Showing posts with label teens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teens. Show all posts

Monday, April 06, 2020

The records that made me (some of 'em):
Never Mind the Bollocks



OK, back to the coal mine -- with my ghetto blaster.

The weekend intruded upon my recounting of 10 influential albums in my life. We resume the recounting with No. 6 in the series . . . the Sex Pistols' 1977 bombshell, "Never Mind the Bollocks."

I got stories about the Sex Pistols. I'll draw upon a 2006 blog entry to tell you about that anew.


But that story starts in the summer of 1977, when my Aunt Ailsa, an English war bride, flew home to Southampton to visit family. By that time, befuddled American foreign correspondents were sending back dispatches about this British phenomenon called "punk rock" and its antihero leaders, the Sex Pistols.

The current single by Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Paul Cook and Steve Jones was "God Save the Queen." It had been banned by the BBC. I was 16. Naturally, I had to have it.

And when Aunt Ailsa got back to Baton Rouge, I did. As far as I knew, I had the only Sex Pistols record in town. Maybe one of the few in the United States. You certainly didn't hear the Sex Pistols anywhere on local radio.

I preferred to think my aunt had to go in the back door of a Southhampton record shop and ask a cannabis-toking clerk "I say, do you have the stuff?" And then, in my teenage imagination, the clerk put down his bag of chips, slipped the 45 into a brown paper bag, and handed it to her. She then would have put a pound note into his resin- and grease-tainted hand, immediately lit a cigarette to mask the smell of second-hand marijuana smoke clinging to her clothes and slipped back out the back door.



MORE LIKE IT, she went in the front door of HMV, grabbed "God Save the Queen" off the rack and paid the teenage clerk at the front counter.

I like my 16-year-old imagination's version better.

Anyway . . . the fine folks in Red Stick thought the Beatles were dangerous and the Rolling Stones were spawns of Satan. Little did they know.

For example:
God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
A potential H-bomb

God save the queen
She's not a human being
and There's no future
And England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future
No future
No future for you

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves

God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid
Oh when there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers
In the dustbin
We're the poison
In your human machine
We're the future. . . .
MAN, I WAS a blue-collar kid in the Deep South. I was, for the first time in my life, at a school where ideas mattered and, like, thinking was encouraged and not reason to label you a weirdo or a "n****r-lover" -- or maybe "queer."

I mean, in the redneck corners of Louisiana, one did not lightly refer to thespians while among people who thought a thespian was other than what he or she actually was.


No, being at Baton Rouge Magnet High School blew a blue-collar kid's mind wide open in a Technicolor frenzy of Dreaming Big. Such was life at the Maggot School.

"The Maggot School" is what White Trash Nation called Baton Rouge High throughout my tenure there -- 1976-79. It was the place where all the geeks, brainiacs, musicians and thespians could be weirdos together in relative harmony and contentment. Hey, at BRHS, it was good to be a thespian.

If Student X had admitted to being a thespian at Broadmoor Junior High, I garon-damn-tee you someone would have beat him (or her) up and administered an enthusiastic version of the Toilet Water Taste Test. And the boys would have been even more vicious.

 
You just as well had put on an ascot and admitted to being a Homo sapiens. Or, better yet, called Junior Martinez (pronounced MART'un-ez) a Homo sapiens.

Anyway, Baton Rouge High, by the 1975-76 school year, was a struggling inner-city school whose halcyon days had gone the way of poodle skirts, B-52s (the hairdo, not the band) and "separate but equal." Then someone had an idea -- a magnet school for academics and the performing arts.

My parents were leery of this thing (I'll bet you can guess why), but I got to go. Miracle of miracles!

Well, Baton Rouge High had -- and still has -- a radio station. A real, honest-to-God, student-operated, over-the-air FM radio station -- WBRH. And thus, in high school, your Mighty Favog learned everything he needed to know.

The college education was for my liver.
 


ANYWAY . . . let me tell you about when WBRH introduced Baton Rouge to punk rock in 1977.

I found out about the Sex Pistols on Weekend, the NBC newsmagazine that preempted Saturday Night Live once a month back in the day. In this case, "back in the day" was, I reckon, spring 1977. Anyway, it seemed that the Pistols were about as pissed at the world as my teenage self, they could rock and -- best of all -- they terrified polite society as much as anything I had seen in my young life.

The fall of '77, I was enrolled in Radio I. I wasn't allowed an air shift yet; back then you first had to get a federal license -- by passing an exam. But I knew bunches of people in Radio II who had their third tickets (radio operator's licenses). Soon, the Sex Pistols were on the Baton Rouge airwaves, via the 20-watt blowtorch signal at 90.1 FM.

One fall afternoon, I was sitting in with Charles, a junior, during the afternoon rock show. He was skeptical of the Sex Pistols, but played it and asked for listener feedback. What feedback you get from a high-school FM blowtorch (that is, not a bunch) was decidedly mixed.

AFTER A WEEK or so of playing Baton Rouge's one copy of a Sex Pistols record, we did get some strong feedback. It was from the licensee of WBRH, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. And it went something like this: We don't know what the hell that is you've been playing on the radio station, but we want you to cut it out. NOW!

The radio instructor and general manager, John Dobbs, liked his teaching gig. The 45 was confiscated, and the Sex Pistols faced the same fate at WBRH that the lads did at the BBC. Banned.

I did retrieve my record from The Iron Fist of the Oppressor, but only after I agreed never to bring it back. It sits, carefully preserved in its famous picture sleeve, in a plastic file box, along with all my other 45s from Back in the Day.

Now, Charles was -- is? -- an interesting guy. Think of Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties a good five years before there was a Family Ties. Only African-American.


It probably was in the spring of '78 that I was again hanging out with Charles in the radio control room, playing the likes of David Gilmour, The Fabulous Poodles, Toto, the Cars, Journey and Queen. Maybe some Commodores -- Brick House, baby! -- and Parliament/Funkadelic.

Well, that day, obviously not enough "Brick House" or "P-Funk."

(Flash. Flash. Flash. Hey, radio-studio phones flash; they don't ring. OK?)

Charles: WBRH!

Caller: Hey, man, why don't you play some n****r music, man! ("N****r" = Not Polite, Racist and Offensive Term for African-American -- then, now or ever.)

Charles: Uhhhhh, excuse me, but I happen to be black.

Caller: Oh, uhhh, oh . . . oh, I'm sorry, man! How about playin' some BLACK music for me, man!

Charles: I'll see what I can do. (Slams phone down.) Redneck son of a bitch!
I DON'T THINK the guy got his "n****r music" played, man.

Now, I think there was a point to this post when I started it. I'll see whether I can get back to it.

When the Sex Pistols' first LP, "Never Mind the Bollocks" -- you know, the point of this whole missive -- came out in November 1977, I made it to the Musicland at Cortana Mall in the manner of someone whose head was on fire and his ass was catchin'.


Is what I'm sayin'.

And it did not disappoint when I got it on the stereo. I was dangerous, too -- in both 45 and 33⅓.

I'd like to think I still am at age 59. My wife of almost 37 years might disagree.

Friday, May 31, 2019

How to create middle-age stranglers

May 30, 1966.

Buddhist monks were setting themselves alight as the war in Vietnam intensified apace. Surveyor 1 headed for the first soft lunar landing of an unmanned American spacecraft. The Klan was being the Klan in Denham Springs, La. -- which meant that Denham Springs was just being Denham Springs.

And "A WOWIE ZOWIE ZING-A-LING SWING-A-LING THING" had just hit Baton Rouge. The Teen-Age Rattler apparently was "the new fun sensation sweeping the nation."

The reaction to this, no doubt, from every person old enough in 1966 to have spawned a teenager was "Oh, joy." Note the lack of an exclamation point.

THE TEEN-AGE RATTLER was billed as being some sort of bad-complexioned, ill-tempered, bastard child of a hula hoop and maracas.

The "bad-complexioned, ill-tempered and bastard child" parts of the description are solely mine.

I gotta tell you that, as a 5-year-old kid in Baton Rouge on Memorial Day 1966, I would have loved this shit. My parents, not so much.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

For just a measly extra buck, you could buy a 45 single of the original Teen-Age Rattler song, "as recorded by the sensational Happy Four quartet." As opposed to the sensational Happy Four septet.
Considering that you could go down to the TG&Y dime store and buy a hot-off-the-record-press copy of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" for something like six bits, I can't see the Happy Four's rattlin' wreck of a hack promotional song as much of a bargain.
THEN AGAIN, this is the 58-year-old me talking and not the 5-year-old me talking. On the other hand, the 5-year-old me had his share of Beatles' records. Until July 1966, that is.
July was the month John Lennon's "we're more popular than Jesus" interview hit the States, and Mama busted up my Beatles records. It was Louisiana; she was far from alone. Apparently, cracking up commie records from Limey purveyors of beatnik music was less inconvenient than actually attending worship services.

Not that I'm still bitter or shit.

BUT BACK to May 1966 and the Teen-Age Rattler.

At the time, the Teen-Age Rattler made no impression on the pre-kindergarten me whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I'd never heard of the things until . . . well . . . today.

My best guess is that the "Rattle in the morning . . . rattle at night . . . rattle anytime . . . it's dynamite!" sensation was a sensation in the same vein Donald Trump is sentient -- hardly.

After all, there DID come to be a Generation X. That could not have happened had the "greatest generation" quite understandably been driven to cut short the rattling lives of their rattling teen offspring.

Now let us speak no more of this. We wouldn't want to give rogue youth social-media "influencers" any ideas.

Thursday, October 05, 2017

Fear and loathing in high-school radio


Who's the leader of the station that's made for you and me?

N-O-T  Y-O-U,  teen-age disc joc-key.

And when it comes to our public schools and the people who run them, the exercise of authority over the inmates students can, indeed, quickly become a real Mickey Mouse operation. This usually comes down to raw politics . . . and the sad reality that once they turn 18, the kids who sat in the back of the classroom are eligible to vote for school board.

Another other sad reality -- and this is one teenagers generally learn long before graduation -- is that what you learn in civics class is 75 percent aspiration and only 25 percent actual execution.

Take your constitutional rights as public-school students, for example. Despite the case law on, say, high-schoolers' First Amendment rights being pretty well settled since the early 1970s -- and since 1943 in the case of those choosing to not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem -- every year, some principal or some school board will try to show some dissident somewhere who the real boss is.

I think you can get the right answer to this question even without the benefit of a multiple-choice exam.

So, every year some principal tries to censor or shut down some high school newspaper or, this year, threaten prep football players with "fire and fury" if they take a knee against racial injustice during the Star-Spangled Banner on Friday night. And unless the student knows a really good lawyer. . . .

Because people are stupid, politicians feel the need to be even stupider. It's a matter of solidarity with the electorate. Mostly, though, it's a matter of getting re-elected.

WBRH bumper sticker, circa 1978
WHEN I was growing up in Louisiana, and on the student side of the power equation, things could get a little weird.  This had a lot to do with how politics pervade everything in Louisiana . . . and how politics in the Gret Stet tend to have this certain Venezuelan je ne sais quoi.

This is where the "fear, loathing and radio" part of the post kicks in.

In any banana republic, the first lesson one learns -- or else -- is not to piss off the Maximum Leader. This goes double for the party newspaper and state radio. When the party organ is your local high-school newspaper and state radio is, for instance, the student beacon of Hometown High, students may have their First Amendment rights, but the Maximum Leaders in the principal's office and on the school board still have leverage.

Like money, for instance. Like the power to hire or fire faculty, for another. Like just shutting this troublesome radio station the hell down. When push comes to shove, "freedom of the press" belongs to him who owns one.

Does the Maximum Leader have to threaten a thing? Nope. Sane employees with house notes to pay and kids to feed know who butters their toast. And Maximum Leader Is Watching YOU.

August 1977
IN THE CASE of WBRH, the radio voice of Baton Rouge Magnet High School, the licensee isn't the Autonomous Students of Baton Rouge High. It is the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board.

Can the state exercise prior restraint against students who staff official, publicly funded media? Theoretically, no, if Maximum Leader cares to pay lip service to the U.S. Constitution.

But does the constitution require the state to fund a radio station or any other official organ? As far as I know . . . no. There's always an angle.

Especially in Louisiana, a state filled with geometry savants.

In banana republics, the peasants always are seditious, Maximum Leader always has an itchy trigger finger, and the employees on the bottom of the government's food chain always are nervous.

WBRH radio now takes you to the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, where Smiley Anders' universally read local column has just rolled off the press. It is June 1, 1981.


IT IS DELUSIONAL to think that everybody who was anybody at the East Baton Rouge Parish schools central office didn't either read, hear about or field jokesters' telephone calls about Smiley Anders' column that day.

It likewise would be delusional to think that the WBRH general manager, radio broadcasting and electronics teacher John Dobbs, didn't quite reasonably think "Oh, shit . . ." when he saw Smiley's column. Or was told about it in no uncertain terms.


We again take you to the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, where Smiley Anders' universally read local column has just rolled off the press. It is June 3, 1981.


MY LAST airshift at WBRH came a couple of years before that -- I graduated in May 1979. And it's true: It was a tradition and, thus, a coincidence.

But there's no denying that it was an epic and happy coincidence. Well, not for Mr. Dobbs, but still . . . coincidence or not, in the world of student media, you take your shots when you're able, and you count your victories when you can.


In my student-media days, I counted a few victories. I also racked up some defeats and collected a couple of battle scars.

First, there was the time I helped introduce Baton Rouge to the Sex Pistols when I brought my British-import 45 of "God Save the Queen" to the studios of 90.1 FM. Maximum Leader was watching. Or listening, actually.

After a few spins during the fall of 1977, "God Save the Queen" was as banned in Baton Rouge as it was on the BBC. Mr. Dobbs even confiscated my 45. I got it back when I promised never to bring it back.


Then, maybe a couple of months later, there was the time we had Fannie Godwin on Teen Forum, the 20-watt, high-school FM radio version of Meet the Press. I'm sure it was indistinguishable from Bill Monroe's NBC program but for the acne.

Godwin was a local activist, vice-president of the Baton Rouge ACLU chapter and a "school board watcher," meaning "watchdog" in regular American English. In the fall of 1977, the organization had undertaken the controversial, nay, subversive practice of . . . passing out booklets to high-school students informing them about their constitutional rights.


IN 1977, this was a full-blown, red-alert controversy in Baton Rouge. I'm sure it would be today, too. 

The Other Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook informed East Baton Rouge Parish students, right there on the cover, that "You are not in the Army. You are not in prison. It only seems like it. . . ." This was because 40 years ago in my hometown, in most high schools, it seemed like you were in the Army. In a few, notably Zachary High School under Obergrüppenführer Jerry Boudreaux, some freethinkers swore it was a lot more like a prison.

This seems to be the part that got folks the most riled up. Naturally, it involved the First Amendment.
You can speak your mind, wear buttons, and arm bands, hand out literature, picket, form clubs and invite speakers, all on school grounds as long as you don't clearly interrupt the normal school process. It will be up to the administration to prove disruption. You do not need prior permission (even though the parish handbook says you do) to speak, wear buttons, hold meetings, and form clubs.
 
THE PARISH school board called the Zachary High administration, parents, students and good Christian townspeople of Zachary before it to mount a defense against the horrible allegations with which the American Civil Liberties Union was filling reporters' minds -- and stories.

Obergrüppenführer Boudreaux denied all. Parents decried the civil-liberties troublemakers. Students took the microphone to pull what we'd later come to recognize as total Tracy Flick moves.

"A former Zachary student, who did not give his name, said he was 'unlucky enough' to have also attended other high schools," State-Times reporter Linda Lightfoot wrote in the Sept. 16, 1977, edition of the evening paper. 
"Nobody makes us salute the flag," he said. "We are proud to be a Christian community.“

He added that the "ACLU is dead wrong if it is saying Jerry Boudreaux is running the school in a totalitarian manner."

Darwin Williams. a senior at Zachary, said a "glint of Communism" shows through in the ACLU literature.

Jill Wilson, editor at the Zachary High school paper, said that the ACLU leaflet seemed to imply that she could say anything she wanted to say in the school paper. “Well, I don't want it that way," she said.
State-Times, Sept. 16, 1977. Click for full-size version

IN ZACHARY, obviously there was no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.

This was the milieu amid which WBRH had Fannie Godwin, second-ranking "commie" in all the parish, on Teen Forum. Charles Knighten was the moderator; I was one of the panelists.

We were keen to know about these constitutional rights students possessed. And we talked much about the ACLU's alternative student handbook.

A just-graduated friend -- a former WBRH staffer -- had dropped by the studio as we were about to tape the program. He told me of pre-performance prayers by the drama students and teacher, suggesting that would make for a good line of questioning.

It was a good topic to quiz the local ACLU vice-president about. If you were (1.) an independent journalist at (2.) a news-media outlet (3.) somewhere in the United States of America.

My journalism and civics teachers would have told me I was, WBRH was, and Louisiana was. Facts on the ground would come to indicate (1.) no, (2.) no, and (3.) "What have you been smoking?"


We thought the show went swimmingly and that Fannie was a great guest. After all, her needling of members during school board meetings surely was high performance art before anyone had heard of performance art.

Someone somewhere in the Maximum Leader ranks thought otherwise. Apparently, I had passed classified material to the enemy.

I was off the Teen Forum panel. And I don't think Teen Forum was back for a second season.


SO, what have I learned in these 40 years since my high-school radio days?

Well . . . I'll tell you.

I've learned that WBRH is made of sturdy stuff. Baton Rouge High's FM station has survived many Maximum Leaders in the school board central office, has endured the politics that infest every single damn thing in my home state, and has grown exponentially despite it all . . . by sticking to the music. Teen Forum still is dead as a door nail, though.

I've learned that digging through old hometown newspapers from one's salad days sure knocks the rose color off your glasses right quick. Ugliness in black and white beats the crap out of nostalgia and sentimentalism every time. (I also am reminded of why I got the hell out of Baton Rouge -- for the last time -- nearly 30 years ago. According to contemporary headlines, things there haven't much improved.)


I've learned that even though I disagree with the ACLU on some things, America damn well needs the ACLU.

Finally, I've learned from the latest effort by "good, Christian Americans" to vilify and intimidate those who, in protest of injustice, take a knee for the national anthem that some things never change. At all.

I have learned that, in this country, there is a wide gulf between the rights society tells people they possess and the rights society permits them to exercise in peace.
 

BATON ROUGE HIGH,  God bless it, was not the Army and was not a prison. Despite the best malevolent efforts of Louisiana's various Maximum Leaders, my old school was a great old school . . . and still is. There, I learned pretty much everything I needed to know in life.

College was just for the advanced degree in drinking.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Pure Nebraska. Straight, no chaser.


In south Louisiana, where I was born and raised, you have Cajun music at Fred's in Mamou on Saturday mornings.

In way-rural eastern Nebraska -- by way of a couple of gravel county roads and a winding dirt one, if you're coming from the nearby metropolis of Brainard  (population 330) -- there's a polka band at the Loma Tavern on Sunday evenings.

You don't stumble across Loma, an unincorporated hilltop village of 30 souls, a handful of houses, a church, an empty hardware store . . . and the Loma Tavern. No, you have to look hard for Loma.

Ever see the 1990s cult movie, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar with Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo? The fictional Snydersville, the middle-of-nowhere burg where they get stranded, is really Loma. And the bar is the Loma Tavern, which used to be the Bar-M Corral.

If you didn't know that before you find your way to the Loma Tavern, you'll know it before you leave.

Anyway,  in this stretch of Nebraska -- Butler County, like many stretches of Nebraska -- you have two kinds of people: Czechs and more Czechs . . . though I did see someone who copped to being German. And on this seasonable spring evening in Little Bohemia, 13-year-old accordionist Addie Hejl (pronounce Heil) was fronting the band for the first time. Then again, she's only been playing for a year.

Sounds like she's been playing for 20 but, no, just a year.


BEING FROM bayou country and having been force-fed a Saturday-night diet of Lawrence Welk during my formative years, I am not unfamiliar with accordions. Or -- thanks again to Mr. Welk -- polka music.

But polka is a Midwestern thing. In eastern Nebraska, polka music on small-town radio stations every Sunday afternoon is akin to Cajun music on small-town Louisiana radio stations every Saturday morning. I think, truth be told, that the DNA of folks on the Czech and German plains of this state has developed a polka mutation, much as my swamp-Gallic DNA has the extra Jolie Blonde chromosome.

The shared trait of the two mutations is the accordion. That and little roadhouses in the middle of nowhere that, on warm and lazy weekend evenings, become the center of the musical universe. Ask Addie Hejl, who still is eight years shy of being able to knock back a legal cold one.

When I was still eight years shy of being able to knock back a legal cold one, I, too, found myself in a few centers of the musical universe in parts of southeastern Louisiana more familiar to bullfrogs and bream than actual people.

A few of them, to tell you the truth, made the Loma Tavern look like the Cocoanut Grove. One in Whitehall -- in deepest, darkest Livingston Parish -- had a drop ceiling . . . with the bottoms of beer cases substituting for tiles.

I REMEMBER sitting at a table drinking my Coca-Cola as my parents and my aunt and uncle sat and drank their beers. It was a quiet Sunday evening -- not much going on except for another 45 dropping on the jukebox.

It was Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Knock Three Times."
Hey girl what ya doin' down there
Dancin' alone every night while I live right above you
I can hear your music playin'
I can feel your body swayin'
One floor below me you don't even know me
I love you . . .

Oh my darling,
Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me
Twice on the pipe if the answer is no
Oh my sweetness,
Means you'll meet me in the hallway
Twice on the pipe means you ain't gonna show
AT THIS, Aunt Ceil looked up at the ceiling.

At the cardboard beer-case bottoms that were the ceiling. At the Budweiser and Schlitz and Dixie and Falstaff and Miller High-Life "ceiling tiles."

"Knock three times on that ceiling, and the damn thing'll fall on you," she deadpanned.

I don't think Coca-Cola blew out of my nose, but it had to have been close. That may have been when I decided that Aunt Ceil was -- by far -- the funniest person in Daddy's German-Dutch-Irish family.




I THOUGHT of these things as I stood in the back of a century-old country bar in Nebraska listening to a teenage accordion wunderkind and a couple of guys a generation and two older playing polka music -- things half a country and a lifetime ago made present here and now by musical ties that bind.

As I looked across the tavern, through the dancing couples and toward the band, I saw something else entirely. I saw Mama and Daddy, alive again and younger than myself, two-stepping across the dance floor to a country band in Killian, La. I saw a time when a little honky-tonk between river and swamp seemed like a big thing to a kid.

To me.

The thought of trying to explain to strangers why a 50-something man was crying in the back of a little bar in Loma, Neb., kept the tears -- and humiliation -- at bay.

Maybe geezers like myself could be forgiven for thinking that, maybe, 13-year-old girls instead should aspire to play in a Runaways tribute band. Call it the Queens of Noise.

It's just that those accordions will get you every time.

Every. Damn. Time.

Saturday, April 08, 2017

We're gonna party like it's . . . 1992


This is 90-something minutes of alternative rock 'n' roll greatness.

This is WBRH, 90.3 on your FM dial in Baton Rouge, La., almost a quarter century ago now. This also is a high-school radio station -- the broadcast voice of Baton Rouge Magnet High School.

I don't know who the DJ is . . . but she is on fire with the music she's choosing.

Likewise, I don't know when in September 1992 this aircheck was recorded, nor do I know the time of day. All I do know is this is my old station (1977-79) near the height of its musical powers.

I had been living in Omaha for more than four years by the time someone rolled tape on this bit of radio history . . . and there is no way the much larger city up Nawth had a rock station as good as this back then.

Or now, for that matter.


Thursday, August 29, 2013

No, son, they're not calling you a whale


You have your freshman mistakes, and then you have your freshman mistakes that you can't wait to share with the world.

World, meet Ishmail Jackson, Nebraska football walk-on. He was set on being a Husker, and damn if he didn't make the team. The upside to that is obvious enough.

I imagine he's just about to experience the downside -- Coach Bo Pelini's survey course on the cold, hard facts of life. One of those is that Husker football players, even the walk-ons, are public figures. And public figures, if they know what's good for them, do not go on Twitter to disparage Nebraska womanhood.

For example, "98% of the black girls at this school are just disgustingly ugly."

For another example, "Yall [sic] thought florida [sic] had ugly girls? omg lol"

I THINK more than half the University of Nebraska-Lincoln population will be calling young Mr. Jackson something, but it won't be Ishmael. It looks like Uncle Matt -- as in Damon, of movie fame -- never got around to explaining public relations, how it works and why it's important. Or the whole public-figure thing.

Now that talk will come from Coach Bo, who sometimes could be mistaken for Mount Vesuvius. He won't be nearly so smooth as Uncle Matt.

Let's just hope that Jackson, post eruption, isn't mistaken for Pompeii. Which, actually, wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to him.

After all, being an 18-year-old male, he might do something even stupider than scorning half the population, with a soupçon of racial je ne sais quoi for bad measure: He might actually ask a coed for a date. That probably wouldn't end well.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

America in the looking glass


What's the difference between your average Islamic-extremist jihadi and your average American teenager with a gun?

The jihadi, at least, has a reason for killing. I'm not saying a good reason, but at least he has one. For three homegrown poster children for the culture of death, according to Oklahoma cops, not so much.

Because of that, an Australian baseball player out for a Friday jog in Duncan, Okla., is making an unexpected trip back home. In a coffin. Solely because he decided to go for a jog in his American girlfriend's hometown.

And solely because, by chance, three teenagers -- it is alleged --  decided that day was a good day for somebody to die, then happened to spy Chris Lane, catcher for East Central University in Ada, Okla.
It comes after a 16-year-old boy confessed to pulling the trigger and killing Lane, according to police chief Danny Ford.

Chief Ford said the 16-year-old was with two other teens aged 15 and 17 when they killed Lane during a random drive-by shooting in the town of Duncan.
He said the three teenagers had no motive other than to make a name for themselves.

All three are facing the charge of first-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of the death penalty.

Chief Ford told 3AW this morning one of the accused has confessed to pulling the trigger, saying he just wanted to kill someone.

"Lately there has been some pretty weak motives, but I don’t know that I’ve had one that they told us they were just going to kill somebody," he said.

He said the three teens were on a "killing spree" after , leaving a chilling message on Facebook.

Peter Lane said his son had left his mark and his death was just so pointless. 
(snip)

Chief Ford said the teens drove to another house to murder a second unrelated victim just hours after shooting Lane in the back and leaving him to die in an upper-class area of Duncan at 2.57pm local time Friday (5.57am Saturday Melbourne time).

"They wanted to be Billy Bob Badasses," Chief Ford said.

"I think they were on a killing spree.

"We would have had more bodies that night if we didn't get them."

On one of the alleged killer's Facebook pages investigators said they found the message: "Bang. Two drops in two hours".

The accused are in custody in Stephens County Jail, awaiting formal murder charges expected on Monday local time.

Earlier, Chief Ford said one of the teens had been co-operating.

"He said, ‘Yeah, we did it but I’m not going to tell you who pulled the trigger’," he said.

One of the alleged murderers was Caucasian, the other two were black, Chief Ford said.

Lane, 22, grew up in Oak Park in Melbourne’s north and was in the US on a sports scholarship.

He was jogging through an area of "high dollar homes" after leaving the home of his American girlfriend, Sarah Harper, when he was followed and shot at the intersection of Country Club Rd and Twilight Beach Rd.


AMERICA'S gun nuts think we could prevent a lot of this kind of thing if only everybody -- or at least enough people --were armed.

What I want them to explain to me, though, is how you defend yourself against being shot in the back, out of the blue. Because that's how we roll in the red, white and blue, every-man-is-an-island incarnation of the culture of death.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

'In the deed, the glory'


I wish I were 30-odd years younger and had talent.

That's because I want to play high-school football for Coach Victor Nazario at Beach Channel, which now stands amid the ruin on the storm-swept Rockaway Peninsula of Queens. I would kick ass, take names, clean clocks and run through a brick wall for a guy who can put it all in perspective before a state playoff game like this:
"Sandy took a lot of shit from us -- a lot. It did not take our courage; it did not take our will. It did not take our courage; it did not take our will, because your will is what got you here today. So let's finish this job, gentlemen. Let's just go out there and go out in style."
Beach Channel suffered the same fate as many of its students: equipment room flooded out, pads, jerseys -- you name it -- swept away by Hurricane Sandy's storm surge. No power. No practice field. Before Saturday's state playoff game, Nazario had salvaged what equipment he could and borrowed those things he couldn't.

THE BIG QUESTION, though, was whether he could field a team from a student body hunkered down in darkened, cold homes or evacuated to God-knows-where. From a New York Times feature story:
Breland Archbold woke up hungry at his grandmother’s house on the Saturday morning of his last high school football game. Typically, Archbold, the quarterback and captain of the Beach Channel Dolphins, spends the night before game day at a teammate’s house in Far Rockaway, eats chicken fingers and macaroni, and then in the morning tackles mounds of eggs and turkey bacon. 
This time, Archbold, his 6-foot, 200-pound frame straining at the contours of a strange bed, awoke wondering whether he would eat at all before the game. It had been like that for two weeks, ever since Hurricane Sandy had flooded and disfigured his Rockaways neighborhood.
Still, there was a football game to play, and no ordinary one. Beach Channel was set to play at Port Richmond on Staten Island this past Saturday in the first round of the Public Schools Athletic League playoffs. Archbold, 17, who still dreamed of a scholarship offer, maybe from the University at Buffalo, was nervous, and grateful, too.

“This was the last time to make everything count, and in the middle of a crazy time,” he said.

Archbold’s father, Dexter, drove him to the team bus pickup spot, and the route, as it had been for days, remained otherworldly. Instead of stoplights, there were police officers dressed in fluorescent green directing traffic, and on the sides of sandblasted streets stood shells of homes and businesses, little more than piles of rubble.

Archbold’s own uniform bore the taint of the storm. His shoulder pads reeked of bleach, used to kill mildew; his rib guard was gone altogether, washed away after Beach Channel’s locker room flooded. Port Richmond, in one of a number of acts of kindness, had lent Beach Channel what gear it could. Beach Channel, in the nearly two weeks since the storm, had practiced only twice, on a dark and borrowed field at Far Rockaway High School.
 (snip)
Breland Archbold moped for a week after the hurricane. He thought his senior football season would be left incomplete. He was in his father’s car in a line for gasoline on Long Island when his coach called him. The playoff game was on, but could the Dolphins play?

Nazario salvaged what equipment he could from the flooded school, and Port Richmond Coach Lou Vesce would lend the rest. But it was Archbold’s job as team captain to find out if the Dolphins could field a squad. He called teammates he had not seen since before the storm.

“Are you serious? I’m in,” Fatukasi said.

The Red Raiders scored again after halftime. Then again. A scuffle broke out after Archbold, also playing safety, tackled the opposing quarterback, Victor Pratt, as he ran out of bounds. The Red Raiders’ captain, Compton Richmond, bumped Archbold with his chest, and Fatukasi rushed over to protect his friend. Referees threw flags. The score was 30-6 and the frustration was palpable among the dozen or so Beach Channel fans.

Dexter Archbold had used his youth league football connections to secure the Dolphins practice time at the powerless Far Rockaway football field Thursday and Friday. About 15 players showed up Thursday, but the scrimmage was little more than a head count. On Friday, four more players showed, and the team did its best in the twilight. A few parents tried to battle back the darkness by shining their headlights on the field, burning precious gas, but it was little use. Some would miss the game the next day because they did not have the gas to get to Staten Island.

If this were Hollywood, the Dolphins would have rallied. But this was Staten Island. They lost, 38-6. After the game, the team huddled on the field. Some boys wept. Fatukasi called his teammates family and told them that despite “all that adversity, we’re leaving this field with respect.”

HALF A CONTINENT away from the Rockaways, in Lincoln, Neb., there's an inscription on Memorial Stadium, where another football team plays: "Not the victory but the action; Not the goal but the game; In the deed the glory."

University of Nebraska philosophy professor Hartley Burr Alexander wrote that. Through the veil separating the world that is seen and that which we cannot -- across the boundaries of time and space -- I'd like to think the good professor was able to see those words of his, carved into stone in 1923, transform themselves. On a cold Saturday in Staten Island, an abstraction suddenly wasn't.

"Not the victory but the action." A high-school coach and a couple dozen teenagers.

"Not the goal but the game." A remnant in borrowed gear, huddled in a cafeteria-turned-locker room, ready to step onto a field and stare down the winds of fate.

"In the deed the glory."



HAT TIP:  Rod Dreher. 

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Paging Capt. Renault . . . Capt. Louis Renault


For decades now, we've been leeringly drenching our entire culture with the ethos of sex as just one more recreational sport, women as nothing more than objects there to help men get their freak on and humans in general as being worth only what we decide they are.

And prime-time TV has become, more or less, all-American Pie, all the time.

Yet, people still are shocked, shocked whenever they're confronted with the extent to which their little darlings have internalized it all. A "fantasy slut league" at a California high school?

Aunt Pittypat, quick! Give me your smelling salts!

C'MON, people. We are a country where suburban housewives are gaga over Fifty Shades of Gray and hold Tupperware parties, only with plastic dildos (among other sex toys) instead of plastic bowls that you burp and seal.

No, this Los Angeles Times blog item from the Bay Area is the most unsurprising thing in the world:
Officials at a Bay Area high school say they are taking steps to deter the type of behavior that led to a "fantasy slut league," in which male student athletes "drafted" female students and earned points for documenting sexual activity with them.

The league at Piedmont High School was loosely modeled after popular online fantasy sports leagues, but instead of drafting athletes, male students drafted females. And the game, instead of baseball or football, was sex. And, instead of being pure fantasy, the league was quite real.

The school's principal, Richard Kitchens, sent a letter to parents last week informing them of the existence of the league and saying there was a "general recognition that over the past 5-6 years such a league has existed in one form or another as part of 'bonding' for some Varsity Teams during their seasons of sport," according to a copy of the letter posted by Piedmont Patch.