Two Documentaries

I just went back to work today after a two week holiday break, one of the perks of being a teacher. I could turn this into another "why I hate my job" post. At the end of the day, we were told that the director of the school believed we were all doing a terrible job. But I won't get into that now. Instead, I have a couple of movie recommendations.

Over the break, I was able to catch up with my Netflix movie-watching. One of them was The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends. It's a documentary that follows soldiers who have served in the current fiasco in Iraq, and the physical, psychological and spiritual damage it's done to them, and their attempts to cope with it. Thanks to Vikki over at Bells On for the recommendation. I actually ordered and bought this one before I was finished watching it-- I knew I would want to lend it to people.

Another documentary I recommend: Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness. It told the story of a World War II-era Japanese diplomat who was stationed in Lithuania. He had left a diplomatic post in Manchuria in the 1930's protesting Japanese atrocities there. Since he spoke Russian fluently, this was overlooked, and he was sent to a posting in Lithuania. Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, and then invaded by Germany. Jews from all over Europe had joined Lithuania's native Jewish population. Sugihara got involved in a complicated-- and ultimately successful-- scheme to issue visas to thousands of Jewish people that allowed some of them to escape to Japan and ultimately Shanghai, China. His actions, for which he was ultimately to pay a high price for, saved hundreds of lives.

Iggy Pop, Erik and Iraq

One of my new favorite blogger buddies, Erik over at Erik's Choice, has a brilliant commentary about the Iraq war and the average American's knowledge of the region and situation. He gets bonus points for including an Iggy Pop song reference.

Me an Extrovert? You're Kidding Me...

While on a visit to one of my favorite blogs, The Sprawling Ramshackle Compound, I read about the Myers-Briggs Personality Test

I'm an ENJI- Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling , Judging. My personality traits:

• very expressed extrovert


• moderately expressed intuitive personality


• distinctively expressed feeling personality


• moderately expressed judging personality

My wife and both my kids are raving extroverts as well. It's rarely quiet in the Yen household when we're all home. You should watch all four of us work a room sometime.

Curtis Mayfield

Back in my barfly days, I would hang at the Hopleaf, in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. The owner had an old-fashioned jukebox that would play actual vinyl 45's. If there were no records playing, the bartenders would put cd's on.

One of the bartenders back then was a six foot eight tall Detroit native named Bruno. Bruno was frequently surly, but underneath was a really nice guy who had great taste in music. One of the reasons he could be forgiven his surliness was his tendency during his shifts to shut off the jukebox and play the music of Curtis Mayfield. Over time, I developed a serious Curtis Mayfield jones. I'd long loved a handful of his tunes-- "Move On Up," "Pusherman," and "Freddie's Dead" were among them. Whenever Bruno would play Mayfield's records, I would hanker to have more Curtis Mayfield in my life.

I hanker no more. I can knock #37 off of my "life goals" list. My wife read my New Year's Day blog post and immediately ordered "People Get Ready", the Curtis Mayfield box set that Rhino Records released in 1996. It arrived Friday afternoon. I uploaded it to itunes that evening and am at this moment revelling in it.

Not only am I a fan of his music, I am an admirer of the man as a man. He grew up in Chicago's horrible Cabrini-Green housing projects. I witnessed the soul-crushing effects of this place first-hand, when I spent a year as a substitute teacher there in 1991-1992. How he managed to get out of there intact, let alone with his enormous talent and creativity amazes me. He formed the Impressions with Jerry "The Iceman" Butler (who went on to be a star in his own right, and is now a Cook Country Commissioner). He's probably best-known for composing and performing the soundtrack to the blaxploitation classic "Superfly." His powerful anti-drug message was muddled in the movie, but Mayfield spent his entire career weaving political commentary into his music. He was a nice guy and a good father-- one of his sons was a college buddy's roommate.

I was saddened when Mayfield was injured in a freak accident in 1990. He was performing in Brooklyn, when a gust of wind blew a stack of amplifiers over onto him, leaving him a quadrepelgic. Amazingly, he continued composing and performing until he died of diabetes in 1999.

As I listen to the box set, I'm enjoying hearing his old hits, but am especially enjoying hearing his lesser-known songs. I can't rave about the box set enough. Thanks darling!

If you can get your hands on "People Get Ready," do so. In the meantime, take a moment and enjoy him performing one of his classics, and one of my favorites, "Move On Up."

Random Ten For a New Year

1. Across the River- Bruce Hornsby and the Range
2. Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Steve Goodman, David Blue and Me – John Wesley Harding
3. The Year of the Cat- Al Stewart
4. Flowers of Evil- Mountain
5. Driving Wheel- Foghat
6. Move On Up- Curtis Mayfield
7. Target- Joe Jackson
8. Double Shot of My Baby’s Love- The Swingin’ Medallions
9. Green Hornet Theme- Al Hirt
10. White Rabbit- The Jefferson Airplane

The Curtis Mayfield song will get some company when the Curtis Mayfield box set my lovely wife ordered me arrives.

I can never hear White Rabbit anymore without being reminded of that scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Raoul Duke's attorney is demanding that Raoul Duke drop the radio into the bathtub and electrocute him when White Rabbit peaks. Turns out that the grapefruits that room service brought up came in handy.

The Survivors

I got an email from my friend Eric the other day telling me that my friend Mark's brother Carl was going to be in town Wednesday, and wanted to get together with some of Mark's friends for dinner. We were to meet at Tecalitlan, a Mexican restaurant on Chicago Avenue that Mark had always liked.

I've mentioned before in this blog that Mark was murdered in a botched robbery in June last year.

When I got there, Eric and Matt were already there. We had a chance to talk before Carl got there. It seems that there have been some shocking-- but good-- developments in the case. I also found out that Mark suffered a lot less than had originally been thought-- he had died pretty quickly. Cold comfort, I guess, but it gave me a small measure of relief knowing that he suffered less.

Carl arrived with Aaron. It was a little awkward at first-- this group of people hadn't been together since August, when we held a candlelight vigil in memory of Mark. Also, we hardly knew Carl. He was six years younger than Mark. We had all met him for the first time while dealing with taking care of Mark's house, and at the services.

As dinner went on, things loosened up. We realized that Carl had really just been getting to know his older brother when he died. We began telling Carl stories about his brother. As we finished dinner, we headed out to a brewpub and continued the conversation. We began talking about how each of us had met Mark. One of the guys, Aaron, was ten years younger than Mark, and had not met him until the mid-nineties. Some of us had known Mark over twenty years. Mark had an amazing group of friends he'd collected over the years, and many of those friends had become friends with one another as well. That was one of his unique qualities-- he was generous in sharing his friends.

We talked a little about the grief each of us had been dealing with, and came to the realization that we'd all avoided seeing one another since the services because it was a reminder of our loss. And we all realized that it had been the wrong thing to do; we badly needed one another, because we were the ultimate support group. Each of us realized that the other guys in this little group understood exactly what we were going through, because they were going through it too.

We told stories to Carl and to one another and finally laughed until we cried.

In the course of the evening, we found that Carl had been going through terrible marital difficulties that had started before Mark's death. Carl was able to tell us how Mark's parents were doing-- much better, he told us. It had really helped them to find out how many people counted Mark as such a close friend.

We told Carl what was so wonderful and unique about Mark-- his incredible range of knowledge and interests, his creativity, his determination-- he built a web-design business from nothing. How damned funny he was. And how he collected people he liked.

We also came to the collective realization that Mark would have been pissed off at us if we continued being sad. He would have told us that the best way to remember him would be to live and to live well.

I felt like a ten ton weight had been lifted off of me.

As the evening wound down, I found out that the grave marker that our college friend Lorelei had designed had finally been placed at his grave. Matt promised to email me a picture when he got home.



"Atwood" was the nickname Mark bore since college-- it was the name of the small central Illinois town where he went to high school. The design at the top-- a row of lines with a single line running through them-- represents how one guy touched so many lives.



For a long time I didn't think I'd ever be able to go to his gravesite again. It was the place of the saddest moment of my life-- when we put his remains in the ground. But I think I can do it now.

I think that this spring I'll be ready to visit his gravesite. Mark didn't know that he'd be leaving us early, but he did leave behind what we needed to survive losing him-- the friendships that developed among the large group of people he collected. When I visit, I'll have good news to bring him-- he needn't worry. We still love him and miss the hell out of him, but we did what he would have demanded of us-- we survived.

Please Let Me Know If There's Some Other Way We Can Screw Up Tonight...

One of my favorite movies is "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." The movie, released in 1991, is a parable for the Cold War, which was then coming to a end, with a whimper, rather than a bang, fortunately.

There's a scene in which Star Trek's archetypal hero, James T. Kirk, is hosting a dinner that is the first time humans and Klingons, the archetypal Star Trek villians, are having any kind of diplomatic connections. The dinner is tense and awkward, mitigated only by the serving of illegal, powerful blue Romulan Ale.

As the guests leave, Kirk readies to go to bed, and probably bed spins, leaving with the words 'I'm going to sleep this one off. Please let me know if there's some other way we can screw up tonight."

Reading the newspaper this morning, I wondered if George W. Bush said those very words last night upon hearing of the complete fuck-up of the execution of Saddam Hussein.

For those who missed it, the execution was an almost textbook clusterfuck: Not only was a guard recording it with a cellphone, what was recorded was, as the New York Times put it, an "almost Gothic display of intimidation and death...". Shiite guards and witnesses were allow to taunt and torment Hussein. Not surprisingly, this has infuriated Sunnis in Iraq.

So let me summarize this entire enterprise in brief.

1. Despite the pleadings of various FBI and intelligence agents, reporting, among other things, that there is about to be an enormous terrorist attack involving the flying of airplanes; that there are specific instances of men of Middle Eastern origin taking lessons on how to fly jumbo jets, but specifically saying they don't need to learn how to take off and land; that there is a huge amount of traffic among terrorist communication networks.

2. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the crash of the airplane in Pennsylvania result in the murder of 2,972 people.

3. The United States invades Afghanistan, a failed state that is full of people the United States trained, who have now turned on the United States. The Taliban and Al Queda suffer serious setbacks, as the United States aids the Northern Alliance in coming to power. This is a rare shinging success in this whole fiasco.

4. George W. Bush stampedes Congress into passing the laughably named Patriot Act, which is meant to curb civil liberties-- allowing law enforcement officials powerful antiterrorist tools such as the ability to see what library books citizens are checking out. Also, the administration begins to capture people allegedly involved with the and holding them, by the measure of most serious legal analysts, illegally. Many were not even involved in terrorism, but since the US held them incommunicado and did not allow even military lawyers to see them, the number is still not clear. In addition, one US citizen, Juan Padilla, is held in bizarre conditions. The fact of the matter is that if various law enforcement and intelligence services had been allowed to do their jobs, it could have all been prevented.

5. The administration vetted information, proscribing information that might contradict the truth-- that Saddam Hussein was no longer, after the 1991 Gulf War, developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The CIA had in fact informed the administration of this fact. It is also a well-known fact that the Al Queda is virtually non-existant in Iraq. This does not stop the Bush administration from building up to a war, ignoring Colin Powell's warning that the war was like being in a china shop-- if you break it, you bought it-- that once we invade, we'll be stuck there as long as it takes to form a viable government.

6. Against the advice of many, including the President's own father, former President George Bush, the US invades in March of 2003, easily defeating the Iraqi army with it's "shock and awe" campaign. George W. Bush has himself landed on an aircraft carrier deck off the west coast of the United States behind a banner saying "Mission Accomplished."

7. Almost immediately the whole thing starts unravelling. Sunnis and Shiites start settling old scores. Since the Iraqi military has been disbanded, hapless US soldiers are forced to deal with the situation. The US hastily tries to reconstitute the Iraqi military, but by now, military members and Iraqi policemen are using their positions to support Sunni and Shiite militias that are exacting a huge toll on Iraqi civilians-- 12,000 in the last year. The Al Queda now runs wild all over Iraq.

8. Over 3,000 US soldiers have been killed, surpassing the death toll of 9/11. Many more have suffered horrific injuries to their bodies and brains. More are coming home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Iraq struggles to form a viable government as it slides into mass chaos and mass murder. Because of the draining of resources from the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban is making a resurgence there. Not even the execution of a known horrible monster like Saddam Hussein went right.

And there is no end in sight.

I wouldn't be surprised if George W. Bush starts drinking again.

Rants, Raves and Resolutions

I, for one, am glad to put the year 2006 behind me. Here are my rants, raves and resolutions for the year.

Rants
1. The death of my friend Mark Evans. He was murdered in June in a home invasion. I still miss him terribly.
2. The loss of my teaching job in Cicero, Illinois. I taught sixth grade there for four years.
3. My father being diagnosed with cancer.
4. The murder or Marcell Collins, one of my students at my new teaching job. He was a nice kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
5. The suicide of an old acquaintance, Malachi Ritscher, in a horrible public self-immolation to protest the war.


Raves
1. The Chicago Police caught the assholes who killed my friend.
2. My friend Garrett came home safely after serving a year in the Army in Iraq.
3. My father survived his cancer surgery.
4. My wife and I celebrated a year of marriage on December 30.
5. My kids had a productive and happy year.
6. Reconnecting with my old friend Dobie. We'd lost track of one another. I tracked him down to Singapore.

Resolutions
1. To begin taking classes to change careers. I want to go to pharmacy school.
2. To spend more time with friends.
3. To play guitar more often.
4. To read more.
5. To spend more time with my kids.

Last year I was reading an article in the New York Times about the parents of a woman who was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. When they gathered her possessions, they found a laptop in her apartment. They did not plug it in and turn it on until last year. One of the things they found was a list of goals. Some were mundane, like "exercise more." Others were loftier, like "hike the Andes Mountains." I was inspired by that list to start my own. Tonight, I was looking over that list to see which ones I've knocked off this year.

#6, "Start a Blog," I think I can say I fulfilled that one.
#8 teaching my stepdaughter to ride a two-wheeler, I fulfilled.
#13, get a laptop for my son, was fulfilled for Christmas. He loves his Ibook.
#17 Buy more art-- I think that went along with #4-- be a better husband. I got my wife a painting she really badly wanted for Christmas-- it's the one at the top of this post.
#19 Buy new glasses and contacts-- done
#25 Play more baseball with my son Adam-- done
#26 Eat more dark chocolate. This is strictly for health purposes, of course-- anti-oxidants, you know. Same reasoning for the red wine.
#30 New health insurance coverage for my son (he was covered by my old job before)-- done

There are some I need to work harder on.
#7 Exercise more. I went out running yesterday, but need to be more regular about it.
#9 Take my son camping-- we bought a tent and sleeping bags-- now we need to actually use them.
#15 Journal more often
#18 Take my son Adam to the Louisville Slugger factory. We drive past Louisville all the time on the way to my parents' house in Eastern Tennessee. We need to plan a stop there sometime soon.
#28 Take my son to the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle. Among a lot of other rock and roll memorabilia, they have the guitar Hendrix played at Woodstock. He's a big Hendrix fan.
#29 End hunger and hatred. I'm working hard, but obviously I need to do more.
#37 Get more Curtis Mayfield music. I need to hint more strongly about a Curtis Mayfield box set next birthday.
#35, #39, #40 See Tom Jones, Los Lobos and Bob Seger. They are the three performers I haven't seen that I've been meaning to see for years.
#38 Set up a scholarship in the memory of my friend Mark. We had gathered reward money to entice someone to rat out his killers. The cops caught them before this happened, so we decided to use that money to set up a scholarship fund. We've got to iron out the details in the next year.