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Over the last decade there has been a mass movement (more like that of bowels) of parents who are extremely upset that the 'local church' isn't do everything to make sure their kids (children and teens) stay out of trouble, fall in love with Jesus, choose church over the world and become the deep Theologians that they are NOT.
The sad truth is that the church is doing more harm than good when it comes to ministry to youth because of this attitude toward parents. Let me break it down to you very simply. The local church's job with young people is to meet their spiritual needs in order to 'qualify' and edify the teachings of the parents. If the parents are not teaching the Christian life and directing the righteous standard found in scripture for our lives, then there is little or nothing the church can accomplish except creating division in the home.
Yes, youth can and do come to know Christ through the local church from time-to-time however, according to national polls done by youth, parents have an 85% influence on the believes and decisions of their lives. Youth workers in the church have about a 5% influence and the main youth leader carries less than 3%.
So what are we going to do? Well, as soon as we find in scripture where it is the job of the local 'church staff' to raise children we would "de-sin" a majority of parent's lives as well as relieve frustrations from many ministry leaders. After an extensive search, we haven't been able to find that text in entire Bible on any level. The responsibility belongs to the parents.
As we continue in our journey to see youth come to know Christ and then find a deep rooted love for Him and His Word, we will ALWAYS see a narrow and wide path. Unfortunately, with today's churches becoming program and activity driven, you will no longer see the deep seeded faith of young people like you have in the past. In order to see a change in this paradigm, we are going to have to exhort the local church to change their focus and put it back on God's unfailing Word.
Ministry programming to children and youth must accept the challenge of health and forsake the popular opinion of the masses to 'give them their king.' Leaders of churches need to resolve to a three fold purpose:
- EQUIP adult leaders who can spend time investing in YOUTH and PARENTS in a real, life changing, life mentoring relationship.
- EDIFY the home and partner with families equipping them and holding them accountable to TRAIN and LEAD their children in righteousness. It's amazing that we won't allow our children to skip school, work, homework, bathing, practice and studies, but when it comes to the Word of God and the eternal investment of their short lives on Earth, we let them choose so we don't come across pushy. I pray that when I stand before God, that I cannot say I allowed my children to choose their own path while they were still impressionable.
- ENCOURAGE living for Christ because He accepts us and we can only give Him our lives in return. Teaching children of the King that our lives should be the standard and that EXTREME love is the example. Matthew 22:37
There are other things that we can add to this list, but honestly, we don't need them. The CHURCH needs to be IN THE WORLD – I guess that is the problem sometimes is that we are in the world and the world can't tell us apart except for our self-righteous talk and the way we let others take our responsibility and then wonder 'why' it's all a mess in the end. Parents (of which I am four times), we must take up our cross and do what God expects for us to do with respect to our children's spiritual lives. The church is here for support and family, not for our jobs to be easy.
(John Allen Turner – Faith 2.0 has written an article similar in nature, "I have looked all through the Bible and have not found one verse that tells churches how to raise kids. God put those kids into a family — under your leadership — and he calls you to do the heavy lifting. Raise your own kids. Stop relying so much on the church to do something God hasn't called or equipped it to do.")


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The Big Show
1961, Drama
A failing European family circus comes close to unraveling under the increasingly desperate actions of the despotic owner, Bruno (Nehemiah Persoff). Trying to please his father, the family black sheep, Klaus (Robert Vaughn), throws over his highwire-walking sweetheart, Carlotta (Margia Dean) for Teresa (Renata Mannhardt), the beautiful animal trainer whose father owns a competing circus Bruno wants to take over. These impetuous actions end in tragedy and threaten the show's future.

subset: commoncrawl


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|"Celebrate!" — By Paris Dukes
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GlobalFoundries is cutting about 30 jobs at its Fab 8 chip factory in Malta as part of a 3 percent reduction of its workforce globally.
Spokeman Travis Bullard said the cuts are "targeted" and are part of a cost-cutting program designed to make the company's position as a contract chip manufacturer more competitive.
"This limited action, representing less than three percent of our global headcount, is specifically designed to drive operational efficiencies, and improve our cost structure across all of our sites worldwide.," Bullard said.
Fab 8, which is located at the Luther Forest Technology Campus, currently employs 2,200 people. GlobalFoundries also has manufacturing operations in Germany and Singapore and other offices around the world, with a total workforce of 13,000 people.
Bullard said the job cuts will occur even as GlobalFoundries continues to hire to ramp up its factory expansion and new $2 billion technology development center. The company will end up having spent $9 billion in Malta once those two projects are complete.
Bullard said the 30 jobs were from its New York operations. The company also has people stationed at IBM facilities in East Fishkill and Yorktown Heights and in Albany at the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. He said the 30 local jobs that are being cut are in "support and non-technical roles."
He noted that the company will still be in hiring mode even as the job cuts are made, an indication that the company is shifting resources. As of Wednesday, the company was seeking 15 new hires in Malta.
"I'm sure they're trying to optimize their operations," said Malta Supervisor Paul Sausville, who was not told of the company's workforce reduction in advance.
GlobalFoundries has been in start-up mode since 2009 and has gone from 3,000 employees and just one customer to 13,000 employees and 160 customers relatively quickly, so it's not surprising that redundancies or unneeded positions would be found.


text: Thinking of making short notice reservations for the weekend of Feb. 11/12/13. We would be the last of the 60 slots available in the backcountry. Would prefer to be at Yankee Paradise or Hickory Hill. They tell me this will most likely not be a problem. Since site choice is based on order of reservations I was wondering what experience others have had. Do not want to be faced with hiking all the way to Brickhill Bluff on Friday as it would definitely be well after dark getting there.


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Which area in Northern Wales is most noteworthy?
The Isle of Anglesey is definitely a fantastic picturesque location that is protected as one of the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This is a mixture of rocky headlands, beautiful beaches, heaths, dunes as well as a lovely countryside. This is where rural life is most stunning and absolutely well preserved.
This entry was posted on Miércoles, Agosto 31st, 2016 at 3:51 am and is filed under Tourism Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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United States Navy Seal Ranks Facts
United States Navy Seal Ranks are similar to the ranks that sailors have. The rem rating is normally used to refer to the different ranks that the sailors in the navy seal have. For instance, first class petty officer is used to refer to the services of the serviceman and the officer is referred to as the boatswain's mate. A navy seal is usually made up of a few members. The total number of sailors that make up a navy seal team is 16. This is usually known as a Platoon. The lieutenant is the person responsible for leading the team in ever mission. Depending on the mission in hand, the team can be divided into either two or our squadrons. The petty officer, assistant officer and platoon chief are responsible for undertaking other leadership activities of the team. The rest of the people on the team include; divers, experts in explosives, navigators, weapon specialists and snipers. All these are enlisted personnel that possess certain special skills required in the team.
United States Navy Seal Ranks' Command
Like all other sailors, Navy Seal Ranks are also under a chain of command in order to ensure smooth running in the operation of the team. Naval Special Warfare Command is the body responsible for providing leadership for this team. The Naval Special Warfare Command is in charge of the entire navy seal team which is made up of a number of units. The entire team consists of 300 personnel. These 300 people are divided into smaller units and assigned different tasks depending on the type of missions available. The platoons are the ones that support these teams and are also the group that is sent out on missions around the world.
United States Navy Seal Ranks Insignia
In order for a navy seal rank sailor to own and wear the warfare insignia, they need to have undergone the BUD/S and Seal Training that qualifies them to possess it. The Insignia is a pin that is worn on the uniform by the sailors. If is formerly referred to as Seal Trident.
Navy Seal Ranks SO Rating Badge
This badge is all- black clothing that is similar to the insignia. The difference is the fact that the badge is worn by enlisted members of the seal force when they are on camouflage activities only. The SO rating mainly included rating of technologies, set of skills and systems of training.
In conclusion, the united states navy seal ranks are similar to other sailors. The only difference is the number of sailors in their team and the missions they go on. The navy seal ranks also have a different chain of command and ways in which they carry out their activities.


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What does yanquapin mean?
Definitions for yanquapin
Here are all the possible meanings and translations of the word yanquapin.
Princeton's WordNet
water chinquapin, American lotus, yanquapin, Nelumbo lutea(noun)
water lily of eastern North America having pale yellow blossoms and edible globular nutlike seeds
Chaldean Numerology
The numerical value of yanquapin in Chaldean Numerology is: 2
Pythagorean Numerology
The numerical value of yanquapin in Pythagorean Numerology is: 1
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Wednesday, July 15, 1829
Vol. II, no. 15
Page 1, col. 4a.-
Page 2, col. 1a
One of the motives of the Government in removing the Indians over the Mississippi is to avoid the evil consequences of their being too near neighbors to the whites. But from the following article, we should suppose the Cherokees would have, in case of removal, neighbors not a whit more conducive to their interests. In case of an irruption from the hostile Indians, the friendly Indians who will form the vanguard of the whites, must either strike hands with the savages, or their scalps must fall a prey to the Comanches, Pawnees and Wacoes.
Unprotected state of our Southwestern frontier.- The following letter
to the Editor, from a respectable citizen of Miller county, we doubt not speaks
the sentiments of every inhabitant of that section of our territory; and we
do not know that we can better subserve the interests of those interested, then
by laying it before the public.
Ark. Gaz.
MILLER C. H. June 1st. 1829
"DEAR SIR.-- The troops stationed at Cantonment Towson will doubtless
leave there for Cantonment Jesup, by the 15th inst. at farthest, which will
leave this frontier in a deplorably helpless condition-exposed on two sides
for a distance of upwards of 300 miles, to numerous hostile Indians."
"It is impossible to ascertain with any degree of precision the number of warriors that the unfriendly tribes of Comanche, Pawnee, and Wacoe Indians can bring into the field-but it is generally estimated at not less than 30,000. When the present frontier settlers remove, which they are preparing to do immediately, it will still leave and exposed frontier which will require the strong arm of government to protect them. I am astonished at the removal of the troops, and am at a loss to account for the cause- but suspect it has grown out of some false representations, the result of private prejudice. Though I am preparing to remove immediately, yet the same strong reason exists for keeping up an efficient armed force in this quarter; and I would suggest the propriety of the dignitaries of our land using their influence with the government, for the purpose of procuring relief for the unfortunate and unprotected inhabitants of this exposed frontier. I have spoken to Col. Sevier on the subject, who is decidedly opposed to the removal of the troops, and offers to render us all the assistance in his power."
"All is hurry and confusion here, to get off from this neglected region, & out of the reach of the devastation & ruin which is anticipated from the hostile Indians on the withdrawal of the troops."
"Some of the unfriendly Indians have recently stolen a number of horses, and it is believed that two of the friendly Indians have fallen victims to their tomahawks. This creates considerable excitement among our citizens who look upon it as only a prelude to what will follow the abandonment of the post at Cantonment Towson, unless they also remove, and seek new homes elsewhere. The giving up of the fairest portion of this section of the Territory to the Choctaw Indians, certainly cannot justify the government in sacrificing the lives and property of those of her citizens who are still left on the frontier. They are entitled to the paternal care of their rulers, and I ardently hope they will not always be neglected."


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| Originally Posted by pouchie
Does the steel band play while you are walking down the isle?? Or do they play after you have exchanged vows? I was also wondering with the DJ do you give him the music you want him to play or does he just play whatever? If you give him music do you give him a bunch of CD's or would an IPOD work
The DJ questions are great, I was wondering the same thing myself. Hopefully someone can answer them for us!


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Into The Badlands Chapter 7: Sara Paretsky & Eugene Izzi
That's About As Cold As It Gets
Part One: Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky is a woman who wears aviator shades and has discovered at 42 the appeal of American football as a sexual spectacle for women. She is also a shy woman who combines diffidence and elegance in more or less equal measures and who worked for some years for an insurance monolith before making her name as the prototypical author of detective fiction with an avowedly feminist slant with a series of novels featuring PI V(ictoria).I.Warshawski. "I wrote the first one in '79. That really came out of several different impulses. I had wanted for years to see it I could actually write a novel and you get to be 30/31 and you realise that a lot of the things you thought you might do simply aren't possible ant more.. In your twenties you think you're immortal and will always be at a high level of phusical ability so you can defer maiking choices - and then you come to the realisation that you are going to die. It seemed to me that the time had come to see what I could actually do, to stop living a fantasy life."
"I decided to write a detective novel because that's what I mostly had read, so I knew them better than any other kind of writing. And I very much wanted a book with a female protagonist, because, particularly in American crime, its hard to find a woman character you can really identify with. I tried a couple of things that didn't work and then one day I was in a managenment meeting - you know when you're in middle management you're really the baloney in the sandwich, you have to execute the really dorky ideas of your seniors and get people who don't have any desire to be at work to do them. So there I was, sitting listening to this real conehead that I worked for, pretending that I thought he was a genius while the balloon over my head said 'this is so stupid I can't believe it'. Then suddenly I just had the idea that I would have a detective who was not a parody of Spade or Marlowe but just a woman doing a job that had traditionally been done by men. So she would be facing the typical difficulties but she would have the advantage of being able to say what was in the balloon over her head because she doesn't have to worry about being fired. I wanted her to be very Chicagoan, which means very ethnic, so I gave her a Polish father and I'm not good with ethnic last names so I thought OK Warsaw's in Poland, so Warshawski is bound to be Polish, though people tell me its not. Anyway its Polish to me."
Sara Paretsky scared the hell out of me when I met her outside my hotel on my first morning in Chicago. Missoula had left me a physical wreck, and a night spent in a fleabag motel in a nowhere suburb of Chicago listening to glass breaking, deals going down in the parking lot and screaming children had done little for my mental equilibrium. I had too many clothes on and the sun was out; still it was probbly the residual alcohol in my blood that was causing to sweat like a pig. I arrived at my new hotel in the city centre late, just at the time I had arranged to meet Paretsky, having intended to leave time to shower and change. Instead I'm stood in the office, checking in and dripping sweat when this purposeful woman in huge shades and a mass of frizzy hair gets out of a car and approaches holding what reveals itself as she approaches to be the new Margaret Atwood novel.
Oh shit, she's here already I think, and, completely discomfited, do what I generally do in such situations, behave with staggering rudenss, grunting rather than speaking. Without realising or intending it both of us have succeeded in thoroughly intimidating the other and the first half hour or so we spend driving around Chicago is distinctly sticky
Sara Paretsky has now written six novels, all of them featuring V.I.Warshawski, a character who, as ever with the fictional private eye, has elements of the alter ego. VI has a background working for an insurance monolith, she's an anglophile, a dog-lover, has similar political views to her creator and started out at around the same age, though, again in the private eye tradition, she seems to be aging at about half mormal speed.
The fact that the novels are centred around the character of VI is both their abiding strength and potential weakness. A strength inasmuch as VI is emerging book by book as a tremendously convincing heroine, a woman holding her own in a man's job in a man's world. But a weakness because if, as the likes of James Ellroy or Tink Thompson suggest, the male PI hero is fundamentally unbelievable, then that goes double for a female character. And at first VI's credibility as a working PI was somewhat lacking; Joe Gores proposes the descriptions of fire-arms as an acid-test of whether the author knows what he or she is talking about and one of the acknowledgemts at the start of Paretsky's third novel, Killing Orders, runs as follows 'Kimball Wright, enraged by repeated errors regarding the Smith & Wesson in V.I.'s previous adventures, provided me with better information about the weapon.'
Parestsky, though, in a way that is pretty much analagous to the likely experience for a woman in real-life becoming a P.I, is learning as she goes along. However she is well aware that the convention of the private eye is not strictly realist; "In some ways my books are very unrealistic, in the things that V.I. does. I sort of think that a significant for women is being at home in their own bodies, and the idea that - of course its becoming increasingly difficult for anyone of any sex to walk on any street in America - the idea that you don't have to worry about what street you walk on would mean that the goals of feminism have been achieved. (For women a lot more mean streets??) In a way VI acts out of what I idealise, she's someone who doesn't have those fears, which is really not true of any woman I know. My ground rule is that she will not be sexually assaulted at any time, and of course that's not realistic with the kind of risks she takes, but it's something that's important to me."
The hotel I'd found was just north of the loop, Chicago's business district and after dark mugger heaven. The hotel itself was blandly similar to every other down at heel motel I'd stayed in, just three times as expensive, reflecting the incredible lack of half-way bearable hotle accomodation in the city. V.I.'S office is down in the loop, but first we're heading north towards the area she lives in, the gentrifying near North Side. It's a pleasant neighbourhood with a lot of trees, big houses, mixed population. Its major north-south artery is Clark Street, which has its share of the trendy restaurants, second hand record shops and comic stores which signify a neighbourhood in transition from multi-ethnic to yuppie via bohemian; but for now its a relaxed area well served with good diners and containing, at its northern end, Wrigley Field baseball stadium, home of the Chicago Cubs and something of a shrine to Paretsky who is a major baseball fan, "I think that the high point of my life so far was when I was selected to play third base for our baseball team when I was 12. I was a great fielder but a terrible batter. Great on defence, that's my story!"
From there we swing west, Paretsky wants to call by an abortion clinic that she's been helping out at. As we speak the Supreme Court is engaged in deciding whether or not to uphold a challenge to the legality of abortion. That abortion should be freely available is a cause she believes in passionately and she's worried. Her feeling, which turns out to be correct, is that the Supreme Court will hand back to the individual states the right to make abortion illegal. Potentially meaning that abortion would be unavailable outside a couple of liberal states like New York and California. So she's been demonstrating and organising in favour of a woman's right to choose. The day before she'd been down at the clinic to help combat an anti-abortion picket. Today she wants to see if there's any more trouble expected. As we drive she expresses her concern for the men involved in demonstating for abortion. She's worried that if they're arrested, they'll be thrown into Cook County Jail, a place where the weak or naive scarcely prosper. Rape, she points out, is not something that only happens to women.
All's turns out to be quiet at the clinic and our conversation moves on to the question of how politics, in this case specifically feminist politics, should influence the writing of a mystery novel, "I think I wanted to write a novel, that was my first goal", she says, "I have very strong plitical beliefs on a lot of subjects other than feminism. Actually I was thinking about this last week, even though I'm opposed in general to all these isms, feminism is sort of a religion for me I suppose, a kind of organising principle. But still my first goal is to tell a story that is interesting and has characters the reader can believe in. I find that when I take my characters seriously, they have points of view that I wouldn't accept if I was working woth them. In Killing Orders, which is partly set in a Dominican monastery, I found that I was being empathic with these Dominincan friars in a way that I wouldn't... I mean my older brother converted to Catholicism and became a Dominican, which is why I picked that denomination, but they really get on my nerves when I go and visit them at his monastery. But when I'm writing about them I have to see their point of view. So my books are more political than a lot of people like but theyh're not as political as I am. I mean I'm not interested in writing political tracts and I'm certainly mot interested in reading them, I can write essays and I do do that, but for me telling a story is in a way more valuable than writing an essay. I don't think you ever understand exactly what's happening in your life - or anybody else's - but telling a story about it makes it clearer than any description can, at least for me."
"So that's why I like to write stories and having them be political is not a very great goal of mine. Actually I've been wrestling with this, I've been approached to write a short story for an anthology, and I actually have a short story that I kind of like about this man who lives with these two horrible women, his wife and his mother, and what happens to him. I was feeling a little bit chicken about sending this in because the feminists, who are my major supporters, might be offended by it. I was thinking, do I have the guts!"
Now we're heading towards the near west side. The south side may be Chicago's largest and best known ghetto area but the near west side takes some beating for concentrated grimness. Along the way we pass a high school where PAretsky has been involved in setting up a birth control clinic, hopng to bring down the unbelievably high pregnancy rate, an initiative that is now in severe jeopardy. Next we encounter some local landmarks; the Cook County Courthouse, the Cook County Jail and The Cook County Hospital. Each of these is bleaker than the one before. The hospital looks grimmest of all, it's one of Chicago's few public health resources and an icy remeinder that in America you get the health care you pay for. Sara Paretsky tellss me about her stepson, a machinist who lives and works in a Hispanic neighbourhood, in which he has something of a reputation, there not being a whole heap of other 6'4" blondes in the locality. He's her main source of information as to what's happening, as they say, on the street - with the gangs and all. He's also self-employed and without healthcare, because it would cost him $5,000 a year, self-employed. So if he gets sick or hurt he is, bluntly, fucked. Paretsky is less than impressed with this state of affairs. Her fourth novel, Bitter Medicine, vividly illustrates the extent to which running medecine as a profit-based industry is in the long term interests of virtually nobody.
Bitter Medicine also features an absolute rainbow coalition of women, blacks, Jews and old people fighting back against the inhuman manipulations of the WASP doctors. Unfortunately the effect is ultimately more hopeful than realistic. I wondered whether the multi-hued array of good guys'n'gals was influenced by the politics of Jesse Jackson - perhaps Chicago's most famous resident. "I think the idea of the rainbow coalition seemed possible when Harold Washington (Chicago's first black mayor) was alive, I think its largely disintegrated since his death. I found him a very hopeful figure, he brought out the most hopeful side of people. I don't think there's anybody on the political scene right now, white or black, who can generate that kind of feeling. Jesse Jackson is not a very popular figure in Chicago, we see him too closely, I don't know...he's the ultimate opportunist I guess. I was writing Bitter Medicine early in Washington's administration, maybe that influenced me."
Washington's (black) successor Mayor Sawyer failed to capture the hearts and minds of virtually anybody and in the lead up to the upcoming mayoral elections the Democratic nomination, traditionally a shoe-in, had been wrested back for the Chicago establishment by Richard Daley, son of the infamous Mayor 'Boss' Daley. From out of the south side, however, a challenge had emerged from Alderman Tim Evans running as an independent iwth the full weight of Jesse Jackson behind him. The election is imminent as we speak but Paretsky is hard pushed to work up much enthusiasm one way or the other. DAley she reckons, is basically stupid, a man whose Spanish language election posters are so badly translated as to be meaningless. Evans, on the other hand, she sees as a charlatan, happy enough to radicalise the black proletariat, but preferring rhetoric to practical help that might lift them out of his automatic electorate.
Heading back in towards the centre we pull up in an old Italian enclave, a few spacious red-brick blocks surrounded by factories and the elevated railroad tracks ('the el') that are the defining feature of inner-city Chicago. This is where we're having lunch, in a dark airy and half-empty-at-this -time-of-day Italian restaurant that firmly subscribes to the Italian-American habit of ladelling an insanely large quantity of sauce on to your pasta. Having battled my way through as much of this as my ongoing hangover would stand for, and resolved to impersonate a decent human being by joining Paresky in drinking mineral water, we're both starting to relax a little and begin to figure out that both of us are nervous, not trying to be cool, Up to now I've been having trouble producing anything much more coherent than a grunt and Paretsky has a diffident way of talking. She's half way into a sentence before its actually out of her mouth, hurrying like she's afraid of boring you, the kind of nervousnes that it's easy to take as rudeness. Still things are flowing a little better now and after I mention that Denis MacMillan in Montana had told me that he had been taught by her father in Kansas, she starts talking about her background.
"I was born in Iowa in 1947, I'll be 42 in June, grew up in Eastern Kansas. My father is Jewish and was the first Jew to get tenure at the University of Kansas. In those days there were zoning laws that were very restrictive as to where blacks and Jews could live in the town, so my parents bought a house in the country, which was wonderful for my brothers - four brothers, three younger, one older. It was great, uh, I don't think I'd want to live there as an adult, but as a child it was really wonderful. I went to a two room country school and all that..."
Kansas in those days however was scarcely a hotbed of radicalism of any kind, certainly not feminism; "My father grew up in New York and he never really adjusted to the mid-west - he certainly never adjusted to not having a building superintendent to call in when things went wrong - but my mother's a good ole midwestern girl and in the midwest in those days girls grew up to be mommies. And if they were going to work they were secretaries or schoolteachers. My father insisted when I was 16 that I get secretarial training, so if I didn't marry I could support myself. Well, I won some scholarships and went to the University of Kansas which had always had a tradition of education for women. And there I fell under the influence of a rather radical Dean Of Women. I think a lot of parents, like my parents, their sons they would send away to expensive Eastern schools but their daughters they'd keep close to home to see they didn't come under evil influences. Ironically enough we couldn't have had a more radicalising influence than this woman who had made it her life'S work to electrify Kansas women."
"That was my first introduction to feminism, at the University of Kansas from '64 to '67. Under her leadership I chaired the first university commission on the status of women and got involved in a lot of research on wage and salary issues. It was in '64 that the Civil Rights Act was passed, banning discrimination on grounds of race or sex, and later, first under Johnson and then under Nixon, surprisingly enpugh, there were several executive orders that really put some meat into it. I came to Chicago first in 1966 to work on an inner city summer project and then moved back permanently in '68, I worked for a small firm that did conferences on affirmative action and how to implement it in universities and corporations, that kind of stuff."
So she arrived in Chicago just in time to catch the city at the most turbulent point of its recent history, when the civil rights movement exposed the degree to which segregation in Chicago, bastion of the Democratic north, dream destination for millions of Southern blacks, made the Southern variety look half-assed. In particular the western suburb of Cicero earned itself a reputation as the most racist township in the whole USA, a place that Chicago blacks had learned to avoid at all costs. "I was here in the summer of 66," PAretsky remembers, "when Martin Luther King came to Chicago, marching for open housing, I was working in a white community on the south east side, a blue collar Lithuanian community, which happened to be where the King march went, and I think it was my active involvement in that community which made me want to move to Chicago. I didn't have any sympathy with the racism, but I also felt that... these blue collar workers who had put their life savings into one thing, their little bungalow, voted for Mayor Daley routinely, nobody cared if they lived or died, certainly Daley didn't - he never did anything for thewm, it wasn't like his home ward where people got patronage jobs abd that kind of thing - these people were left to rot, for all anybody cared, so I could sort of see both sides of the issue. On the other hand it was a predominantly Catholic neighbourhod, the local Catholic church could get 4,000 people to mass on Sunday, the Sunday before the march the pastor preached in favour of open housing and the Sunday of the march they had 200 people instead of 4,000."
THis neighbourhood, known as Hegewisch, is where Paretsky chose to set V.I.Warshawski's roots. And in the fifth Warshawski novel, Blood Shot, she returns to those roots to discover, amongst other things, something of what she loved in the place and more of why she left it. In Paretsky's Hegewisch men range from the violent to the broken, women from the strong to the stubborn
This is where we're headed after lunch. We take the inevitable expressway that carves through the middle of the huge south side ghetto. Off to our left are endless housing projects, high rise blocks where the youth get their kicks by sniping from the upper blocks at anything foolish enough to move around without a tank for protection. There was no need for the projects to be built, Paretsky tells me, but here was profit in it, and Chicago runs on graft. Daley proclaimed it the housing of the fuure (God help us all if he was right) and Daley's friends got richer. Business as usual in a city where corruption is merely routine. "This is Chicago, last year the chairman of the Cook County Board, who has a tremendous amount of importance and patronage, a man in his 70s, appeared in a news story. It wasn't even a scandal, just a news story, about how he was having sex with women in exchange for them getting jobs on the Cook County payroll. So the next meeting of the COunty Board he got a standing ovation. People thought it was wonderful that old George could still get it up in his 70s, and that was the limit of the political fallout. This is a city where it really doesn't matter what you do. The Mayor of Milwaukee practically had to resign his job because he had attended a $100 a plate lunch when he was a council member, given by somebody who was a lobbyist for the city. People in Chicago were just rolling in the streets. I'm not going to pretend it's any different to that in the resolutions of my books. V.I. is not capable of changing that, she's only capable of doing some very small things for individuals."
Turning off the Expressway on to Stony Island, we head south into a jungle of heavy industry and its side effects. The road degenerates into a heavily potholed track, and we bump around, dodging flying trucks as we head through an an area of landfill, grey grass covering God knows what kind of chemical waste, towards Dead Stick Pond. Dead Stick Pond is a key location in Blood Shot. V.I.is left for dead there while investigating a local chemical company. It's a bleak enough place, looks like a location for a film set in the immediate aftermath of nuclear war. What amazes Paretsky is that despite its devastating man-made inhospitability rare birds still come here to feed.
So too do people hang on in Hegewishch, just a little way north and east of here, the place that provided the labour when all around here was the hub of American industry. Now that the States has given up on manufacturing; American capital preferring the Pacific rim where noone hears of union organising. Hegewish remains as a dormitory community bereft of a place to go in the daytime. The potholed streets are lined with little wooden-frame bungalows, bargain basement American dream homes. Paretsky points out one of these, on Houston St and painted yellow, tells me it's the one she imagines as V.I.s childhood home
Heading back northwards on I 41 along the lakeshore fringe of the south side we're on our way to Paresky's home in Hyde Park. Along the way we pass the South Shore Country Club, a Gothic tribute to Boss Daley's ego, a symbol of exclusivity in happier days for the area. Now it's semi-derelict, given back to the people and today it's deserted bar a few black kids playing crazy golf. As we're driving I ask Paretsky what she reads, "books about people surviving in extremity", she says, "I want to be prepared for being taken off to a camp". And suddenly she is talking about her father, who is Jewish, and was a hard man to his family. His hardness she feels was born out of the sense of futility brought by knowledge of the holocaust; "this probably sounds really pathetic, but I think that the guilt of those who were never in the camps is something people should be aware of."
This is the kind of heavyweight territory that she would like to explore in her writing. Whether such ambitions are compatible with writing detective fiction is something that is starting to bother her. Particularly as she has recently signed a contract with Dell that is considerably lucrative but commits her to writing several more VI Warshawski novels: "I've been writing nearly my whole life. I learned to read when I was 4 and I've sort of been writing since. It took a long time for me to think about writing for publication, and it's still kind of an awkward issue for me. I'm going through a fair amount of personal conflict right now because writing for me was always something private. It was a way for me..." she pauses here, suddenly looking almost stricken, "I hardly know how to say it and I don't even know if you care, but writing for me was a way I could develop some personal space for me inside, a way of buffering me against the world around me. Now my books are getting pop-ular and I write under contract. And I've found that writing under contract has destroyed the personal aspect of my work and I don't really know how to fix that problem. I worked for many years for this large insurance company and I wasn't economically dependent on my work and in a way it was much better. Its nice now, not to have to work downtown, but on the other hand I'm not independently wealthy, so to pay the bills I sign these contracts..."
Ironically too, and maybe here is something of the truth about writing, she has also got far far better as a writer even as the thrill has gone. Burn Marks, the latest in the Warshawski series, is a modern thriller that neither begs nor needs special pleading. It's as good a Chicago novel as has recently been written, certainly it compares favourably with anything lately produced by the man who lives opposite her but never says hello - a professional pessimist by the name of Saul Bellow, a man who neatly symbolises for Paretsky the smug American literary establishment.
Home for Paretsky is in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is a strange enclave in the south side poverty. Its raison d'etre is that the University of Chicago is set squarely in the midst of the south side around 57th street; and Hyde Park is essentially the area between the University and the lakeshore. For a long time it was a lone beacon of integrated housing in Chicago. It is still integrated today in a toney kind of way, not only Saul Bellow but also Jesse Jackson lives here. And it's more than pleasnt; it's leafy, it has second-hand bookstores, it has students on bicycles, it has a little VIctorian style carriages that ferry tourists around, and it has some quite remarkably pretty buildings. One of the prettiest of which is lived in by Sara Paretsky, her husband, Courtney Wright, who is a physicist at the University, and their dog Cardhu. Inside the house has been painstakingly restored to is original American Gothic glory. Courtney, who has lived here for years and is responsible for most of this restoration, offers me a glass of sherry while Paresky goes to run off a copy of an autobiographical piece she has just written for an anthology.
The piece is a straightforward and moving account of the difficulties of becoming a writer when your childhood, spent on a farm in Kansas and occupied almost entirely by schoolwork and looking after her two younger brothers, has left you with two distinct impressions; one that as a woman you don't measure up - hair too frizzy, body too ungainly, ergo you're a tomboy and two that as a woman your creativity should be confined to the making of cakes and babies:
Male writers such as Sartre and Bellow have recorded knowing early in life that their destiny lay in literature. Bellow knew he was "born to be a performing and interpretive creature," Sartre that he was born for words. I call myself a writer but feebly, without conviction. Where did they get this sense I wonder? Were their childhoods spent like mine?... Was Jean-Paul or Saul's first responsibility to look after the little children - to spend summer vacation and evenings after school taking them for walks, changing their diapers, feeding them, reading them their stories?
Now Paretsky has a talk to give on women crime writers, so she arranges for Courtney to give me a ride back to the hotel. Driving north along the lakefront we pass the various Chicago Museums and the Art Gallery with all the Impresssionist stuff in it, which is, as they say,a must for every visitor. I express my eagerness to go visit all these places while suffering the sinking feeling that comes from knowing you're the kind of person who given the choice between whiling away an hour in a sports bar or a major art gallery will take the sports bar every time. Courtney is charming, some way older than his wife and keen to talk about England, his parents' birthplace. He drops me off at the hotel, I thank him for the ride and he's gone before I realise I'm still clutching Sara Paretsky's map of Chicago in my hand, an accidental souvenir.
Part Two: Eugene Izzi
In the hotel I make a couple of decisions. One, I want to change hotel, two I'd better hire a car. Tomorrow for all that, though. By the time I've had a bath and made some phone calls, it's time go out and take a look at Chicago after dark. Clark Street, says my guidebook, is the place to go for chic young things so, hell, I'm on my way.
On arrival, however, there is less than a good deal happening - a couple of discos outside which congregate brattish sixteen year olds tying to look 21, no bars, and several restaurants which look to better prospects for posing in than eating. Still I figure that a man has to eat, so I decide it's time to treat myself and head into a plant be-decked, nouvelle cuisine-ish kind of place, where I have a perfectly pleasant meal, interrupted only by the attentions of Craig. Craig being the name, assuming he was telling the truth, of the guy serving me my food, a chap with a hairstyle ruffled just so. Craig made a succession of fine contributions to my index of sycophantic waitng practices with such gems as, when taking away my first course, informing me that the chef was even now working on my next course. Yes well, I should fucking hope he is; if he wasn't working on my second course then maybe that would be news. Then, after the obligatory ceremony of the admiration of the English accent, comes Craig's big scene - the moment at which I bring out my credit card to pay and he spots that we have, gasp, the same surname. That's Williams incidentally, not Cholmondley or Krzywycki, but Williams. There's no holding Craig back now, clearly we are soulmates and Craig is ready to reveal all. Actually he's not really a waiter but... an actor. Well, goodness, gracious me.
One whisky sour in a bar down the street, populated by business student types who have discovered that with a CD Jukebox it is possible to put on a whole side of The Doors' first album as often as you like, and I realise I'm dead on my feet.
In the morning I once more consult my guide to getting by in the USA with not much of the green, and discover that Chicago suburbs are recommended for cheap motels provided you have transport. Which is how come, having rented another car - some kind of Toyota - I happen to be headed for the western township of Brookfield, Illinois. How come I then found myself driving due north up Broadway is harder to explain. The result of my sense of direction being around 90° out, was that on a Broadway corner, up towards Uptown, I ran into the aftermath of an outburst of gang warfare - blood all over the street, cops wandering around and people standing around looking grim. It turns out that the blood belonged to a black sixteen year old called Marlon Wade. He was leaving a party with a group of friends when an Hispanic gang showed up to continue some kind of feud with some black guys at the party. Marlon was no part of it, but he was the one ended up dead when one of the Hispanic gang decided that these guys leaving the party would do, and opened fire on them. Couple of days later there's a memorial service at Marlon's school. His granmother says, 'If I could have two things, that is to let Marlon come and be here for five minutes. The other I'd want is the one who killed Marlon... I'd hug him and tell him just what I told Marlon, 'Son, I love you.'"
Whether this level of Christian forgiveness will be practised on the street is another matter. Marlon's friend Timothy Dodero is quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying of the Puerto Rican students at another high school, who were believed responsible for the attack, that, "they will just as surely feel the pain." Already Hispanic students are staying away from Marlon's high school, afraid of retribution. And so it goes on in a country where high school students can take advantage of the inalienable right of each and every American to arm him or herself to the teeth.
Having mentally and physically reoriented, I take the expressway out due west to the Brookfield Zoo slip. Out here it looks like semi-countryside, prime susburbia, but it turns out that the hotelI'm looking for is a little further on. A litle further on and I'm out of Brookfield and into Lyons, which is some way less salubrious. What Lyons is mostly is a bunch of gas staions, truckstops and flea-bitten motels strung along Ogden Avenue, a not what it used to be type of thoroughfare. One of these motels, The Pioneer, has its name in my book. So blind faith tells me that it can't be as bad as it looks (i.e. mean, peeling and grim as all get out). It looks deserted and semi-derelict, ready to cater to transient ruckers from hell; the note on the office door says ring and wait. So I do and, after a while, a Shelley Winters type emerges from the recesses. I ask if she's got a room for me. She looks at me for a while and says 'sorry, son, bu we're all booked up, got a convention coming through tonight. Which is, I guess, a polite enough way of saying 'son, believe me, you do not want to stay here. It is cheap but there are reasons for that.
Then she tells me that there's a nice place a little way down the road, and with the relief that comes from not being allowed to do something you were dreading, I head on down. The nice place turns out to be the Chalet Motel, a little piece of Chicago that is forever Switzerland. That is if Swiss motels habitually offer you a room called The Warm-Up Hutch, complete with a hot tub (nudge), king-size (nudge, nudge) water-bed (nudge, nudge, nudge), 'your own VCR for relaxing pleasure'(elbow in your ribs) and two Tvs (two TVs? Why?). The brochure on the check-in desk suggests you consider taking a 'leisure retreat' in the Hot Tub. Presumably 'leisure retreat' is salesman speak for 'piece on the side who your wife will never find out about because you've taken her to a motel in Lyons, for God's sake.'
I decline the once in a lifetime opportunity to stay in a Warm-Up Hutch and persuade the man with the booze-stricken face on the desk to check me into a regular room. After a few lengths in the tackiest, not to say smallest, swimming pool I've ever seen it's time to get back into Chicago central,eat some original Chicago pizza at Pizzeria Uno and go shopping. Shopping takes me back to Clark to the first of a string of bookstores that leads me northwards back on to Broadway, where the blood is still in the road but the police have left. Further into Uptown I park under the sign of he big old Uptown cinema, a classic piece of Cine Deco. Everyone around here looks lost; this is where the Appalachians and Native Americans tend to wind up in Chicago, the country people who've found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take a picture of the Uptown cinema and the folks lying on the pavement beneath and you could call it the Home Of he Blues. Probably someone already has. Urban deprivation stil being a favourite magazine topic; providing it's sufficiently photogenic, of course.
Hard by the cinema is a used book and record store called Shake Rattle And Roll. Inside I run into a couple of blokes who work in a record shop in London. They're here to buy up the jazz and soul records that America has discarded but attract the attention of collectors in London. So the rest of the day gets spent with Mark and Alan taking in some record stores and ending up in Delmark Records, just north of the Loop, where I buy a Chet Baker LP and Alan spots veteran jazzman Eddie Harris hanging out, gets him to autograph an album. Then it's on to Chicago landmark foodstop Ann Sather's for a classic hamburger, to a sports bar near Wrigley field to watch a ball-game and drink Leinenkugel, a moderately unpleasant beer from Minnesota, and back out to the Chalet Motel, fighting sleep all along the Dan Ryam Expressway.
Back at the Chalet Motel the previously empty parking lot is now full of motors of the kind bought by people who believe a car should say something about you. 'I'm a complete bastard' in most of these instances. Morning comes around and none of the caras are there any more. Strange huh?
Eugene Izzi has the kind of logical explanation I was afraid of... "Jesus, how come you're staying out here?" he asks, 'Lyons, Jesus, this used to be a hell of a place around here". Turns out that Lyons wwas for years the wide-open town that every major city likes to have adjacent, the place just outside of the city limits where all the bad stuff can happen - the gambling and the whoring and the and so on - and the city fathers can tut tut, shrug in despair, and leave well alone. So Lyons was an all night kind of a place where all-night kind of activities could be indulged in. By day, too, it was none too far from the Sportsman's Racetrack. And of course, what with one thing or another, this made Lyons a popular hotspot with businessmen of an I-talian persusaion.
All this Eugene Izzi, the hottest new name in American crime writing, tells me as we walk out of the hotel lobby to the spot across the road where he's parked the first fruit of his sudden and dramatic literary success, a brand new Lincoln. Big as a tank and quiet as a mouse, this is the state of the art vehicle for the man who has come up the hard way, and is sure as hell going to get the car he dreamed of when he was a kid, not some candy ass environmentally sensitive Euro-pean type car.
Izzi is somewhere in his thirties. He's wearing an old army jacket and his characteristic pose is hunched up, hands in pockets, fifties hoodlum style. The effect is to make him appear slighter than he is. In fact he's a solidly bult six footish type with workout muscles; man likes to box. He has the confidence that comes with six books in three years, two of them currently under production as movies, but he's some way off flash. He may drive a Lincoln but he's still in his army jacket and says, "you see this shirt, John, pretty good huh? Cost me seven dollars."
We decide to head towards Downtown Chicago, driving all the way along Ogden, the scenic route. A mile or so down the road we cross the Des Plaines river. Izzi tells me about a paedophile named John Gacey who dumped a binch of bodies there, as an overflow after dumping 33 in the basement crossways from his home. This being a guy who was known as the life and soul of the party; a contractor, a clown, a Democratic precinct leader, got his picture in the papers with Rosalyn Carter. "You never know", says Izzi, "I've got a book coming out called Invasions, in which I really go into what creates a monster. We create them. American society creates them. We turn our backs, pretend it doesn't happen. After the deal came out with Gacey suddenly all the neighbours knew there was something wrong; the same people who were going to his parties and drinking his booze and eating his food. Henry Lee Lucas is another one, this is something that could have been stopped at the source. Before this guy was a teenager he was killing animals and having sex with their corpses. It's hard for me to believe that nobody noticed and even harder to believe that nobody did anything. He begged 'don't let me out of prison', but they let him out... now he's copped to about 300 murders. The bad guysin King Of The Hustlers started out ase kids who used to hang up in trees and put little nooses around birds' necks. I caught some bum raps on that but, you know what, I knew guys who used to do that."
It's not only guys who go out and murder a shitload of children that Izzi sees as psychopaths; "I think most organised criminals have psychopathic tendencies. There was a major mob boss in Chicago named Sam Giancarna(?). He was rejected from army servise during World War Two. They said he was a raging psychopath - and in World War Two they were taking people with one eye!"
Ubsurprisingly this attitude, coupled with his belief, clearly expressed in a book like Bad Guys, that while the law may be corrupt, there are still good guys and bad guys, and that bad guys, specifically Mafia bad guys, are scum who need to be wiped out, has failed to endear him to the Honoured Society; "I made my opinions on the mob clear in the first four books. Now its time to move on. I paid the price for it, I get phone calls, I have to change my number every few months. I just moved house, this car's registered to a PO Box, my driver's licence relates to a different address... I cover my tracks. There's a difference between paranoia and caution."
Driving down Ogden we pass some spectacularly dubious nightspots including a steak'n'cabaret joint done up as a castle, with crenellations and all, before passing through Cicero , blue collar Italian, a faded industrial suburb, once a byword for racism and still probably not a good place for a black man to buy a used car after dark.
After Cicero we're inside the Chicago City LImists and we've gone from blue collar white to black and Hispanic ghetto. The near west side around Douglas Park is simpy despairing. In Paretsky's latest Burn Marks, V.I.Warshawski is scared half to death to visit a witness around here and it's easy to see why. Buildings are burnt or boarded up, fortified or derelict. Storefront churches and liquor stores are about all that hangs on. As we drive Izzi starts talking about the legacy of the Reagan years on racial poitics in America; "When Reagan was elected I worked in a steel factory. I was working with this black guy, seemed intelligent enough to me, and one day he says to me about Reagan, 'you know why a man that age has got a full head of hair? It's so you can't see the 666 on his forehead!' There's a culture there believes Reagan was the Beast, the Devil, keeping black people down. The last mayor, Gene Sawyer, had an aide who was putting out tapes fpr Farrakhan's church, making the statement that the Jews were injecting the AIDS virus into black children as a form of genocide. On the other hand I can show you neighbourhoods where you say 'black guy' everyone says 'nigger, rapist, thief,'. Nobody individualises."
I mention the killing in Uptown the day before and he talks about the way black on black killings are seen as barely newsworthy while black on white killings are horrorshow headlines. Then he tells me that he has been up all night wriitng some stuff set in Uptown. 'Did you know Andrew Vachss lived in Uptown?" He asks. Vachss is a New York child abuse lawyer who writes thrillers featuring a survivalist P.I. involved mostly in child-linked cases. I'd already mentioned to Izzi that I'd interviewed Vachss before and was scheduled to meet him again when I got to New York. It turns out that Izzi and Vachss are very close, Vachss had in turn mentioned me to Izzi. and was, I suddenly realised, the man who had first mentined Izzi's name to me. I said I didn't reaise he'd lived in Chicago, "Yeah",says Izzi,"he was organising there with Saul ALinsky years ago." Which is fairly serious popular radical credibility, and further evidnece of Vachss' uniqueness amongst thriller writers. Of which more later.
I asked Izzi what other writers influenced him; "The biggest influence on me was Elmore Leonard. I was writing this serious art shit until I read City Primeval which I think is probably the best crime book ever. I realised then that if a book is good the art comes. The Gigi Parnell character in Bad Guys is a homage to Clement Mansell from City Primeval", then, without the tell-tale pause that too often accompanies this kind of statement, he adds, " naturally not as well done." When Leonard was in Chicage for a book signing Izzi wanted to get one of his signed. Too embarrassed to go along himself he got a friend to go. Now he's really pleased because Leonard had heard of him, sent his best. "When you reach that level people either become stone assholes or very supportive", he observes.
Izzi is genuinely modest about his writing, is amazed that anyone should put him up with the big names, the Leonards and Higginses. Partly this is because he hasn't been at this game long enough to slip into any kind of arrogance, but also it is an attitude that seems to be common to those writer whose backgrounds determined that, as Paresky put it, they never saw themselves as being writers, certainly not professional writers. Certainly, of the writers I've met so far, it is Izzi and Haywood and Paretsky who have the least sense of themselves as 'writers'. Izzi goes on to tell me that while he hit with his first published novel, The Take, it had been no easy road: "I was broke until '86. For the last three years I've supported myself writing, the first ten I did it for free. I started writing seriously in 77 when I got married. I had won an award in the third grade for writing, I came from poverty and that was he only good thing that I can remember from school, the one time the teachers tried to encourage me. Now I'm scared if I stop writing I'll lose it."
Now Izzi is starting to realise that having come up the hard way has its benefits. In contrast to the Tom Wolfes of the literary world, Izzi's research only needs to be done at the top end of the social scale; the lower end is just as clear as can be in his memory; "I know my people. They aren't cartoon characters, everybody's a composite of people I've met. Panther Payne (sadistic slobbish rent-a-sidekick from King Of The Hustlers) is an example of a guy - who's still living so I don't want him suing me - he pulled up in this car one time when I was a kid, I was standing on the street outside the pool hall. Sothis maniac's looking at me, he smiles, throws what I assume is a cigarette out of the window. It was one of those cherrybomb deals, it lands right by me in the alcove. I thought I was deaf. The guy that was driving hit the brake, and there's four guys sitting there waiting to see what I was going to do, I didn't do nothing, looked away. Many years later, I'm about 26/27 drinking in a bar, the same guy who is now a junky comes in this bar which is owned by a guy named George. He wants to sell me a hot television set, I say no, you got anything real, you think I'm going to do seven years over a TV set?. I took my drink to the john and suddenly here he comes - ba-doom he hits me. That wound up in the book. Naturally I had him killed off in the end. The real sonofabitch, he's still living."
By now we're closing on Downtown and suddenly Izzi swings the car north, "OK John, now I'm going to show you a place". The place is a housing project named Cabrini-Green. I tell him I've heard of it, the place has its own kind of fame, even had a rap record dedicated to it;
Everything is mean inna Cabrini Green
If you've been to Chicago, the near north side
Here's a piece of advice, man, just down ride
In a bus or a cab down a street called Division
If you do ride thru you made a very bad decision
You walk across the black top, you prolly get shot
You're bleeding to death but the cops won't stop
Cause youre just another victim of black killed black
And another black death and they like it like that
One of my best friends got shot in the back
While trying to get out of Cabrini Green shack
Sang lead vocals for Electric Force band
He never gangbanged, just took the mike stand
I never will forget my friend Larry Potts
Or the terrifying night when he got shot
(Sugar Ray Dinke - Cabrini-Green)
Cabrini Green is a housing estate set amongst a collection of road junctions and rail lines. It consists of several medium rise blocks - fifteen storeys or so, set in a square. For at least the first couple of storeys of each block the windows are broken or boarded up. In the middle is a bit of scrub grass where we park. Izzi keeps talking; "Cabrini Green is supposed to be the baddest of the housing projects in America. The west side is very bad, the south side is a terrible ghetto area, but for concentration this is the worst there is. People live here. They're niggers now because they're raised like this. It's not fair, it's not right, it's not only immoral it should be illegal. To put people in sardine cans like this and expect them to grow up to become brain surgeons! To these peole we're either cops or drug dealers. There are three or four gangs that patrol here. At night I wouldn't bring you here, wouldn't bring the car here, though a couple of bullet holes might give it character."
This time of the morning the place is yesterday's battleground. On a wall someone has spraypainted the name Arise. That's the name of the white trash gang in King Of The Hustlers. Izzi thought he'd made it up. 'Hey', he says, 'hey'. Meanwhile nothing's happening, which is OK by me as there's nothing I can imagine happening here that could be good news.
So we get back in the car and head eight blocks west along Division Street. The great Chicago institution Studs Terkel, radio broadcaster, writer and maybe the best interviewer of 'ordinary people' alive, wrote a book called Division Street USA which uses the street as a stand-in for America. It's not hard to see why. Eight blocks east of Cabrini Green and we're on Astor Place, the classiest street in Chicago, lined with VIctorian town mansions. Given the right wind you could hang-glide from a Cabrini Green rooftop to an Astor Place lawn. We walk round the back of Astor place and the alley is covered in graffiti, the walls topped with razor wire, keep the wolves out.
Izzi tells me how the Hollywood folks who are making movies out of The Take and Bad Guys came out to Chicago. "There were some guys came here scouting locations for one of the movies, I took them to Cabrini Green they'd never seen anything like it. They go 'What are those holes'. I say 'those are bullet holes, what do you think?' and they go 'lets get out of here'." Which, in turn, is farther than William 'French Connection' Friedkin, the director of Bad Guys, managed. He wouldn't even venture into the Astor Place alley; "I tried to get Friedkin out here. I said 'come out and walk with me I want to show you the alleys'. He said 'Guy, even when I was a kid I saw myself in mansions, not alleyways'. I knew right away we were not going to get along."
From Astor Place we take a walk, wandering through Chicago's Gold Cast, a neighbourhood that Izzi, who's from far south Chicago, down Hegewisch way, says he barely knew existed before he started researching the last couple of novels. He talks constantly about the price of the houses; 'you know they spent four and a half million just on renovating this house, John, four and a half million!". Then we head up towards Lincoln Park, to take a stroll along the lakeshore. Izzi says that walking is the only thing that will keep him awake walking. He hasn't slept at all, just worked all night. Usually he sleeps in the day.
Up to now Izzi has been cagey about talking about his background. Recently a Chicago magazine ran a piece on him as a literary freak, a criminal turned novelist and he's really unhappy about it. Now he's keen to stress the marginal nature of his criminal career; "I've been known a time or two in my life to spend a night in jail, but never any serious time or any major problems. Still I know what it's like to get beat up by the cops, I know what it's like to be in place where I'm not supposed to be, where I could definitely lose a piece of my life if I got caught. In the days before I got married nothing mattered."
But now he seems satisfied that I don't simply want to focus on sensationalising his life story and the barriers start to come down when I ask him how he got to here from Hegewisch: "Hegewisch is economically falling apart because the steel mill has closed. I worked im the mills for years. I was considered a parttime guy till I got lucky with the writing. There when people lose their jobs, they don't lose their pride. People round here lose their jobs, they're jumping out of windows. You know what money does it takes away your money problems, that's all. I was a very happy man after I quit drinking, being with my family. In '83 drinking had me so bad, my wife Lisa left me, took the kids, wouldn't let me see them. I lost the apartment we were in, I wound up sleeping on the floor of a barber shop. I would wash his windows, and the guy would let me sleep in the back toom, his toilet, I was slepeping in his toilet. I decided that's enough, I quit drinking and we got back together. Up to that point I had done some things, stealing things, stuff like that, I said if I'm going to be straight, I'm going to be straight all the way. We rented a house from a friend of mine, behind it there were some woods. I'd go out there with an axe and chop down the little trees for firewood and go down the streets selling the firewood. That supported us, Jesus, for a year till I went back and got a regular job again."
Now Izzi lives out in the suburbs in a nice detached house with burglar alarms and dogs to keep out the bad guys and woods where he can run when he finishes writing for the night. Hegewisch, meanwhile, is a place he had to get out of; "I got together with a guy from Hegewisch, hadn't seen him for 15 years. We put our heads together, came up with 30 people we knew had died violently or from drugs. That seems a little high." One of the dead was a guy named CHarlie, Izzi's best friend in his teens; "I got out of the car, ten minutes later he was dead. That's what taught me not to make friends. Fact is I like my dog more than I like most people."
Izzi's passionate belief is that your background may be crucial but it need not be decisive. Like Andrew Vachss, though, he believes that a vast amount of criminal behaviour is rooted in the abuse of children. He tells me about a dinner he went to recently with a cop friend of his, where some politician started talkin about the gangs as the city's number one crime problem; "I'm much more concerned about the guy down the block fucking his kid in the ass than I am about guys with colours on their heads kidnapping people off the streets - which I just don't believe is happening anyway. And I don't believe the big problem is drugs, either, shit I was 12 years old seeing junkies. But if we could just stop the abuse of children I tell you 75% of crime would stop."
Linked to this is Izzi's big hope for his writing; that maybe the kind of book he writes ('If you want symbolism go see a Bergman movie, I make it as simple as I can') may get read by the kind of people he used to be and will, just maybe, make them make some connections; "There's even a possibility I could make a difference, not yet but down the road. WHen I reach my potential..the first books wre light punched, jabs, but if I get as good as maybe I can get, somebdy might read that and say 'Hey this is the way it really is. Like I was in the 4th grade looking around and thought how come nobody else has got a black eye? Nobody else has got broken fucking leg? Then it dawned on me, other people aren't beating their kids! That was a big revelation to me. Later I was in the army and I got overseas and found out that not everyone's a drunk, not everyone's a vicious fucking... my father was in prison a lot and that was a relief to me, when he was out he used to terrorise us."
"I think I was married a year before I told my wife I loved her. Up to that point I thought it was a scam that people who had stuff made up. Now I want to dispel some myths, I want to let people know that you can overcome this shit, you're not stuck. I was 29, John, I really believed I was too old to change. I thought I'm stuck I'll never see my wife, I'll never see my kids. I may as well go and fucking die."
Suddnly we realise weve been walking for miles, up past Belmont Harbor, so we turn and head back towards the car. I'm dying for a cup of coffee. So Izzi says 'OK I know a place'. Eventually we wind up on Michigan, Chicago's swankiest shopping street, and we head up into the Bloomingdales shopping mall; the kind of place which has some guy in a lounge suit tinkling away on a Steinway to entertain the shoppers as they take a croissant and a breather in between deciding which set of Louis Vuitton luggage to buy for their cats. It's the kind of place that tends to feature in Izzi's books. Generally being turned over by some Italian hard guys from Hegewisch.
Back in the Lincoln we're driving down Wabash or maybe Ohio. We pass a hostel and Izzi tells me about a black guy, no legs, lives there, gets about on a cart, guy with a lot of spirit. Other week a bunch of so-called gangbangers decide to have some fun; they flip him off his cart, rob him, rape him, beat the shit out of him. 'That's about as cold as it gets' says Izzi.
By now he's visibly exhausted. And we quietly retrace our route back to Lyons. He leaves me with the inevitable Hollywood story, Eugene Izzi style; "Staying in Hollywood, I was going up to my room and this fella says, 'shall I send up a girl?', and I say 'no', and he says 'how about two?', he's being tough, impressing me, I say 'no thank you, I'm not into that', he says 'oh, oh, a boy'. I say 'no, I just want to be alone'. They think I should be grateful, they think they're giving me something by offering me flesh that I never met before. It's enough to turn your stomach. Thank God it's taken so long before I got to this stage or I'd be into that, that's the kind of man I was. Miserable, oh God was I miserable, always thinking about suicide. Staying in that barbershop, at night I'd be spinning round in a chair eyeing those razors - if I get drunk enough it won't even hurt. Thank God I didn't. Look what I would have missed, My God, I've got a woman who loves me, I've got kids who actually want to grow up and be like me. At night when I finish working I go out, run a couple of miles, then I come back, see the trees, see the house, see the Lincoln..."
And that's it. Izzi heads home to get some sleep. I pick up my stuff from the hotel and head on out to the airport. On the way I listen to Studs Terkel's radio show. At the end of the show he signs off like this; 'Take it easy, but take it.'


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This talk will look at turbulent times from the perspective of an IT Director. What challenges are we as IT departments facing, what challenges are HEIs facing that we can help with, and what impact on our services are these challenges going to have?
by Paul Boag
With government funding being slashed many Higher Education institutions are reducing the budget assigned to web development. However, it is more important than ever to attract new students and the website is a key tool in this battle. How then, can you do more with less? Paul answers this question with 5 powerful techniques.
12th–14th July 2010


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But I don't think it will happen that way; personally I think the 4th Q. female is from POP, probably Frosta or Glimmer.
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But I don't think it will happen that way; personally I think the 4th Q. female is from POP, probably Frosta or Glimmer.
I like NA but i dont care if mara's made into a figure or not. It wouldnt be that exciting of an action figure
What if they tried to pull off Mara like they did Queen Marlena giving us the battle armor Mara and then a clip on robe ala Marlena's to give us both looks and then two different heads.
The Boots from cartoon are better as the prototype form.
Body or Bikini - the 4H can suprise us :hmlol:
I really think this would be an awesome idea. And Catra's ponytail would be pretty cool.
I hope not, would be an easy pass for me...
I'd doubt it only because I think TG said one NA/GP for 2011 which we know is Flipshot. He would have hinted at two NAs.
I really want Mara (both looks!) but...
...I want Drissi more!!!
Oh Mara, where art thou?
I'm afraid Mara might take a while with the line's new direction. A few months ago I would have considered her a lock to be sooner rather than later. I wonder what backlash there would be if they announced Mara before say Glimmer or Sweet Bee? I'm thinking that Matty won't take that chance now.
And i think just like Glimmer she is overdue. She was very important in Jetlags New Adventures and has been ther from episode 1 as right hand/assistant of Masters Sebrian(who totally needs to be done in MOTUC as well).
Back than she even had a relationship with Hydron!
And this is one of my favorite pictures with her, i would love to see her made like that:
Bring on Mara - hopefully we'll get a hybrid figure like Marlena, with two costumes - the white dress and her ambassador look. :)
I would back Mara in MOTUC. I would prefer the Warrior Mara.
Mara should definitely be released before the end of MotUC. She is a GG/P A-lister, and even reached prototype stage in the vintage NA line. I don't care if they choose her long robes or her warrior looks (or preferably both, with some solution à la Glenn/Marlena), but she has to be released. She's the Teela of NA—no excuses not to make her.
In fact, pretty much everyone in the above ^ screenshot (Flipshot/Icarius, Hydron, Sebrian, Drissi and Mara) should be made in MotUC, since those (with the addition of a few key others such as Sagitar/Tharkus) were the mainstays of the Galactic Guardians/Protectors throughout the Jetlag cartoon (like Teela, Man-at-Arms, Orko, Sorceress, Ram Man and Stratos were for the Heroic Warriors in Filmation).
I honestly don't want the "civilians" from the NA toon in the line, but I know a lot of people do. However, me being me, if they make it, I'm all for it and I'll find a spot on the shelf for her. Plus she had a prototype figure made, so she qualifies more than Sebrian or the Scientists.
I want her with both cloths.
I´m a total prototype fan when it comes to Mara.
Her toga look reminds me on how jedi knights look so it´s not really that new or special.
Her ambassador look is better and i like the asymmetric design but the bikini version is just more interesting if you ask me. So if the FOUR HORSEMEN combine the asymmetry and the two part look i could´t be happier.
I would´t mind getting her with both looks but i want her with the new bug and as much articulation as possible.
Which would include boot swivel as well...i really don´t get why they started to cut that with the female characters?


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Groove Tube (The)
Comedy | Minor Interest | 1974
- Director: Ken Shapiro
- Writer: Rich Allen; Lane Sarasohn
- Producer: Dale Bell; Ken Shapiro
CGiii Comment
One of the earliest skit movies - and, the humble beginnings of Chevy Chase.
And, surprise surprise, it's RUBBISH.
Cast & Characters
Ken Shapiro;
Richard Belzer;
Chevy Chase;
Berkeley Harris;
Jennifer Welles;
Roy Wallace;
Kirtus Allen


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5. Anchored during Times of Question
Words to Anchor Your Soul
"When the fig tree does not bud,
and there are no grapes on the vines;
when the olive trees do not produce,
and the fields yield no crops;
when the sheep disappear from the pen,
and there are no cattle in the stalls,
I will rejoice because of the LORD;
I will be happy because of the God who delivers me.
Habakkuk 3:17-18 (NET)
Have you ever dealt with a very difficult time when everything seemed to be going wrong, and then it got worse despite your prayers? I expect you questioned God about what He was doing in the midst of it all. If you have ever been in that situation, you have company in the prophet Habakkuk. He had the courage to come right out and ask God what He was doing and why. In the end, Habakkuk learned to trust God as his anchor in the midst of a time when what was happening seemed unjust!
Background to Habakkuk
The message of Habakkuk dates from the seventh century B.C. Parts of the book seem to predate the battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C., and some suggest a date following the victory of the Babylonians over the Egyptians in that battle.22 That battle occurred some eighty years after the death of King Hezekiah, whom we met in our study of Micah last week.
Day One Study
Read the book of Habakkuk at one sitting, if possible, and answer #1 as you go through it. The book is easy to read when you understand that it involves a series of dialogues between Habakkuk and God.
1. Divide the book into Habakkuk's words and God's. (Don't read notes but read the book carefully and do this yourself!) Write down who is speaking and in what verses. You should end up with three "speeches" of Habakkuk's and two of God's.
Diamonds in the Word: Add more detail to what you just wrote down about Habakkuk. You can put it in outline form or in a book chart.
2. Write down your first thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the book.
Read Habakkuk 1:1-4.
3. What did Habakkuk see happening around him at that time? How do those things parallel what we have seen the past four weeks in the other books of prophecy?
4. What questions did Habakkuk have for God because of what was happening in his world?
5. Sharing question: Share with your group some questions that you have for God about what you see happening in the world today.
6. Responding to God: Write a prayer or poem honestly asking God those questions, just as Habakkuk and some of the other writers have done. It is not a sin to ask God questions! It acknowledges humility, that you do not know everything and cannot fathom Him because He is God and you are not.
Day Two Study
Read Habakkuk 1:5-11.
7. What was God's answer to Habakkuk's questions in 1:1-4?
8. How would you have felt if this were the way God answered your questions about injustice and evil?
Read Habakkuk 1:12--2:1.
9. Describe the Babylonians in your own words from Habakkuk's description.
10. God's reply brought more questions for Habakkuk. What was Habakkuk's main issue with God's plan (1:13)?
Diamonds in the Word: Read about the Babylonians and their methods of warfare.
11. Read these cross-references and write down your thoughts about what Habakkuk said to God in 1:13:
a. Romans 2:6
b. Acts 17:30-31
c. 2 Thess. 1:8-9
d. Revelation 20:12-13
12. Sharing question: What injustices in the lives of individuals or in nations have you seen that have not been righted? How do you feel about them?
13. Responding to God: Although we desire justice, we read about the final judgment and recognize how final it will all be. We realize that it is only by God's grace that we will escape it. Pray 2 Peter 3:9 for specific people in your world but also for world leaders.
Day Three Study
Read Habakkuk 2:2-20.
14. Summarize God's answer to Habakkuk's questions in 1:12--2:1.
15. What do these verses teach about the character of God?
16. Responding to God: Write a prayer, psalm, or poem of praise to God extolling these character traits.
Diamonds in the Word: What Bible stories do you think of when you consider how eventually God brings justice for a person's or nation's actions.
17. Sharing question: Share a story of a time when you did see justice prevail in a situation.
18. Sharing question: How does Hab. 2:3 give you hope for the future?
Day Four Study
Read Psalm 37. We will finish Habakkuk tomorrow.
19. This psalm helps us see how to respond when we see people prosper and succeed although they are committing evil acts against other people. What kinds of injustices did the psalmist mention?
20. What hope does this psalm give those who have seen or experienced the apparent success of evil?
21. According to this psalm, what does God want His people to be about while we wait for Him to deal with evil?
Diamonds in the Word: Carefully read this psalm. What do you learn from the parallelism in the lines?
22. Sharing question: Copy one verse in this psalm that gives you hope. Why did you choose that verse?
23. Responding to God: Draw a picture representing God as you see Him in this psalm. Yes, you can draw! Then, spend time thanking Him for the hope that He gives us, knowing that we will have questions about what is going on in times of trouble.
Day Five Study
Read Habakkuk 3:1-19.
Our memory verses come from this section of Habakkuk. They are one of the most beautiful expressions of trust during times of trouble in the Bible. Knowing these verses will be an anchor for you when all seems to go wrong. Work on learning them today!
Diamonds in the Word: What stories from the scriptures come to mind that model Habakkuk's trust despite his questions? What other Bible characters had that kind of faith when nothing made sense?
24. The imagery here for the acts and power of God is beautiful. What picture do you like best? Why?
25. What feelings did Habakkuk experience after God let him in on His thoughts, according to v. 16?
26. What was the secret of Habakkuk's ability to withstand the times of trouble and question that were there and getting worse (3:17-19)?
27. Compare Psalm 46:1-3, 8-11 with Habakkuk 3:17-19. What do you learn from these about dealing with times when you question God?
28. Sharing question: In what present "time of trouble or questions" are you in right now that makes you feel limp and shaky, much like Habakkuk?
29. Responding to God: Write your own prayer or psalm of trust in God in your present situation.
Habakkuk questioned God because his prayers for God to deal with the injustice and evil in the land seemed to be unheeded. Then, things only got worse! This week's stories deal with times of questioning God and with the God who anchors despite not giving the reasons for what is happening. Although both stories are long, they are worth reading!
Kara's story
Last year was a year I will never forget. My husband was in a difficult work situation. We didn't feel peace about his staying there, but no matter how often we asked God, he didn't provide another job. To top it all off, we were expecting our third child due in the midst of this. We began to feel as if the Lord wanted my husband to resign without having another position to go to. It's not something I would ever consider encouraging someone else to do, but it was clear that is what the Lord wanted him to do.
Our son was born with complications. (God what are you doing here?) My husband returned to work two weeks later and resigned. (God, how long until you provide, and why is this taking so long?) I'd like to tell you that the Lord provided right after my husband resigned, but that wasn't the case. My son recovered from his complications within a month, but we spent 8 long months crying out to God to provide financially for our family, the whole time living off of all the inheritance we had. (Lord, why are you wasting this money? Like Peter said: Lord, to whom shall we go?) Ironically, though my husband has a graduate degree, he couldn't even get a call back to stock shelves on a night shift. God had closed all opportunities.
Eight months later, to the week our savings ran out, we received our first paycheck for my husband's next position. Reflecting on "our wilderness," as I call it, I have realized several things about how the Lord loves His children. First, sometimes he wounds us intentionally, just so he can be the one to precisely put us back together again, only this time better, more Christ-like. We are all like zebras, parts of us still black with sin, and other parts masterfully changed to white because we met up with our Father, the surgeon. Second, the "promised land" after the wilderness doesn't always make sense or look nice, but our promises are little pieces in a bigger promise. It's less about our thing, and more about His larger plan. It's more about our hearts, our view of His nature, and our faith that He is orchestrating all things. Third, after all this the deepest of peace and an ability to trust the Father like never before remain. I feel it; I feel it now, deep, deep, down inside.
Job 5:17-18 (NET) "Therefore, blessed is the man whom God corrects, so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also bandages; he strikes, but his hands also heal."
Tommie's story
On a Sunday morning several years ago I was awakened by the phone ringing. The call was from my son. He was crying so hard that it was all that I could do to understand what he was trying to tell me. After he calmed down a bit he told me that he and his wife were separated. She was involved in an affair, and he needed me to come be with him. I was on the first plane possible. My son Tom was so grief-stricken that he could not come to the airport to pick me up. When I arrived at his home, I was shocked to see the physical condition that he was in. This had apparently been going on for a while and he just could not bring himself to tell us.
I was so heart-broken for him. He would get in a fetal position in the floor and cry uncontrollably. The more I heard and saw, the angrier I got. How could she have done something like this to him? My son had allowed her to have control of the checkbook, and she had spent most of their funds unwisely. She was going out with her guy friend to fancy restaurants, buying him gifts, and you name it. Tom found this out after he learned of the affair. I just wanted him to come to Texas with us for a while to get well both physically and mentally—and to file for divorce.
I stayed with him for at least a week. He would go from being certain of what he wanted to do to falling apart. We had a meeting with her and her parents to try to decide how things like bills, the sale of their home, etc., would be handled. Her parents were great, but she was very hateful and showed much disrespect toward us both. Needless to say, I wanted to get as far away from her as possible and never wanted to see her again. I did have to get back to my job, so I made arrangements for the return trip home. My son would not come with me. Even as much as she hurt him, he stilled loved her and wanted to try to make things work.
My son did come to visit us and was almost to the point that he was not going back to her. This is what I wanted. I had only prayed that he would leave her. I felt I could never forgive her and that if he went back to her that I would lose my son forever. He did go home. One day we got a letter saying they were back together and that they would be glad to discuss their decision at any time. The letter was supposedly written by our son and signed "Sincerely," not "Love." That hurt so much.
I was consumed by the situation. I did not want to talk to God about it because I did not really want to hear what He had to say. I finally reached my breaking point. I asked God to forgive me for my actions and attitude toward Him. I asked my family to forgive me. I also told God that I was ready to forgive my daughter-in-law. I could not do this alone and asked for the faith to turn it all over and to leave it with Him. What a relief this was! I could function; I could sleep; I was at peace.
It was more than a year before we heard from our son. Our daughter called him to see if he would come to her wedding. He was not able to do so, but this broke the ice. When my first grandchild was born, he asked me to stay with them when they got home from the hospital. This time together was so healing. There is a good relationship now between their family and ours. My daughter-in-law and I have a love for one another. This could have never happened if I had not finally been willing to turn myself and my son over to the Lord. He taught me so much about faith in Him and what forgiveness really is. I am glad that He did not give up on me when I lacked faith in Him for a solution. He was there waiting to meet me where I was in my life once I decided to meet Him. What an awesome God we have!!
22 Chisholm, 433.
Related Topics: Suffering, Trials, Persecution, Curriculum


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Level 1 School
November 16-18, 2012
Parkview High School – Lilburn, Georgia
Loren Seagrave
Registration Information
$150.00 - Pre-registration (received by November 2, 2012)
$200.00 - Late Registration (received after November 2, 2012 or on-site)
$75 - Alumni pricing for those who have already taken and successfully completed the Level 1 Course. Please contact email@example.com to verify alumni status and register for the course.
Click here to register online now. If you have problems registering online please contact the school director.
(A current USATF membership is required to register--please join online if you are not a member.)
ALL received registrations are posted on the Registration Status page (list is updated hourly).
Refund policy: Only 1/2 of the registration fee ($75.00) will be refunded after the registration deadline, and no refund will be given after the start date.
DirectionsParkview High School
From I-85: North or South Bound Take the Indian Trail exit to Highway 29. Cross over Highway 29. The name of the road changes to Killian Hill. Proceed on Killian Hill and turn right at the light onto Arcado. Turn left at the light onto Cole Drive. Go through the three-way stop. Parkview is the second school on the left. Turn in at the main sign.
Click here to view the schedule.


text:
Benedict XV: the Pope of Peace by John F. Pollard.
If you glanced too quickly at the title of this book, you might have mistaken it for one more book on our new pope. A closer look reveals it to be a biography on Pope Benedict XV and not on Benedict XVI. Benedict XV was pope from 1914 to 1922. He too chose the name "Benedict" to show that he was breaking from the Piuses and Leos of his time just like our new pope has done by breaking from the Johns and Pauls of his times. Neither did this to condemn their predecessors, but to show that they are their own man. Both popes chose that name because they wanted to imitate St. Benedict, the founder of Western Monasticism. The saint was also known as a man of peace and both popes sought to follow the same path.
Benedict XV was elected pope as World War I was beginning and he hoped to foster peace. Unfortunately neither side was really interested in listening to the pope as they had their own agendas.
At the same time he was a quasi-prisoner of the Vatican, as had his predecessors since 1870 when the newly created nation of Italy took over Rome and the Papal States. Members of the Italian government did not agree on what to do with the pope. Some wanted to create a small independent state for him while others did not want anything for the pope. This issue was known in history as the Roman Question. The anti-clerical elements of the Italian government opposed the pope's attempts to bring peace to Europe as it might legitimize his role as a head of state. The Roman Question would not be resolved until 1929 during Pius XI's pontificate.
Pollard's very readable book was originally published in 1999 and has been re-published due to the election of Benedict XVI and the increased interest in his predecessor. Pollard had access to Benedict XV's family archives, his diaries and letters, and also the Vatican Archives which previous biographers lacked.
Benedict pushed for leniency for the defeated Germany as he feared what impact such treatment have. His fears were realized with World War II.
(Br. Benet Exton, O.S.B., writes from St. Gregory's University, Shawnee, Oklahoma.)