Different Slants

Brad Meyer:
IT’S FINALLY HERE!!! After months of planning, days of shooting, and over a hundred hours in post, my short documentary film, Out of Print, is finally complete! This is my second final short film. A huge thanks to Robert M. Katzman for being such a captivating man, and a special thanks to Sofia Kerpan for being a kick ass documentary partner: she deserves way more credit than I gave her. I kindly ask you all to take several minutes to indulge in the fascinating, emotional, and inspiring world of Bob and his collection in “Out of Print”. ENJOY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sNxlgshryY

Robert M. Katzman My appreciation for your compassionate film about a topic and situation few people can understand, or worse, know about at all. Thanks to you Brad, and of course, to the lovely Prom Queen, Sofia.

I didn’t make this film, I was the subject. The filmakers are from The Columbia College Film School. It is the second documentary, the first visible on my Oldzines.com site made by DePaul University Film School. That one is 14.5 minutes long. People tell me they find them fascinating. To me, they are eulogies while I’m still here and very sad. I watch them and am reminded how powerless I am to be unable to effect change.

You won’t see it that way, so I hope you will look at them.  They are serious history of what is disappearing day by day in America:News printed on paper in America.

 © May 1, 2013

I came to Hyde Park in April, ’64 from an odd ethnic bubble of only Irish and Jews, mixed together with periodic success on the South Side of Chicago, near 87th Street. Never had any relationships or encountered any black people anywhere.

There were two black girls in my last year at Caldwell School whom no one would talk to. It was stunning. I was both appalled by this situation and I was unpopular as well, so I got it immediately and befriended them. They were suspicious of me at first (and who wouldn’t be?), but then visibly relieved that the ice was broken for them. Except it wasn’t broken.

(Read on …)

© April 18, 2013

I write on another blog about Hyde Park in a southern part of Chicago six or so miles from the Downtown area, a diverse intellectual community containing many things but most famously the University of Chicago, its experimental K through 12 school, the Laboratory School and the Museum of Science and Technology.

Sometimes I respond to what another person writes and sometimes that response can stand alone here, because it expresses reflections that might mean something to a larger group of whoever my readers are. How can I know you? Facebook is, illogically, faceless. So, Strangers, see if what I wrote matters to you, possibly in some other context.

There was a significant political person named Marshall Korshak, mostly forgotten today, who was a Chicago Democratic Party powerbroker there in the ’50′s,’60′s and ’70′s. Not everyone loved him. I responded to that expressed feeling in his defense. Marshall, born in 1911, died at 85, in 1996. This is what I wrote about him:

I was reading this thread until I read the part about Marshall Korshak and some not so complimentary remarks about him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Me, too. But my relationship with him couldn’t have been more unbalanced.

(Read on …)