I was worried when I saw Louis smoking in every single scene of that documentary, except on stage. He's insecure about his voice and yet chainsmokes through the day.
Anon 2: Are we sure this isn't another sabotage exercise? Louis is a humble guy but they've got him out there saying he feels like 'a fucking god' in his documentary and smoking cigarettes in every scene even in a lesson with a vocal coach. Solo Harries are already bitching and it just seems like too much.
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I thought the concern trolling of the first anon was bad, but the second anon may be in competition for one of the worst anons I've ever got.
1. Louis smokes. If you have a problem with that it is very much your problem. If you think it's somehow incomptaible with his job, then you know nothing about the history of touring musicians. Get a fucking grip.
2. The lack of media comprehension of the second one blows my mind. If you watched that and don't understand why they showed him saying he feels like a god when he got off stage in Barcelona - I don't think you can have understood any of the text or subtext of what you watched.
3. This is a fairly clear example of why the 'sabotage' arguments with Louis are completely reality disconnected. No, a probably very profitable, two hour livestream and accompanying free music festival isn't sabotage.
4. Louis and his career don't exist to make you feel superior to the people you're having fights with on the internet anon 2. You may dislike it when people say things they or you think are negative about Louis, but nobody doing anything worth doing lives a life free of criticism. If you give completely ridiculous views weight that's your problem, not mine and certainly not Louis'.
This saga continues! Brief break but I now have access to better internet and Fold3, and in a while, I’ll get unlimited access to Newspapers to stock up on Chicago Tribune articles.
Yes, sadly you have to pay extra to get the access to big-name newspapers even if it’s from the 40s and earlier. Sadly, I did not know that when I bought an Ancestry 6-month bundle.
At the moment I’m doing script work for turning this from being a written journal to a vlog. Or in other words, I’ve made my opening for the series and now need to get props.
Yikes. Not a ton of anxiety about being on camera (yes, sounds nuts) because there is a teaching aspect for genealogy which I am looking forward to. There are some research tips that are really useful for essays or genealogy that I’m looking forward to sharing.
Thanks to some wonderful gentlemen from the local veterans group, I have an idea of where to contact next to see if there are more military records. What I got from D.C. is mostly the transfer orders and a ton of medical files. Grandfather was never shot, he apparently had flat feet as debilitating as mine.
Fires in the place of record holding buildings is the curse of all researchers.
I’ve also had some luck with finding WWII books at my local library’s used book shop. Their copyright is the late 70s, me buying them is to compare the consistency to some DK books I bought a few summers ago and see which have new information that my other history books don’t have.
And I’m searching through the public domain again because I forgot to list a source I found that mentions Utah Beach and the specifics of what went on - which ties into a WWII documentary. Hopefully, I can find it for proper citations because that old book mentions grandfather’s troop and credits them for saving what tanks made it to the beach.
I’ll say it again, tall (6ish ft) American-Swede hunching over to fix a gear on a tank to make it go on sandy soil is a visual that I will never fail to find funny because how the heck did he not get shot? The men of my paternal family are way over 6 ft. Dad, before his back froze in a slump, was approximately 6 ft 5 or a lil taller. Some of my cousins are the same if not taller.
The other aspect that I might dig into is Sweden during WWII. I know a little bit from conversations with a family friend who’s a Swedish immigrant. Because great-grandpa returned to Sweden and owned a farm, hiding Jewish refugees is something I’d like to look into more. It’s an intriguing bit of history that I want to know more about.
There’s one more addition that I might consider adding for a conclusion to this whole series in video format. My main goal is to travel to the areas that are vital for the storytelling to this, and recent genealogy finds have brought to light a very humbling thing that I want to add if I manage to get more information about it.
I think the hardest things about researching my grandfather isn’t the lack of army records but the family drama it causes.
This is a little long and personal, but I’m open and healed enough to start talking about it.
My great aunt is very persistent in the belief that her sister (my gran) was a slut and that my dad wasn’t her husband’s son. Great Aunt’s hate for her sister bleeds over to me because I look enough like her that she’s forgotten that her sister is dead and blurts out things to me that are meant for gran.
What research I have done into grandfather, in my opinion, proves that he is my biological grandpa. There’s enough evidence to say that it is 99% true. My research and conversations with paternal cousins are proving this old woman wrong on a daily basis. Every time pictures are sent and I find pictures of grandfather and great-grandfather, you see the similarities are too close to deny. Heck, grandfather’s high school graduation picture revealed so many facial traits that dad and I have that it’s like, “Yep, not too many people have these.”
And holy shit it is intimidating.
Back to the previous point: Great aunt was always introduced as “grandma” because in the family drama she adopted my dad after gran died from cancer. When you’re a kid, like around 4 and then 8, and the person introduced as grandma says you’re a slut - that does not go away. Add to the fact the narcissistic tendencies and that is elderly person from hell.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will probably never see any inheritance from that side of the family - even from people that dad was hopeful that he’d be in their will. Me doing anything public about grandfather is the last nail in the coffin. And I am perfectly okay with that because kissing up to the matriarch isn’t worth the sacrifice to my mental health that it’d take.
I have countless other projects that I have in a folder titled “for once these people are dead” - meaning my gran’s two remaining siblings.
The only thing that I have inherited from that side of the family is great-gran’s letters. Organizing and publishing those will be more satisfying.
Cause see, the really messed up thing about all of this is gran and her siblings were born in China. Their parents were missionaries and some of the most fucked up people you will ever hear of.
My whole family’s story is what goes horribly wrong when missionaries have children in a hostile field (and what happens when a child becomes disabled while in the field). It’s a very long story, but to summarize some of it:
My gran and her twin were born during a time when the Chinese were rioting against the English. Mother and children were constantly abandoned because husband thought the calling from G-d was more important than family. And that pain is still felt generations later.
Yeah, some could say that grandfather has some fault but I think the only fault is that he fell in love with gran - a woman who was so centered on what she wanted and her own hurt that she couldn’t see others were hurting around her or because of her.
I’ve had a lifelong belief that what grandfather saw in WWII caused some form of mental illness in him. After all, family stories paint him as a wonderful violinist but his occupation was a cabby. Will I find it? Maybe not but I do know that grandfather was raised and lived in Skokie.
And most of us know the history of that place just from its name.
“Monsters are evangelical creatures for me. When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was… an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.” – Guillermo Del Toro.
And the period of me shutting up is over (Documentary update)
After yesterday’s news headlines, I had to do a big epic nope because the alternative was to sit in front of a camera and make EP#1 of my Docu-vlog be me giving an emotionally charged statement of how what I was seeing was not the future my grandfathers fought for. That what was on the news all weekend was not what my paternal grandfather envisioned for the future when he was preparing for the biggest suicide mission in US military history at the time.
For a moment, let’s just forget that I’ve spent most of my life immersed in WWII history, and three years obsessing about D-Day since finding out grandpa was there. Forget the fact that I’ve spent years formulating a documentary on Utah Beach and the road to D-Day, and let’s take a historical view on this:
We went to war against the ideology of the Nazis. Back then, no one was fully aware of the atrocities the Nazis did. Now, we do know. There are people alive today who survived, people alive who liberated those survivors. Examples were made of these men in courts and those who escaped were hunted down and brought before a court of law.
The generation who came before us always wishes for us, their descendants, to have a brighter future. As I said yesterday, “My grandfathers fought in WWII for this?”
For the past year, my documentary has been on hold because I’ve struggled with some extremely out of character levels of anger that’s blurred with betrayal. As I’ve probably mentioned before, my great-grandfather came to America, saw what was here, and decided it was better back in Sweden - and thus loaded up the whole family. My grandpa, 18 at the time, stayed for one summer and returned to the Skokie side of Chicago just in time to go to basic training with his friends.
I have first cousins who are Swedish, and after the shit storm known as Election 2016 I sat back and had a gut wrenching realization: grandpa keeping the family American actually put us in the situation where suffering is an unwanted friend you can’t seem to get rid of regardless of what you do.
I’m disabled, my dad was disabled. For me personally, my disability could’ve put me into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before turning 18. For dad, his disability meant that he was in chronic pain and therefore unable be in the workplace long. He went the “I am my own boss” route but his health got worse too quickly for there to be a profit from the business.
I’m a kid who had a Mr. Mom because the parent who was sickly stayed home with me. Don’t get me wrong, what I obtained from those years were valuable but the sorrow that the narrative could’ve been different - that mom and I currently wouldn’t be a few bad paychecks away from poverty - does make me angry. This isn’t the future grandpa wanted for his children and grandchildren.
And to add insult to injury, me finding out that most of the jobs I qualify for and would want to do in video game writing and copywriting are in Sweden makes the last one hundred years of my family’s personal history void. (Great-grandpa came to the USA in the spring of 1914.)
I look at what my cousins have access to and I do cry. Seriously, I have bawled my eyes out a couple of times because of this. I still fight back the urge to do the research to find out if grandpa ever bothered to get duel citizenship (cause for me that means I’d have a hope of qualifying for duel citizenship myself).
So, it has been really hard to work on my documentary while half of me wants to scream at the man I spent a lifetime yearning to know and have in my life. A man I wished for over a decade had lived so I had the real patriarch of the family to look up to instead of the adopted side of the family (that is so screwed up I hope no one else gets the bad luck of meeting them).
Part of me questions my sanity at the thought of doing a WWII documentary now with the news headlines we get every single day. But yesterday made me realize that now is the right moment to do this daring project.
While I’m waiting on some medical stuff before recording the first vlog of the documentary, I am doing prep work with scripts and bonus vids for researching WWII genealogy. (As me researching found lots of children/grandchildren of WWII vets making posts on forums to find out about their person’s experience, so I’ll be doing lots of things to watch for those who want to know more.)
Michael Moore and many others said, “be the satire army.” I’m joining up for the historian army by doing this.
Whoever was handling the school's Twitter feed last night is like a devil on my shoulder. In other news, I have script one of the "live blogging/video diary of a documentary" started.
