.As a boy in Clarksdale, Tennessee Williams was dazzled by the lavish entertainments hosted by
Blanche Clark, the daughter of the town’s founder, and her husband J.W. Cutrer at their mansion
(below left) built in 1916. The playwright even used the Cutrer name in many of his plays including
The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
In his poem The Couple, Tennessee Williams wrote, It’s all so wide in the Delta and so level! The seasons could walk across it four abreast! Clarksdale has dedicated an elegant Tennessee Williams Park, overseen by an angel (right)…a wistful reminder of Summer and Smoke. Source
.Moon Lake Casino
Williams’ work is filled with references to Clarksdale and neighboring towns. More than any other site, Moon Lake and Moon Lake Casino in nearby Dundee are at the center of the playwright’s work. Speaking about her gentleman callers, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie remembers Moon Lake, and Blanche DuBois talks about it most movingly in A Streetcar Named Desire. The casino is where Blanche would go dancing on a summer’s night, until the evening she discovered that her young husband was romantically involved with a male friend.The Moon Lake Casino, or club, has had several incarnations, on and off stage. The Reverend Dakin would often take the family there for dinner, which in the southern tradition came at midday. But the place also had its moments of notoriety, and in Summer and Smoke Williams suggested that it had once been a brothel. As Alma Winemiller says to a stranger at the end of the play, “There’s not much to do in this town after dark, but there are resorts on the lake that offer all kinds of after-dark entertainment. There’s one called Moon Lake Casino.” source
Today it is a quaint bed and breakfast known as Uncle Henry’s Place.
Above Right: Moon Lake…directly across the road from Uncle Henry’s/ Moon Lake Casino.Below Left: Carole and I rented one of the 2 remaining cabins.
Right: With a steep path to swampy river directly behind.
George (Uncle Henry’s grandson) warned us “Feel free, but something stinks like rotten cabbage,
it’s a water moccasin! Slowly back away…They don’t much like you neither.”
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.Left:: A City Girl (Carole Giacona) encounters RoadKill.
Center: So, I bought her a gift. Right: William Faulkner probably stayed in this very cabin. But he didn’t come to Moon Lake for the gambling, drinking, whoring and great food. Bill came here to kill critters…Great hunting and fishing in these here parts!…OK, maybe he was also here for the drinking.
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Above left: The famous 10-foot-tall Egg…“Memphis- Home of the Blues, Birthplace of Rock”
Right: From the bridge over the Mississippi tourists learn that you can’t spell Memphis without a guitar.
ELVIS is the big Memphis draw for most folks. What made the King so special?
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Above Left: As a kid Elvis drove a truck for Crown Electric…
Above Right:…and listened to “race music” on America’s first radio station with an all-Black format.
This was unheard of for white American teens in early 1950s.
White kids had their own pop charts, radio stations and clubs. But, Elvis kinda dug the beat.
Below: And, Elvis (along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and so many more white kids) brought that great sound to Sun Records.
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Presley not only covered the Black sound (such as Big Mama Thorton’s “Hound Dog”), but also developed his own style which nearly matched the original. Blacks laughed when they first saw Elvis strut his stuff… a little tame by the high standard of performances that they were accustomed to. White parents weren’t laughing. They considered Presley’s gyrations as suggestive and immoral. WASP teens claimed a double-standard foul here. “How about your Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe?” The Elvis issue confused Mom and Dad. When they looked at the boy, Presley fit the Wild One / Rebel Without a Cause/ JD image with his greaser hairstyle, black leather jacket and the obscene way that he shook his hips to entice young girls. On the other hand, in interviews between songs, Elvis sounded like a God-fearing, good-ole-boy. Certainly, this hillbilly kid seemed less dangerous than Little Richard, Chuck Berry and the rest of those “sex-crazed Negroes.” Elvis from my free e-book Puzzling Evidence.
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But, of course, I came to Memphis for Bar-B-Q and Blues.
To be continued
The world is laughing at America and our White Trash Tea Potty protests:
A Mosque (health club with swimming pool, basketball and tennis courts and a small prayer area on the 8th floor), blocks away from Ground Zero (with many churches, Cathedrals, Synagogues and a famous strip club in between???!!!) Anchor Babies???!!! Gays attacked by Target???!!!
Lions and tigers and bears, Oh My! Racists and Homophobes Unite!
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!” FDR (a real no-bullshit-American president).
From The DailyMash England Anchor Babies
.Perhaps our Founding Father, The Bible and I are wrong.
Perhaps America should scrap the Constitution, the New and Old Testament.
Moses’ mother send her child down the river in a reed basket to escape genocide by an Evil Empire.
Should America follow Egypt’s racist lead?
My brother, Nick, has done a ton of research on our Family Tree.
The result: My Irish Grandparents wandered down from Canada (no border check) around 1908 and never bothered with that citizenship nonsense.
Nick found an Ellis Island record of my Italian grandfather from 1907, but nothing on my dear Nana.
Thus, MY PARENTS WERE ANCHOR BABIES!
But, Praise the Lord, I PASS FOR WHITE, so NO PROBLEMO!
.LEST WE FORGET:
ALL of our Foundering Father were Anchor Babies or sons of Anchor Babies.
YouTube vid- Target Ain’t People from MoveOn
Corporations can now buy American elections? You Betya, Guys and Gals!
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The 3 rules of Real Estate: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
I pity Afghanistan…in the wrong place for 3,ooo years…
Gateway between Stupid White Men in Europe and the rest of the known world.
The Afghanistan quagmire has swallowed so many great Empires.
The Greeks…2340 years ago:
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Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan in 330 BCE, but after 25 years of occupation The Turks kicked his ass to the curb and soon after the Greek Empire collapsed.
The Great Roman Empire invaded and began an occupation of Afghanistan in the the first century AD, but in 220 Parthian Persia vassal, Ardashir, kicked their ass to the curb and thus began the fall of the greatest Empire in history.
In 1219 Genghis Khan invaded and occupied Afghanistan with the same result.
MODERN HISTORY: After WWII there were only two great empires: The United States and Russia.
In the 1980s the commies put all their chips on the table and Reagan matched them with $3,000,000,000 of our tax dollars to Osama bin Laden and his warlord Taliban buddies in Afghanistan. And then, Ronnie raised the bet by forcing Saudi Arabia to throw another $3,000,000,000 into the pot. Russia went bust and bin Laden became a superstar.
Today America is posed to wage a full scale occupation of Afghanistan…Will our fate be any different than the Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Huns or the Russians?
Those who do not know history are doomed to relive it. George Santayana OR:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World, Candorville, Conrad, Get Your War ON, Matt Wuerker, Mr.Fish, Horsey, Doonsbury, Non Sequitur, Tom Toles Oliphant, Luckovich, La Cucaracha, Lalo, What Now toons
The first entry on this blog 6 years ago…after a personal “Do it” from America’s greatest living poet.
After 51 years of harassment (Freedom of Speech, Dissent and great literature are pornography!)
by cops and city officials Lawrence Ferlinghetti (writer/ publisher and owner of City Lights Bookstore) was named as San Francisco’s first poet laureate (1998).
Lawrence nailed the frameless certificate to a wall in the Hypocrisy section of his store.
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Speak Out
And a vast paranoia sweeps across the land
And America turns the attack on the Twin Towers
Into the beginning of the Third World War
The war with the Third World
And the terrorists in Washington
Are shipping out the young men
To the killing fields again
And no one speaks
And they are rousting out
All the ones with turbans
And they flushing out
All the strange immigrants
And they are shipping all the young men
To the killing fields again
And no one speaks
And when they come to round up
All the great writers and poets and painters
The National Endowment of the Arts of Complacency
Will not speak
While all the young men
Will be killing all the young men
In killing fields again
So now is the time for you to speak
All you lovers of liberty
All you lovers of the pursuit of happiness
All you lovers and sleepers
Deep in your private dream
Now is the time for you to speak
O silent majority
Before they come for you!
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Complete deck!
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Huckabee pardons psycho born-again killers, Lou Dobbs, The Vatican welcomes homophobic Anglicans into the fold, I Survived a Republican Town Hall!, Afghanistan…Empire Graveyard. A Voting Literacy Test for your Uncle Bubba, The Sanctity of Marriage, Christian Taliban and American Terrorists, Torture or Enhanced Sadism?, The New, Improved Hip Hop GOP, Recent American Occupation and Oil History As I Remember, Iran’s Bogus Election
PEOPLE
Those who should be thinned from the herd-
Sara Palin, Another Exciting Episode of the Wasilla Hillbillies, Bionic Christian Carrie Prejean, PsychoKiller Steven Green, Blogogate, Joe the Plumber, The Bush Legacy
Persons of Interest:
Carol Shepp and John McCain, GOP ST Ronald Reagan
Recent Constructive Anarchists
Ted Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, ShoeGate Muntadhir al-Zaidi
2008
The 2008 election, Xmas 2008
Below are my archives of stuff you may have missed
Return to TOP OF THIS PAGE
Poster from If You’re Not a Terrorist…Then Stop Asking Questions by Micah Wright
“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not its institutions or its office holders.” — Mark Twain
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Dr Samuel Johnson
“Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious.” — Oscar Wilde
“A patriot must always defend his country against his government.” — Edward Abbey
“When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear the government, you have tyranny.” — Thomas Jefferson
Billionaires For Bush have a vision for a stronger America:
Billionocracy: Our Vision for the Future
For more info hit Ad Busters
3 of these CloneMasters songs played on the Dr Demento Show 25 years ago. No Toys is new!
Poster by Micah Wright
Speak Out by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poets Against the War
Jules Feiffer on Nixon- 1973
Harold Pinter
Gore Vidal on President Jonah
Kurt Vonnegut’s Custodians of Chaos
God Save the Queen by John Cleese- Nov 2004
Will Rogers speaks to me thru a Ouija Board
War Prayer by Mark Twain -1904
The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld
Read Rummy’s Poems
To link up: E-mail Greg
