The Sound of Young America

A few songs into the dance portion of my wedding reception, my Aunt Margaret, a proper woman of leisure, told me, "Play some Motown." We did immediately. The music Barry Gordy's little-record-company-that-could made in the '60s is already timeless. I remember hearing Motown music growing up from my sisters and brother, and it sounded like it came out the day before. Like their chart peers the Beatles, the Motown artists never age. The Temptations always sounds as fresh as they look in the picture above.

On a broader level, Motown paved the way for Barack Obama. The popular black artists who preceded Motown were not young. Motown brought young, black America into whites' car radios and The Ed Sullivan Show. They were the non-threatening vanguard of the civil rights movement. I truly love and admire the artistry of the Motown musicians. This year is the 50th anniversary of the label, and I'm sure you will see much publicity about that fact. Vanity Fair provides an oral history on the label that made it all happen.

Star Wars Set Photos

I always thought that the creature the stormtroopers rode in Tattooine was a digital effect for the '90s re-release. Either way, the Spanish website Taringa has a series of great on-set photographs from the original Star Wars film. Enjoy shots of George Lucas filming Han Solo and not raping him.

Craigslist Crook Caught

Sad news, today. It appears that Monroe, WA police have arrested the ingenious man who robbed a Bank of America via a Craigslist stunt and inner-tube getaway.

About three weeks before the robbery, a Monroe city employee was contacted by a homeless man who had found a pile of items behind a trash bin near the Bank of America.

The items included a black two-way radio, a yellow reflective safety vest, a black wig with a short ponytail, dark sunglasses, a large can of mace and a baseball cap, police said.

The homeless man watched as a man drove up to the trash bin in a silver car, gathered the items and left. He wrote down the license-plate number.

Willis said police believe the homeless man may have witnessed a failed attempt at a robbery or a practice run.

She said Monroe police tracked the license-plate number to Curcio and the FBI placed him under surveillance.

His DNA was collected without his knowledge when the FBI retrieved a container he'd been using as a chewing-tobacco spittoon. DNA from the container was matched by the State Patrol crime lab to that collected from the robber's discarded particle mask, police said.

Busted by a vigilant bum? What are the odds? Craigslist Crook, we will still hold you in high esteem at Shambollocks.

Our South Sider-In-Chief

Happy Third Day of the Barack Obama Epoch!

Today my happiness comes from the above picture. The day after the election, Barack left for meetings with his advisers with a Chicago White Sox cap perched on his head. I have left my home countless times in my life wearing that exact logo. The President of the United States is a South Sider. The President of the United States is a Chicago White Sox fan. A maligned and near-invisible half of a major metropolitan city will walk in pride for the next four years (OK, I'll say eight years...I'm pretty giddy).

If you are not a Chicago native, you don't understand what it is to be both a South Sider and White Sox fan. Over the last thirty years, the make-up of Chicago has changed dramatically. In 1978, Chicago was on its way to becoming yet another Rust Belt casualty- a memorial to its own past grandeur like its siblings in Cleveland, Gary, and Detroit. At that time, the Chicago White Sox overwhelmingly outdrew the Chicago Cubs. Wrigley Field lay in a neighborhood of flophouses, massage parlors, and vacant lots. The White Sox broadcaster was a fellow you may know-Harry Carey. Neither team won titles, but the Sox were the 'Hit Men' while the Cubs were just hitless.

Then a perfect storm happened. Jerry Reinsdorf bought the Sox and fired Harry Carey, who was immediately snapped up by the Cubs. With the power of superstation WGN behind him, Harry became a cultural icon, starring in Budweiser commercials and giving the Cubs a party image. At the same time, DePaul University and the Chicago Tribune (new owners of the Cubs) began to buy up the land around their property and pressure the city to clean up Lincoln Park and Lakeview. The seat of culture migrated further and further north. Most major rock acts played the Aragon, the Riv, the Vic-all on the North Side. The booming Chicago theater scene blossomed on the the North Side with Steppenwolf and Second City as its leading lights. Living on the North Side was cool. Soon thousands of young whites from all over the country moved to Lincoln Park and Lakeview because it gave them a mini-city that was clean, white, and out-of-sight.

The South Side had one major problem that prevented gentrification. Blacks. Any blacks who lived in Lincoln Park and Lakeview were quickly moved to heavily segregated neighborhoods on the South and West Side. All of these events led to a severe and mystifying fact of life for South Siders. Black or white, we were second-class citizens. I grew up with this sense of inferiority, and it drove me crazy. People labeled our side of town as 'dangerous', 'ignorant', 'racist', and 'backwater'. What drove us South Siders nuts was that most of the people who said this would turn into a puff of smoke if they ever crossed Madison Ave.

In 2005, the White Sox won the World Series. Hundreds of thousands emptied out years of angst on Western and Cottage Grove Avenues. We finally had something the North Side didn't. Of course, the next three years gave us more trouble. Each Cubs playoff failure only increased the celebrities who would come to butcher "Take Me Out To The Ballgame". The White Sox had Bernie Mac. I love Bernie Mac. But he's not Bill Murray.

Then Tuesday evening came. I know I speak for a million or more South Siders when I say my deep North Side resentment is over. You can have your wine bars, your life-long Cubs fans from Iowa, and your hipsters. I'll take this President of the United States and the knowledge his wife doesn't need directions to the Plaza. You can keep your executive and his North Side statehouse.

You get the politician you deserve.

Bill Ayers: America's Most Dangerous Man

Hahahahahaha...oh, sorry, you caught me chuckling at the computer again. Throughout the entire election we heard from Hillary Clinton and John McCain surrogates that Barack Obama was some kind of dangerous radical because he once attended a dinner party also attended by Bill Ayers. Ayers and his wife were active members of the Weather Underground, a dunderheaded militant '60s organization whose bombs kept going off when beat cops and night watchmen were in shrapnel distance. Seriously, if the Weatherman Underground was a terrorist organization, than Hezbollah is the second world superpower.

I retained some mild curiousity about Ayers, especially since unlike Rev. Wright, he seemed to want to live his old life out of the spotlight. Two days ago while covering Obama's polling location, an elementary school, the New Yorker's editor David Remnick went with a colleague across the street to meet Bill Ayers and take the above picture.

THAT guy is dangerous?!! Remnick says he has both ears pierced and is wearing that RIDICULOUS T-shirt. On the day Obama is elected. Of all days. And he's an education professor wearing that shirt across from an inner-city ELEMENTARY school?!

AAAAHHHHH!!!!! Seriously, the shuttle is ready, baby-boomers. It has all the seasons of West Wing and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It has all the C,S, & N albums. Your last representative for the White House has been defeated. You can check out. Thanks for the '70's and twenty years of conservative bullshit. Now board the shuttle and you can enjoy the last few months of your life before you fly into the sun.

There. I just solved the Social Security crisis.

Next election, can we find a real dangerous dude, and not somebody who embarasses every sentient liberal on the planet with his attire?

Big, Bad, and Green

Just today, the head of General Motors stated that the next month will tell the tale of their future survival. What a shame. Like many, I believe that American automobiles were one of the great design products of the last century. I grew up madly in love with Detroit products through films like Bullitt. I joined many of my high school friends in drooling over muscle cars for sale in the local Auto Trader. I still dream of one day owning a Dodge Challenger or a Plymouth Barracuda.

Unfortunately, big and beautiful is mighty expensive right now. The high price of oil and ongoing ecological disaster have made my big car dream seem extraordinarily far-fetched.

But maybe not. This month's Fast Company has an article about Johnathan Goodwin, a Wichita mechanic who is making green look cool. Maybe we don't need to look at a future of super-charged Priuses. Goodwin is building an H3 (above) which can get 600 HP while also 60 miles a gallon. No, I did not lie. 60 MPG! I first heard of Goodwin on the Late Show, when Neil Young discussed his Lincoln Continental which Goodwin will modify to get 100 MPG.

What's the secret to his engineering feats? Not much. Detroit stock parts make up 90% of his machinery. Detroit engineers are in awe.

Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"

"Yeah," he said.

"No way," they replied.

He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"

American ingenuity on display. I love it. Don't wring your hands quite yet. We might still be able to have our cake and look good eating it.

Let's Go Change The World!

You must bear with me today. The last five days have flown by with the speed and vividness of a fever dream, and I am still attempting to catch my breath.

Friday morning I was in a Rome airport on layover from my honeymoon. After seventeen days abroad, I longed to be back in the States amongst my people, amongst the things I knew. That evening I was at a Chicago Italian restaurant with my wife and parents. My father brought my attention to the television, where I saw the man above. I recognized the man instantly. He is to my life as permanent a fixture of what home is as Lower Wacker Drive or a boiled Vienna dog on a sesame seed bun. The next morning I found out that man had died.

The man is Studs Terkel and he loved America-all of America- in ways few ever have. He had a show on WFMT in the evenings and through him I learned about Walt Whitman, jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Great Depression, and why they call it the blues. Through his books I took a crash course in political science, reading the words of people from every area of our country, from every class, creed, and color.

More important, though, is what Studs stood for- an active American past where the greatest excitement came from civic action. His was an experience of speaking at Bughouse Square, shouting at union meetings, and toasting strangers in smoky clubs. His community was wider than a land between the great oceans. His community was all of us.

Studs lived through two world wars. He hustled through the Great Depression. He was spit on during civil rights marches. Through all of this, all of this, he never doubted once that we should end this American experiment. He knew you had to have skin in the game to make it all work. You can't let the next guy pick up the tab. You heard it in his voice every broadcast. "We shall overcome these differences," he would say.

Studs would be over the moon today.



Last night, Barack Obama became the 44th President of these United States, and the first black one. I watched the election returns at a near-by bar. The surrounding streets sung with electricity. At the bar, there were a group of West Indians watching the returns. There were a couple of guys from Bosnia. There were tables full of white kids. Every state that went blue was met with a thunder of applause. When the result came final, we hugged. We kissed. We cried. It was a shared national experience I had never known- the anti 9/11. You didn't want to go home.

And the world woke up changed.



What got us to last night was what Studs was all about. Corporations and agents of prejudice did not elect Obama, we did. The American people did. We as a country stood up and said, "Enough!" We did it through unions. We did it over the internet. We did it over coffee at diners and in breakrooms. After eight years of misrule and how many more years of shared apathy, we rediscovered our own power. We renewed the civic bonds that make this country a living thing.

Let us stay vigilant. A night that saw one maligned minority victorious, also saw the majority take away minority rights in California. America will always be an experiment. The minute any of us take any of this for granted is the minute our experiment fails. In Egypt, I walked amongst a people who lived under the boot heel of oppression. Thousands of armed guards walk their streets night and day. Their middle class live in a degree of filth you wouldn't see in our ghettoes. Their votes are suppressed, their voices imprisoned. America is a truly wonderful idea. We make it a reality when we stay involved. You can't own what you don't use. For eight long years, we have been used. Last night we took America back. Let us never give it away again.

Celebrate this. Don't forget how we feel. Later-think, pray, meditate. We have come a long way, baby.

And read. Yes, you can read quite a bit about this historic moment today. Newsweek begins a seven -part series on the campaign. Six years ago, the New Republic wrote about the inevitable new Democratic majority.

FoxNews, a prime vehicle of our past divisive habits, announces for Obama, and Juan Williams takes his token ball and and scores.



I leave you with this.

Thank you, Studs. Thank you, America.