Word: protestations
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Oklahoma cannot. But Tom Sankey's The Golden Screw is a pretender to the folk-rock name which rejects our commitments to urban-ness, peace and humanity and insults our perspicacity. It idealizes instead a Dylanesque young folk singer who goes through the protest song stage into electronic rock on the rock road to success. At the end, when our hero is king of the music mountain, he sings a last rock song about "Flipping Out". Then he asserts his individuality by saying "fuck you" to the world in general and the audience in particular, and singing again the quaint...
Substandard dialogue and music can sometimes be forgiven, though not enjoyed . But The Golden Screw is unforgiveably inane because Sankey looked at the world, saw that it was not perfect, and plugged in the easiest wrong answers. Protest songs and rock music are hardly decadent--they represent a social and artistic commitment to our world. They, not "John Henry" are the songs of us folk, as hip Country and Western groups. Sure, folk music is often great and gutsy. But the simplistic Romantic anti-sellout sentiment it symbolizes in this play really equals the willful alienation of Sankey's hero...
...circle, which 20 minutes earlier had been thinking primarily about peaceful protest, was now talking about military strategy for the policeman-enemy. There was still opposition, of course. One bearded man, Leonard Wolfe, who had supported the march to the jail, argued in a half-whisper with Mark Dyen, of Harvard SDS, who supported mobile tactics...
...total confusion. Kids who had been listening to the tall New Yorker with sideburns now didn't know which way to go. Were they supposed to run, or stay? Some people scattered. Some began to battle the police. It was impossible to tell whether this was a public protest, or a battle out of the American revolution. Kicking kids were dragged by three cops into a paddy-wagon. Cop cars chased individuals across the grass. One young boy threw an empty bottle against a paddy wagon, and immediately five or six policemen and a couple of other citizens descended...
...offensively effective. But there will be other nights." And then as I saw that kid getting his arms and legs twisted as the cops dumped him in the wagon, it occurred to me that talk of police brutality in a situation like this was almost meaningless. This was no protest; this was a miniature war. Most of the kids on the Common hadn't wanted a war, but they nonetheless listened as the tall New Yorker told them that it was like the American Revolution, "and we're the ones who are gonna fight like Indians...