published in 1927, a collection of songs roughly from the turn of the twentieth century that contains nearly the whole of the sixties’ repertoire- Midnight Special, Stack-o-lee, alternate versions of St. James Infirmary, Nearly everything that has been attributed to Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter. I think most people think Ledbetter wrote The Midnight Special. I did until acquiring a copy of the Son Book at an estate sale. Apparently he must have had an early copy of the Song Book.
Bob says that he wanted to talk to Carl about the collection.
Victor gives the fullest and best account of the encounter. Bearing in mind that this gang of four burst upon the Sandburg’s unannounced they sprang on the Sandburgs’ like a summer squall. Mrs. Sandburg who was sitting on her porch greeted them graciously going in to get her husband. Remember this is 1964 and this rag tag bunch with wild hair, manners disordered by drugs, sort of exploded from the car onto the lawn. Perhaps Mrs. Sandburg was terrified.
Sandburg himself being an old trooper from the hog butchering capitol of the world rose to meet the challenge. According to Victor Sandburg spent an hour with them. In this scene Victor hung back while the bumptious Pete Karman shouldered Bob aside trying to monopolize Sandburg.
Sandburg, pushing ninety, tired, excused himself and returned to his nap or whatever, perhaps practicing banjo licks.
Victor’s account clarified this situation that has always puzzled me. Sounds about right.
Victor gives a good account of Bob in New Orleans and the trip West through Colorado to San Francisco.
Altogether two very worthwhile chapters. Good enough for general reading in my opinion.
Exhuming Bob 3d follows.
Exhuming Bob 31b
A Review
Victor Maymudes’ Another Side Of Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
A Stranger Came Walking…
This book is actually written by Victor’ son Jacob Maymudes, since Victor died a couple decades ago. The tapes Victor recorded appear to be heavily edited while Jacob is defending his father against Dylan. In such a situation the temptation to rewrite as well as editing might be too strong to resist. It would have been better to have used the full transcripts as spoken.
Jacob has really written a biography of his family focusing on his dad’s relationship with Dylan. It is a bittersweet tale while Jacob has written a very readable and pleasant little volume. He captures well the personal tragedy of his father.
Victor and Bob
In this part of the review I will concentrate on Tapes 2 and 3 of Victor’s aural memoir.
After leaving Bob in 1962, almost ’63, Victor took up residence in Yelapa, Mexico a village of 300 at the time with a half dozen Hippies lounging about. Today, let us say, it has been discovered. Yelapa is in Jalisco State of which Guadalajara is the capital and Puerta Vallarta the main tourist destination. Yelapa is on the southern end of the 7th largest beach in the world. Undeveloped when Victor stayed there it is well developed now. Victor doesn’t explain how he knew of this, what he considers, a terrestrial paradise, but he stays there until…
One day just before sun down, I was laying on the beach with Tom Law, one of my great friends, who would later became the road manager for Peter, Paul and Mary. But at that moment He was sitting up watching the Mexico sunset while I lay with my feet in the warm glow of the sand. A stranger came walking down the beach toward us. There was nobody else in sight….The Stranger stopped in front of us and asked, “You guys know this guy, Victor Maimondez?” mispronouncing my last name.
Tom, who was always cautious and protective of me, squinted up, “Yeah, maybe. What do you want him for?”
The stranger said, “I have a message for him. From someone named Bob Dylan in New York City. He wants Victor to come back. They’re going on tour.”
Like something out of the Twilight Zone isn’t it? If it happened, it happened. Who am I to say differently.
Victor returns triumphantly as Dylan’s tour manager. Grossman grant’s Victor the magnificent salary of 65.00 a week. Victor was ecstatic. Heck, even I was making twice that in 1964 although I’m sure I wasn’t having as good a time.
Tape 3, Chapter 3 is a very long chapter of thirty four pages covering approximately eight months in 1964. These boys were certainly living an action packed life as the events covered may be the central part of Bob’s 1960-66 career.
Victor arrives back in LA on November 22, 1963 just in time for the Kennedy assassination. Victor is an authentic voice of the period. His thoughts are representative of about half the people at the time While time has sanctified Kennedy’s memory at the time about half the people were relieved to be rid of him. I was in that half.
Victor’s voice however is phrased in the spirit of the times. It brings the period back in high relief.
In February Dylan, Paul Clayton, Pete Karman and Victor took the well reported cross country auto tour from NYC to SF with Victor doing most of the driving. Today they probably would have used an SUV but theirs was a more modestly sized station wagon.
While Victor adds a few new details his relation places the story in more human terms than other accounts. He and Dylan were outraged at the Kentucky miners’ plight and the civil rights situation in Dixie so they decide on a drive through for a look see.
The key points are Dylan’s visit to Carl Sandburg in Asheville and the visit to New Orleans and the drive from Denver to SF.
Bob At The time. Note Subdued Hair Style
Victor’s account of the Sandburg visit makes more sense than other accounts I have read. Rather than a cranky reception for this unannounced visit as often reported the boys were met cordially by Mrs. Sandburg who went to get her husband. Sandburg himself was in his late eighties and apparently frail, tiring easily. According to Victor he spent about an hour with the boys then tiring returned to the house.
According to Victor Paul Clayton smoothed over the situation while Pete Karman boorishly tried to brush Dylan aside to monopolize the interview.
Carl Sandburg
Carl and Friend
For those who for one reason or another are vague as to who Carl Sandburg was his date are 1/6/1878-7/22/67. He gained fame for what is called his poetry, not only fame but he bagged two Pulitzer Prizes and his biography of Abraham Lincoln netted him another.
He was a Civil Rights activist gaining an award from the NAACP. Dylan’s interest stemmed from is 1927 collection called The American Song Bag. The volume was very successful and extremely influential. Pete Seeger was said to swear by it and if I am not mistaken Huddie Leadbelly Ledbettor memorized a great deal of it.
I managed to pick up a copy at an estate sale for a couple bucks. it is a fairly amazing collection of what might be called folk songs. Lots of tunes from the turn of the century and some earlier stuff. Midnight Special, Frankie and Johnny, the backbone of the Sixties repertoire. Words and music, nice collection.
Bob said he wanted to talk to Carl about it. Pete Karman got in the way.
Victor gives a nice tribute and portrait of Paul Clayton who he admired as a great folk figure although time has now passed him by.
The next stop was New Orleans which holds no interest for me although the stories are well told while being well known.
The inner dynamics of the car with Karman being the trouble are well known. Apparently Suze Rotolo included him, probably as a chaperone to make sure Bob didn’t stray too far. Strange attitude for a Communist girl. When they reached SF Karman was given a plane ticket and sent back to NYC. Karman was replaced by Bobby Neuwirth who would himself replace victor as Dylan’s confidant. Neuwirth fit in where Karman didn’t. But then as a friend of Suze’s who forced him on the trip perhaps his quality of mind was more equal to hers.
After returning , in May of ’64 Dylan left for England with Victor in tow. This was the English trip that formed the material for the film Don’t Look Back. Unless the tape is edited too heavily by Jacob one would gain the impression that it is just Bob and Victor on this trip. There is no mention of Grossman or Baez, the movie or even the famous scene at the Savoy, no Lennon, no Beatles, no nothing but Bob and Victor. One gains the impression that Victor is in love with Bob, practically man and wife.
After England he and Dylan make Bob’s trip to Greece. There are some interesting details here. According to Victor Dylan wrote the whole of Another Side Of bob Dylan in Greece recording it without practice on returning to New York.
There is no mention of Nico here for whom Dylan wrote I’ll Keep It With Mine at this time. Victor excludes anything except what he and Bob were doing while Victor is guiding Bob and showing him the world.
They then return to NYC
Exhuming Bob 32: Didn’t We Ramble Though, A Review Of The Bob Dylan Show, Portland Performance 10/21/14
October 22, 2014
Exhuming Bob 32
Didn’t We Ramble Though
A Review Of The Bob Dylan Show, Portland Performance 10/21/14
by
R.E. Prindle
The steel is moanin’, the guitars are speakin’,
The piano plays a jelly roll.
The man on the drums is far from dumb,
The bassman he plays from his soul.
The tables are quakin’, and your nerves are shakin’
But you keep on beggin’ for more.
You’re havin’ your fun you lucky son of a gun
On that Honky Tonk hardwood floor.
Sung by the late great Johnny Horton
The Bob Dylan show dropped into town last night. And what a show it was. My first Dylan show, from reading all these reviews depicting the shows as atrocious my expectations were very low.
I can’t imagine what these critics are thinking. The Show was absolutely sensational. Dylan is one of the great Rock and Roll showmen. Beats anyone else I’ve ever seen.
I hope I can hit a stride here commensurate with the show and my muse doesn’t let me down. The venue, the Keller Auditorium, is a twenty-five hundred capacity house and it was filled. The stage is relatively big about sixty wide and fifty high. Bob and his musicians used the whole space like they had been performing there for a year. The lighting while minimal was dramatic, effective and beautiful putting one in a good mood. An aura was provided that brought one into the Secret Garden.
The electronic gear seemed to be artfully scattered haphazardly across the whole stage. The musicians wore red blazers while Bob came out in a white planter’s outfit, uniting the Templars with the old plantation down South. Jeb Stuart rides again.
The musicians appeared to be encamped among the gear with the lead and rhythm guitarists to the audience’s left. The drum stand was middle as is proper flanked by the bass player and finally a steel guitar player cum banjoist on the right end. Bob’s keyboard was forward and on a level with the steel. It was all very minimalist and effective. They filled the stage while being placed in perspective by the high fifty foot frame keeping everything human size. Dylan must have been studying performance art under Yoko.
It is a mistake to go to the concert to hear Dylan sing. He apparently learned to vocalize by singing along to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. At first I thought it was a cabover with two cylinders not hitting coming up a mountain grade hauling a hundred thousand K in triple bottoms. Then I saw that it was Bob. The music is the thing; as a composer and conductor lies Bob’s genius.
The band was incredibly disciplined, everyone knew his role, fit tightly with the others and played their instruments without exhibitionism. The harmonics and spacing was incredible.
The drummer carried the band on his back. He was so sensational that like the Hindu elephant he could carry the world on his back. I mean, he had time in his hands, the money in his pocket and could walk the dog on a long leash. I haven’t seen anyone like that since Michael Shrieve. The guy was terrific, he couldn’t only play he looked good doing it. The bass player standing next to the kit kept the beat rolling forward. Bob understands the rhythm section. No amateurishness near.
While relatively unobtrusive the steel player was carrying a lot of the weight.
Now, the band doesn’t play any songs; what Bob has written is some sort of symphonic suite in several movements. The lead and rhythm play a succession of chord progressions loud; there is no melody as such. The music has a strong forward flow that sweeps along like the Mississippi in flood before it was channeled and diked.
The band set the crowd off from the first chord; it was all daylight from there. Like nearly everyone else I flipped to the ozone, shouting and howling, lost in the noise. Amazingly the audience responded differently to different chord progressions; sections would shoot from seats with a roar that competed with the amplification. It was like a huge sea of deep rollers rising and falling.
A wonderful crowd, best I’ve ever seen. Everyone looked good and went way into the show. There was no one not having the time of their life. Dylan was flattered and showed it, trying a little harder to deliver the goods.
His singing was irrelevant. Why he is charged with plagiarism is beyond me. I won’t say you couldn’t understand a word because I was able to snag a few while even getting a phrase or two- Tangled Up In Blue but he shouted that out in his normal voice.
If he was singing from his catalogue it was hardly noticeable although I did get the faint impression that one of them was She Belongs To Me. Either that or Love – Zero = No Limits, or something else, might have been The Star Spangled Banner. Didn’t matter, Bob had to do something to justify his being there. He had the band so tight they could have performed without him.
The band was the cake. The progressions were so powerful it was like Godzilla walking in rhythm. There were two sets and the first one was a power walk. Just unbelievable. If all Bob’s shows are like this one I can’t imagine what critics are belittling. Forget the singing, it’s some kind of frosting to add a little variety. So is Bob’s posturing. He struts around a little like the Lord of the Manse directing the slaves striking what I suppose are meant to be power poses.
The end of the first set leaves you exhausted but energized and hoarse. During the intermission most people didn’t leave their seats but in their high excitement there was a huge billowing roar rising up. I was in the first row, first balcony. It was a kindly roar, mellow even. Dylan’s fans are OK. No weirdos there regardless of Kinney’s book, The Dylanologists: Adventures In The Land Of Bob.
I was there with my wife and our friends Mark and Jenna, two old fans. On my left I sat next to a couple from Medicine Hat, Alberta who had driven down for the show. He was a wheat farmer with 600 acres. Using three John Deere combines he harvests all 600 acres in one day. Gives him a lot of leisure I suppose.
The second set was a little more frivolous lowering the energy level considerably. But, before you went to sleep he pepped it up a little ending on a power note.
I had heard that he doesn’t do encores but after a steady drum roll of applause for about ten minutes he and the band came back for not a one piece encore, but two, ending the show with a medium power progression while Bob mumbled the words to Blowing In The Wind apparently a very personal lyric. Ah, Hibbing.
By this time I had a firm grip on the situation paying attention to the band, but it is Bob’s band and I imagine that he has composed the music. As a composer he is no mean hand. I hesitate to say it but the music is at least as good as Beethoven although falling short of Mozart.
I don’t know how long the piece was but they must have given us five to ten minutes with the crowd and myself going wild. The woman four seats to my left had virtually taken leave of her senses screaming doing a wild gyration of a dance. Really spectacular.
OK, I confess it. I did some involuntary things myself. The band was really showing off their discipline and expertise. Now this is really spectacular, they were powering along then cut off simultaneously leaving a half beat silence before resuming at the same pace and volume. They did this three times in succession.
I sensed it coming on, now I’m not bragging because I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing, but in that brief half beat space was total silence. I shouted out a perfect rock and roll ‘hey’. I did it the second time slipping that hey into that narrow opening. Perfect timing on both our parts. I think the band was surprised by the first one then sort of amazed at the second one. Then consciousness came slipping back and I missed the third opening. It was still terrific.
As the encore drew to an end the cell phones came out and whole rows held them up to snap pictures. Endless tiny images shown back to up above. Bob came center stage to pose for the cameras while the band lined up behind him.
The band was terrific. Dylan was terrific, the whole show was breathtaking and invigorating. If you are being swayed by all the negative reviews, disregard them. Dylan’s show is a can’t miss situation. Carpe Diem! Good things don’t last forever.
Exhuming Bob 31a
A Review
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
by
Victor Maymudes
Review by
R.E. Prindle
It Ain’t Dark Yet
31a will concern itself with Chapter 1 only. Victor Maymudes while closely connected with Dylan has always been written of as a shadowy slightly malevolent character. My impression has been that he was an enforcer of some sort for Dylan.
In this his own memoir he is a friend, advisor and confidante. Maymudes, born in 1935, was six years older than Dylan who he met in 1961. Maymudes was already in a career in show business. In 1955 near the heart of the Beatnik era he had opened a folk club coffee house on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles called The Unicorn. He was subsequently advised by Jack Elliot who he was managing at that time to go to New York to take in a new performer who turned out to be Bob Dylan.
Elliot explained that Dylan was copying his act but doing it better. Ramblin’ Jack himself introduced Victor to Bob giving the latter a run down on Victor’s achievements. According to Victor he and the twenty year old Dylan hit it off immediately. They began to pal around.
Maymudes gives a slightly different view of this period than has yet been around. The first chapter covers the period from the Spring of ’61 to Dylan’s Carnegie Hall performance in the Fall of ’61.
According to Maymudes shortly after meeting Dylan they went on a long drive and walks around the perimeter of New York City.
To quote Victor:
Bob mentioned going to Juvenile Hall and how he quickly realized there was a social structure inside and either you are going to get along or you really shouldn’t be there.
Hopefully this should settle the issue of whether Dylan was incarcerated in Red Wing Reformatory of Minnesota. While the paper trail has always indicated he did yet his term has been denied by all. In what amounts to a self-admission this should settle the issue.
There is also a piece on the internet by someone who had been in Red Wing at an earlier time but said he knew someone who was in Red Wing at the same time as Bob. Dylan says according to Victor that in order to get along you had to go along. I take that as a reflection after the fact, while Bob probably held himself aloof from the other boys as his possible fellow prisoner as above said he did. No one has believed the article but there may be something to it.
At any rate it seems clear that Bob did serve a sentence which was very unpleasant for him as why wouldn’t it be. The stay had a devastating effect on his personality, as why not? Bob’s song The Walls Of Red Wing thus seems to be a personal reminiscence.
Some of Bob’s stories such as touring with a carnival while false as told seem to be based on actual facts while being definitely embroidered. In the same paragraph Victor says: He talked about going with the carnival when they came to town. I would take that to mean that perhaps he volunteered to help in setting up the carnival as an extra hand as was common. There were temporary jobs when the circus came to town. You could drive stakes for instance and maybe get a free ticket.
2.
It also seems clear that Bob’s family life was far from harmonious. The Zimmerman’s seemed to have covered up a lot. Maymudes, same paragraph, p.4:
He told me deeply personal stuff like his dad leaving town and how he would have to stay at his dad’s mother in Minneapolis, how she would tell him his mother was a whore, sleeping around with other men. It was the kind of thing that probably wasn’t true about his mother, but his grandmother was sticking up for his father and trying to use her power to distance Bob from his own mother. Terrible thing to do to a child.
Bob’s grandmother may have been telling tales about Bob’s mother but I think not. My impression at looking at her picture was that she was a goodtime girl. She certainly kept Abe broke buying her furs, jewels and Cadillacs.
In Dylan’s portrayal of his putative father and his mother in his movie Masked And Anonymous his alter ego Jack Fate’s father is portrayed on his death bed while his mother with a red dress on appears to be gallivanting about.
I find it hard to believe Dylan’s grandmother would say those things about his mother if she didn’t mean them. It is also the first time I’ve heard that Dylan’s mother and father separated from time to time. As such behavior is common knowledge in a small town like Hibbing Dylan’s life may have been made miserable partly from that cause. He certainly has no love lost for that period in his life.
3.
One major question everyone asks is why Robert Shelton wrote such a glowing review about a performance of Bob’s and why John Hammond gave a nondescript Bob a recording contract. Maymudes may shed some light on that. He says on p. 46:
Over the next week Bob and I ended up hanging out non-stop. We were together all the time. We would depart and arrange to meet the following day. Eventually we even exchanged numbers. We had extensive conversations about everything. During the day we would go see Fellini’s movies and stop by the happening clubs and cafes like the Bitter End. We would stay up till dawn each morning. I would introduce him to everyone I knew, like Richard Alderson, the guy you hear announcing bands at Woodstock. We went to Dave Von Ronk’s house and played our guitars. John Hammond Sr. had a house on lower MacDougal St. and we would go there too.
All this has to fit into a time frame of about six months but the interesting thing here is that Victor and Bob visited John Hammond Sr. apparently several times before Shelton’s New York Times article of 9/29/61 and Dylan signing a Columbia Records Contract with Hammond on 9/30/61. Did Hammond really have time to read the article and say to himself, I’ve got to find this boy and sign him by the next day? Astonishing on the face of it. It would seem to have been a plan.
No other writer, no biographer places Dylan at Hammond Sr.’s house before 9/30/61. But according to Maymudes, and why should he lie although he might misremember, Hammond and Dylan were familiar with each other as early as the summer of ’61. Hammond must have heard Dylan play and sing before Shelton’s article. Thus his behavior in the studio where he had Bob just play and sing into the microphone while he read the newspaper is more understandable.
While every other folk label in NYC had rejected Bob evidently Hammond saw and heard something they didn’t. It would seem highly improbable he could sign Bob’s nearly indiscernible talent on his own hook. It may be then that he conspired with Shelton who he surely would have known to write an extremely favorable review to be published in the premier newspaper in the country and then sign Dylan on the strength of that. As it was his prescience was not immediately justified as the record bombed.
At any rate the above scenario would make the article and signing plausible.
On the other hand Hammond may just have had the golden ears with which he is attributed. In that context my brother-in-law played me all four of Dylan’s first LPs in 1964 that I found excruciatingly painful to listen to. I thought Dylan was going nowhere but my brother-in-law said, you watch, this guy is going to be big. That goes to prove whatever Bob had could be heard but only apparently by the elect.
4.
The Winter and Spring of 1961-62 Victor was touring with his act Wavy Gravy who he managed. He then returned to New York where Dylan was now living with Suze Rotolo. They continued their friendship.
Dylan had returned to Minnesota that Winter and had just returned as Victor hit town. Bob was now looking for management. He discussed this with Victor, pp. 51-52
During our walks on this second trip to New York, Bob and I talked about the future. He asked me about Manny Greenhill and Albert Grossman; he was wondering who he should sign with. Manny Greenhill was managing Joan Baez and her commercial success was increasing every day. At the same time Dave Von Ronk’s wife was managing Bob, but he was ready for the next step. Flat out he asked me which one he should sign with. I asked him how traditional he wanted to be and how far he wanted to reach. Those questions appealed to him and he expressed he wanted to go the distance, more commercial than Greenhill was doing. His day-to-day routine didn’t point to someone who wanted to go mainstream; he was more folky and traditional at this point. But he knew what he wanted and where he wanted to go from the start. So I said Albert was the logical choice. He was much more aggressive and much more commercial. Bob signed with Grossman a few days later.
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Bob’s ability to bend and refashion words was like magic; he was the one that could break into the mainstream while still playing socially conscientious music. Bob believed in himself and so did I, and that’s why Albert entering the picture made sense. Albert had commercial connections and wouldn’t ask Bob to change his tune to fit in. With Albert’s help Bob could force his style in front of the broader public and ultimately make everyone else fit into what he was doing.
That’s a pretty good insider’s synopsis. Grossman who would soon launch Peter Paul and Mary on the back of Dylan’s songs certainly had recording connections although Warner Bros. at the time was fairly low down the list of successful, maybe unsuccessful, record companies. Anyway Bob was already signed to CBS, the actual premier recording company at the time.
Victor goes on to give an interesting thumbnail of Albert Grossman that is immediate and accurate.
Always handy with the advice Victor tells Albert how to go about handling Bob while at his own expense he was setting up Dylan’s first Carnegie Hall appearance, not the main stage but a side stage.
Victor says Albert took the concert away from him while it is usually attributed to Izzy Young. In the event nobody came and the show was a total financial loss. Victor had a falling out with Albert deciding for ‘spiritual’ reasons to depart for Yelapa Mexico. Apparently Victor had been inhaling too much from The Teaching Of Don Juan.
His last words to Bob at this time were that if he ever needed him to say to whoever he was standing next to, Get Victor, and he would come.
It was the Sixties you know.
That is the end of the revelations of Tape 1. A remarkable and interesting account. We do know that Victor and Bob were friends so barring any embroidery or misremembering the account should be accurate. If so, all biographies are now askew. The period has to be reexamined and reevaluated to include Victor’s account.
I, Dynamo 