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Whatever Happened To? Elian Gonzalez
On Friday, Nov. 26, 1999, newspapers throughout Florida published this Associated Press dispatch;
“A 5-year-old boy was found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast Thursday, one of three survivors from a boat carrying 14 Cubans that sank two days earlier in the Atlantic. Seven people were presumed drowned and three others were missing, the Coast Guard said. The body of one woman was found floating about three miles from the boy, and authorities believe she had been tied to the same inner tube, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Scott Carr. The boy was spotted by a fisherman Thursday morning about two miles off Fort Lauderdale.”
The boy was Elian Gonzalez. His mother, Elisabeth Broton Rodriguez and her boyfriend had taken Elian on the boat headed for Florida. It proved to have a faulty engine that failed during a storm. His mom did not survive. He did. Elian, who already had family in Miami, was rescued, treated and released in the custody of his great uncle Lazaro Rodriguez.
There followed the second major storm of the young boy’s life. That was the custody battle between the boy’s father in Cuba, Juan Miguel Gonzalez Quintana, backed by Fidel Castro, and his relatives in Miami, backed by the Little Havana exile community there. The decision ended up in the hands of Attorney General Janet Reno. She determined that the boy should be returned to his father. The Miami relatives refused to let him go. He was then, dramatically and controversially, seized by INS agents and returned to Cuba with his father.
Today, Elian Gonzalez has an engineering degree and a job in the tourist industry. He is married and has a two-year-old daughter. Earlier this year he was seated as a representative of his hometown of Cardenas in the Cuban national assembly.
What happened in the interviewing years? We only really have occasional glimpses as he has been largely sheltered from international media during his childhood and youth. He returned to Cardenas, the town where he had lived before his mother’s attempt to bring him to Florida. He lived with his father, who came back to the same job of bartending at a tourist park. And he returned to the same school he had attended. It seemed like something of a normal life for a boy in Cuba. That is except when he was paraded about as the cause celebre that he had become in Cuba.
Vanessa Bauza of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel put together this picture of 11-year-od Gonzalez’ life in Cuba, based on interviews with family and associates who had traveled there, in 2005.
“Today, Elian and his family live in a roomy blue home with red trim on Cardenas’s main street, 130 kilometres east of Havana. It has a tidy fenced front yard, a porch swing and a menagerie of pets, including parakeets, fish, dogs and a rabbit…
“Today, Elian is a model student, favouring math and Spanish classes. He has been chosen leader of his sixth-grade class and will begin middle school this fall. He takes karate lessons and plays table tennis. Despite having lots of toys at home, one of his favourite games is fishing for tadpoles in the gutter in front of his grandparents’ home on Cossio St., near the rocky beach.
“Still, for a boy known around the world by his first name, ‘normal’ is a relative term. Several plainclothes security officers are stationed in front of Elian’s home to keep strangers from getting too close, and a museum in his hometown is partly dedicated to Cuba’s campaign to ‘save’ him.”
One of those not so normal moments occurred on April 22, 2005, when Gonzalez, still 11, read a prepared speech to a gathering celebrating the anniversary of the INS raid that seized the boy and set him on the road back to Cubs. Vanessa Arrington of the Associated Press filed a story on April 24 that quoted part of Gonzalez’ speech:
“Five years ago, I returned to my dad. When I saw him, I became very happy. I could hug him, I could see my little brother. That was the happiest day of my life.” The story went on to quote Gonzalez thanking both Cubans and Americans who fought for his return to his father in Cuba.
The AP reported another sighting five years later on April 6, 2010:
“Cuba has released photos of one time exile cause celebre Elian Gonzalez wearing an olive-green military school uniform and attending a Young Communist Union congress. Gonzalez, now 16, with closely cropped black hair, is shown serious-faced with fellow youth delegates during last weekend’s congress at a convention center in western Havana. The images were posted Monday on Cuban government Web sites, then widely picked up by electronic state-controlled media.”
In 2015, he did an interview with ABC News and talked about his memories of his mother and her attempt to get to Florida:
“I remember when the boat capsized, when we fell on the sea. I remember when I was put on the raft and my mom was covering me and I was raising my head, looking around… and at some point I raised my head and I didn’t see her again. There was no-one else. I was alone in the middle of the sea … and that’s the last thing I remember.”
“I believe that if today she is not here with me it is because she fought until the very last minute for me to survive. After giving life to me, I believe she was the one who saved me. She was the one who gave life back to me at a time of danger.”
He also told ABC he would be interested in visiting the U.S., not to stay, but to see a baseball game, to go to the museums in Washington and to talk to people.
“For my family it has always been, we always have the desire to say to the American people, to say to each household our gratitude, appreciation and love that we have. Perhaps one day we could pay a visit to the United States. I could personally thank those people who helped us, who were there by our side. Because we’re so grateful for what they did.”
He also talked about his feelings toward the U.S. in a 2017 interview with CNN:
“I think I would have become the poster boy for that group of Cubans in Miami that tries to destroy the revolution, that try to make Cuba look bad. I would have been used in that way. Maybe I would have become an actor on TV or maybe I would have more money than I have here with more comforts, but I wouldn’t have my family. I wouldn’t have the tranquility I have in Cuba.
“My two feet, my body, my mind are in Cuba. But there are times when I think about the United States. I wouldn’t be who I am had I not been in the United States.”
Another subject oft pursued by reporters following the Gonzalez story is his relationship with Castro. The Cuban leader was front and center in the fight to bring him home. He famously showed up at Gonzalez’ 7th birthday party and has seemed to let no opportunity pass to be seen with Gonzalez at public events.
Here’s what he told ABC News:
“I am his friend but above all I consider him my father, my grandfather. Fidel, he is an incredible person. Everyone has his own opinion. It is somewhat difficult to refer to Fidel, because everyone thinks of Fidel as a god or those who reject him call him the devil. But I’ve known one side of Fidel and what I have left to say is he is a normal person. He is a friend. He’s someone you can share with, you can laugh with.”
Gonzalez became more widely available to the media earlier this year on the occasion of his swearing in as a member of Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power. He sounded very much the politician, conciliatory, hopeful and almost pollyannishly optimistic.
He told Andrea Rodriguez of the Associated Press :
“From Cuba, we can do a lot so that we have a more solid country, and I owe it to Cubans. That is what I’m going to try to do from my position, from this place in congress — to contribute to making Cuba a better country.”
In an interview with CNN:
“What we want one day is Cuban exiles are no longer exiled, that they come home. When the young people that have left are willing to work for Cuba, the well-being of Cubans beyond a political party and beyond ideologies. Our doors are open to build a better country which is what we need.”
The passion that was generated by the Elian Gonzalez story is still felt in parts of the Cuban community in Miami. Some there would tell you not to pay too much attention to what you hear in these interviews, that Gonzalez is not free to speak his mind, is mimicking the message the government wants to hear, or simply that he is “brainwashed.”
Earlier this year The Miami Herald opined “At 29, he is a show pony for Cuba, as many exiles feared.”
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Whatever Happened To?
Posted in History, Whatever Happened To?
Tagged Cuba, Elian Gonzalez, Fidel Castro, Little Havana, Miami
30 Comments
Whatever Happened To? Jennifer Capriati
Jennifer Capriati’s tennis career was nothing short of stellar. She reached the pinnacle of her sport, winning three grand slam titles, an Olympic gold medal and achieving a number one world ranking. Along the way she had victories over Martina Hingis, Monica Selas, Sheffi Graf, Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova. She beat Navratilova when she was 15.
Monica Seles vs Jennifer Capriati in the match that changed women’s tennis! | US Open 1991 Semifinal
And that last little bit is what complicates her legacy. She is remembered for her achievements on the court but perhaps even more so as “the poster child for the dangers of having too much of everything forced upon someone so young.” (Daily Mail, March 2016 )
The Daily Mail story elaborated “Astonishingly good at 14, she went spectacularly off the rails…
“Suffocated by the attention and demands on her – an endorsement by Oil of Olay coincided with an unfortunate outbreak of adolescent spots – Capriati went into teen rebel mode.
“Desperate for normality, she started to dress in black and seek friends outside of tennis. After taking a break from the sport in 1993 she was caught in possession of marijuana and arrested for shoplifting a ring – she has always insisted it was an act of mere forgetfulness.”
In a 1994 story in the New York Times, she told the writer Robin Finn how she felt after losing a first round match at the U.S. Open, “I started out O.K., but at the end of the match I couldn’t wait to get off the court. Totally, mentally, I just lost it…and obviously it goes deeper than that one match. I really was not happy with myself, my tennis, my life, my parents, my coaches, my friends. . . . I spent a week in bed in darkness after that, just hating everything. When I looked in my mirror, I actually saw this distorted image: I was so ugly and so fat, I just wanted to kill myself, really.” It was after that loss that she took a 14-month hiatus from the sport.
Her widely publicized marijuana arrest occurred during that time.
“Capriati’s arrest occurred on May 16 inside a seedy Coral Gables motel room where she was bankrolling a party attended by an assortment of teen-aged revellers she later described as ‘acquaintances, not real friends.’
“What they had in common was a complete lack of interest in Capriati, the tennis player; her generosity with her car and wallet were enough to award her a high ranking in their pecking order.
“What the police, who made two felony arrests and released two others without charging them, found in Capriati’s backpack was just enough marijuana to charge her with misdemeanor possession and snap a mug shot that turned up on TV screens around the globe. Her sponsors dumped her, she went into a 28-day treatment program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, and learned another lesson.” (NewYork Times, Sept. 26, 1994)
She told the Times reporter, “I thought, ‘Am I that big that they have to make such a big deal out of this?’ And I see now that once you’re considered a celebrity, you kind of have no rights to privacy. After that I kind of forgot about everything and everyone except for my brother; all I cared about was having my music and partying with friends.”
It is Capriati’s experience that gave rise to new rules by the tennis federation limiting the number of tournaments a player can participate in under the age of 18. These rules are widely known as the Jennifer Capriati rules. Not surprisingly they are the subject of protest by the parents of other young ‘phenoms.’
Capriati did come back. Her grand slam titles and number one ranking occurred between 2001-2003. She continued playing until 2004 when a series of injuries, back, hamstring and shoulder, ended her career.
Today, you most likely won’t see her hobnobbing with other tennis celebrities in the posh court side seats at the big tournaments. She won’t be called out onto the court to pass out trophies nor will she be chatting it up with other former players in the TV studio.
“Capriati is largely cut adrift from the sport that made her globally famous. She is so detached that she does not even have an agent or management representative.
“Home for her is Singer Island, a three mile strip of land 60 miles north of Miami, and just across a bridge from mainland Palm Beach, the golf mecca where the likes of Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood have homes.
“She lives in a plush block of apartments attached to a five star hotel, with views over a private beach and the Atlantic…
“Whatever else has happened in her life, Capriati must have looked after her money to live in such a place.” (Daily Mail, March 27, 2016.)
She has emerged in public on occasion. She appeared on one episode of the reality TV show ‘The Superstars’ in 2009. Injuries again prevented her from continuing.
In 2012 she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. In her induction speech she said: “I left the game earlier than I expected, earlier than I wanted to, and because of this, I wasn’t able to leave the game on my terms. I was not able to thank everyone who had such a positive impact on my life.”
“I knew [with this honor] I would be able to pay tribute to the game I love and always think about. I would also be able to acknowledge and embrace what my blood, sweat, tears, determination, and heart have brought me. I would be able to remember who I am again and give me a voice again, my one voice, the true voice.” (wtatennis.com)
Jennifer Capriati: Hall of Fame Induction Speech, 2012
Her life on Singer Island has not been quite private enough to keep her out of the headlines. In June of 2010, an overdose episode landed her in the hospital. Here are two differing interpretations of that incident:
“Tennis champ Jennifer Capriati is recovering at a south Florida hospital after an accidental overdose of a prescription drug, her spokeswoman said Monday.
“’Jen is recovering fully and speedily,’ spokeswoman Lacey Wickline told Reuters.
“Wickline said the medication had been prescribed for Capriati by her doctor but did not elaborate.”
The Daily Mail, June 29, 2010.
“Former tennis star Jennifer Capriati is reported to have attempted suicide after becoming depressed over her failed career.
“An ex-boyfriend has also claimed she was upset over his decision to return to the adult film industry.
“The 34-year-old, who was found in a ‘dazed’ state on Sunday, is said to have swallowed a handful of pills in an attempt to end her life.
“A city official told the Palm Beach Post: ‘My understanding is that she had a fight with someone early in the morning and she emptied the pill bottle in her mouth.’”
The ex-boyfriend is a porn actor who goes by the name of Dale DaBone (of course he does). His film credits include such classics as ‘BatmanXXX: A Porn Parody’ (he was Batman) and ‘Naughty Reunion.’
More ex-boyfriend problems emerged in 2013 when she was charged with battery and stalking. The Palm Beach Post (March 22, 2013) described that incident:
“She began screaming at (Ivan) Brannan, then stuck her finger in his chest when he was trying to walk away, according to a police report. A witness reported seeing Capriati punch Brannan’s chest four times with a closed fist. Capriati, who lives in an Ocean Drive condo on Singer Island, left the gym while Brannan, 28, called police. The description for the stalking charge says that between Feb. 16 and 18, Capriati did ‘willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follow, harass or cyberstalk’ Brannan.
“On Feb. 18, a co-worker of Brannan’s told North Palm Beach police that Capriati tried to enter a locked door at their office. She was pacing, yelling and pounding on a window. The co-worker told police she was afraid what Capriati would do. She also told police that Capriati called the business up to 50 times a day.
“That was the ninth incident involving Capriati and Brannan in which police were called to investigate. “
On January 14, 2014, the AP reported that the charges were dropped. “Former tennis star Jennifer Capriati won’t have to face battery and stalking charges stemming from a 2013 confrontation with an ex-boyfriend under an agreement announced Monday. Mike Edmondson, spokesman for the Palm Beach County state attorney’s office, said the charges were dropped in exchange for Capriati’s completion of 30 hours of community service and four hours of anger management counseling. Court documents show Capriati attended the anger management sessions last week and did her community service at Florida Hospital Pepin Heart Institute in Tampa.”
Capriati’s father Stefano, the man who foisted her into this career, died in 2015.
He had made Bleacher Report’s list of the Five Worst Tennis Fathers of All-Time. “Stefano Capriati pushed the ‘pushy parent’ model to a whole new level. Notorious for dragging his daughter onto the professional circuit at age 13, Capriati gained a reputation as a bully. In 2002, Jennifer Capriati was not selected for the Fed Cup team largely because her father refused to follow rules. Former USA Today writer Ian O’Connor once wrote that Stefano Capriati used his daughter as ‘a ponytailed ATM.‘’
Capriati had a different take. This is one of her last entries on the site formerly known as Twitter.
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Whatever Happened To?
Kings and Queens, Statesmen and Poets
Images from the National Portrait Gallery, London
Royals
Men of Letters/Women of Substance
Reframing Women
Posted in Art, History
Tagged art, history, London, museums, National Portrait Gallery, portraits
2 Comments
Rating the Festival Films
Selections from the 2023 Montclair Film Festival
Evil Does Not Exist ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A quiet, simple, beautiful movie, at least at first. A small village in a remote land of woods and lakes. A small population living with nature, getting their water from the stream that flows through their land, their heat from the firewood they chop.
So where does the question of evil pop up? A Tokyo company buys land in this village and plans to build a glamping site, seeking to turn the area into a tourist attraction. Greed, pollution, profiteering and insensitivity are now introduced into the story.
Two people, a man and a woman, who work for a talent agency, are hired by the developer to be the liaison with the locals. They don’t connect. They don’t connect with their employers either, nor with each other. They are in fact little connected with the life they lead and the choices they’ve made.
Maybe that reminds you of another Japanese movie, Drive My Car. The director is the same, Ryusuke Hamaguchi. If you saw Drive My Car you’ll recognize the pacing. Deliberate. Evil Does Not Exist is much shorter than Drive My Car. I think most of the audience would have wanted it to go a bit longer.
That’s because the ending is all ambiguity. We don’t find out why things happened the way they did, nor are we even sure what exactly happened. If you like to have all the loose ends tied up before a movie ends, this one may not be for you. I found it crazy captivating.
‘Evil Does Not Exist’: first trailer for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Venice award-winner
Fallen Leaves ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Holappa is a construction worker who gets fired from one job after another for drinking on the job. Ansa gets canned from her job stacking grocery store shelves when she gets caught pinching a packet of something that had an old expiration date and was ticketed for the dumpster. She loses her next job when the owner of the pub where she’s washing dishes get hauled away for dealing drugs .
They first encounter each other in a dive karaoke bar where his friend tries to hit on her friend (and gets dissed). They go on a date, to a zombie movie, then she gives him her number. He folds up the paper, puts it in his pocket and two minutes later when he pulls out his cigarette packet the folded paper goes flying out into the gutter.
The settings for this Finnish movie are grim and somber. There’s alcoholics’ bars and job sites where the work is hard and the treatment harsh. There’s small, sparse bunkers where the workers live and dark, deserted streets.
This is a movie of the common man. Average looking folks who lead hard lives, have little money and no hope for the future. The faces of the people in the bars and the stores look as though the life has been beaten out of them, most blankly staring straight ahead. And for Holappa and Ansa, there’s the loneliness as well.
The lost phone number is only the first in a series of obstacles that keeps these two from getting together. But ultimately in this world where the slightest of smiles has outsized meaning, this is a heart-warming love story. And, despite all the grimness, it’s told with a hearty dose of humor.
Fallen Leaves (2023) | Trailer | Aki Kaurismäki Alma Pöysti | Jussi Vatanen
Wilding ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you want to see a feel good movie, go for the one with the animals.
Wilding is about a re-wilding project in the south of England. It is mostly narrated by Isabella Tree, author of the “The Book of Wilding” on which the documentary is based. Her husband Charlie inherited a farm only to find that the land had undergone year after year of plowing, insecticides and fertilizer to the point that the soil was farmed out. Based on a project they’d visited in Holland, they decided to undertake a project to restore the land to its natural state.
Where to start? The animals. They bring in horses, cows and pigs and turn them loose. They live not as farm animals but back in their natural state, running free and finding their food and means of survival. What took years and years happens in 90 minutes when you’re watching this movie. What you see is the land come to life. Birds arrive, so do butterflies and worms and mice. There are some landmark moments. Two storks produce a baby for the first time in England in 400 years. And they bring in beavers, animals that had been hunted to extinction in England.
Of course the stars of the show are the animals. It is fascinating to see how these animals easily transformed to a wild existence. We get to see why they do things like digging and nosing through mud. My favorite are the pigs. I could watch them all day.
There is a serious environmental message here. What have we done to the earth’s skin, the soil, and where do we go from here. Re-wilding has apparently become a bit of a thing. It’s not a fast solution, as the 15 years of pictures in this documentary will attest.
Anselm ⭐️⭐️⭐️
When I saw in the program a 3D movie by Wim Wenders about the artist Anselm Kiefer, my first thought was that this is the kind of movie you make after you’ve done everything else in cinema. Turns out that this is not Wenders first 3D movie and that he is a master at it. This is not the Disney fantastical sort of 3D viewed through paper “glasses” with colored cellophane. This is a hyper-realistic 3D viewed through battery-operated viewers that the festival organizers assured are expensive. And when the subject is an artist who does installations, sculptures and 3D paintings, two-dimensional flat screen pictures would pale by comparison.
We see Kiefer at work in old warehouses and factories where he took space in Germany and later France. At work for Kiefer involves burning, melting, pouring, splattering. There’s a series of headless white dresses with objects on top, numerous ruined landscapes and massive murals, damaged airplanes and bicycles. A theme in his work is recognizing Germany’s Nazi past, a statement aimed at a society that wants to forget.
There are some biographical scenes as well with actors playing a younger Kiefer and the artist as a child. There is little narrative. But there is poetry.
This is more a gallery experience than a cinema one. The attraction of the film is the wonder of Wender’s 3D. A great artist plying his trade by documenting another great artist.
Rule of Two Walls ⭐️⭐️
A documentary about artists in wartime Ukraine. Sometimes you see people trying to live normal lives in abnormal times. Other times you see the devastation. And be forewarned there are some gruesome images of bodies dead and dismembered by Russian bombs. There is no getting away from what’s happening in Ukraine.
The movie is centered in Lviv in a community arts center. There are musicians, visual artists, cinematographers. They tell their stories. Some came to Lviv from harder hit areas like Mariupol or Kharkiv. Some stayed as their families left, some stayed because their families couldn’t leave. Sometimes the distinction between who is in the movie and who is making the movie is blurry.
The “rule of two walls” apparently is an expression that suggests the safest place is the corridor (as opposed to say the bomb shelter).
Putin wants you to think Ukraine is not a nation with a language and a culture. These artists are the embodiment of that culture. And that, folks, is the moral of this story.
If I were to use one word to describe this film it would be uneven. Not sure the translation didn’t leave something to be desired. There were times I felt that I was listening to smart people say profound things, but the words that came up in the subtitles didn’t match those expectations. In the end I don’t feel I got to know these people or their art.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Anselm, Fallen Leaves, film, Montclair Film Festival, movie reviews, movies, Rule of Two Walls, Wilding
6 Comments
Whatever Happened To? Dave Clark
When the Beatles led music’s so-called British Invasion in the 1960’s, it was not the Rolling Stones who were their chief rival for the attention of teenage girls. Nor was it the Kinks or the Hollies, the Who or the Yardbirds, nor any of the other bands whose music has lived on for decades. It was the Dave Clark Five.
When the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was displaced as number one on the UK singles chart in January 1964, it was by Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over.” The Beatles arrived on these shores for a two-month tour in August of 1964. The Dave Clark Five beat them to it, starting a U.S. tour in the spring of that year. There was a much ballyhooed appearance by the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show that same year. The Dave Clark Five graced the Ed Sullivan stage 18 times. The Beatles first movie, “A Hard Day’s Night” debuted in the UK in July 1964 and in the US one month later. Within a year the Dave Clark Five were in theaters with “Catch Us If You Can” (it was released in the US as “Having a Wild Weekend”).
The Beatles popularity never seems to wane. The three surviving band members make occasional appearances and are involved in different music projects. The Rolling Stones just released a new album, their 26th studio album. It’s not unusual to turn on rock radio and hear the Kinks. The Dave Clark Five? They were done and dusted by 1970 at the age of six, rarely to be heard from again.
Dave Clark was the drummer. But he was also manager, producer and co-writer of most of the group’s songs.
Clark would later say of the 1970 break up: “‘People never understood why I did that, but I wanted to get back to being an ordinary person. I enjoyed every moment, but we’d been everywhere, done everything. I wanted to get back to being just Dave Clark, not Dave Clark Celebrity. The only thing I missed was going out on stage and performing.’ (Daily Mail, Feb. 13, 2015)
His drumming is not what led to the group’s success. In fact, it was later learned that he was not always doing the drumming on the Dave Clark Five’s records. This came out in a story by Spencer Leigh in The (London) Independent (Sept. 23, 2009) about studio session drummer Bobby Graham.
“Even at the time, it was suggested that Dave Clark was not playing on his records. Clark has never acknowledged this but Graham told me, ‘Dave wanted to produce and he couldn’t be up in the box and down in the Studio at the same time. Mike Smith had written Glad All Over with him and they weren’t too sure what they wanted from the drums. I was playing how I would normally play with the hi-hat, snare and bass and Dave asked, Bobby, can you make that simpler please? He didn’t want complicated fill-ins he couldn’t play himself on live dates as that would have given the game away.’”
What Clark did do on his own was the numbers. Jeff Tamarkin, writing for the web site Best Classic Bands, says “Clark…was an astute businessman, who, from the start of the group’s recording career, shaped their image, planned their tours and recording sessions and shrewdly negotiated to retain ownership of the band’s master recordings, a smart move that has allowed him to license out the catalog as he’s seen fit ever since.”
Clark also owns the U.S. rights to the Dave Clark Five’s music as well as the recordings of their TV appearances. His deal with EMI Records gave him a much more favorable royalty agreement than was common at the time. “We had a ‘live’ reputation, big enough where I could actually go in and see somebody at E.M.I. Records. I found out what the top rate was for an independent and asked for three times that, thinking that it left you room for maneuver, and to my amazement, they agreed.” (www.classicbands.com) Apparently, if you were a record company in the 60’s that had not signed the Beatles, you were caught in a seller’s market and Clark was savvy enough to take advantage.
It was those agreements signed while managing the band that would start Clark down the path to becoming a multimillionaire and owner of a home in West London valued at 12 million pounds.
Since then Clark has managed Spurs Music Publishing Ltd., the entity that published the Dave Clark Five’s songs. He was also involved in TV production and in the 1980’s acquired the rights to a popular British music TV show from the 60’s “Ready Steady Go!”. In 1986 he wrote a science fiction musical Time that had a two-year run on a London West End Stage. There was a follow-up album, also called Time, that featured Queen’s Freddie Mercury, among others. Clark and Mercury became life-long friends. Clark was at Mercury’s bedside when he died at home in 1991.
What he has not done, and likely never will, is a reunion tour. “I don’t think you can go back, but that’s me. You can’t go back to being a teenager or in your 20s or whatever. The people that carry on, from Elton and McCartney, Rod Stewart, they’ve never stopped. I can understand that, and good luck to them.” (bestclassicbands.com)
In 2008, the Dave Clark Five was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Tom Hanks.
Clark is now 83. He and guitarist Lenny Davidson are the only two living members of the band.
If you want to hear some Dave Clark Five, you might catch some if you tune in the English football games on Saturday morning. Manchester City fans have been known to sing a verse or two of Glad All Over with an altered lyric “cause we’ve got Guardiola” (a tribute to their manager). And Crystal Palace fans offer a hardy rendition of the song before each of their home matches at Selhurst Park in London.
Clark himself is a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. ““My one disappointment in my career is that it didn’t go to Spurs, because my company’s called Spurs Music Publishing. I tried to buy Spurs in the ‘60s and the family who owned it wouldn’t sell it. Going back to the past, the whole reason I formed the band was to raise funds so our youth team could travel to Holland. We got sick on the boat going over, won the match, came back and the rest is history. I’m flattered Crystal Palace use it [as their anthem], but I’m Spurs through and through.” (nme.com Jan. 20, 2020)
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Whatever Happened To?
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 1960's, British Invasion, Dave Clark, Dave Clark Five, Glad All Over, history, music, rock and roll, The Beatles
31 Comments
Romantics and Realists, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists
European Painting at the National Gallery, London
The Renowned
Monet
Impressionists
Realists
Self Portraits
17th Century Faces
Posted in Art
Tagged art, IMpressionists, London, Monet, museums, National Gallery, painting
1 Comment
McCartney Behind the Camera
Photos taken by Paul McCartney during the Beatles 1964 tours on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 1964, George Harrison, John Lennon, Murray the K, museums, music, National Portrait Gallery, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Ronnie Spector, The Beatles
8 Comments
Bansky Art and Wisdom
A pop-up exhibit on Regent Street in London. It is neither authorized, curated nor endorsed by the artist.
Whatever Happened To? Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee
The Spaceman was a major league baseball pitcher. He was what baseball folks like to call ‘a flake.’ He was also a really good pitcher. Lee won 94 games over 10: seasons with the Boston Red Sox between 1969 and 1978. In one of those years, 1973, he was an all star. He pitched another four seasons with the Montreal Expos and ended his career with a 119-92 won-loss record and a very respectable 3.62 earned run average.
You might think the ‘Spaceman’ moniker was a result of his eccentric behavior both on and aff the field, but it was in fact much more literal. Lee was fascinated by space and was an avid follower of the Apollo missions. A teammate, John Kennedy, offered up the nickname on a day when Lee was having locker room discussions with reporters about a moon landing.
Lee was not your typical gung-ho ‘one for all, all for one’ sort of athlete. He was more of a baseball activist. As a Red Sox, he and a few teammates, including Ferguson Jenkins and Rick Wise were known as the “Buffalo heads.” What seemed to unite them was their disregard of team rules and distaste for manager Don Zimmer, the puffy-faced veteran who Lee once referred to as “designated gerbil.” When one of them was traded Lee “left a burning candle on Zimmer’s desk after Willoughby was traded and refused to show up for the 1978 team photo (he had to be inserted later). When Bernie Carbo was dealt to Cleveland, Lee ‘wept for 20 minutes, ripped his telephone from the wall at home and vowed he would never play for Boston again.’ When he returned the next day and was given a $533 fine, Lee asked for the team to make it $1,500 so he could have a few more days off.” (Michael Clair, mlb.com, Dec. 27, 2022)
A similar incident while with the Montreal Expos ended his tenure there and his major league career. Joel Yanofsky, writing for the Montreal Gazette (March 5, 2005) recalls Lee’s last day as an Expo: “Early in the 1982 season, manager Jim Fanning released one of the most underrated and exciting players on the team, second baseman Rodney Scott. This, in turn, caused left-handed pitcher Bill Lee to storm out of the clubhouse in protest, drowning his anger at an east-end tavern. This was quintessential Lee — loyal teammate and quixotic rebel. The next day he was booted off the Expos and blackballed from the game.”
While Lee spent a good deal of his post-MLB career with charity events, speaking engagements and promotional baseball events, he also ventured into politics. In 1988 he ran for President under the satirical Rhinoceros Party banner. His campaign slogan was “No Guns, No Butter” because both kill you. Unsurprisingly, he failed to get on the ballot in any state. But that didn’t stop him from telling the Ottawa Citizen (Nov. 7, 2000) that if he had won “we wouldn’t be in Iraq. We wouldn’t be in Afghanistan. We’d have universal Medicare. There would be no border between the U.S.and Canada. We could walk freely back and forth.”
So it may then surprise you to hear him endorsing George W. Bush in that same interview. Here’s why: “The way things are now, people want to party and George W. is the kind of guy you can party with. Back in 1973, we rolled a couple of doobies (marijuana cigarettes) and smoked them together. And I can tell you he definitely inhaled.”
He was at it again in 2016 when he threw his hat in the ring for the governorship of Vermont. This time he ran on the Liberty Union Party line, the socialist party that Bernie Sanders had been a part of. The Rutland Herald (Oct. 15, 2016) observed: “Spaceman is unpolished. His positions are unconventional, often rooted in his counterculture beliefs. He is an eloquent and humorous storyteller, but he is goofy as a politician. There is little about him that is political. He wears his uniqueness and eccentricity as badges of honor. “
Writing in Time Magazine (May 15, 2016), Sean Gregory commented “Here’s a gubernatorial platform for you: legalized pot, universal health care, seizure of federal highways, and steroid cheats in the Hall of Fame.” He got 2.78% of the vote.
Asked what, if elected, he would do on his first day as governor, he said: “I would meet with Justin Trudeau and work on the fact that if Trump gets elected, we have a covenant in our charter that says we’re allowed out of the United States.” (Vice, June 8, 2016 )
Lee also co-authored four books. They were not all critically acclaimed. In his review of Have Glove Will Travel; Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond, Joe O’Connor of the National Post in Toronto (April 23, 2005) remarked: “(Lee) writes like a teenager anxious to impress the cool kids with anecdotes that begin and end with him. And this me-me-me approach takes away from what is, in parts, truly engaging material.”
But above all else, Spaceman was a pitcher, and even into his seventies, he’s not up for letting that go. Here are just a few bits of Lee’s post-MLB ball playing resume:
— 1984. Living in Moncton, New Brunswick, he pitched and played first base for the Moncton Mets.
— 1992. He pitched for the Vermont Grey Sox, a team of former major leaguers that traveled the northeast playing minor league and collegiate teams. His teammates included his old Buffalo Heads colleague Ferguson Jenkins.
— 2007. Lee joins other former major leaguers on Oil Can Boyd’s Traveling All-Stars.
— 2008. He pitches for the Alaska Goldpanners in the annual Midnight Sun game played during the summer solstice.
— 2010. At age 63, Lee pitches 5-⅓ innings for the independent Can-Am League Brockton Rox. By picking up the win, he becomes the oldest pitcher to win a professional baseball game.
— 2012. Lee breaks his own record when, at age 65, he throws 94 pitches for the San Rafael Pacifics for a complete game victory over the Maui Na Kia Ikaika. He allows four runs on nine hits in a 9-4 victory.
Just last year the Washington Times (March 31, 2022) reported on a “video of Lee, now 75 years old, emerging from the crowd at a Savannah Bananas game, walking onto the field with a beer in hand and recording a strikeout.”
But last year age started to shows signs of catching up with the Spaceman. “Lee, 75, pledges to continue to pitch 40 years and counting since his last MLB game in 1982. That might have been in doubt after a medical emergency Friday night when he collapsed while warming up in the bullpen before entering a Savannah Bananas exhibition game — a scary incident captured on national television (ESPN2) and reported in stories across the internet as a near-death experience.” (Savannah Morning News, Aug. 24, 2022)
More recently ESPN reported on Aug. 31, “Lee collapsed on field during pregame ceremonies of a triple A game between the Worcester Red Sox and the Norfolk Tides. The triple A Red Sox doctors recommmended Lee be taken to UMassMedical Memorial Center for evaluation. It said later he is in stable condition after having what it called ‘a brief health scare.’ Lee, 76, had been scheduled to throw out the ceremonial first pitch and sign autographs at the game.”
Throughout his entire career, Lee never shied away from a microphone or an interviewer. Aside from his pitching, what he is best known for is some colorful quotes. Here’s a few examples.
On mandatory drug testing “”I’ve tried just about all of them, but I wouldn’t want to make it mandatory.” (Out of Left Field, Peter Drier and Robert Ellis, 2017)
Following his collapse in Savannah, “I always thought I’d die on the field, but not in the (obscenity deleted) bullpen.”(Boston Globe, Sept. 20, 2022)
“Well, I cut my own firewood. I turn my potato patch over with a shovel. I don’t use gasoline. I don’t use fossil fuel. I gather all my own kindling. I recycle all my own paper. I recycle everything. I eat within fifteen miles of my house. I think those are conservative things that Republicans don’t do. “ (Vice, June 8, 2016)
“A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The Earth will be turned into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won’t matter if I get this guy out.” (The Province Vancouver, Sept. 1, 2009)
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Whatever Happened To?
Posted in Baseball, Sports, Uncategorized, Whatever Happened To?
Tagged baseball, Bill Lee, Boston Red Sox, MLB, Montreal Expos, Savannah Bananas, Spaceman, sports
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