DON'T BANK ON AMERIKA

Joe Melchione's personal tour of "Year of Rebellion" ...

http://www.sbchannels.net/videos/303/year-of-rebellion-pt-1.html
http://www.sbchannels.net/videos/304/year-of-rebellion-pt-2.html


Thanks to Josh Figatner, Production Coordinator for the Santa Barbara Channels, SB's own local and educational access TV network, for the heads-up.

Labels: 1970, Isla Vista, Joe Melchione, riots

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Joe Melchione's exhibition of photographs from the Isla Vista Riots period has garnered a lot of local attention. In his on-line photo gallery of YEAR OF REBELLION, Joe's got the best photographs of the era, along with text covering a concise history of the time. Highly recommended. Advance each photo by clicking "Next" to get another image and more text.



Joe Melchione self portrait coutesy of Joe Melchione Photography


In conjunction with the opening, there was a forum held where many recollections were shared...


[ Excerpt from: "Rebellious Isla Vista," BY ERIC LINDBERG, DAILY SOUND, August 19, 2008 - full text at: DS: Rebellious Isla Vista ]

... in 1970, a series of intensifying events triggered violent exchanges between students, activists and police that quickly turned Isla Vista into a battleground.
Perhaps the most recognizable incident from those fateful six months is the burning of the Bank of America building in February 1970, torched by protestors upset over police brutality.

But Joe Melchione, then the newly appointed photo editor for UCSB’s El Gaucho newspaper, sees it differently.

“My sense is that what happened in 1970 has kind of devolved into the bank burning,” he said. “…But it wasn’t something that just happened one night when the bank building burned down. It was a repeated message and I think the community finally got together.”

And while the impetus for social unrest can be traced back to several specific incidents, such as the firing of leftist anthropology professor Bill Allen or the beating of student Rich Underwood, the larger context reveals a society already on edge.

Mick Kronman — now Santa Barbara’s harbor operations manager, then a rebellious Gaucho — looked back on the events of 1970 during a panel discussion Sunday evening with an attempt to root out what he described as “hindsight bias” and to understand the entire dialectic.

It had to do with the civil rights battle and the Vietnam War, he said. Radical black students on campus were enlightening others to their struggle. Fear of being drafted hung thick in the air.

Police, ill-equipped or untrained completely in personal interaction skill sets, faced increasingly irate students upset over Allen’s firing, the war and a lack of empowerment. Many officers were veterans with a strong distaste for draft-dodgers and war protestors who called them names and spit on them, said Robert Potter, professor emeritus of literature and theater.

“If you call someone a pig, they may begin to act like one,” Potter said.

Protestors and petition signers on campus demanding a fair hearing for Allen in January began to receive visits from sheriff’s deputies for the first time ever, said Becca Wilson, then the editor-in-chief for El Gaucho. Attacks by police and provocation by activists during those protests further polarized the two sides.

By February, the conflict escalated dramatically. Activist attorney William Kunstler, fresh off his defense of the “Chicago Seven” against charges of conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic convention, came to speak on campus.

But rather than Kunstler’s fiery speech, UCSB professor emeritus of sociology Dick Flacks described how [Rich] Underwood, who came to the speech toting a bottle of wine, sparked the infamous riot.

Police monitoring the speech spotted Underwood’s wine bottle and mistook it for a Molotov cocktail, subsequently beating the young student into submission in front of thousands.

The resulting protest grew into torching of police cars, dumpsters, and finally the bank.

“It was a baptism of fire,” said Melchione, who had just picked up a camera a few months prior.

Many of his images, currently on display at the Brooks Institute’s Cota Street Gallery through Sept. 12, had to be shot on the fly — the longhaired photographer using single streetlights as sources of light as he fought through nightstick-wielding police officers.

“I got threatened lots of times,” Melchione said. “I had a press pass. It didn’t help much for flying tear gas.”

In the weeks that followed the torching of the bank building, panelists said police broke into apartments, beat people indiscriminately and enforced a strict evening curfew.

“What shocked me the most is that police were willing to brutalize people to protect property,” Wilson said. “That property was more important than life.”

In an attempt to evenly portray both sides of the equation — and not an attempt to offer any excuse for their actions — Kronman noted that authorities faced militant students and outside agitators bent on driving them from Isla Vista.

“These people were scared,” he said. “They’d never seen anything like this before. They felt like they were under siege and, frankly, they were under siege.”

Jean Voss, a former sheriff’s dispatcher, confirmed the fear she heard in the voices of deputies as they patrolled the streets of the small community.

“It was a situation so intense, you couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Fear. Fear of drug addicts, the out-of-control students, the atmosphere.”

Kronman later agreed that police engaged in widespread injustices during what he deemed an all-out street fight.

“It wasn’t pretty,” he said. “It was indiscriminate. … The closest cousin to fear is anger.”

Several panelists speaking at the Cota Street Gallery described the feeling in the months following the burning of the bank building as a sense of being occupied by an out-of-control police force.

One audience member, 11 years old at the time of the riots, recalled running home with food from a burger joint in an attempt to make the curfew. While other kids around the country might have been out collecting butterflies, he said his friends would go out to see how many empty tear gas containers they could find.

During that time, Potter pulled together a posse of colleagues and friends to form a system of cataloging complaints about police brutality, using his own background in intelligence gathering as a soldier in Vietnam.

“I saw some of my old fogey colleagues were taking no notice of a world that was changing,” he said. “…We were able to get the information while it was still hot.”

Altogether, he catalogued 1,000 reports of police misconduct, eventually publishing them in a book titled “The Campus by the Sea where the Bank Burned Down.”

In June, the conflict came to a head again, when protestors learned that authorities planned to indict 17 people for torching the bank.

Wilson described how those arrested for the arson just happened to be the leading activists and organizers on campus.

“Somehow, all the leaders of these radical movements on campus, according to these indictments, banded together to burn the bank building,” she said.

On June 11, a group of approximately 1,500 students and activists gathered at Perfect Park to peacefully protest police brutality. As the 7:30 p.m. curfew approached, officers told the crowd they must disperse or face arrest.

After peacefully arresting more than 300 people, and as night began to fall, police announced they would begin making arrests by force if the crowd didn’t disperse.
Authorities sent tear gas streaming into the park and officers began swinging nightsticks indiscriminately, ultimately taking 667 protestors into custody.

“It was entirely peaceful and the police went completely out of control,” Melchione said.

All charges against those arrested were dismissed — and the indictments for the bank burning ultimately ended in a hung jury — but the impact of the Isla Vista riots left an indelible mark.

The unrest led to the formation of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol, Potter said, bringing officers out of their squad cars and lessening the gap between students and law enforcement.

A year later, the Isla Vista Youth Projects came into existence, offering a series of diverse educational, recreational and social programs for children and families in the community. Food co-ops and credit unions popped up.

“I believe very strongly that a group of people who are committed to a cause can bring about change,” Melchione said. “Those events that spiraled out of control in 1970 brought about great changes in Santa Barbara.”

...

Labels: 1970, Bank of America, Perfect Park, riots

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Joe Melchione's "Year of Rebellion" photography exhibit, now to September 12th (reception on August 7th, 5-8pm):

Labels: 1970, Joe Melchione

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Appreciations to Jeff Probst, who supplied this classic photo of The Santa Barbara 19 (minus a few), of which he was one. Jeff clarified: "The 19 were arrested after the first large demonstration at UCSB, in January 1970, calling for an open hearing for Bill Allen."



Top row, left to right:
Greg Knell, Mick Kronman, Kim Christiansen, Richard Trussell, Ricky Fisk, Michel Barton, Walt Chesnavich, Patrice Drolet, Bruce Cook, Jim Gregory

Bottom row, left to right:
Jeff Probst, Linda Rudolph, Emily deFalla, Mary Poulsen, Sandy Wardwell

Jeff Probst's "Isla Vista Bank Burning Story"

Labels: Santa Barbara 19

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Tom Hayden has just written "Writings for a Democratic Society," published by City Lights.

Dick Flacks reviewed the book and it is posted at TruthDig, with hyperlinks, at:

Richard Flacks on Tom Hayden

Dick's review is posted below, minus the hyperlinks:





If you were on the campus at Ann Arbor at the dawn of the 1960s, you’d have been aware of Tom Hayden’s writings in The Michigan Daily (the substantial and influential University of Michigan student newspaper). He first came to notice for his travels to the South to cover scenes of civil rights struggle and the movement then bursting into history. Then during the summer of 1960, Hayden was reporting from California, on the new breed of student rebel at Berkeley, on farmworker conditions in Delano, and a conversation with Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, at the Livermore Nuclear Lab. And then there was Hayden at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, watching JFK’s nomination and interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. as he led pickets in the streets outside the convention arena. In the fall of 1960, Hayden became editor in chief of the Daily, writing full-page articles declaring the birth of an American student movement. He was 20 that year.

Mickey and I, just married, were in Ann Arbor, where I was working toward a Ph.D. in social psychology. We’d gone there from New York City, both of us red diaper babies, disillusioned with communism’s betrayals, harboring no expectations that we’d ever find a way to restore political hope, enjoying instead our breakaway from the provincialism of the City, and discovering at that moment cultural possibilities unknown to New Yorkers. Ann Arbor was humming with film and electronic music festivals, “happenings,” coffeehouses and bookstores where young writers and artists could find voice and space that would not have been possible in the big city. Tom Hayden’s articles in the Daily became part of that ferment. We read them avidly, seeing them not as mere reportage, but as an effort to construct an exciting political myth—that Cold War apathy and conformism might be replaced by a new, youthful protest and dissent, spawned by the civil-rights movement, seeking possibilities for personal commitment and social renewal. We weren’t yet ready to believe his story line, but we certainly wanted to hear it.

In March 1962, Hayden delivered a well-advertised speech at the university on “student social action.” That speech changed my life: Here was a 21-year-old kid from America’s heartland, putting into words what Mickey and I had been groping and hoping for—that in the United States a new left was needed and possible, that it had to break with many of the fundamental suppositions of all the factions of the traditional left and with Cold War America, that it could come in part from students. He quite insightfully saw how personal struggles for individual self-determination and moral coherence could fuel a collective commitment of youth to social change. I remember coming home right after the speech and telling Mickey: “I think I’ve just seen the American Lenin!” This wasn’t a reference to the substance of Hayden’s talk, which was quite self-consciously antithetical to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, but to his evident gift for making the hope for a movement seem a practical possibility.

Hayden’s speech that day was a trial run for what became, by the summer of 1962, a fuller draft of a manifesto for the emerging Students for a Democratic Society. Sixty folks, including Mickey and me, gathered in Port Huron, Mich., in June to debate and rework the draft and lay the groundwork for what was meant to be, and eventually became, the organizational expression of the 1960s’ new left, and the spearhead of a multi-issue student movement. Tom Hayden wasn’t the originator of this breakthrough (if any single person deserves credit, it’s Al Haber—a fellow Ann Arborite, who actually created SDS out of the remnants of the old Student League for Industrial Democracy and recruited Tom and other student leaders to the project). But Tom’s writing and speaking enabled a genuinely new political voice and outlook to come into being. He was, appropriately enough, elected first president of the new formation at that meeting.

Forty-five years later, City Lights, the independent press founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has published a collection of Hayden’s writings over the last nearly five decades, called “Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader.” Its 600 pages [in some editions] make it a monumental book in more ways than one. It’s fat and densely packed, with some 60 pieces of reportage, advocacy, reminiscence and reflection drawn from some of the more than 15 books Hayden has written or edited, and the hundreds of articles and speeches he’s produced over these years. (Full disclosure: Not only have I been a friend of his for the last 47 years, but I discovered, after getting the galleys, that one of the chapters is a speech Tom gave in my honor two years ago. But what I write here is not a “review”; rather, it uses the occasion of this book to reflect a bit about Tom’s work in helping advance radical democracy in our time.)

It isn’t the size of the book that makes it monumental; it’s the life that has gone into the writing and that is reflected by it. The book’s chapters trace that life: from student journalist to SDS leader to community organizer in the Newark ghetto; then on to North Vietnam in the midst of war, to Chicago streets leading anti-war protest, to Chicago courtroom as a defendant in the conspiracy trial. Then his partnering with Jane Fonda in working to end the war and in life. In the mid-1970s, seizing new mainstream political openings, running for the U.S. Senate in California, building a statewide electoral organization, winning a seat in the California Legislature. In the state Legislature, where he serves for 20 years, he pioneers alternative energy development and, along the way, crafts a spiritual perspective on environmentalism, discovers his Irish heart, and tries to rouse the University of California to serve egalitarian purposes. And, after he ends his adventures as politician, we find him in the streets of Seattle and Miami, in Mumbai and Chiapas, in Bolivia and Cuba exploring and reporting newly emerging movements for global justice. Not many Americans have done so much making of history while, at every juncture, taking the time to be a “participant observer” of the scenes and events one is helping to shape. The writings so produced are of course uneven in style and perspicacity. Some are remarkably moving and insightful: a heartfelt reflection on the meanings of the Irish famine for the American Irish soul; some brilliant appreciations of the meaning of the World Social Forum and other grass-roots resistances to corporate globalization; a weird “journal” of epiphany in the Amazon, and a number of valuable documents and reflections on the meanings of the 1960s, both personal and political. These suggest that Tom Hayden could have been one of the great journalists of our time, given his ability to combine a penetrating style, keen eye and an unusually sharp theoretically informed mind.

Tom, however, chose a different path—to change the world rather than merely interpret it. From those early Ann Arbor days, he insisted on living inside the fierce contradictions and dilemmas inherent in political engagement. Engagement demands advocacy, and therefore at least some sacrifice of the intellectual’s claim to being a disinterested truth-seeker. Accordingly, these “Writings” don’t tell stories or express ideas for their own sake; each of them is making a point in an ongoing debate with the powers that be and reflects a persistent effort to challenge the complacent and the passive.

But some of these pieces are deeper and more durable than topical advocacy. Tom has had, from his earliest work, something to teach both activists and intellectuals about the tensions and connections between them. He’s been guided by a fairly coherent philosophical pragmatism, learned from his Michigan professors like Arnold Kaufman and Kenneth Boulding, from immersion in the writings of C. Wright Mills, as well as now neglected heroes of the late ’50s and early ’60s Albert Camus and Paul Goodman. Our passion and our action, this pragmatism says, should be guided by our experience, rather than ideological doctrine, theory or concealed thirst for power. Here, Tom suggests, are some ways to make our experience useful for making change:

* Take institutional claims seriously and see if they are practiced by those in power.
* Challenge elites to live up to their claims, to justify their actions.
* Oppose structures of authority that block ordinary people from, in the language of Port Huron, “participating in the decisions that affect their lives.”
* Try to figure out, by observation of relevant cases, by experimentation, by dialogue, how social empowerment and participatory democracy can be made real.


It is through such ongoing efforts to organize from below, to win voice for the voiceless, to de-legitimize elites, that fundamental change happens. And, he teaches, whether or not transformation is possible, that struggling for democratic voice and empowerment is the essence of practical strategies by which ordinary people can advance their interests.

In 1976, at age 36, Tom made a turn to electoral politics after 15 years as a movement leader. He decided to run in the California Democratic Party primary for U.S. Senate, opposing the incumbent John Tunney. Not only was this a break with his longstanding political identity, but it was an affront to the interests and sensibilities of party professionals. Running for the Senate was presumptuous for a political upstart, it threatened a perfectly respectable liberal incumbent, and it was bizarre to imagine that a former revolutionary ex-Chicago conspiracy defendant, spouse of Jane Fonda, might have a chance in the political mainstream. The move was also questioned by many on the left—as an opportunistic betrayal of principle which would legitimize one of the two corporate-dominated political parties and undermine the effort to build a mass movement.

Tom’s pragmatism, however, allowed him to see that the mid-1970s might be a moment when the electoral process could be open for a genuinely democratic possibility. The generation of the 1960s was now grown up and ready to be an electoral force ("The radicalism of the sixties is the common sense of the seventies,” he declared). The economy was in stagflation (and the Keynesian strategies to revive it seemed no longer viable). Rising global competition in manufacturing was leading to declining real wages for American workers for the first time since World War II. A new awareness of environmental peril was rising; newly asserted demands for economic justice were being expressed by women and minorities. In Europe and the United States speculation was growing that corporate capitalism was in crisis, no longer able to manage its manifold contradictions. New paradigms were in the air: “Eurosocialism” and “Eurocommunism,” Ralph Nader’s crusade against corporate domination, and a variety of ideas about how to empower communities, workers and consumers. Tom’s campaign decided to issue a new Port Huron Statement-style manifesto, and gathered a number of academics and activists, myself among them, to write a campaign platform which we called “Make the Future Ours.” Some passages from this lengthy effort are reprinted in the “Writings.” The key idea was captured by the phrase “economic democracy,” coined by Derek Shearer, a term that paralleled and focused the “participatory democracy” of SDS at Port Huron.

In reality, however, the Hayden for Senate campaign did not operate as a vehicle for new vision. Instead the logic of big-time campaigning—and the availability of Jane Fonda as effective fundraiser—led to a series of negative TV ads aimed at Tunney’s vulnerabilities, featuring Henry Fonda and other Hollywood figures. These ads boosted Hayden’s poll numbers into the 40 percent approval range. In addition, there was a sizable grass-roots organization, and Tom undertook a 1,000-mile walk down the California coast. To win the race was always a long shot, but garnering 1.3 million votes led the media to take Hayden seriously as leader of something new on the political scene.

An internal premise of key organizers was that the campaign, when it was over, would be the foundation for a permanent progressive electoral organization in California, and within a few weeks after the June primary race, the “Campaign for Economic Democracy” came into being. The CED became a significant electoral force in several cities and counties over about five years. It came to an end as Tom focused on his own political career, getting elected from Santa Monica to the California state Assembly, while many other CED activists found niches in government, party politics and mass media.

This chapter in Tom’s life story is not well represented in the book, nor does he devote much space to the 20 years he spent in the California Legislature. This absence reflects the fact that he hasn’t written much about these matters. The CED’s work and his efforts in the Legislature certainly bore fruit of which he’s proud (and these are mentioned in the text of the book). But to write in detail about these efforts, and the times themselves, might also be painful. The hope that many new leftists had, in the 1970s, of creating a new movement for economic democracy was considerably dashed by the rise of Reagan and the triumph of conservatism on the national stage. The fact that such a hope existed has been largely obliterated in prevailing memory, and there has not been much documentation of the fact that as national politics moved right in the last 30 years, many localities across the country were moving left. Politics rooted in environmentalism, feminism and the growing numbers of Latino and Asian-American voters have changed local structures of power and implemented some pieces of the “economic democracy” agenda. (The Web site http://www.community-wealth.org/ provides a comprehensive inventory of local efforts at establishing economic democracy.) Below the radar, new forms of citizen action have taken local power away from old local elites. In Santa Barbara, where we’ve lived for 40 years, local government, once securely controlled by bankers and real estate agents, now is led by environmentalists, feminists and liberal Democrats. It’s a shift that’s happened in many other California communities, too. These developments need to be documented, in part because they constitute some of the experience that a new national reform agenda can draw on.

Tom is now 68, and some of us of the SDS generation are in our 70s. It would be a good thing if, individually and collectively, members of that generation were to spend some part of their remaining years in efforts to closely interrogate our political experience. I don’t mean producing further rehashings of “The 1960s.” It’s the 40 years since then that have been inadequately examined. Tom Hayden and his compatriots helped shape the history of these decades, and not always in ways we intended. Still, it’s the right that claims and is generally perceived to have dominated during most of this time. Yet all ideological perspectives from left to right have failed to comprehend the world as we now experience it. An effort to comprehend the state of that world would benefit from a systematic examination of the gap between the expectations and hopes of activists on all sides and the reality that ensued.

But ’60s oldsters now are stirring themselves to new action rather than reflection. Tom Hayden himself has been tirelessly speaking, writing and organizing in hope of mobilizing grass-roots opposition to the war in Iraq. Some of the pieces in “Writings” express his excitement on encountering the street-level global justice movement. He and other ’60s veterans are even more excited by the Barack Obama youth surge. It inspires hope for social regeneration in some of the ways the youth revolt of the 1960s offered.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t, as far as I know, an SDS member back in the day, but we do know that she was moved by the student movement and the new left. Yet it is Obama, (even though, as he has reminded us, he was only 7 years old in 1968), whose campaign provides validation for some of the hopes of the new left. He, like Tom Hayden, roots his leadership experience in his work as a community organizer. His campaign, as explained by Michelle Obama, bears a striking resemblance to the way Hayden’s 1976 Senate campaign was conceived. She declared: “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Obama’s frequent assertion that it’s not the president who makes change, it’s the movement from the bottom up that makes change, very much expresses the spirit of the “organizing tradition” that includes SNCC, SDS, King, Saul Alinsky and the “local heroes” who led the movements of the 1960s. Maybe participation in and critical observation of the Obama experiment will provide the best opportunity we’ve had to learn about the chances for that democratic society Tom and his co-conspirators started to write and organize for in the very year that Obama was born.

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Richard Flacks is professor of sociology emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1969. He is the author of “Making History: The American Left and the American Mind,” published by Columbia University Press.

Labels: CED, Dick Flacks, SDS, Tom Hayden

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Recently, the Santa Barbara community lost its judicial giant, Joseph Lodge. Many very good words have been subsequently printed about Judge Lodge, but none as good as that from his wife, Sheila.

In response to what Sheila Lodge wrote, Carmen Lodise sent me the following:

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Allow me to express my gratitude to Mayor Sheila Lodge for her moving eulogy to her husband, Superior Court Judge Joe Lodge.

In it she mentions the time he ordered the release of some 350 people who had been arrested in a peaceful sit-in in Isla Vista’s Perfect Park on June 10, 1970. Those of us active in Isla Vista politics and community affairs during the Vietnam War era will forever honor Joe for his brave and principled rulings in that case.
As Sheila notes, he could well have lost the job that he loved when he said, in effect, that the offense of torching the Bank of America three months earlier could not be used to restrict the entire community’s right to free speech and assembly. The demonstrators who made that point in Perfect Park were amazed to come before a judge willing to stand firm in the face of overwhelming pressure from the sheriff, the DA and a large swath of public opinion.

By the time he was an institution on the bench, Joe was even more forthright in publicly discussing that case when he appeared as the featured speaker at a reception launching the website www.islavista.org on Feb. 25, 2000, the 30th anniversary of the night the bank burned. That he actually showed up to address about fifty people gathered at the Isla Vista Medical Clinic was a surprise; what he had to say was downright astonishing.

“I looked out at those young people who had been arrested in Perfect Park, and in letting them go I felt I was taking sides in a revolution,” he said to gasps from the audience.

In 2002, hundreds of people attended the anti-retirement party Mayor Lodge threw for Joe at the Montecito Country Club. I thought it remarkable that four of the six speakers mentioned that his releasing the demonstrators back in 1970 was the ruling that most impressed them about the judge in his nearly 50 years on the bench.

I think of Joe’s words and example each time I visit the monument to the international anti-war movement in Perfect Park.

Carmen Lodise
Barra de Navidad, Mexico

PS Thanks to Kevin for some help polishing this note.

Labels: IV3, Joseph Lodge, Perfect Park

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Back in the day, Jeff Probst was a UCSB student and EL GAUCHO (re-named "Daily Nexus") reporter. A number of years back, he wrote a story about his life during those times and prefaces his work by writing:

"This is a personal story about the late sixties and the events leading up
to the bank burning, and its aftermath. The names of people, unless well
known, and those of publications, have been changed..."

To read, please go to:

The-Isla-Vista-Bank-burning-Story.pdf

Labels: El Gaucho, Jeff Probst, Santa Barbara 19

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The 1969 Oil Spill resulted in environmental degradation, but also to a local and national sense of increased environmentalism, leading to the first Earth Day, 1970. Read about it at:

Daily Nexus: Locals Remember 1st Earth Day



U2 photo courtesy of Jeffrey Hemphill

Labels: 1969, 1970, Earth Day, oil spill

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"Back in the early 1970s... the gossip kingpin was a politically-active student at the University Of California Santa Barbara. This recently resurfaced newsclip (exact origin date: unknown) shows the future TMZ boss speaking to a local television crew on the campus of UCSB in the wake of the Isla Vista riots. As evidenced in the clip, Levin demonstrated not only an early penchant for dealing with the media, but also, dare we say, a slight case of Napoleon complex..."

Watch the video:

Harvey Levin in front of the Ucen, 1970

Labels: Harvey Levin

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Thanks to Greg Knell and Sarah Kunstler for the heads up on the new film about William Kunstler. Here's the message from Sarah:

"... my sister and I are making a documentary about our father, and would certainly appreciate if you could post something to your list about our film. The website for the project, where you can watch a short trailer, is www.disturbingtheuniverse.com

"We are definitely interested in any archival photographs or any other materials related to Bill's speech and the bank burning that we might be able to incorporate in the film. We may also be doing some additional interviews, although have limited funds to travel at this point..."

Labels: Chicago 10, Chicago 8, William Kunstler

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