This Kid Is Lucky To Be Alive

My friend Keith sent me this scan of a newspaper clipping.



My god, the kid is lucky to be alive.

I certainly hope they hosed the deer off before they posed him with it.

Occasional Forgotten Video: U2, "Two Hearts"

I had my second and last final for the semester, in Chemistry 201 this morning. It was a rough one. I'm brain dead today, and still have to work tonight, so I'm taking the easy way out with another "Occasional Forgotten Video." When I'm feeling a little fresher and creative tomorrow, I'll post about the beginning of the The Evil Dictator's baseball season, including a surprise about the team's sponsor. Just to give you a hint, his Indy Cred is about to skyrocket. And he will try to break your heart.

This vid was from 1983, a year before the overtly political turns that U2 would take with albums like "The Unforgettable Fire" and "The Joshua Tree" in 1984 and 1987 respectively. This song is pure pop brilliance and the video beautifully filmed in Paris.

Occasional Forgotten Video: Psychedelic Furs, "Love My Way"

I've got a Biology Final tomorrow and a Chemistry test covering 5 chapters and Wednesday, so I'm going to be a busy guy the next couple of days. But after that, I'm done for three week (until summer school starts) and can resume regularly scheduled posting, including baseball news about the The Evil Dictator, who is off to a good start-- and is making out like a bandit as a consequence. More on that in a couple of days.

In the meantime, I'm taking the easy way out for a couple of days, with my "Occasional Forgotten Video" series.

Today's is the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way." The first time I ever saw this video, I was in Marty's, a tavern in Charleston, Illinois, where I went to college at Eastern Illinois University.

I've loved the Furs since the first time I heard them on the radio in 1979 or 1980. Their first album is incredible-- "India," "Sister Europe" and "We Love You" still sound great nearly 30 years later. "Love My Way", from 1982, is another of their songs that really grabbed me. It's everything I love in a song-- ethereal and haunting. The video was classic eighties video-- shot on the cheap, filled with meaningless imagery and in black and white. It's one of my favorite songs and one of my favorite videos.

Celebrating Lee Elia Day

Today's Chicago Sun-Times had a story about an obscenity-laced tirade by White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. It was hilariously similar to a notorious tirade by Chicago Cubs manager Lee Elia in 1983. A few bloggers noted it on the 25 year anniversary on April 29.

The Cubs had gotten off to a very poor start that year-- 4-15. At a press conference on April 29, 1983, Elia exploded, ripping into the heckling Cub fans. Most notoriously, he said:

Eighty-five percent of the f*ckin' world is working. The other fifteen come out here. A f*ckin' playground for the c*cksuckers.

What Elia didn't know was that a reporter had a tape recorder running. The recording made its way to the public and into legend.

The funny thing, even to we Cub fans, was that it was largely true. In 1983, Wrigley Field did not yet have lights (they were installed in 1988). There was a reason they were called the Bleacher Bums.

In the next year, the Cubs would acquire the great pitcher Rick Sutcliffe, and a young player who was a throw-in for a deal to get shortstop Larry Bowa from the Phillies. Sutcliffe and that then-unknown player, Ryne Sandberg, would lead the Cubs to their first division title since World War II the next year. Elia, however, would be around for it. He was fired not long after his tirade. While what he said was true, it probably wasn't a good idea to rip on the bums whose ticket purchases paid his salary.

I found the recording on Youtube. The first is the unexpurgated version. WARNING: NOT WORK FRIENDLY!

The second one is the "bleeped" version of it.

The Kent State Massacre

38 Years ago today, during a student protest at Kent State University in Ohio, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed students, killing four and wounding 9 others. One of the students who was wounded was left a parapelegic.

Many of the students who were shot were not participating in the protest-- they were either walking from one class to another or observing the protest from a distance.

The photo at the top of this post, of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway, over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, has become iconic.

The Kent State protests were part of a large wave of protests across the country over the American invasion of Cambodia. After promising peace in the 1968 election, Nixon had widened the Vietnam War into Cambodia. The ostensible goal of this invasion was to destroy bases that the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong had been using to launch strikes into South Vietnam.

From Nixon's point of view, the invasion of Cambodia was part of the strategy to "Vietnamize" the war-- to substitute South Vietnamese troops for American troops. The problem was that the South Vietnamese government was increasingly unstable, corrupt and untenable. In the end, there was little left to prop up.

Sound familiar?

The move was looked at as a widening of the war, prompting the widespread protests.

The killings, which came to be known as the Kent State Massacre, have themselves remained controversial. What is known is that 77 National Guardsmen, who were armed, faced hundreds of students, some of whom were throwing rocks. The Guardsmen had no training in riot control-- odd, given that the stated purpose of states having a National Guard is to deal with civil disorder.

The guardsmen pursued a group of students over a hill. The students turned left, but the guardsmen continued straight, until they reached a place closed off by a fence. At this point, "command and control" had clearly fallen apart. The guardsmen did not want to go back over the hill, which they considered a "retreat." Yet, they could not move forward. After ten minutes, the guardsmen finally turned around to go the only way out of the area, back over the hill.

Then, suddenly, at 12:22 PM, some of the group of guardsmen, for reasons unknown to this day, turned around, at the top of the hill, and fired their M-1 Garand semi-automatic rifles. Some fired into the ground or into the air; some fired into the groups of students in the area. Of the 77 guardsmen in the group, 29 fired their weapons. The 67-shot fusillade lasted 13 seconds.


For decades now, there have been a lot of questions. The guardsmen testified that they feared for their lives. Yet, the students who were killed were nowhere near them-- they were all 200-400 feet away. No one has ever taken responsibility for the order to fire; in fact, whether there was an order to fire has been debated.

Not long after the shootings, the Ohio National Guard Adjutant General claimed that a sniper had been firing at the guardsmen. This was, of course, a blatant lie.

In an awful irony, one of the students killed, William Knox Schroeder, who had been walking from one class to another, and uninvolved in the protest, was a member of the campus ROTC (Reserve Officer's Training Corps).

And of course, the irony of the fact that National Guard duty was a popular way to get out of going to Vietnam was not lost on a lot of people. (You might remember that our current President got out of going to Vietnam the very same way).

Across the country, protests over the killings and the widening of the war erupted, shutting down over 450 campuses.

In the end, there were no prosecutions of any of the guardsmen. Later the President's Commission on Campus Unrest stated that "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable." I'm sure it was very comforting to the families of the dead and wounded students.

The Vietnam War was to drag on for nearly five years after the shooting.

Neil Young later immortalized the incident in his song "Ohio." He wryly stated in the liner notes of his great Decade collection that it was ironic that the song ended up being a hit, and that he made a lot of money off of it. Still, I find the song angry, sad and powerful. I found a great clip on Youtube of Young performing the song with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in 1974. As we find ourself in another endless, unwinnable war in Asia nearly four decades later, the words "how many more?" really resonate.

Sad News- The End of the Berwyn Spindle

Some sad news today. Despite efforts to save it, the Berwyn Spindle was razed.

The Spindle, which was in the parking lot of the Harlem-Cermak Shopping Center, was immortalized in the opening sequence of Penelope Spheeris' 1992 movie Wayne's World, which featured various Chicago and Chicago-area kitsch icons.

Here's a video clip about it.

The Spindle was probably the only memorable thing about Berwyn, Illinois, the town I was born in nearly 47 years ago. It was taken down to make way for a new Walgreen's.


Recently, an auto dealership sign on Western Avenue that was in the same sequence was torn down to make way for condos. Happily, Chicago Joe's restaurant, which is also near my home, is still there, as well as the giant Indian at 63rd and Pulaski.

DVD Updates- The Invaders

Exciting news. Occasionally I post about DVD's that I am waiting for. There are several on my list that are finally being released.

First and foremost, the first season of the short-lived, but cult favorite The Invaders. The premise was that architect David Vincent (played by Chicago-born actor Roy Thinnes) is travelling late one night and decides to pull over in an abandoned town to get a few hours of sleep. He witnesses the landing of an alien spaceship, and soon discovers that society has been infiltrated by these invaders. The first season (there were only two seasons, from 1967 to 1968) was realeased in England last year, and will be released here in the States later this month, on May 28.

Another Roy Thinnes project, Journey To The Far Side of The Sun, which was also known as "Doppelganger," will be released next month. This movie was produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who produced the puppet science fiction series "Thunderbirds Are Go" and the British import UFO. The premise of this movie was that a space mission is sent to the far side of the sun, where it is discovered that there is a mirror image earth on the other side.

This movie was released a few years back and quickly went out of print. I loved the movie as a kid, and can't wait to Netflix it to see if it was as fun as I remember it.

Also being released next month by those wonderful patron saints of the neglected art movie, Criterion, is Before The Rain. Released in 1994, Before the Rain is set in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia during the time of the war in Bosnia. As the war threatens to spill over into Macedonia, a love triangle forms. I've never seen this one, and look forward to finally getting to see it.

And speaking of Criterion, if anybody has a spare hundred dollars or so laying around, I've got a birthday coming up; I'd love to get Criterion's collection of Cassavettes' independent films.... ; )

Waiting For the Great Leap Forward

Over a month ago, there were elections in the southern African country of Zimbabwe. After delaying the results for weeks, the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission announced that there was going to be a runoff election, since supposedly neither candidate got at least 50% of the vote. Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change allegedly got 47.9% of the vote, while longtime leader Robert Mugabe got 43.2%.

Most observers believe that Tsvangirai got over 50% of the vote. Since the election, opposition leaders have been jailed, and supporters have been inimidated, beaten, jailed and even murdered.

When Mugabe's rebels forced the racist white minority government to yield to a democratization of the country in 1980, the world rejoiced. 28 years later, though, Zimbabwe is in shambles because of Mugabe's lack of democracy and his economic incompetence. Unlike nearby South Africa, which realized it needed both to protect the rights of the white minority, as well take advantage of the skills they possessed while building the country, Mugabe has driven most of the whites out of Zimbabwe.

A couple of recent events have made me reflect on Zimbabwe's future.

A few weeks ago, a Chicago legend, Bill Wirtz died. Wirtz owned the Chicago Black Hawks, Chicago's National Hockey League team. For years, at Wirtz' behest, Black Hawks games were not available on television, not even cable. Recently, it was announced that the Black Hawks were going to televise all of their games in the upcoming season. For years, interest in the Black Hawks has declined, as people were not able to watch them on television.

More news of change comes from Cuba. For years I've talked to friends about what would happen to Cuba when Fidel Castro left. Some years back, I'd read Tad Szulc's excellent book on Castro, "Fidel." He dealt a little with Fidel's brother Raoul, who has succeeded Fidel as leader of Cuba. The prospects did not seem good, according to Szulc.

Happily, Raoul Castro has been surprising. He has rapidly launched economic reforms that Cubans have desired for years. One of the most important of these has been to allow Cubans to purchase consumer items-- microwaves, dvd players, scooters and home appliances. Another has been to open up places that had been off-limits to ordinary Cubans-- hotels and beaches. These had been set aside for foreign tourists who brought in desperately needed cash. He has also allowed Cubans to plant crops on unused agricultural land.

There was no reason that Fidel Castro couldn't have launched these reforms, except that he feared the loss of control. Just the same, Bill Wirtz clung to zealous overcontrol of the Blackhawks, to the point of hurting them.

Robert Mugabe is doing the same with Zimbabwe. He was an successful leader of a rebel movement; not so good a leader of a country. Zimbabwe's people are suffering under staggering economic hardship, and what has amounted to a brutal dictatorship.

With Cuba and the Blackhawks, it took the medical incapacitation or death of a leader to bring about change. And I suspect that it will take the same, sadly, with Zimbabwe.