#chicago 68

[oldshowbiz]

Chicago 7, Jackson 5

[american-troubadour]

Phil Ochs at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. August 28, 1968.

Photographed by Ron Pownall

[highsocietygifs]

𝕾𝖔𝖒𝖔𝖘𝖚𝖓𝖔

[pc-98s]

the chicago dnc this year is going to be such a mess, the city is already denying permits for pro-abortion marches and telling them to go through grant park, which is exactly what they did in 1968 as well. we really are just repeating 1968 verbatim huh

[reidsvest]

(gif is not mine,credits to @hotch-girl )

Hello!I'm completely new to this so first things first.My name is Avra,my pronouns are she/her and I am 21 years old.I'm currently on my third year of college, studying away from my home which sadly means traveling a lot, so i'm not sure how much or often i will be able to upload fics but I will be trying my best.Also my native language is not english and while I will be proofreading my fics before posting,I apologize in advance for any mistakes.I have a really big rambling problem as it has already become evident.That will probably be showing in my fanfictions and in the actual rambles i wish to post about whatever episode of criminal minds I'm watching so I feel like I want to apologize in advance for that too and I hope that it's not too boring/annoying.I promise my thoughts follow a logical order😂

Like I mentioned in my description I love everything spencer reid (and cm in general), jay halstead (same for cpd) and charles leclerc (you guessed it roughly the same applies to f1).Honestly what I'm trying to say is that I love most characters on chicago pd,criminal minds and many many drivers from formula 1 but the ones I mentioned are my top favorites.I have watched almost every single film that matthew gray gubler has acted in,i pride myself for making it through some really weird scenes but at the end of the day it was worth it for more mgg content to feed the obsessive monster.I also absolutely adore elizabeth olsen/wanda maximoff but i will not be writing for her.This is also a great moment to state how much i love Taylor Swift and her music!I am tho completely open and would love to talk with anyone about wanda or any of these topics.

My fanfictions for starters will be of the above mentioned characters (mostly spencer reid as he is my current biggest obsession) and will be female reader x character fics.I will be writing angst and nswf content (probably a mix of both) so minors please do not interact but I will also be writing fluff too. I'll try to post my first fanfiction soon-ish but I just wanted to write a quick introduction to my blog and say hello!If you read this whole essay,thank you so much!I cant wait to start!🧡🌼

[featuresofinterest]

watching/reading about these college campus protests is really making me feel some sort of way about the dnc this summer and not just because it's in chicago

[rastronomicals]

5:20 PM EST January 4, 2024:

Chicago - “Questions 67 and 68” From the album Chicago Transit Authority (1969)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

–

[goldendiie]

okay another reason why i'm taking so long to write this next chapter of americana is because it requires a great deal of research on things i've never really looked into before. like, the king assassination, republicanism in the 1960s, how both interact with election politics... i'm just trying to make it as accurate as possible!

[azspot]

On social media, the writer Rick Perlstein has been discussing, with reference to his book Nixonland, the policing of unrest back then versus the policing of unrest now and pointing out that since 9/11, a riot-gear posture of emergency has become so ordinary that armed-up, militarized, SWAT-like equipment and attitude are common even in small towns where nothing much goes on in the way of crowd action: a militarized crowd-control vibe is simply what much of policing looks and feels like now. People taking issue with Perlstein’s history point to the many times in the ‘60’s when police and the military ran amok and/or harmed or even killed protestors, but I think that just underscores his point. Columbia (‘68), Chicago (‘68), and Kent State (‘70) are examples of uprisings where—the behavior of those cracking down aside—varying degrees of genuinely insurrectionary violence were really going on.

Students Protesting?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Austin Grossman’s ‘Fight Me’

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In Fight Me, the novelist and game developer Austin Grossman uses aging ex-teen superheroes to weigh the legacy of Generation X, in a work that enrobes its savage critique with sweet melancholia, all under a coating of delicious snark:

http://www.austingrossman.com/fight-me

It is, in other words, a very Gen X kinda novel. Prodigy (AKA Alex Beekman) is a washed-up superhero. As a nerdy high-schooler, he was given super powers by a mysterious wizard (posing as a mediocre teacher), who gave him an amulet and a duty. Whenever Alex touches the amulet and speaks the word of power, reaclun (which he insists is not "nuclear" backwards) he transforms into Prodigy, a nigh-invulnerable, outrageously handsome living god who is impervious to bullets, runs a one-minute mile, and fights like a champ. Prodigy, he is told, has a destiny: to fight the ultimate evil when it emerges and save the world.

Now, Alex is 40, and it's been a decade since he retired both Prodigy and his Alex identity, moving into a kind of witness protection program the federal government set up for him. He poses as a mediocre university professor, living a lonely and unexceptional life.

But then, Alex is summoned back to the superhero lair he shared with his old squad, "The Newcomers," a long-vacant building that is one quarter Eero Saarinen, three quarters Mussolini. There, he is reunited with his estranged fellow ex-Newcomers, and sent on a new quest: to solve the riddle of the murder of the mysterious wizard who gave him his powers, so long ago.

The Newcomers – an amped-up ninja warrior, a supergenius whose future self keeps sending him encouragement and technical schematics backwards through time, and an exiled magical princess turned preppie supermodel – have spent more than a decade scattered to the winds. While some have fared better than Alex/Prodigy, none of them have lived up to their potential or realized the dreams that seemed so inevitable when they were world famous supers with an entourage of fellow powered teens who worshipped them as the planet's greatest heroes.

As they set out to solve the mystery, they are reunited and must take stock of who they are and how they got there (cue Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime"). With flashbacks, flashforwards, and often hilarious asides, Prodigy brings us up to speed on how supers fail, and what it's like to live as a failed super.

The publisher's strapline for this book is "The Avengers Meets the Breakfast Club," which is clever, but extremely wrong. The real comp for this book isn't "The Breakfast Club," it's "The Big Chill."

When I realized this, I got briefly mad, because I've only had two good movie high concept pitches in my life and one of them was "Gen X Big Chill." Rather than veterans of the Summer of 68 confronting the Reagan years, you could have veterans of the Battle of Seattle living through the Trump years. One would be on PeEP, one would be an insufferable Andrew Tate-quoting bitcoiner, one would be a redpilled reactionary with a genderqueer teen, one would be a squishy lib, one a firebreathing leftist, etc. The soundtrack would just be top 40 tracks from artists who have songs on "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!_Rocks

Every generation has some way in which they seek to overthrow the status quo and build a new, allegedly better one, after all. "Big Chill"'s impact comes from its postmortem on a generation where it was easy to feel like you were riding destiny's rails to greatness thanks to the sheer size of the Boomer cohort and the postwar prosperity they lived through. A Gen X Big Chill would be a stocktaking of a generation that defined itself as a lost generation reared in the Boomers' shadows, armored against the looming corpo-climate apocalypse with the sword of irony and the shield of sincerity.

Which is basically what Grossman is doing here. What's more, doing this as a superhero story is a genius move – what could be a better metaphor for a teen's unrealistic certainty of destined greatness than a superhero? Superhero fantasies are irreducibly grandiose and unrealistic, but all the more beautiful and brave and compelling for it.

You know, like teens.

At 52, I'm a middle-aged Gen Xer. I've got two artificial hips and I just scheduled a double cataract surgery. My hairline is receding. I'm an alta kaker. But I wasn't always: I was a bright and promising kid, usually the youngest person in the room where we were planning big protests, ambitious digital art projects, or the future of science fiction. I had amazing friends: creative and funny and sweet, loyal and talented and just fun.

We're mostly doing okay (the ones that lived; fuck cancer and fuck heroin and fuck fentanyl). Some of us are doing pretty good. On a good day, I think I'm doing pretty good. I had a night in 2018 where I got to hang out, as a peer, with my favorite musician and my favorite novelist, both in the same evening. These were artists I'd all but worshipped as a teen. I remember looking at the two selfies I took than night and thinking, Man, if 15 year old me could see these, he'd say that it all worked out.

But you don't get to be 52 without having a long list of regrets and failures that your stupid brain is only too eager to show you a highlight reel from. No one gets to middle age without a haunting loss that is always trying to push its way to the fore in order to incinerate every triumph great and small and leave ashes behind.

That's why there's a "Big Chill" for every generation. Each one has its own specific character and meaning situated in history, but each one has to grapple with the double-edged sword of nostalgia. Not for nothing, John Hodgman (a bona fide Gen X icon) calls nostalgia "a toxic impulse."

Grossman really makes Fight Me work as a Gen X Big Chill. He's a great Gen X writer; his first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, was a knockout debut about superheroes and supervillains that had a very "The Boys" vibe, you know, that neat little move where you contend with the banal parts of a super's life and show how super powers don't make you a good person, or even a competent one.

His followup to Invincible came six years later. YOU is a coming-of-age story about the games industry with a second-person narrator (think "Zork"). Grossman is an accomplished game dev (Tomb Raider Legend, Deus X, Dishonored, etc), and he uses YOU to really plumb the depths of what games mean, what fun is, and how working on games isn't just work, it's often really shitty work, the opposite of fun:

https://memex.craphound.com/2013/04/16/austin-grossmans-you-brilliant-novel-plumbs-the-heroic-and-mystical-depths-of-gaming-and-simulation/

Grossman's last novel was Crooked, a very daffy alternate history in which Richard Nixon is a Cthulhoid sorcerer locked in a Lovecraftian battle of good and evil. This is a purely hilarious romp, wildly imaginative and deliciously certain to offend reactionary jerks:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/26/austin-grossmans-crooked-the-awful-cthulhoid-truth-about-richard-nixon/

All those chops are on display in Fight Me: a book that covers its brooding with wisecracks, that spits out ten great gags per page even as it drives a knife into your heart. It's a great novel.

Fight Me doesn't come out in the US and Canada until tomorrow (it's been out in the UK, Australia, NZ, etc for more than a month). Normally, I would hold off on reviewing this until the on-sale date, but this is my last day on the blog for two weeks – I'm leaving on a family vacation early tomorrow morning. I'll see you on July 14!

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/01/the-big-genx-chill/#im-super-thanks-for-asking

[batteredshoes]

DNC | Chicago 68 | Peter Bullock

[oldshowbiz]

The Chicago Seven

[robertreich]

Why We Need to Ban College Legacy Admissions

Children of the super rich are more than twice as likely to get into America’s most elite universities as middle-class students with the exact same test scores. This fast-tracks them to become the next generation of CEOs and lawmakers, and helps keep wealth and power in the hands of people who started out wealthy and powerful.

A big reason rich kids have such an advantage is so-called “legacy admissions” — the preference elite schools give to family members of alumni.

The vast majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, think this is unfair. An astounding 68% of all voters support banning legacy admissions outright. This is the strongest bipartisan agreement I think I’ve ever seen on an issue that boils down to who gets special privileges in America.

Now I went  to an Ivy League school (Dartmouth), followed by Oxford, and Yale Law. I wasn’t rich. My father ran a clothing store.

That was a half-century ago — before inequalities of income and wealth exploded in America, before the middle class began shrinking, before the American oligarchy began corrupting American politics with a flood of big money donations. Today, it’s much harder for a middle-class kid to get the same opportunities that I had.

New research conducted at Harvard (ironically) looked at 16 years of admissions data from the Ivy League schools, plus Stanford, Duke, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

The research reveals that one in six students at these prestigious schools comes from the richest 1% of American families.  

Why are so many rich kids getting in? It’s not because they’re better students.

Children from the top 1% were 34% more likely to be admitted than middle-class students with the same SAT or ACT scores.

Those from the top ONE TENTH OF ONE PERCENT were more than twice as likely to get in.

Legacy admissions are one of the biggest reasons. Nearly 30% of Harvard’s Class of 2023 were legacies.

It's a vicious cycle that consolidates wealth and power in the hands of a few.

Less than 1% of Americans get into one of these top schools, but their graduates account for 12% of the Fortune 500 CEOs,  a quarter of all U.S. senators, and more than a third of all Americans with a net worth over $100 million.

And because these graduates are in the winner's circle, their children have every advantage in the world — even before they get legacy preferences into the same prestigious universities, which in turn hand them even more advantages.

You see how this entrenches an American aristocracy? Concentrated wealth at the top leads to even more and more wealth concentration with each new generation.

It also perpetuates racial discrimination. Since non-white students were barred from most colleges for much of America’s history, legacy students are by definition more likely to be white.

The Ivy League’s legacy policies were introduced during the Jim Crow era, with the specific intent of limiting the number of students of color and Jewish students who could be admitted.

To this day, about 70% of Harvard’s legacy admissions are white, which is why the U.S. Department of Education is now investigating Harvard for potential violation of civil rights.

And with the Supreme Court's ruling against affirmative action, this systemic racism is likely to get worse. The Court is pretending to make college admissions "race-blind," while preserving systems that advance wealthy white students over all others.

It’s time for the government to ban legacy admissions.

[highsocietygifs]

📍Chicago, IL Summer 2023

[readyforevolution]

A 'COOLEY HIGH' REUNION

AT THE 2022 TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL IN LOS ANGELES, CA

Steven Williams (73), Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (68), director Michael Schultz (83; middle back row), Cynthia Davis (63), Glynn Turman (75), and Garrett Morris (85) attend the screening of "Cooley High".

One of the most influential African American films of the 1970s, this coming-of-age tale was inspired by writer Eric Monte’s experience growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, where he attended the real Cooley Vocational High School. Indie studio American International Pictures developed his story and had the wisdom to hire a Black director, Michael Schultz, to shoot the low-budget film on location. Glynn Turman stars as Preach, who dreams of writing plays while palling around with basketball champ Cochise (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs). Their episodic adventures and a soundtrack filled with Motown classics helped turn the picture into one of the year’s biggest hits.

It had a major influence on writer-director-actor Robert Townsend—who had a one-line bit—and John Singleton, among other Black filmmakers who saw its use of three-dimensional characters and focus on friendship as a breakthrough. It also inspired the hit TV series What’s Happening!!

[politicalprof]

When I was in Los Angeles, about 1988, I took in a show at The Comedy Store. One of the performers, whose name I have long since forgotten, went on a riff about how everyone says that whatever war we’re about to get into is going to be “another Vietnam.” That isn’t true, the guy noted, because we can’t get the Vietnamese to come.

Likewise, lots of people keep fantasizing that this week’s Democratic convention in Chicago will be like the one in 1968. But it won’t be: ‘68 happened. Every host city ever since has been ready for it. In any case, you can’t get either Mayor Daley or the anti-war movement to come.

Maybe it will be its own story. What a thought.

Two other comments about the show I went to. JJ Walker, who some of us who are old enough will remember, was *hilarious.* Roseanne Barr was awful in ways I’m sad I remember.