The winters are like a preview of the center of hell. The newspapers are in straits. The average person on the street is just 85 percent as attractive as the average New Yorker. It's a sprawling spill of a grid, with nothing resembling a hill or mountain to keep it from tumbling out, out, ever outward. But oh, Chicago is still one bumpin' little cow town, and without peer as a summer city. And the folks I know here are some solid sonsabitches.
Red Line: the Harrison stop, July 10, 2010

On Tuesday a journalism instructor friend of mine asked me to address a class of graduate students in the magazine program at Medill. This was funny, actually, because while I knew he wanted me to say a few words to the group at some point, I didn't know until I arrived at the office fresh off a Blue Line trip from O'Hare that he expected me to speak, uh, right then. With enough prep time to print out a few stories (on a South Florida one-time gambling wheeler-dealer, on a dark documentarian of the club-kid thug life, and on a self-immolating father of a slain Marine) from which to quote, I managed to fill about an hour of their time.
Boston Library: shot June 24, 2010The topic was the fate of alt-weeklies at a time when weeklies and dailies alike are shrinking, fading and getting gutted. Chicago has seen this like few other cities: The third-largest city in the United States now has two daily papers that you could finish reading between the “ah” and the “choo” in your average sneeze. The students are charged with re-imagining the Reader, a free weekly that 10 years ago was a four-section broadsheet, chockablock with listings and classifieds, thick enough any given week to choke a camel; these days, it's a slender tabloid hoping just to keep its tiny head above water.

To summarize my ramblings from Tuesday, I believe I said now would be a great time to be a journalist, especially a quote-unquote alternative reporter (which is really nothing less than a locally focused magazine writer), if we didn't have bills to pay. So anemic now are the dailies that they can't help but default on their Fourth Estate duties; I was told Tuesday that the Chicago Tribune, the World's Greatest Newspaper of WGN fame, does not have a full-time reporter covering Chicago public schools. That's a district of 400,000 students and a $5.3 billion budget, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Niger. There simply are not enough hands on deck. Anyone aspiring to find a great story could do worse than stake out a department in your average major metropolitan or state government and simply go spelunking. You're bound to find something.

Another point: The writing in a weekly shouldn't sound like a daily. A daily that fashions itself a “family paper” will necessarily write to adults as though they are children. This analogy came to mind: Be the HBO to their ABC or CBS. Begin with astonishing reportage, then write it as though writing is an ongoing experiment (which it is, blessedly). Undertake in your writing the mission of literature, which poet Donald Hall described this way:

When we read great literature, something changes in us that stays changed. … If literature is nebulous or inexact; if it is impossible to determine, with scientific precision, the value or the meaning of a work of art, this inexactness is the price literature pays for representing humanity. Human beings themselves, in their feelings and thoughts, in the wanderings of their short lives, are ambiguous, ambivalent, shifting mixtures of permanence and change, direction and disorder. Because literature is true to the complexities of human feeling, different people will read the same work with different responses. Literary art will sometimes affirm that opposite things are true because they are. (Emphasis the author's.)

That said, now, don't be afraid to bring the fuckin' hammer down, unambiguously, when a story warrants.

Everyone's concerned, and rightly, that jobs will be hard to come by. (The anxiety of a journalism student these days mirrors that of your average 14-year-old virgin, who can see his peers caught up in this strange yet consuming activity (earning money, to uphold the journo's side of this metaphor) and yet can easily imagine himself dying poor, overeducated and thoroughly unlaid.) My advice was to follow a topic of consuming passion, write about it until everyone knows the territory you've staked out, and then get paid to cover it. That, and get paid. Get paid. Get paid. If someone else is making a dollar off your written word, then they ought to give you a couple of dimes. Get paid. Get paid to stay solvent, and to keep from depressing any further this already-depressed writers' and photographers' market. Get paid. When one writer gets paid, we all get paid. When one works for free, we all do.

As for getting jobs, my suggestion was to get in front of the hiring editor. Like, physically get in front of them. Send your stuff, know the job you're applying for, and make it incredibly easy for the editor to hire you. I've never hired anyone, but I've been close to the process a couple of times, and I've been hired myself. My experience, for what it's worth, is that editors hate hiring. They'd rather do just about anything else. They don't want to compare people's clips, or their resumes, or take time to show someone the ropes. It's just not an activity built into most editors' schedules; they'd rather run the publication. Do what you can to make an editor's life easy in the hiring process, and I'd wager that your odds shoot way, way up.

Midtown Manhattan at sundown, June 20Several soldiers were among the standbys for a mid-morning flight from Dallas to Little Rock on Thursday, and a tall, broad young National Guard call-up wound up sitting next to me in the ninth row.

“Sir, I just want to apologize upfront,” he told me. “I haven’t had a shower in four days, and I smell.”

I told him I’d been traveling myself, and that I hadn’t had a shower in a couple of days either: “Between us, we’ve got almost a week’s worth of stink.” I asked him where he was coming from and where he was headed. Afghanistan was the point of origin, and Little Rock, home, was the destination. Seven months he’d been gone. “I can’t wait to get laid,” he said.

He turned up his iPod, and all I could hear of the music was a rolling-thunder drum attack that sounded like Scandinavian death metal on meth. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and was asleep at the window before we even left the ground. A few minutes before we landed, I came to, slid up the shade and watched us soar low over the Arkansas River and then touch down. As much as Little Rock lacks, home remains home, and I thought how fine it must feel for my fellow flyer after having been at war for the better part of a year.

The flight attendant took to the intercom, reminding everyone that we were now free to use our cell phones, and thanking us for flying American Airlines, “part of the Oneworld alliance.”

The solider stiffened. “One World Alliance?” he said. “What’s that?”

I explained that it’s a consortium that lets people use their frequent flyer miles among different airlines. “I admit, it does sound kind of ominous,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “‘One World Alliance.’ Like someone else I’ll have to fight.”

Town Pump

Dear Town Pump: In the future, please do not display a marquee as amazing as this and then follow through with such wedding reception hits as TLC's "Waterfalls" and the "American Idol"-ravaged "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours." The hard-drinking dirtbag regulars who come in to slide your shuffleboard pucks and sit on your porch and lay waste to your Jell-o shots on karaoke night are expecting, if nothing else, a musical selection that moves their sneakers and doesn't banish them to the tiki bar out back. Seriously, some of us like to dance, in public and embarrassing fashion, and all it takes is a real melody, the sort of bass line that shatters your fillings or the sort of song crassly engineered solely to move your ass, and it doesn't take a whole lot to inspire us. Our bodies want to become the music. Just not worn-out or flaccid music.

Thank you.

Pre-tornado: May 1, 2010, in northeast-central Arkansas
I snapped this shot a little north of Judsonia around 7:30, about one minute before this gap in the clouds sealed itself up, zipper-like, with clouds closing in from either direction. Then an assault of raindrops, bumblebee-fat and cold, came cascading down.

I'm not sure which exit we took, but if you know the area you'll know it as the Highway Church of Christ exit off 67/167. (If you don't know the area, you'll be amused to learn there's a Highway Church of Christ.)

Apparently Little Rock is in the path of a storm cell that has thrown 1,500 lightning bolts in the past hour and has churned up tennis-ball sized hail in downtown Malvern. Thus just in: There is a downtown Malvern.

Of course, this shit could always be worse. The news could be telling you to flee your home for the safety of a shallow hole.

Stay safe tonight, gentle Arkies.

Longbranch Inn: Men's room graffiti

I've never spent more than a couple of days at a spell in Austin, which might be why I've never found time to hate the place. It is, as much to its detriment as its credit, almost exactly the sort of town I'd dream up to live in, except that it's crawling with Texans and positively blighted by burnt orange. We all make sacrifices, I suppose. This bathroom wall I shot in a bar called the Longbranch Inn, an east Austin joint festooned with taxidermy painted various shades of psychedelia, stuffed bobcats with flowers behind their ears, that sort of thing. As I was idling on the street, preparing to leave, I saw a pick-up truck make a surprise U-turn directly into a man crossing the street. It was dark, and so were his clothes and skin; it's likely the driver was tired or tipsy and simply too lazy to look where she was going. He stuck his arms out to keep from getting walloped and caught the bumper. Out of my earshot, he and the driver exchanged words. He walked to the bar. "Did you see that?" he asked me. I said I did. "She hit me! She ran into me!" I said he might consider himself a lucky fellow: Hit by a truck, and here he was walking around just fine. Even people who do wrong by us enrich us, by my silly logic, so long as they don't go so far as to actually harm us.

Disappointment Bear: Stuffed bear found in an alley, Hot Springs, Ark.Once in a while we're all lucky enough to recognize something beautiful at its point of origin, before it has been run through the groupthink, both overt and subtle, that will shade our opinions later. Watching "Pulp Fiction" for the first time at age 14, I could feel my mind wrapping around it thisissofuckingawesome with lusty tenacity, like finding candied dynamite. I remember seeing Jeremy Shockey catch a pass during his senior season at the University of Miami and bull his way around and through defenders on the way to a touchdown, and thinking, "That guy's going to be in the NFL."

You can feel that same awe when you read the New York Times original review of "On the Road." I listened to it last year during a multistate road trip, which is a little like mirrors on the ceiling, I reckon. You can't 10 lines of that full-bore coyote call to wanderlust without wanting to stomp the accelerator through a floorboard, peel the roof off your ride and fly like some hell-sent black bird burning across the hills, slinging asphalt in your wake and gulp in the tarry air until it glues your squirming tongue to your molars. Here's a bit from that original review:

"On the Road" is the second novel by Jack Kerouac, and its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion (multiplied a millionfold by the speed and pound of communications).

This book requires exegesis and a detailing of background. It is possible that it will be condescended to by, or make uneasy, the neo-academicians and the "official" avant-garde critics, and that it will be dealt with superficially elsewhere as merely "absorbing" or "intriguing" or "picaresque" or any of a dozen convenient banalities, not excluding "off beat." But the fact is that "On the Road" is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat," and whose principal avatar he is.

Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, "the Sun Also Rises" came to be regarded as the testament of the "Lost Generation," so it seems certain that "On the Road" will come to be known as that of the "Beat Generation." There is, otherwise, no similarity between the two: technically and philosophically, Hemingway and Kerouac are, at the very least, a depression and a world war apart. ...

This search for affirmation takes Sal on the road to Denver and San Francisco; Los Angeles and Texas and Mexico; sometimes with Dean, sometimes without; sometimes in the company of other beat individuals whose tics vary, but whose search is very much the same (not infrequently ending in death or derangement; the search for belief is very likely the most violent known to man).

There are sections of "On the Road" in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking. There is a description of a cross-country automobile ride fully the equal, for example, of the train ride told by Thomas Wolfe in "Of Time and the River." There are details of a trip to Mexico (and an interlude in a Mexican bordello) that are by turns, awesome, tender and funny. And, finally, there is some writing on jazz that has never been equaled in American fiction, either for insight, style or technical virtuosity. "On the Road" is a major novel.

I got an aftershock of that same prescient frisson when the inestimable Jonathan M. Katz dredged up an old Google Talk chat of ours, which I'll here paste in its relevant entirety:

Jonathan: Have you read the new WaPo piece about leaving children in hot cars?
me: Nope.
Jonathan: Do. It's spectacular.
me: Weingarten's solid. Their heavy hitter.
Jonathan: I started and was like, "The hell is this." Then I got to page two and was like, this is fucking painful, I can't read this. And then on page four I realized I was reading it to the end. And that it was awesome. If they let you win two Pulitzers in a row, he's got it in the bag.
me: Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely check it out.
Jonathan: don't mention it

Well, I'm mentioning, in part because he did again today when the Pulitzers were announced. If you haven't read Weingarten's story, take Katz' advice: Do. It's one of the most ethical ambiguous stories you're likely to run across in a newspaper anywhere. It's proof that while many journalism awards contests are ego-fueled pony shows, the cream still rises. No pat storytelling formulas here; "Fatal Distraction" is that rare newspaper piece that will forever alter your thinking about a topic (inadvertently leaving children in cars) powerfully as his previous Pulitzer-winner, about a violin virtuoso decamped in a Metro station at rush hour, ignored by the punchclock masses.

We move too fast these days. Unless we're driving across the country. Then, everyone best getthefuckouttatheway. But do stop in DeValls Bluff, Arkansas, if you need not-quite-the-coldest beer in the state:

Happy Times Liquor

In case anyone is still under the impression that American forces detain and punish only terrorists, that bombings can be surgical, that only the bad guys kill innocent people, that only other governments' militaries stand and lie to their citizens, and that the very light of God's good graces shines like a divine beacon out of Uncle Sam's benevolent asshole, please take a second to remind yourself of what happens when you support war as a policy, as an ideal, and as a culture.

We have Reuters' tenacity and Wikileaks.org to thank for the release of this video, which depicts a 2007 helicopter mission in Iraq. In it, we see and hear Americans misidentifying two journalists' cameras as weapons, then making the decision to hose down a group of suspected insurgents with gunfire. A little later, a van pulls up to help a wounded man. That vehicle, too, is obliterated, on the grounds that brown men were attending to a man already determined to be a threat.

As it turns out, the attack was off. Way off. I'd rather not link to the Huffington Post, because I regard it as something of a vampire on my profession, but it has the best coverage at the moment, so here ya' go.

As soldiers arrive to lug wounded children away from the scene, the tape crackles: "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." Giving the benefit of the doubt to soldiers in this edited tape, we can only guess whether one wondered, at any point, whether the presence of children in fact suggested the battle was in their minds alone.

Look, the military has its share of fuck-ups, same as any business. This is a horrendous action, a blatant atrocity, but still you can't pin it all on a few triggerhappy goons. Frankly we just need a clear-eyed accounting of any endeavor in which blowing up humans based on spotty visual evidence is anything like a good idea. For moral, economic and strategic reasons, a policy of violence ought to be a last resort. Every time Americans forces massacre people for holding oblong objects on a street corner, or bomb a wedding party, or torture people, I'm chagrined that 9/11 continues to be such a resounding success.

Peeping: Wherein feathers become hot
Valentine's Day, to the chagrin of thinking human adults, is still a holiday taken seriously outside the walls of schoolhouses where kids learn to appraise one another like sexual chattel with the measured exchange of "Be Mine" candy hearts and SpongeBob Squarepants note cards. We're grownups now; we shouldn't need Hallmark to tell us when to take our lady out on the town or when to, you know, do it. (Line of the night, incidentally, from a friend at dinner, when I told the table of a couple I know who conserve water by limiting their showers to a no-nonsense three minutes: "No shower sex?!")

Fortunately, though, big VD can turn a visit to the Pretty Things Peep Show into a damn romantic throwdown at the Rev Room. Picture strip-teasing cheesecake all dolled up like Suicide Girls inspired by Vargas pinups, peeling off pieces of sailor suits to reveal their birthday suits. One bustier-clad lass, Heather Holiday, swallowed swords in the early act and then swallowed fire in the second, blowing the latter into a billowing dragon ball that could be felt from the crowd. (Intermission, incidentally, featured a proposal by the boyfriend of the French maid who tidied the stage between strip acts; she said yes.) The mustachioed MC Donny Vomit managed to traumatize every couple in the joint by hammering a condom-wrapped spoon back into his sinuses, then removing the spoon, snorting the tip of the condom into his mouth, and flossing his skull with the rubber stretched out like an exercise band. I don't think I'm belittling myself in this semi-public forum by admitting I personally have never had occasion to need a condom to stretch to lengths of four or five feet, but it's nice to know they can accommodate.

When I congratulated Mr. Vomit after the show for a well-played spectacle, he said the Valentine's crowd made for a rowdier time, because people were expecting great things. True, it was one of the most responsive crowds I've seen for any show in Little Rock, so I can't hate on Valentine's Day too much. Also, it helped that these single dames were in the house:

Ah, the delights of overlaying profane and violent voice tracks on a children's movie. This is must-see for anyone who a) digs "The Sorpranos" and/or b) thought "Where the Wild Things Are" was a bunch of overheated mumble-mouthing camouflaged as thoughtful entertainment by awesome visual effects.