Big Mike: The Shows Go On
I’ve read a lot of crap on the Internet. You have too.
The Internet is the great, quasi-free printing press of the 21st Century. Anybody who knows how to read and write can become an instant publisher.
Unfortunately, too many of the people who publish in this electron universe don’t know how to read and write.
When you come to The Third City, you can be sure that Benny Jay, Milo (Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer), and the above-signed big keypounding lug know how to read and write. And we’ve never, ever served up a plate of crap.
Benny Jay and I started this crazy thing nearly three years ago. November of 2008, to be a little more exact. At first, we didn’t know what the hell we were going to be. We tried on personas and styles like teenagers in the fitting rooms at Forever 21.
If I recall correctly, at one point I was thinking of running a serial advice column for forlorn Cubs fans.
By and by, Benny Jay and I found our voices. Then Milo came aboard and the threesome was complete. For the next few years you could be sure to read quality writing in these precincts six days a week. On the seventh day, the writers rested and Chicago’s finest photojournalist, Jon Randolph, took over.
It seemed as though we could go on forever.
And maybe The Third City will. But I won’t be part of it.
The world has been shocked by breakups before. Lennon and McCartney (and Lenin and Stalin), Martin and Lewis, Schwarzenegger and Shriver, Bachmann and sanity — the list goes on. Where this schism ranks on that august list is for the historians to decide.
But for our own good as well as the good of this communications colossus, I’ve decided to pack up my keyboard and clack it elsewhere.
When I got antsy about where The Third City was headed and began to ponder pulling away, I confided to The Loved One that I was terribly sad about the strife it all was causing my two partners, colleagues, and good friends. She advised me not to take it so hard; people who worked with Mother Teresa probably got into fights with her.
And that was the hell of it. Benny Jay and I had never exchanged a harsh word in our 30-year-long friendship until we began clashing over Third City issues.
Now, I’d better clear out of here before we strangle each other.
See, Benny Jay, Milo, and I are three stubborn, hard-headed old goats. That’s part of what makes our writing compelling. That’s what has led to this tempest in a cyber-teapot.
It doesn’t do anybody a bit of good for us to air out our dirty laundry here. Perhaps someday after we’ve become world renowned blogging tycoons we can each pen tell-all memoirs and join the ranks of other famous literary feudists.
For now, let it suffice for us to say we’re parting ways due to those reliable old “creative differences.”
All I know is, there’s no better urban issues journalist in this town than Benny Jay. Former mayor Richie Daley probably counts not having to face Benny’s weekly Chicago Reader broadsides as one of the two or three best things about retirement. And Milo might not be Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer much longer. Thanks to his finely-honed ear for dialogue, his wit, and his ability to draw word pictures, he’s on the fast track to becoming Chicago‘s Greatest Writer.
As for me, I aim to take over this little South Central Indiana town. The Loved One and I are starting what can only be described as Bloomington’s own Third City. Only it won’t be called The Third City. We’re working on the name thing at this very moment.
One little problem: Bloomington doesn’t even rank in the 2010 US Census list of the 275 largest cities. I mean, we’re far behind even those bustling metropolises of Centennial, Colorado and Temecula, California.
Well, we’ll be the big fish in the tiniest of ponds. And I refuse to name us The Three-Hundred Eighty-Ninth City.
What we will be is a daily magazine tying in the cultural, political, and arts communities of a damned exciting, reasonably cosmopolitan college town. There’ll be regular blog posts by this key pounder, a slew of guest bloggers, opinion polls, podcasts, issue commentary threads, music, video, two-dimensional art, time arts performances, poetry, fiction, and anything else I care to jam into the pages of…, well, you’ll be the second person to know after I figure it out.
We’ve already begun preliminary discussions with Peter LoPilato over at The Ryder magazine to set up reciprocal content sharing and other innovative features.
If you thought I was a trouble maker at The Third City, wait’ll you see the hornets nest I stir when I begin railing against the evils and hypocrisy of college sports in a burgh where the Indiana Hoosiers are revered as gods.
The shows must go on.
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Big Mike: The Chief Hits 90
The whole mess of Glab/Parello scoundrels, wastrels, beggars, borrowers, and stealers is gathering Saturday afternoon in the western suburbs to celebrate Sue Glab’s 90th birthday.
I call her The Chief.
She’s my mother. Born Susan Mary Parello in 1921. The nurses only put down the name Susan because they couldn’t make head or tail out of the Italian name Vince and Anna Parello really wanted to hang on her. That would be Asunta, pronounced ah-SOON-tah, for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Parellos started their Chicago brood in Little Sicily near Grand and Ogden. When Ma was a little girl, the family moved to the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood. There she met a Polish kid named Joe Glab. She was 16. They eloped to Indiana. She buried the old man in 1995.
Ninety freakin’ years old. Can you imagine?
I don’t even know if I want to live to 90. I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to run around at night, chase women, drink till all hours, smoke like a chimney, then go out the next afternoon and play softball in Lincoln Park at Addison Street at that age.
I know I won’t be able to do these things when I’m 90 because I can’t do them now. Haven’t done them for a good ten or fifteen years. I don’t guess I’ll experience some second wind within the next few decades on my way to that big birthday.
In fact, the cardiologist’s office called me the other day to report that my last echocardiogram indicated the old chest pump is getting even creakier than it already is. Great. Got an appointment with him on the second so we can strategize.
I’ve got my fingers crossed he won’t tell me he wants to crack me open like a lobster, to borrow a line from our own Milo, Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer. See, I’ve got Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), the genetic condition that took the life of basketball stars Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis and continues to strike young athletes down to this day.
It’s a weird disease that usually becomes known to the young sufferer’s family only when he or she suddenly collapses and dies on a basketball court or football field. The young sufferer, of course, hits the wood floor or the green grass without ever having known of the time bomb within.
If you’re lucky enough, as I was, not to have died young, HCM makes itself known around middle age. Suddenly, you find yourself losing your breath after the simplest exertions. Before you know it, you can’t walk a quarter of a block or climb a flight of stairs without feeling as if you’ll pass out. Sometimes you do.
Even though I received an ethanol ablation in 2007, my heart still is only a fraction as good as it once was. And it’s still a ticking time bomb. The electrical signals coursing through my jumbled heart muscle cells could at any time go wild, sending me into fibrillation. Should that happen this afternoon, for instance, I’ll be able to have dinner with Mark Twain, George Harrison, Richard Feynman, and Emilie du Châtelet tonight.
I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed ever since I was diagnosed, back in 2003. Of all the things I can worry about, I’ve chosen to lose sleep over the possibility that I’ll turn in my timecard before my mother does.
To paraphrase another line, this one from “Seinfeld”‘s George Costanza, I hope Ma goes lo-o-ong before I do.
So far so good. Now Sue Glab is almost 90.
You know, 90 is really, really old. When I was a kid, I thought 12-year-olds were old. Then when I started hanging out at dance and punk clubs when I was 21, I’d see couples who were 30 or so and think What are those old fools doing out on the dance floor?
Ma has always had a habit of remarking when anybody dies, be they 35, 67, or 77: “Such a shame; and he was so young.”
I’d think, What the hell is she talking about? A 67-year-old is not young.
But to Ma, everybody who’s a day younger than she is, is young.
Now, just about everybody on Earth is at least a day younger than she is.
Even Ma knows enough not to say a 90-year-old who keels over dead is young.
Somehow little Susie Parello, later Glab, has made it through 10 spins shy of a century. Yow.
That’s a lot of heartache and disappointment. And a bit of triumph here and there.
She doesn’t need to suffer the loss of the likes of me. Losing a kid, I understand, is the worst fate a parent can experience. She’s already destined to cash in her chips bearing another great grief. If she lives to be 137 her beloved Cubs still will not have won the World Series. One tragedy is enough in anybody’s life.
So far I’m holding up my end of the deal. And The Chief just keeps rolling along.
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Big Mike: My Vote Is Worth A Hundred Bucks
The 2012 presidential election, incredibly, already is in full swing.
Those of us who don’t buy the Mayan end-of-the-world scenario are actually making plans for the future.
Image From Krishna.org. Even The Krishnas Think This Is Weird.
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I fully anticipate being around for the next few years, barring setbacks due to the assorted maladies that afflict me at this time. Hell, there may even be two or three new physiological bugbears to be discovered in this massive temple I call my body.
Still, I’m making my own plans for all the tomorrows I’m certain will come. One of them is deciding who I’ll vote for in 15 months.
But really it’s no decision at all. I volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign when I was in Kentucky in 2008. When he won the election I was as giddy as if the Cubs had won the National League pennant.
The ensuing three and three quarters years have tempered my glee, of course. Barack Obama has turned out to be, well, precisely what he was when he was an Illinois State Senator and then a United States Senator. That is, a safe and comfy center-rightist who always knew which side his bread was buttered on.
The Smart Politician Knows
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The Change We Can Believe In turned out to be, with a few exceptions, only the skin color of our dear leader.
Which was enough for me to jump for joy when Obama beat John McCain. And to a large extent, it’s still enough.
As long as the brown man sleeping in the White House isn’t Idi Amin or Charles Taylor he’s got my vote, considering the legacy any of the white aspirants for federal room and board must lug into office. The presence of Barack Obama in the Oval Office puts historical plot points like the Indian holocaust and slavery just that much further in the rear view mirror.
The unofficially depressed economy and Congressional gridlock, though, have combined to make Obama’s reelection a less-than sure thing, as the oddsmakers might put it.
In fact, one international oddsmaker says Obama is a 4/7 favorite to cop the 2012 stakes. This same fellow, though, had the sitting president at 2/5 after the American posse bagged Osama bin Laden.
So, clearly, the smart money will rollercoaster depending on national and world events up to the moment the polls close next year.
Bodog Sports has Obama at -200 for reelection with his closest challengers, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, at +1000 for their respective first-term chances. Here’s Bodog’s complete line on the 2012 race:
So we can quibble over precise probabilities but it appears that money can be made betting on Obama.
I’ve got a c-note on the line.
Baby Needs A New Pair Of Shoes
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My old pal from Chicago, the radical attorney Jerry Boyle, isn’t so sure. No one outside of the rabid crypto-racists and paranoiacs of the Me Party right is more anti-Obama than Jerry Boyle. He characterizes the president as a “traitor,” mainly because Obama seems more comfortable being counseled by former Goldman Sachs executives than the progressives who worked so hard to put him in office.
I admit I’d be a hell of a lot happier throwing my support (and dough) behind, say, a Dennis Kucinich campaign. My version of political bliss would include the Ohio congressman as the nation’s boss with Noam Chomsky as his closest advisor and Paul Krugman in charge of the Treasury Department. But I’m far enough from delusional to grasp that far lefties and radicals have as much chance of winning in this country as TV reality show stars. Wait…, what am I saying?
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Anyway, you take what you can get and pretty much every time since I began voting in presidential elections back in 1976, I’ve held my nose when I pulled the lever, checked the box, or touched the screen.
Guys like Jerry Boyle, though, loathe holding their noses. Based on my read of his Facebook posts, Jerry seems unlikely to cast even a tepid electoral endorsement of Obama in 2012. He’s actually calling for folks to actively work for Obama’s defeat. Jerry’s gone so far as to suggest a vote for a Republican — any Republican — might be better than one for Obama. Now before those who know him pass out, understand that Jerry Boyle’s being cunning when he suggests this. Put a Republican in office, he figures, and let him preside over the inevitable collapse of the economy.
Let The Republicans Take The Heat
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Which, I guess, is the political equivalent of cutting one’s throat to spite one’s neck.
So I proposed a simple hundred-dollar bet to Jerry the other day. If Obama wins, I win. Jerry has the rest of the field.
Jerry happily took the bet. But he added that the winnings must go to an organization or charity of our mutual choice. I proposed the ACLU and Jerry jumped at it.
Nothing like putting a dollar value on democracy.
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Big Mike: Love Becomes Political
We gathered in the Michigan Room of the University Club. It was hushed, in direct contract to the hubbub across Michigan Avenue, where kids splashed through the Millennium Park fountain.
I wished I could have been any place other than this chapel devoted to Chicago’s old wealth, with its mahogany appointments, its hand-painted ceiling portraying the medieval hunt, its stone fireplace, and the oil painting of that sad-eyed pal of mine set up prominently at the front of the room, flanked by a lectern on one side and chamber musicians on the other.
And no, I wasn’t feeling uncomfortable because of my recently rekindled radicalism wherein I sniff righteously at any and all trappings of the rich. Naw. I can do that another time. Not now.
Now I want to tell you about the memorial for Tim Imse I blew into the Windy City for last night. It was a quickie trip. A stealth trip. In and out.
They played music for us. Schubert and William Byrd. Saint-Saens and John Rutter. Albert Hay Malotte and Bach. Tim would have loved that.
They said kind words about him. Tim would have rolled his eyes and given a little kick at the carpeting. He would have loved that, too.
I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. That is until I looked at Tim’s partner, David, that cuddly old bear. He was just putting on a pair of half-glasses to see where we were in the program. Then I saw his shoulders shudder.
That’s when I started to cry. And for a hot minute, it felt as though I’d never stop. The Loved One put her hand on one shoulder. Little Mikey put his hand on the other.
They couldn’t fool me, though. I glanced at each of them. Their cheeks were glistening as well.
Little Mikey, Tim and I. We were roommates in East Pilsen in some combination or another from the summer of 2001 through — what was it now? — 2003? 2004?
Somewhere along the line, the three of us found our partners. Little Mikey, the big, hairy panda with a prayer from the Torah tattooed on his chest, found Ati, the Persian beauty with the elegant neck. They eventually got married. Might not have happened had Tim not kicked Little Mikey in the ass.
Little Mikey was mooning over Ati, a co-worker at his architecture firm. Little Mikey was never a Romeo. Sometimes it seemed as though he was more comfortable mooning than romancing. But Tim had just recently discovered how important — how vital! — it was to act. To move. To get what he needed.
He’d spent far too many years pretending he wasn’t gay.
Then — like that! — he came out. Well, “like that” to us. For him it was long, arduous process.
Anyway, Tim told Little Mikey he should go up to Ati and ask her out this very damned minute. If he (Little Mikey) didn’t, Tim warned, he (Tim) just might do it himself. Yeah, that’s right!
It was Tim who tipped us off to Ati’s elegant neck. From a profile, she looked like a portrait of Cleopatra. Tim may have at last realized he loved men, but he still could appreciate a beautiful woman.
So Little Mikey asked Ati out. She hesitated at first, then said yes. A couple of years later, they were married.
Around the same time, I met The Loved One. And whaddya know? A few years later, she became Mrs. Big Mike.
And Tim. Tim met a man. Then another. Two successive impetuous, intense relationships. The first guy had a roving eye. He broke Tim’s heart too many times until Tim finally wised up and told him to go to hell. The other guy was as mad as a hatter. Bubbling over with unfocused energy, this second guy and Tim fought tooth and nail. I can’t pin down exactly how many times Tim shouted into the phone, “I hate you! I never want to see you again.” He’d swear that he and the second guy were kaput. Then, just as regularly, I’d see the two of them cooing and canoodling in a booth somewhere. Sheesh.
Tim at last gave that second guy the boot as well.
One day, Tim wandered into a dimly lit joint on State Street just north of the river and met David. By the end of the night they were holding hands like teenagers.
And for the rest of Tim’s life he was happy.
Our little roommate troika was broken up. That old gang of mine. We lucky few…, and all that.
And now, David’s shoulders shuddered again.
You know, I promised I wasn’t going to get political here. I wasn’t going to climb on my soapbox and rant against the greedy rich and beatify the dear old poor. David and Tim’s parents, Charlotte and Bob, are far too noble and decent for that. So they’ve made a pile of dough. They earned it. I don’t have a beef with people who make money honestly. Sometimes I forget that now that the opening rounds of the coming class warfare are being fired.
But I lied. I am going to get political. From now on, any son of a bitch who tells me that homosexuals don’t deserve to marry each other, that they’re somehow sick or perverted or sinful, that rights shouldn’t be granted them, and all the rest of the hateful, ugly claptrap too many people are pissing our way, I’m going to think about David’s shoulders shuddering.
And then I’m going to tell those big mouths they can kiss my fat ass.
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Big Mike: Chris Hedges And The Coming Virus
Chris Hedges could have been on top of the world if only he’d learned to keep his mouth shut.
Hedges
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He’d been a reporter for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the Dallas Morning News. He’d been a foreign correspondent for a couple of decades. He covered wars in El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, and that little dust up between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He’d won a Pulitzer Prize. He’d written several books and by the spring of 2003 was being asked to give commencement addresses at colleges and universities.
By now, Hedges should have had millions in his bank account. He should have been a fixture on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. He should have been toasting and roasting with Michelle Obama, Tim Geithner, Donald Trump, and Alan Greenspan. Hedges and Katie Couric and Keith Olbermann and Ann Coulter could have started their own little cottage industry, renting themselves out for corporate meetings, conventions, and rallies just to tell the assembled throngs what it’s like to rub shoulders with the most powerful people on this planet.
NBC Reporter Andrea Mitchell And Her Husband Alan Greenspan
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But none of these things has come true.
Chris Hedges, sadly for him and his money manager, has a big mouth.
Well, sadly for his money manager. Hedges, I’ll bet, is happy he has a big mouth. And the rest of us are lucky.
See, back in that spring of 2003, when Hedges was on top of the world and addressing graduating classes, this holy land was just embarking on one of its ugliest, most immoral undertakings since slavery and the Indian holocaust. George W. Bush and his pack of lickspittlers and blow job artists had just bamboozled the Great United States, Inc. and much of the rest of the world into war in Iraq.
“Boys, We Gotta Sell This War Now. Any Ideas?“
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Chris Hedges knew the war was a fraud from the start. It took the rest of us years to come to that conclusion. Maybe he had an edge on us.
Hedges early on possessed a strong moral compass. He studied at Harvard Divinity School and later would go on to be awarded an honorary doctorate from a noted Unitarian Universalist seminary. He has cited the moralist/ethicist authors George Orwell, Samuel Johnson, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and C. Wright Mills for influencing him. He has also given the religious philosophers Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr credit for helping him, through their writings, become the thinking man he is.
Orwell
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He has a deep faith in god. He believes strongly in the concepts of right and wrong.
And Bushey Boy’s Iraq adventure, in Hedges’ view, was dead wrong. One May day eight years ago, Hedges told the graduating class of Rockford College just what he though of that foray. He said: “We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security.”
You may remember the prevailing mood in the spring of 2003. Our fellow citizens wanted to leap into Iraq to kick the living shit out of Saddam Hussein. Hell, some people would have volunteered to swim across the Atlantic to wrap their fingers around his filthy neck. The man was readying nuclear bombs to hurl across the sea at us. New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and even Rockford, Illinois — they all were soon to be vulnerable to this madman’s evil designs.
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The President of the United States of America said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
That was the pièce de résistance in Little George’s scheme to rally us around his coming war.
So when Hedges said what he said in Rockford, his audience reacted. They jeered. They booed. They tried to shout him down. Several students cut off his microphone. A few rushed the stage. Hedges escaped with the aid of security guards.
And then his employer, the New York Times, one of the biggest cheerleaders for Bush’s sick little war, sent out a press release implying Hedges was not only wrong, he was unprofessional. He had, the deep thinkers at the Times said, undermined the public’s trust in the august paper. He had, the statement continued, violated the sacred vow of impartiality that our sainted journalists must take.
Not much later, Chris Hedges and the New York Times agreed to part ways. Neither party seemed terribly unhappy about the split.
Then again, as I say, Chris Hedges’ money manager might have slapped his own forehead when he heard the news. To be fair, since then Hedges seems to have found ways to keep the refrigerator stocked. He has churned out more books with clear, concise, biting titles like “Empire of Illusion.” He’s a senior fellow at the Nation Institute.
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But he’s never been invited to don a tuxedo and mingle with the rich and powerful in Washington ballrooms. He hasn’t whispered in the ear of cabinet secretaries nor have powerful CEOs confided in him. A lot of journalists today would consider that evidence he’s not all that great a journalist anymore.
Chris Hedges has a different definition of journalism. Here’s what he has to say about that:
I keep my distance from the powerful. I distrust all sources of power regardless of their ideological orientation. I do not want to be their friend. I do not want to advise them or be part of their inner circle…. I made a conscious choice to report from the developing world and war zones during most of my career. What I witnessed rarely matched the version of events spun out for the media courtiers in Washington by the power elite. As a foreign correspondent I often fought my own Washington bureau, where reporters in suits were being fed a partial version of reality and had a vested interest in reporting it as fact. The longer reporters spent in Washington, the more they looked, sounded, and acted like the power brokers they covered. — from the introduction to “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”
The coming years may be the most important and traumatic in our lifetimes. The financial system is teetering on the edge. The social fabric is breaking down in any number of hot spots around the world. The old is being swept out. The young and the angry are taking to the streets. Riots in London. The Arab Spring. Labor unrest in China. Here’s what Chris Hedges has to say about that:
Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right wing backlash…. (The unemployed and the poor) have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not, surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. — from “Death of the Liberal Class.”
London Calling
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Has he hit the nail on the head again? Consider this: Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are considered serious candidates for the presidency of the United States. Their putative planks are nothing more than promises of magic, miracles, and a phoney-baloney utopian Christian nation.
Lady Messiahs?
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The revolutionary spirit in the Middle East and the rampaging of disaffected youth in England just may spread to these shores. It only took the killing of a civilian by a cop in London to set the blaze. Hell, the killing of civilians by cops in Chicago is only slightly less common than the Cubs winning a ballgame. This year 42 civilians have been shot by officers of the Chicago Police Department. Sixteen have been killed. (The Cubs, as of this writing, have won a grand total of 49 games.)
Will the next killing be the trigger? How will the people of this holy land react if riots break out here? Which presidential candidate will promise peace and calm through magic, miracles, and a fictional Utopian Christian nation?
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Big Mike: Crash? What Crash?
The week just past is one I’d like to forget. A dear, longtime friend died after a brief but vicious bout with cancer. And then another even dearer, longer-time friend and I had words for the first time ever.
Yes, Benny Jay and I had a fight.
The harrumphing between the two of us threatened to turn into a permanent Cold War. In fact, suggestions were made that some of the issues causing us to speak crisply to each other just might cause us to go our separate ways. I don’t mind saying that prospect scared the living bejesus out of me.
As if my personal problems weren’t enough, this holy land’s economy teeters on the brink of catastrophe. After the Tea Bagging, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-social-safety-net fetishists pushed the Great United States, Inc. to nearly defaulting on its obligations and then Standard & Poors micturated over the nation’s credit rating, our collective stocks, bonds and dollars may in short order become as valued as road kill — which, by the way, many of us just may be compelled to gain a taste for over the next few years.
“Set The Table, Hon, I’m Bringin’ Home Dinner!”
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Now, the melee between my dear old friend and me certainly won’t devolve into physical violence. A tussle between the two of us would be, to borrow a characterization from the old National Lampoon, like a brawl between Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. I would suffer a bent hat brim while Benny Jay would be forced to recuperate from a torn hankie.
The Noted Brawler
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This global economy mess, though, promises to be far more destructive. Some are even saying the current dust-up between political ideologues, investors and economists could potentially be the swan song of capitalism. (Well, okay, I’m saying it — although there’ve got to be others who agree with me.)
Anyway, I’m hoping with all my heart that Benny Jay and I get over our tiff and start bear-hugging each other for the sheer joy of it again soon. As for the battle between unfettered capitalists and the subset of humanity that doesn’t fly private jets or conjure billion-dollar business deals out of thin air, I hope the battle is now joined.
Capitalism, as it’s been defined since the beginning of the Age of Reagan and through the terms of four successive presidents has done nothing but make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Hell, I say let’s get ready to man the barricades sooner rather than later. It’s time for change — and not Barak Obama’s phony-baloney change.
Oh, and not — certainly, positively, indisputably not! — the psycho, crypto-racist, fundamentalist Christian, homophobic, anti-sex, Me Party version of change either.
So, what I’m saying is I’m pretty down right now. Throw in the historic dry and hot July South Central Indiana just experienced (being forced to stay inside in the air conditioning for this long has resulted in a second cabin fever this calendar year) and the pathetic state of the Chicago Cubs and your too-often unhumble correspondent has been reduced to a morose, cranky bear.
So, allow me to pretend things are dreamy, okay? Let me dwell for a moment on happy topics.
What I’m going to do is wallow in books, movies, songs, etc. that have brought me nothing but happiness over the years. One has to fight the sadness as well as the madness, after all. Here are some of my favorite things that I’ll be watching, listening to, and escaping from this mean old world through over the next few days:
The movie, “An American in Paris.” Gene Kelly’s performance in the Gershwin classic establishes him as one of the finest athletes of the 20th Century. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean. Every time I see Kelly and the delightful Leslie Caron run down the grand staircase hand in hand at the end of the movie, I almost believe love is magical again.
Gene Kelly Turned His Body Into A Work Of Art
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The book, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” I’ve read it three dozen times, easily, already. I hope to read it three dozen times more before I turn in my timecard.
Audrey Hepburn As Holly Golightly
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The album, “What’s Going On?” Marvin Gaye’s 1971 opus was brilliant, probably my pick as the best record of the last century. True, he eventually sunk to drug-addled depths of violence and self-centeredness, but when confronted with Bill Veeck‘s famous choice between tarnished genius and simon-pure mediocrity, I’ll always go with genius.
Marvin
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Bertie and Jeeves. PG Wodehouse’s stories about the last of London’s idle rich and his ingenious valet have helped me get to sleep for decades. And trust me, getting me to sleep is no small task. Between my panoply of nightmares, phobias, neuroses, my bad back, sleep apnea and occasional bouts of tinnitus, any time I get even two hours straight of wood-sawing is worth all my wordly goods including my books, movies and music.
Hugh Laurie & Stephen Fry As Bertie & Jeeves
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Astrud Gilberto’s Compact Jazz compilation. Her voice and Stan Getz’s equally ethereal sax transport me to a sunny street in downtown Rio de Janiero or a Brazilian beach at dusk every time I hear them together.
Heloísa Pinheiro, The Inspiration For The Girl From Ipanema
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Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Brian Eno invented ambient music. And this seminal work might still be the best of that genre.
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Anything by The Rascals. They were, to borrow a phrase from the great Don Cornelius, the definitive blue-eyed soul brothers. Their R&B-infused ’60s pop never fails to make my heart soar.
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The Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press. These mini-books are small enough to fit into your back pocket but they explicate the basics of everything from Nuclear Power to Advertising and from Cosmology to Madness. If there’s ever a fire in my house, I grab my laptop first and my collection of OUP VSIs second. The Loved One, I trust, will round up Steve the Dog and the cats, Boutros and Terra.
Steve The Dog
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Sticking with science, I just might value Natalie Angier’s “The Canon” as much as my VSI collection. The science writer for the New York Times, Angier lays out what we humans think we know about geology, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and others in a bright, clear, breezy style. If Angier isn’t the best science writer around, then Mary Roach is. I’ll probably re-read her “Bonk” (about human sexuality), “Stiff” (about what happens to us when we die), and “Packing for Mars” (about the difficulties in getting astronauts to our planetary neighbor.)
Mary Roach
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Then, I suppose, I’ll stick “Out of the Past” in my DVD drive. Has anybody ever looked better smoking a cigarette while wearing a trench coat than Robert Mitchum? This film noir classic touches on the very, very simple topics of making a living and falling in love — and the ways these two pursuits can get a person into the deepest of troubles.
Kirk Douglas & Robert Mitchum As Whit Sterling & Jeff Bailey
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So, it looks like I’ve got my next week or three planned out. I’m gonna get on these things as soon as I hit Publish. Tomorrow promises to bring us the most traumatic stock market crash any of us has ever seen. I hope those Tea Bagging motherfuckers enjoy it.
Me? I’ll be too busy to notice the carnage.
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Big Mike: Smart Money, Dumb Colleges
All I want to know is when did this holy land’s colleges and universities become nothing more than vocational schools?
All my life growing up I operated under what now seems to be the quaint impression that kids went to college to learn stuff. And by learning stuff, they’d become better human beings, more complete thinkers, analysts rather than reactors.
“Maybe We Can Go Up To My Room And Study Physiques.”
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They’d be exposed to different modes of thought, different-colored people, visitors from the other side of the world, Jews, Muslims, born-again Christians, Democrats, Republicans, homosexuals, S&M aficionados, chess masters, future pro-football players, neurobiologists, anthropologists, thespians, opera singers, library scientists, jazz historians, logicians, folklorists, and even — god forbid — English majors.
They’d become well-rounded.
“Okay Everybody, Let’s Learn About The Physics Of A Billyclub Crashing Into Your Skull!”
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Which seemed to this idealistic dope to be a good enough reason to spend some $10,000 of Ma and Pa’s hard-earned dough (at the time).
And the reason I accepted this is because I believed that a human’s greatest accomplishment was to become smart.
Doctors, I thought, were smart. Lawyers. Newspaper columnists. Electrical engineers. Architects. All smart guys and gals.
And they all went to college.
Smart
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My thinking was, smart came first and money followed.
I remember my mother once marveling at the dinner table about something she’d heard from her sister on the phone that afternoon. Aunt Teresa, it seemed, had a neighbor who had a PhD in something, Early American Literature, maybe, and — oh my god, get this! — he was driving a cab!
My brother Joey and I literally stopped eating. We gaped at her. Dad, naturally, continued to shovel it in; he’d long before stopped listening to Ma under any circumstances.
Ma nodded her head. “Yeah,” she said, “it happens.”
Joey and I were dumbfounded. The point is, we assumed smart people could make a respectable living no matter what they were smart in.
That, of course, was long before the United States of America became the Great United States, Inc. As far back as the Age of Reagan, making a respectable living was becoming a laughably unambitious goal. By the mid-2000′s anybody who didn’t own a McMansion was a loser.
Fit For A Phony King
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As citizens of this blessed nation, our roles have been clearly defined. We are to work ceaselessly to amass as much money as possible so we can spend it all — and even that which we haven’t yet earned — on cheap, flashy shit.
There were titanic flat-screen TVs in the 90s, Hummers in the 00s, and now, in the teens, there are…, well, soup kitchens and bread lines. Oops.
“Man, My New TV’s Too Big To Fit Inside The House!”
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Well, there’ll be a recovery one day.
Before you know it, we’ll all be flush again and there’ll be some other shiny, worthless crap we’ll all have to buy.
Whatever money we’ll have in our pockets or credit we’ll have to draw on will be the result of going to college and picking the absolute right major that’ll be in demand after we graduate.
I wonder if any university offers a major in Gas Station/Convenience Store Midnight Shift Science.
Anyway, nobody goes to school to become smart anymore, save for the few geeks who are obsessed with the Beat Writers, say, or the genome of the okapi.
Here’s proof. A CNN reporter went to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to ask kids what they knew about American history. He did this because he’d just read a report issued by the National Center for Education Statistics entitled, “The Nation’s Report Card: U.S. History 2010.” The report suggests that fewer than one fifth of high school and elementary school students know much about American history.
“Um, Uh, Lincoln? He Invented That Luxury Car, Right?”
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The headline of the CNN piece was “If Students Fail History, Does It Matter?” After laying out the depressing results of the study, the reporter writes that history teachers and college professors are tut-tutting from sea to shining sea. But then, in that weird way that corporate journalists like to present “the other side,” the author writes, “Some wonder whether schools should focus on history at all, when the ability to recall historic facts or themes might not help students land certain jobs later on.”
Which, I suppose, makes sense in some perverse world. It’s hard to imagine the night shift clerk at my local Circle K would need to know much about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act controversy back in 1930. Even if it was the most significant thing to happen that year.
After all, when we get out of this Great Recession (don’t believe what the economists say — too many people are slipping under the poverty line and/or are out of work for this to be a recovery in any sense of the word save for big investors and bankers who are making scads of dough) we’ll have some more money to spend on worthless crap. Again, that is our clearly defined role.
(And, by the way, the latest Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog still offers a dizzying array of deranged crap we can blow our future dollars on. When this recession ends, believe me, I’ll be micturating my cash away on a Gyroscopic Electric Unicycle for $1800 or the Hands-Free Hair Rejuvenator for $699.96. It doesn’t even matter that I don’t have hair anymore.)
Rejuvenate Your Hair (Whatever The Hell That Means)
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We Americans are very practical. We figure, since being smart doesn’t make you a dollar anymore, why be smart?
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Guest Blogger:
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Candyman. Written by Benny Jay. Read by Joel Reitsma, Lorenzo Toia, Ray Jay 3000, Andy Orscheln and No Blaise. Produced by Jus Buckingham of King Conundrum Productions.
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