Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Review Of An Old Movie

   Review Of An Old Film "Goodfellas': "Crime Doesn't Pay'




      'Goodfellas' by now is an ancient film. It came out in 1990, nearly thirty years ago. Yet I bought a DVD version of the film from a video store about a week ago.( I am lucky. This video store called 'Black Dog Video' is one of only two or three video stores left in Vancouver.)
      What is 'Goodfellas' about? Mostly crime. It's full of violence murder and bloodshed done by gangsters. Some of these men are Italian-Americans: some aren't. They live in New York City from the 1950's to the 1970's. What the film proves simply is that crime doesn't pay. "Any new criminal starting out on  a life of crime," writes the American sociologist Randall Collins, "has a lot to,learn and many connections to make."
    In this sense the young Henry Hill (Ray Liotto) is lucky. Growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1950's, he learns a lot and makes connections as a young adolescent. He runs messages for criminals, survives beatings by his father, and by his early 20's is a full fledged criminal. Now he has made friends with Tommy De Vito(Joe Pesci) and Jimmy "The Gent" Conway (Robert De Niro). These three and others do horrible things. They extort money, sell stolen goods, brutalize other people and in the case of Conway and De Vito kill quite a few people.
     As a very young man Hill admires the Mafia don played by Paul Sorvino. Near the film's end he denounces him and Conway to the police. Tommy De Vito is by now dead, killed by another gangster.
     The film directed by Martin Scorsese and scripted by Scorsese and Nicolas Pileggi is based on Pileggi's book called "Wiseguy: Life In A Mafia Family'.The movie is told in a semi-documentary style by Hill and his wife Karen (Lorraine Bracio). 'Goodfellas' is full of scenes of meals which serve up delicious food, visits to night clubs and robberies and murder. Yet  the old adage  "Crime doesn't pay" comes true. Nearly all the criminals end up killed or behind bars. Hill survives but only be turning state's evidence. "Never rat on your friends," Conway tells Hill  near the film's beginning. Hill breaks this rule and survives.
     Scorsese's film is one of the finest gangster films I've seen. Yet it's not for the faint of heart. These 'Goodfellas' are anything but good. They're mostly killers who end up dead or in prison. And its's in prison where they belong.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Two Cheers For The Hiipies. Part Four by Dave Jaffe.

   Two Cheers For The Hippies. Part Four/




         Many people didn't Like the hippies. Yet business people saw money to be made in this new group. Businessmen produced and sold bright psychedelic posters. Music companies produced rock music by the Doors, Janis Joplin, and Big Brother And The Holding Company. Drug paraphernalia was soon being sold. Meanwhile millions of men and women grew their hair long, practiced what mainstream society called 'free love',and for a time scorned marriage and lived openly with a man or a woman. The changing lifestyles were in some ways a peaceful revolution.
     Then in October 1973 the Oil Producing Exporting Countries threw the Western world a curve ball. In the wake of the Israeli-Arab 1973 OPEC countries raised the price of oil  400 per cent .This price hike set off a worldwide wave of inflation . "In France," wrote economist Robert Heilbroner, "prices rose by 75 per cent in the five years after the OPEC oil shock." In Italy, Heilbroner pointed out, prices rose by 125 per cent, while in Britain prices soared up by 185 per cent.
       "Around the capitalist world production began to fall and unemployment began to rise. In the U.S. the G.N.P. fell 9 per cent  and joblessness rose by 85 per cent." The same trends hit Canada too. The affluence of the 1960's which did exist side by side with large pockets of poverty, seemed to vanish. Now the live and let live ethic of the hippies gave way to a far harsher competitive ethic.
     Fifty years after Jack Newfield wrote his article on the hippies in the 'Village Voice' much has changed. Newfield died many years ago. So has Jerry Rubin. 'The Village Voice' has closed up  shop along with many other countercultural papers, Across the world tyrants and tough rulers like U.S. president Donald Trump. China's Xi Xinping. Russia's Vladimir Putin and other heads of state rule the roost. Yet despite all this, the hippies have left their footprints on the sands of time.
      Casual sex, casual dress, and casual drug use that the hippies pioneered, has been embraced by many people. Marijuana, the drug that hippies openly smoked , is now legal in Canada, Uruguay and many American states. Thousands of young unmarried couples, live together just as hippies did. The hippies that so many people scorned and sometimes even attacked did  help make parts of the world better places to live in.
   "Give flowers to the rebels that failed," said some early 20th century progressives. The hippies also pushed for what they called "Flower Power." They may have failed but they also in part succeeded.
 They should be remembered.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe: Two Cheers For The Hiippies - Part Three by Dave Jaffe

    Two Cheers For The Hippies by Dave Jaffe: Part Three




       " Peace and Love' may have been the motto of many hippies. Yet there were dangerous moments in the hippie world too. Bikers often visited the hippie world and bullied these young people. Some of the young  people were strung out on amphetamines or crashed after bad acid trips. Free clinics staffed by volunteers sprung up to help the injured and sick people.
     Meanwhile the great rebellions of the late 1960's provoked a reaction from conservatives. Police and National Guard people shot and killed more than 160 people in the riots that erupted after Martin Luther King Junior was killed in 1968. Police attacked demonstrators and others who came to Chicago in 1968 to protest outside the Democratic Convention. Then police raided the headquarters of Black Panthers across America in 1969 and shot and killed Fred Hampton in Chicago.
      In Berkeley California students and street people clashed with police forces in the summer of 1969 as the young people tried to defend "People's Park' from the local government. The National Guard killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University in the spring of 1970  and three students at Jackson State University. These students and tens of thousands of others were protesting the American invasion of Cambodia.
     "Just watch me," Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau told t.v. reporter Tim Ralfe in the fall of 1970 when Ralfe asked the p.m. how far he would go to suppress the terrorism  of the Front de Liberation de Quebec or the F.L.Q. In the wake of two F.L.Q. kidnappings and one murder, Trudeau announced a War Measures Act in October1970 that embraced the whole of Canada. Hundreds of people had their homes searched and many ended up in prison for a few weeks undergoing interrogation by police.
      The cadres of the F.L.Q. like many other hard core left wingers scorned the hippies. Francois Simard a former F.L.Q.'er wrote a book on his political journey into and out of terrorism. In his memoir Simard trashed the hippies. Another man but this time from the richest one per cent  swung to the right in the wake of the rebellions of the 1960's.
   Nelson Rockefeller, the ultra-rich governor of New York State or"Rocky" as Rockefeller was known, had at one time supported single payer medicare  and a woman's right to an abortion. .He had also voted to build a state wide system of hospitals and a number of universities. In Albany which was  the state's capital, massive buildings went up that helped grow support for Rockefeller among the unionized members of the building trade unions. Now prisoners in the state prison at Attica rebelled in 1971 and seized guards as  hostages.
      The prisoners invited journalists and political activists onto prison grounds. "You're doing a great job buddy," Rockefeller told journalist Tom Wicker who phoned the governor and pleaded with him to come to Attica to defuse the rebellion. Instead Rockefeller sent armed forces and police to Attica. The police and others shot and killed three guards and dozens of prisoners. The Attica uprising was the last rebellion of the 1960's and 1970's and it was crushed.
     Then a few years later Rockefeller brought in a sweeping anti-drug law that sent thousands of
   young mostly African-American men to prison. This law was a precursor of President Bill Clinton's 'Three Strikes And You're Out' law that swelled the ranks of prisoners across America in the 1990's and beyond. In any case the era of liberalism that helped fuel the number of hippies and an era of liberalism in the U.S.A. was coming to an end. 

Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man. "Two Cheers For The Hippies" .Part Two by Dave Jaffe.

  Two Cheers For The Hippies: Part Two by Dave Jaffe.




        The hippies produced new things to get their views out. So-called 'underground papers' written by hippies surfaced all over the United States and Canada. Singers like the Beatles and Bob Dylan were already popular when the hippies appeared. Then in the mid-1960's, new groups like The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, Mock Duck, The Doors, The Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas And The Papas and Big Brother And The Holding Company popped up to sing and create new music for this new demographic.
    Some of the mainstream media launched attacks on hippies. They headlines and front paged stories on the danger of L.S.D. and also the dirt that hippies lived in. L.S.D. was a dangerous drug. "I never saw anybody get better using L.S.D.," said Tom Clark, a British-born immigrant to Canada in the mid-1960's. "Yet I sure saw some people's lives get worse." Yet at the same time that some papers were demonizing L.S.D. users, over 20,000 Canadians were dying every year from smoking cigarettes. Another 6,000 to 10,000 were facing early death by drinking alcohol.
   While some Canadian papers talked about the dirt that hippies lived in, they said nothing about the terrible living conditions of First Nations people. Hypocrisy ran rampant when some Canadians talked about hippies.
    Books on the hippies rolled out of the publishing houses. Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" became a best seller. Pierre Berton's "The Smug Minority" and Nicholas Von Hoffman's "We Are The Children Our Parents Warned Us Against' were read by many thousands of people.
       It was in some ways a magical moment. A consumer driven world was being slowly undercut by a group of youngsters who didn't want to join in the rat race. Yet all of this soon ended. Hard core progressives had never liked the hippies. "I had no time for the hippies," said the late Sandy Cameron who was a Vancouver-based activist. Yet police and governments were a far more threat. Police arrested dope smoking hippies and threw many of them into prison after bringing these young people before tough judges. Police often harassed sellers of underground papers and charged them with selling obscene material.
    "I would spend sometimes a whole day in court rooms," the publisher  of Vancouver-based "The Georgia Straight" Dan McLeod said recalling days when he first started publishing the paper.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old man by Dave Jaffe. Part One of 'Two Chhers For The Hippies.

    Two Cheers For The Hippies' by Dave Jaffe. Part One.






              In 1967, journalist Jack Newfield wrote a story on the hippies that appeared in 'The Nation' magazine. "Two cheers for the hippies" wrote Newfield, who was a left leaning journalist. Back then he was a regular writer for the alternative New York based paper 'The Village Voice'.
     Newfield liked the lifestyle of the hippies. He was glad that these mostly young people had cast off the trappings of the middle class. Yet he couldn't endorse their contempt for political issues. Back in 1967 in the United States, African Americans struggled for social justice. Young American men were being drafted into the U.S. armed forces and then shipped off to fight, kill and die in Vietnam.
     An American anti-war movement was urging young American men to defy the draft. "Women should say yes to men who say no," said folksinger Joan Baez. The hippies rarely joined political demos. Tens of thousands of young hippies dropped out of suburbia - at least for a time. They swarmed into places like San Francisco's Haight Ashberry district, Yorkville in Toronto, New York City's East Village and the Kitsilano area of  Vancouver. Here they crashed or lived in what they called "pads". They smoked marijuana, and took L.S.D. or Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, which they soon called "acid". They let their hair grow long and dressed in colourful clothes. They scorned the working majority that they called "straights".
      "Tune in, turn on and drop out," said one of the chief advocates of dropping  out and  taking L.S.D., namely Timothy Leary. Jerry Rubin back then, was a young uptight left leaning politico. Rubin was a post graduate student at the university of California in Berkeley. Berkeley sat right across the San Francisco bay from Haight Ashberry. "In the midsixties," Rubin recalled, "came the emergence of the hippies, dropping out of school, getting high on grass and acid, communicating with God and creating a new lifestyle."
    Rubin scorned liberals like Jack Newfield but the hippies impressed him. He joined them at their grand gatherings called 'Be Ins". Rubin then moved to New York City to start a new revolutionary group called "yippies". Yippes fused the hippie life style with revolutionary politics.

Ends and Odds: the Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. What Women Said To Me.. Part Two.

   What Women Said to Me by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.




         My blog that you're reading also angered some women and they let me know it. "Stay away from me," one woman in her late 50's told me one day the street not far from where I live. This woman had read one of my blog sentries and it outraged her. She told me that I was anti-American and "full of hate and anger." I said nothing back to her except to tell her that I had no interest in talking to her ever again.
     I put these outbursts by women down to the feminist movement. Now let me make two points about what and why these women said what they did. Most of what they said about me was true. I am an eccentric or "weird" if you want to use that word, I often copy or "appropriate" other people's work as fine art aficianados often say about duplicating  other people's art products. At other times I have been  pompous and overbearing.
      Also the feminist movement is still around and that's good. It has liberated millions of women around the world and opened to them opportunities that never were there  before say, 1975. Yet at the same time many women see the new power of women as an opportunity,as they used to say, "To let it all hang out." They now feel no restraints in saying what they don't like about men's actions.
       "Women are sugar and spice and everything nice," some people used to say in the 1950's. This stereotype along with a whole lot of other stereotypes about women is now buried in the garbage cans of history. This is a definite step forward. Yet now as an old man I stay away from arguing with any woman.  I've taken enough insults in my life. I don't wish for any more of them.
     My treatment of women in my youth has come back to haunt me, and that I believe is only fair.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe. What Women said To Me . Part One

   What Women Said To Me by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




        Once upon a time I was an abuser. In fact from my mid teens to my early 30's, I abused women. I never raped, abducted, stalked or incested women. Two or three times I touched and kissed women when I shouldn't have.
     Still, no woman then or now was or is any danger from me. Yet I did say some horrible things to women. Then I went into therapy and tried to gag my abusive mouth. And for the most part I did succeed. Still, as the old  saying goes, "What goes around comes around."
      In the early 1970's the second wave of feminism surfaced. I remember when 25,000 women walked out into the streets of New York City in the summer of 1970 to demand equality. I thought that this was a great event which did move me. At first I supported this movement totally.
"Feminism is a great thing," I told quite a few people.
     Yet the I ran into some young feminists who were extremely abusive. I just responded to them the way the treated to me. I was abusive as they were. "You were crazy back then," one of my co-workers in the early 1970's told me years later. He was right. Back then I was a short, quasi-psychotic very muscular man who was both sad and angry and potentially violent.
     Then in 1975 I started years of therapy. I emerged from therapy as a much thinner, quieter person but full of anxiety. Now I met women who may have seen me as a potential verbal punching bag. They said horrible maybe true things to my face and I didn't argue back.
    "Mister," one visual artist said, "all you do is copy. You don't have an original bone in your body." Another woman, a powerful art bureaucrat didn't like me at all. And she let me know it. "You are one of the most pompous and derivative artists I've met," she said.
   Outside the art world I met other women who insulted me. "You are weird," a neighbor of mine in a housing co-op said. "You are the weirdest person I've ever met." Her view of me, she told me, was held by most people in the co-op. She was probably right about me. I'm an eccentric and always have been.
   In the religious world women also took verbal pot shots at me. One woman in her late 40's erupted in a fury when I put down the late American evangelist Billy Graham. "How dare you insult Billy Graham,"  she just about screamed at me. "This man was my idol when I was young. I listened to his sermons and loved them."
   She went on for about ten minutes praising Graham and trashing me. I just smiled all the time as her rant unfolded. A few months later I left the worship house where this woman unloaded her anger on me and never went back. Her outburst played some part in me leaving that religious place.