Gil Reavill's Blog, page 3

Windy City Noir

Anyone who has glanced at Mafia Summit, my book on a watershed event in mob history, or at Aftermath, Inc., chronicling my time job-shadowing a trauma-scene clean-up team in the Chicago area, knows that I’m a sucker for the gangster past. Both my parents were from Chicago, and grew up during the time when the Outfit reigned supreme. The Chicago Tribune has released a stockpile of photographs from the days of Capone, O’Banion and Torrio, and The Atlantic’s CityLab has posted some of them online. The shots are superb. There’s a crust of mythology that has built up around Chicago’s mob, but here are unglamorized bulletins from the gritty reality. Worth checking out. They are collected in Gangsters & Grifters, by the Chicago Tribune staff (Agate Publishing, 2014).

Gangster moll and copper

 

A Long Time Coming, But A Change Has Come

In the midst of all the big news of the season–the Sony hack, Ferguson, Eric Garner, cops ambushed, the huge economic numbers–some of the biggest news might just have slipped by unnoticed. More than two thousand years of legal tradition was challenged and overturned in Argentina recently, when a great ape was declared a “non-human person” and granted a writ of habeas corpus. The name of Sandra, a Sumatran orangutan, ought to go down alongside the Magna Carta, Hammurabi and Solon (really, I’m serious) as a benchmark, not just of animal rights but for human progress before the bar.

From Thirteen Hollywood Apes:

The half-dozen orangutans the zoo kept were the old men of the jungle—jowly, massive, and Buddha-like. There were bonobos, too, one of the world’s largest captive populations of the least well known of the great apes. Whenever you caught the gaze of the creatures, they displayed an uncanny sense of having something there, some inner life, intelligent and deep.

That’s what her father had said: “Something there.”

Layla hadn’t said anything.

“Soul,” Eugene Remington had added.

Remington now felt her dad’s “something there” in the eyes of Angle the survivor ape.

Publication Day

Thirteen Hollywood Apes drops today. Available wherever fine e-books are sold.

Thirteen Hollywood Apes Playlist

Rooting around for songs for a 13HA playlist, I found that there are not many chimpanzee songs, a few gorilla songs and a whole lot of monkey songs. The distinction between the great apes (chimps, bonobos, orangutan, gorillas) and monkeys is one of the points that the characters in the book re-hash. So there probably shouldn’t be any monkey songs on this playlist, but it’d be a pretty short list if I didn’t include them. I didn’t go ape with this, I was more or less just monkeying around. Search Spotify for”Thirteen Hollywood Apes” to listen to this playlist (slightly modified from the list below).

THIRTEEN  HOLLYWOOD APES PLAYLIST

Another Postcard (Chimpanzee)            Barenaked Ladies

Apeman            The Kinks

The Monkey            Dave Bartholomew

King Kong            Big ‘T’ Tyler

Monkey 23            The Kills

One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show            Joe Tex

Les Singes            Jacques Brel

Monkey            Low

Monkey Man            The Rolling Stones

Monkey Man Blues            Charlie Kyle

Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse            David Lindley & Ry Cooder

The Monkees (Theme From)            The Monkees

Monkey On A String            Charlie Poole

Monkey to Man            Elvis Costello & The Imposters

King Kong            Tom Waits

Tweeter And The Monkey Man            Traveling Wilburys

Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey            The Beatles

Come Monkey With Me            Gino Washington

From Miss Emma Brawley            Rachael McShane, Mark Erelli & Krista Detor

Go-Go Gorilla            The Ideals

King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O            Chubby Parker & His Old Time Banjo

 

Rest Assured, Homo Sapiens, You Are Still Special Before the Law

A New York appeals court turned back a push to declare Tommy, a chimpanzee caged in Gloverville, NY, a person before the law, “recognized as a potential bearer of legal rights.” Steven Wise, the lawyer-founder for the Nonhuman Rights Project, pursued a writ of habeas corpus to free the ape. Read my op. ed. article about the issue here. Read the story about the appeals court decision here.

 In durance vile: Tommy, can you hear me?