November 2016

The Donald spent the whole campaign slamming his competitors. Now he is putting them all in his cabinet! Did he tell the truth about anything during the primaries? He slammed Mitt Romney, now he wants to make him secretary of State!! He slammed Ben Carson. Now he wants to make him Secretary of HUD!! Looks like he is building his own swamp.

So, are his backers ever going to believe that he told them anything they wanted to hear just to get their vote!

He also said he did nothing wrong with the Trump University scandal, and would fight it all the way. Last week he settled- guess the idea of a convicted felon in the White House would have been too embarrassing.

I read a music blog by a guy named Bob Lefsetz. Most of the time he is pretty much a blowhard. But he had a great analysis today:

I’ll argue all day long that the right wing labeled Hillary Clinton unfairly. But I’m hard pressed to say her status quo agenda made me hopeful. Bernie Sanders may have promulgated policies that had no chance of passing but at least he channeled people’s frustration and spoke the truth. But the media blasted Bernie and said hosannas for Hillary. Meanwhile, Trump sneaked to victory between them.

Just food for thought.

Time Magazine has a very interesting issue out this week. It is titled:

“The Most Influential Photos of all time”

Pretty tall order! I saw the editors on a morning news show this week, and they explained that it took three years to edit down to 100. Most of them are very good, some are Ok and some have some historical significance ( cellphone photograph of a guys newborn that was the first photo tweeted out! So I guess we can blame him!!!)

There is one that is really bothersome.. It is titled “The Ultimate Appropriation.”

Richard Prince was working in the Time Magazine Tear Sheet Department, deconstructing magazines and filing the articles in appropriate file drawers. His eyes were drawn to the advertisements, one, in particular, the Marlboro Man riding across the plains. In a process that he called “rephotography” he photographed the ad, cropping out the type.

As the magazine says, “That Prince didn’t take the picture meant little to collectors. In 2005, The image, titled: Untitled (Cowboy0 sold for $1.2 million at auction!!!!!!!!

Prince started a new art form- he titled it photography of photography

Prince went on to gain fame for stealing Instagram photographs from the web, enlarging them to 3 feet square and selling them in galleries. (He became very rich doing this)

As he said on Twitter just 15 hours ago:

Being sued: They say I don’t care. That’s not exactly true. I just don’t care about what they want me to care about.

What a country we live in! He has been sued many times, and always wins for some reason.

Just saw a great piece on CBS Sunday Morning by Ted Koppel. He went to a small town in West Virginia that was decimated by the demise of the coal industry. They voted 4 to 1 for Trump last week, because he told them he was going to bring back coal mining. He actually stood on a stage during the campaign with a coal miners helmet on his head and said “I dig coal.” Nobody that Ted interviewed could tell the camera what Trump was going to do to accomplish this, or why coal mining was needed. All they heard is that he was going to get them their jobs back. They all sounded like they weren’t sure what he was going to do, but were willing to giuve him their vote to see what was going to happen. The most gut wrenching story was a young single mother of three children who said that she was so so sick of all the talk that she did not vote for either one of the losers.

Meanwhile, Hillary is now blaming FBI Director James Comey for losing the election for her by reopening the email scandal two weeks before the election. Maybe she should blame her staff for the fact that she did not set foot in Wisconsin from April to November, causing that state to put Trump over the top in Electoral votes.

I have always told myself not to vote for the lesser of two evils, but this year I voted for Hillary, and felt bad for days for doing it. Trump told the people what they wanted to hear (with no plan to accomplish anything he talked about) and the people listened. Who knows what is going to happen next. There are people marching in the streets, and Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus (both ironically from Wisconsin are kissing up to Trump to try to get jobs in his administration. Kellyanne Conway, who seemed to appear on every morning news show for the last month (and who also appeare3d to be a totals blond bimbo) is now seen as the mastermind of this debacle, and will probably be running the country come the end of January.

Final note: Trump is scheduled to testify a few weeks before he is inaugurated in the Trump University fraud trial in California. Should be great TV watching!!!

This summer, Joe Maddon’s famous clubhouse speech- “Try Not To Suck_ became a rallying cry for the Cubs and their fans. T shirts and signs everywhere. This past Friday, Manager Joe was wearing a new black shirt. It said WE DID NOT SUCK, and they did not! They won the World Series in seven games, and they did it in a crazy, edge of your seats kind of way- extra innings in the seventh game.

One of the great sports stories of all time was Kyle Schwarber- catcher and outrfielder, who had a devastating injury in a collision with Dexter Fowler in the outfield in the third game of the season. He was told he would be back sometime in 2017, but that didn’t work for him. He rehabbed his leg all season, cheere3d the team on from the dugout, and the day before the World Series started, after testing out his body for two days in Arizona, the Cubs flew him to Cleveland in a private plane to become their designated hitter in the World Series. He went 7 for 17 for a .412 average in the series, and gave all of Chicago a story that wasn’t to believed unless you saw it with your own two eyes. The only question left is Who is going to play him in the movie of his life?

There was another great story that has unfolded over the last few years. I got in this business to work with and meet some of my favorite musicians. I met Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, and the Rolling Stones. One kind of obscure guy that I used to see perform around Chicago was Steve Good, a diminutive singer songwriter with a very large talent. In 1984, he wrote a song about his beloved sports team, called Go Cubs, Go. He passed away from Leukemia in September of 1984, never seeing the Cubs win a Championship. In 2007, the team started playing his song over the PA system after every home win (there weren’t many of them). The crowd would sing along, and Steve, up in heaven must have been really happy.

This year, the song had 1.19 million on demand streams through October 27th. So one of the unlikely by products of the World Series win was a hit record for one of the nicest guys to ever pick up a guitar!

One more note:

Someone posted this on my Facebook page this week-

http://petapixel.com/2016/11/03/chicago-tribune-sun-times-covers-world-series/

It shows the covers of the Sun Times (A really lousy wraparound picture) and the Tribune (a great celebration shot). The article goes on to explain that this is what you get when you fire your whole photography staff and pickup a photo from a wire service to illustrate the most important sports story of the last 100 years in Chicago!

Way to go, Chicago Sun Times.