Showing posts with label John Mellencamp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Mellencamp. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

50 weeks 'till Election Day 2012: On the current political dynamic in Hallandale Beach and a rationale for running for office...

50 weeks 'till Election Day 2012: On the current political dynamic in Hallandale Beach and a rationale for running for office: more middle-class jobs, the injection of common sense, foresight and enthusiasm at City Hall, and the elimination of its apathy & myopia


Below is a revised excerpt of an email I sent out around Noon today to a couple of dozen interested parties and 'all the ships at sea.'

November 22, 2011

Within the past two weeks, I received a very curious email from a well-known South Florida political consultant about their curiosity about what was going on here and who was running for office in Hallandale Beach next year.

That email to me, as well as the column below from the Howey Politics Indiana newsletter, caused me to wonder if I should finally state publicly what has been building up inside me for months as I observed what has -and hasn't- been going on around me here in this corner of Broward County -frustration.

They have, and combined, they've caused me to write this email, which will be the only large group email I send out this week before next Sunday night, unless something crazy happens around here.

Check that, unless something REALLY, REALLY CRAZY happens here, which is always possible. (Sometimes even I forget where we live.)

I'll still be posting material to the blog, though.

After reading it, I hope that email will prompt some of you to strongly do some soul-searching and speak to your family and friends in the next week or so and consider the possibility that YOU might very well need to actually do MORE for the community than you already are, whatever that is, to rid us once and for all of Cooper and her Rubberstamp Crew in all its pernicious manifestations -attitude, policy, stealthiness...- that is making a mockery of our city's Quality-of-Life improving markedly anytime soon with them in charge.

My thought: some of you may, in fact, need to actually run for office yourself.

Or, failing that, at least consistently start bringing friends and neighbors of yours to various civic-minded meetings around town that will be taking place here until the election -50 weeks from TODAY.

Apathy being what it is in this community, longstanding and entrenched, the only way that the long overdue institutional reform and public policy changes towards greater accountability and transparency can take firm hold here -including a real work ethic by city employees and commitment to giving friendly and professional service to taxpayers and business owners that will have real world consequences for those who fail to do so- is to enlarge the universe of people actually committed to voting for positive change next November.

To me, having seen what passes for public policy and campaigns here, our simply relying on persuasion next September and October is a recipe for failure and naive, and only shows a failure to fully appreciate human nature here and the high level of public skepticism.

In my opinion, this community can NOT stand more of the sort of disconnectedness to the larger community that we have already had to endure the past five years from Mayor Cooper and City Managers Good and Antonio, who have actively discouraged civic involvement and participation -unless you're a crony of City Hall.

The way to change that negative dynamic here is to work hard now to increase the number of people who become engaged and become actively committed to changing the status quo, so that by next November, that wave of change can't be stopped.
Result: a majority on the HB City Commission for common sense that can improve the Quality-of-Life here and make it better for residents and business owners alike.

Despite it being a city of under 40,000, the City of Hallandale Beach isn't currently in the rut it's in because there aren't enough people from a myriad of backgrounds, interests, and talents with good ideas to share and contribute, it's the way it is because under the current administration, good ideas aren't actively solicited and allowed to rise to the top on their own merits, because so many existing bad ideas and myopic thinking aren't seriously held up to scrutiny or penalized.

Unfortunately, the current City Manager and his staff are among the very worst offenders of all, as they continually refuse to admit their mistakes on a whole host of issues, and persist in driving the wrong way despite all the passing signs that they don't enjoy the support of the community: continued taxpayer-funding and subsidy of South Florida Sun-Times; the North Beach facility on State Road A1A & Hallandale Beach Blvd. taking over three times as long to be fixed as it took to be built and yet is STILL closed to the public it belongs to; the unpopular Golden Isles Overlay proposal that has zero support...

The result is that bright, thoughtful and enthusiastic people with something tangible to contribute feel like ostracized outsiders at HB City Hall, and after awhile, after enough encounters with the octopus bureaucracy of being shown their input is unwanted, people with something to contribute get frustrated and give-up.

The very people whom we need to engage and hear from!

Name another city in Broward or South Florida where there isn't a single attorney on the city's council or commission?
Or an owner of a successful ongoing business, who knows first-hand what dealing with that city's bureaucracy and Code Compliance is really like?
Yet in Hallandale Beach, we have neither!

After reading this column below, ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time you heard the mayor or commissioners sound the least bit convincing when talking about bringing middle-class jobs to Hallandale Beach, not part-time hospitality jobs?
Especially Commissioners Ross, Sanders & Lewy?

I mean if you walked up to one or more of these three completely out-of-the-blue and said, "Hard at work or hardly working?" we all know what the honest answer would be, don't we?

They and the mayor seem to think that job creation is the sole province of real estate developers and their land-use attorneys -when trying to convince the P&Z or City Commission to give them approval for variances or side deals- not elected officials like them or the HB Chamber of Commerce, the way those sorts of thing are done normally and successfully in other parts of the country, and we have results that match their apathy and lack of effort, don't we?.

Some of the following article may be lost on you because you don't know the locales and don't recognize the names being mentioned here like I do, from my time living in Indiana while at school and still trying my best to follow things from a distance, and so may miss the clever nuanced approach to connecting-the-dots, but this new column from the popular and much-read Howey Politics Indiana newsletter has a lot of things worth thinking about in Hallandale Beach.

Especially for those of you receiving this who are seriously interested in being part of the tangible positive change we need in this community, and replacing the myopic,
ethically-challenged, common sense-challenged status quo we are stuck with on the dais at City Hall now -the Rubber Stamp Crew.

I hope some of you will take the hint, and NOT just run for office exactly like candidates have done in the past. That model simply doesn't work anymore.

There are literally armies of VERY FRUSTRATED taxpayers out there who are looking for someone who'll seriously engage them in ideas, listen and show some intelligent moxie. The good news for you all is that there are also more ways of effectively reaching them thru technology than ever before.

But you have to start making the effort to be part of that wave of positive change NOW, NOT next Spring.

For myself, I wouldn't consider voting for someone who isn't already hard at work campaigning around town by the end of January, since genuine hard work and action, not mere words,
are what it's going to take to get things changed around here, starting with the paralyzing bad attitudes at City Hall and the scared-straight citizenry.

FYI: John Mellencamp, who is mentioned below, grew-up and lives about 20 minutes from Bloomington and IU in Seymour, which while I was going to school was home to one of THE worst sites of the EPA Superfund -and a one-time girlfriend.

(Two of my female housemates back then, owing to their ridiculously cute, Midwestern girl-next-door looks and appeal, were among the girls in one of his first videos for Columbia Records.)

Mellencamp has given millions to IU and is responsible for the "Bubble" that the IU varsity teams use to train under during inclement weather -that is, our normal weather for December thru March! It's named after him, of course, which is entirely appropriate.
http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/facilities/ind-facilities-mellencamp.html

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Howey Politics Indiana

Brian Howey, Publisher

Gregg launches from his Sandborn roots

11/18/2011 9:28:00 AM

SANDBORN, Ind. - To be a governor requires a candidate to reveal his roots.

While recent Hoosier governors have come from the big cities of Indianapolis (Daniels), South Bend (Kernan), Lafayette (Branigin) and Evansville (Orr), there is that Mellencamp charm of coming from a small town – a Bremen (Bowen), a Vincennes (Welsh), a Seymour (Whitcomb), a Shirkieville (Bayh), and, of course, Corydon, where Frank O’Bannon worked a sentimental connection from the first state Capital to the current one.

Read the rest of the column at: http://howeypolitics.com/main.asp?SectionID=10&SubSectionID=21&ArticleID=7250

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Filming John Mellencamp "A Ride Back Home" at IU

While looking for something in the Indy Star this morning, I came across this short behind-the-scenes video of John Mellencamp singing and shooting a video that was filmed on campus at IU's awesomely beautiful Beck Chapel.  http://www.iub.edu/tour/cmps7.shtml

This intimate chapel, which I've been in many times over the years for either ceremonies or weddings, is located just east of the main entrance to The IMU, the Indiana Memorial Union 
-"the largest student union in the world" as we were always quick and proud to remind visitors- which is in the original part of campus, complete with a very comfortable hotel, huge bookstore, and tons of offices, restaurants and lounges to eat, study or people watch, some even with fireplaces, which is especially great in the winter when your nose and eyeballs feel frozen. 

This huge building was where I spent the most majority of my time on campus in Bloomington when I wasn't in class, because the two student organizations I was most involved with had their offices located there, in The Tower: the IU Student Alumni Council, and the IU Student Athletic Board, SAB, which is the group that works intimately with IU's Athletics Dept. in many different areas.

At one of the popular apartment complexes I lived in off-campus, I twice had two female housemates, the second time being with two very cute sisters, one blonde and the other brunette, who had appeared in one of John's very first videos, which was also filmed on campus.
They never tired of telling people about it.

This was back when the geniuses at CBS Records had him recording under the name Johnny Cougar. (Because Dash Riprock was already taken on The Beverly Hillbillies, I guess.)
Ironically, the same record executive who came up with that particular name had also re-christened David Jones as David Bowie.  Well, one out of two isn't so bad!

Attending IU when I did, from 1979-'83, it was right when John -from nearby Seymour- was really starting to make a reputation for himself as someone with talent and heart who gives it his all every show.
John has literally given millions of dollars in donations to IU over the past 25 years, 
http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/homepages/4-21-2000/text/mellencamp.htm  and actually has a building named after him on campus, the John Mellencamp Pavillion.
 
John's nephew, also named John Mellencamp, is a starter on IU's perennial top Top Ten soccer team, which is a seven-time NCAA champion, most recently in 2004.  http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/sports/m-soccer/mtt/mellencamp_john00.html

After lots of close calls, our first NCAA soccer title came in December of 1982 in a multiple overtime game win at Fort Lauderdale's Lockhart Stadium, which I was fortunate enough to attend because it coincided with IU's Christmas Break, a great bit of serendipity for me.
After the victory, after celebrate with my friends up in the stands and then down on the sidelines, we headed for the Sheraton Yankee Trader Hotel where the team was staying, where fans, players, coaches, school officials and parents and family partied long into the night.

Speaking of Hoosier soccer, since I haven't mentioned it previously, one of the great things about having the Big Ten Network on DirecTV is actually being able to watch IU soccer games, especially those at home at Armstrong Stadium, which is also home to The Little 500 Bike Race, a.k.a. "Little Five."  http://www.iub.edu/tour/cvrs4.shtml

Also making an appearance on this video is singer Karen Fairchild of Little Big Town.
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This article has a nice photo of John with his wife Elaine Irwin-Mellencamp, who is the popular face of Almay products, and whose TV ads. like her beautiful smile, are very hard to miss.

The Indianapolis Star
Mellencamp films new video at IU's Beck Chapel
February 17, 2009

and http://www.indystar.com/section/comment?&key=20090216.indystar.BG902160395.article.ENTERTAINMENT&s=a

After initially embedding the Mellencamp video here, I was running into lots of problems with the audio coming on -and staying on!- so I've chosen to replace it with a link to John's own website, where you can see it without any audio or video problems.

http://www.mellencamp.com/?module=news&news_item_id=353