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A Visit to the Fair

It’s summertime, so that means it’s time for Ferris wheels, junk food and carnies—in other words, the county fair. Yesterday we went with our German visitors to the Ottawa (Mich.) County Fair, to give them a taste of good ol’ American wholesomeness. In fact, it was very wholesome—so wholesome, in fact, that it wasn’t very interesting. Maybe at night the carnies get a little more loud and lascivious, and the teenagers and rednecks get a little more reckless. I certainly hope so, cuz it was just a little too sedate for me.

(Last summer on our trip to Germany, these friends had taken us on a surprise trip to the Circus Roncalli, a fabulous one-ring circus with its HQ in their hometown. We had the most fantastic time, and I was hoping that this county fair would at least be as diverting. No such luck.)

The big event that our kids wanted to join in was The Money Booth, one of those phone-booth sized Plexiglas boxes with fans in the floor into which cash is poured and people get in to grab as much flying money as they can in 15 seconds. We signed up early, then waited and waited for one of our names to be called. While more than 50 kids eventually got to grab some cash, our names were never pulled from the bucket. It struck some doubt into my kids’ faith into the splashover of the free enterprise system. But shove some elephant ears in them and they were fine again.

The other kids were just as rabid to stick it out in the blazing sun for their chance to grab a free $6. Hey, they were Dutch-Americans, which means for free money – or free anything – they’d sit on a nest of fire ants waiting their turn. And holy moley, the NAMES these kids have been burdened with! I lost track of the Tylers and the Taylors and the Brodys among these little suburban urchins. Might parents be naming their kids after their favorite taverns? Not in this dry neck of the woods. One little girl was named Brooklyn, apparently being groomed by her parents for a prizefighting career. And two different boys were named Stone. What the hell is up with that? Are the parents big fans of NBC News? Are they afraid any less sturdy names will mean their boy will turn gay? Do they get their inspiration for baby names at the building center? That would explain little brother Caulk and little sister Sheetrock. These people must be watching a lot of television that I’m not, considering how exotic yet generic their kids names sound.

I remember hearing about a mother some years ago looking up her child’s name in one of those reference books to find out what it really means etymologically. Imagine her disappointment to find that the name Tyler, which sounds so classy and Ivy League, actually means “a laborer who installs tiles.” No, no, how will he ever marry a Rockefeller now?

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A Little Bit Here, A Little Bit There

If you were reading the Huffington Post last night, you might have seen one of my posts up there on their “Politics” page. Of course, if you missed it, I wouldn’t blame you. (I’ve created a page for it at the right.) Since I’m not starring in a cable series, and my Q rating is not what it should be, my posts are last-in-first-out as others are submitted. Hard to amass a huge following there, which is the reason for doing it. Well, not a “huge” following, but I’m trying to get some bump that will help Recut Madness along. Six hours up on HuffPo, effectively buried in the Home and Garden section, won’t really do much.

But I press on, because what else is there to do? It has proven a challenge to get PR and press for the book. We’re still trying, and have a few new ideas that will be implemented soon. But we need to give this thing a boost so we can make it to the fall and take advantage of the Christmas buying season. If you’ve read Recut Madness and liked it, ask Barnes and Noble the next time you’re there to order a couple copies for the store. They don’t take your phone number, and it costs nothing, and it will get copies on the shelf for me. Also, it ain’t like I’m begging, but — BRANDEN! Are you listening? ——— it sure would be nice to get a review on Amazon, one that seems very independent and shows no hints that you are a friend or relative of mine. Every little bit helps, and I’m grateful for your support.

On the other hand, BARDBALL is enjoying some nice attention from real baseball fans out there. Just my luck that the project I’m doing for fun is performing better than the project that’s for money, but hey, I live for irony. We’ve got a backlog of poems already, and have stopped doing any guerrilla marketing for a while. It’s going to be very interesting to see where BARDBALL is by the end of the season, but I’m certain we’ll have enough material for a book.

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Best Compliment All Year

A friend heard the tail-end of my interview on WBEZ some weeks ago, and sent the message:

A much welcome break from the pledge drive (though that is doing you an injustice — the sound of cicadas boffing would be a pleasant break from the pledge drive. You were much better than cicadas boffing.)

JFG: “Much Better Than Cicadas Boffing.”

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A Week Off, Then WGN Radio on Sunday!!

Well, after feverishly working on various projects from our cottage (where my desk space is only slightly larger than an airplane fold-down tray), I get to quit worrying about book sales and PR for a week and go up to Camp Owasippe with the Boy Scouts. No worrying up there, right? As long as everybody sticks to the buddy system. And people stay away from the poison ivy. And a storm doesn’t come through and send a tree cleaving through someone’s tent like happened last year. No worries at all.

But after that, on Sunday, July 15, I’ll be the guest on Rick Kogan’s radio show on WGN-AM, a station so powerful I think they can pick it up in Helsinki. Rick is a famous journalist and boulevardier, and we’ll be cutting wise about “Recut Madness” and probably BARDBALL as well. I’m very excited. So tune in, from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., and be ready to chortle over your Ovaltine.

See ya in a week.

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The Post Turtle

An excellent joke from my old friend, Lou Bolf:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher whose hand had been caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to former Texas Governor George W. Bush and his elevation to the White House.

The old Texan said, “Well, ya know, Bush is a post turtle.” Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old rancher said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.” The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there and you just want to help the dumb shit get down.”

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Darwin Exhibit at Field Museum

The family took in a preview of the new exhibit at the Field Museum last week, and had a terrific time. “Darwin” is a thorough profile of the shaggy naturalist who laid the bedrock of modern biological science with his “On the Origin of Species.” I heartily endorse the show, which runs through January 1. You’ll come away with it with a new appreciation of how hard he worked at what he loved, and how his inescapable conclusions about evolution gave him incredible grief (weakened his own faith, threatened his marriage).

My favorite quote from his letters came from a missive sent during college to one of his favorite cousins and fellow bug-hunters: “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects”

I wrote a post about it for the Huffington Post, which you can find here. In it , I present a modest proposal (really modest, b/c I didn’t feel like belaboring the point) to airlift these types of exhibits to the American hinterlands and not-so-hinterlands where cretins believe that God created fossils and other evolutionary evidence just to confuse us and test our faith.

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Article of Ol’ Fashioned Summer Fun

I apologize for the lack of postings lately, but the blame lies squarely on outside impediments: The dial-up service I’ve been dealing with lately, and the fact that I’m trying to write essays, stories and other posts to give a little boost to the profile of Recut Madness in other markets, with other readers. Not that I don’t appreciate all 7 of you out there, but I need to spread the net a little wider to pull in some new eyes.

One piece you might like is in the new issue of Lake Magazine, in which nouveau riche bozos like myself learn about the best wine tastings and ice cream shops over on Michigan’s western shore. (Actually, it’s not a bad magazine at all, and publishes a funny writer named Wade Rouse from whom you will probably hear more in the future.) My article recounts the experience of buying fireworks in Indiana, then bringing them to the cottage. I was forced to excise a passage that hinted that this was illegal, even though it is, because the magazine needed to protect its brand image. It ain’t Outlaw Biker, after all.

Anyway, the first paragraph reads thusly:

Summer in Michigan promises many refined moments. Gallery openings. Wine tastings. Sunsets on the beach. But underlying all this elegance are numerous messy jobs that need doing, jobs that take grit, tenacity and steady nerves in the face of danger.

Somebody, after all, needs to buy the fireworks.

“You don’t need fireworks,” my wife has claimed, on more than one occasion. “You just want them.”

“But how will the kids learn about handling fireworks safely if I don’t teach them?”

And if you want to read the rest, click here. Enjoy.

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Interview This Morning on WBEZ!

This morning WBEZ-FM will run an interview they did with me a couple weeks ago, regarding Recut Madness and various and sundry matters. So tune in to “848” at 9 am, or listen for the rebroadcast in the evening, or listen to it online. Whatever you do, don’t miss it or you’ll miss a clue about where I’ve hidden all of Joey The Clown’s loot.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the program, where you can find the MP3.

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New Poem for BARDBALL

In honor of the bare-knuckle fightin’ spirit of Cubs catcher Michael Barrett, I whipped up the saga below and posted it to Bardball today. If you haven’t checked out Bardball yet, click on that blue box on the right and get with it, baby!

BATTLIN” MIKE BARRETT

This is the saga of Battlin’ Mike Barrett,
A tiger of a man with fists of ore.
He’d raise his dukes and take on all comers,
Regardless the color of jersey they wore.

His mighty hands landed many a blow.
He never backed down from a brawl.
But such hardened paws don’t do you much good
When your job’s to be fielding the ball.

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Wide World of Sports

What’s with this stupid beanbag game I keep seeing? This weekend we drove by three different places where young guys were barbecuing and drinking beer on the stoop, and they all were tossing their beanbags at a piece of plywood with cut-out holes. (Except for a group near DePaul, who my wife pointed out were playing Toss-Across. The leaders of tomorrow apparently feel the need for the greater challenge of long-distance tic-tac-toe.) It’s starting to look like Romper Room with Leinenkugels out there.

Apparently this is a big pastime with Bears tailgators, while they hang around drinking schnapps on Sunday morning. Okay, maybe there’s not a lot to do in a parking lot in November for a couple hours before they open the turnstiles for you, so you get this thing out to play toss around, and maybe the beanbags are soft enough that when some boozer gets out of control, he doesn’t injure anyone with an errant toss. That I can understand. (Also, the fact that it doesn’t take a whole lot to amuse football fans.) But why in the name of Leon’s Barbecue would you do this in your own backyard? Is the art of conversation COMPLETELY dead and buried now? Are black-market Jarts too hard to find? Does Horseshoes require too much training and conditioning?

If you’re REALLY that hard up for something to do while waiting for the coals to heat up, may I suggest something in a more classic vein, like Russian Roulette?

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Printers Row Book Fair

For anybody in the area considering a trip to The Printers Row Book Fair this weekend, consider this: I’ll be speaking with film critic and writer David Kipen on Sunday at 12:30. We’ll be talking about writers in the movies, as well as Recut Madness (I hope). David is the director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts and author of The Schreiber Theory, which aruges that writers and not directors are (or should be) the driving creative force in film.

So stop by University Center, 525 S, State, at 12:30 for a good talk, some autographin’ and then bookstall browsin’ till you keel over from the heat and/or pile of purchases you’re lugging around.

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“BARDBALL” Officially Launched

Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s play ball!

I’m proud to introduce to you all the official site of BARDBALL, dedicated to the art of spontaneous poetry about the national pastime. My fellow Hungerdunger Stu Shea and I have been talking about this type of site for about 6 weeks, and now, after the web craftsmanship of the mysterious Dan X., it is ready to take the field in its home whites.

The whole thing was inspired by gamma-ray-enhanced slugger Barry Bonds last spring. You might have seen the limericks penned by us and a few of our friends on this blogsite. Those poems came so easily that we kept swapping verse back and forth about any number of baseball items. And we got to thinking, “Hey, let’s get this going nationwide!” I’m still amused by the image of a grandstand full of people with pen in hand, searching for just the proper metaphor to describe how their team’s bullpen just served up 5 runs. (“A break in the dam? Swatting a beehive? Serving up the Hell’s Angels some tequila and greenies?”) And now that Barry has slowed down in his quest to make the whole country uncomfortable, we have the chance to squeeze in many more poetic tributes to his “massive 90-pound cranium.”

A hundred years ago, baseball writers routinely penned doggerel to publish in their daily columns. “Tinker to Evers to Chance” was one of the most famous, and arguably was a major reason those three players were inducted in Cooperstown on their first try. These days, with the advent of the blogosphere, everyone potentially has their own column inches to fill, so if they’re looking for inspiration, they could do worse than look to those noble bozos out on the diamond. One doesn’t have to be a baseball expert or statistics nerd to contribute to Bardball–casual fans have opinions and talent, too.

So check it out, and if you like it, tell your friends to visit Bardball. If we get enough entries, the entire season will end up documented, parsed and versified. Maybe we’ll bind them in a book somehow, and sneak a copy into the cornerstone of the new Yankee Stadium. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

And to commemorate the launch of Bardball, I want you to click on this link for one of the best managerial tirades you will ever see. What happened this past weekend, with Piniella and Guillen and Jim Leyland getting the boot, was exciting, but for sheer imagination and showmanship, you have to doff your cap to Phil Wellman of the Mississippi Braves for his performance Friday night.

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Art Imitating Life, Only Not as Fat

This year for their annual spring “operetta,” my daughter’s school decided to stage a musical called “Kate & the Giant.” (Alternative casting aside, this change to a Jack and the Beanstalk production was necessitated by the fact that there are only four kids in the fourth grade, one of whom would have to be the star.) The kids (this year, Grades 1 through 4) work hard on the show for weeks, and then are able to perform it only twice, which causes a lot of post-show letdown in our house.

Over the years I’ve helped in painting and assembling sets, and by now, I’m the default guy for planning the whole job. I don’t mind–it’s a lot of fun trying to make everything functional yet lively, trying to make a backdrop of a stand-alone prop serve more than one purpose in several scenes, etc. Since the writers of this play had some kind of food obsession and had the Giant at one point stuff himself comically with food, I had to devise supersize portions of various tasty treats. Papier mache did the trick, turning 2-liter pop bottles into chicken legs, an old detergent bottle into a baked ham, and balloons into fruit and vegetables. But one of my proudest creations was a nice big juicy cheeseburger. For some reason, I just couldn’t see the play going on WITHOUT a cheeseburger. I even brought it to school once to show the kids at dismissal, and their enthusiasm for the play spiked to new heights.

Here’s what the fabulous cheeseburger looked like:

Now that’s a damn tasty burger, as Jules Winnfield might say. The pieces were made and painted separately, then glued together. My plan was to make a burger so hugely humongous that people would split their sides laughing as soon as they saw it. But when I glued all the pieces together, I had a nauseating revelation: As big as this burger was, there will be a countless number of REAL EDIBLE burgers at least this big being served all over America this summer, either at a beef festival or at some Texas roadhouse with a money-back guarantee deal attached to it.

The very next day, as I was thumbing through Smithsonian Magazine, I found a pic of a guy wrestling a platter-busting burger for a festival in North Carolina.

Once again, no matter how big you can make something for comedic/satiric effect, real life will always outstrip it.

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Occupational Movie Spoilers

You know how sometimes you go to a movie with someone who has a certain occupational specialty, and that person cannot enjoy the movie because of the huge gaffes spotted by his trained eye? The worst situation is going to a scifi flick with an engineer, who will happily show off his knowledge by telling you (and everyone within earshot) that X couldn’t have happened because it violated the scientific principles of Y and Z, and besides, the torque and stress on the lateral support couldn’t blah blah blah. This can happen when you bring a lawyer, a doctor, or even a fishmonger to the movies.

(Of course, one example of some gaffes that EVERYONE in the country should’ve gotten was that romantic presidential comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline, in which the president (Kline) has a stroke and so the evil chief of staff recruits a doppelganger (also Kline, but more rakish and friendly) to fill in for him. And somehow, this faux president was able to pass legislation on his own, without any mention of Congress or the courts. Sort of a benign dictator, although still rakish and friendly, so I guess it was okay. What a steamer that was.)

But that’s a long way around the fact that I saw Spider-Man 3 last weekend, and spotted two ridiculous errors regarding Kirsten Dunst and her acting career. So, I guess I’m going to be one of those insufferable know-it-alls.

1. First, after a disastrous opening night, Mary Jane is replaced in her B’way musical the very next day. She even finds out by showing up at the theater to discover a new actress doing her number! Oh, the pathos! In reality, if this were a B’way show, Mary Jane would’ve had a solid contract that would’ve guaranteed her X number of performances if the show was being staged, and if she were replaced, she’d be paid a big severance penalty. Nobody’s ever heard of Actor’s Equity??

2. And during her performance in said musical, the camera zooms in on Mary Jane up the center aisle of the theater. Trouble is, there aren’t any center aisles in theaters, of any kind, movie or legit. Think about it. Those are where the good and expensive seats are. Additionally, I can’t remember a single NY theater I’ve ever been to that has had any kind of aisle at all, let alone a 12-foot-wide freeway down the middle (though I could be wrong on this point).

And on another subject: If the Sandman cries, like he does at the end of this movie, shouldn’t parts of his face wash off or something?

Other than that, 2 webs way up!

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Book Drought Ends with Massive Outpouring of Beer and Support

Well, that was quite an exhausting evening, and quite wonderful. Many thanks to all the friends and neighbors who came to Feed The Beast last night to help launch Recut Madness. The food was great, the drink was plentiful, my iPod was cranking Bootsy Collins over the sound system, but the people are what makes a party work. My mother, Aunt Pat and Cousin Ginny came down from Milwaukee to lend their support, and I got to visit with my cousin Celeste’s daughter Erin, who just moved to Chicago. And old work pals and friends from school and neighborhood, and friends of friends and…… I’m a lucky and blessed fella for having such people in my life.

It actually felt more like a wedding reception, seeing people and catching up. I apologize to those folks I didn’t speak with enough, but I hope you understand. Busy busy busy. I appreciate your support of the book, and of the Belle Center, which got a portion of the proceeds.

I hope to put up some pictures on Flickr, as soon as I can find where we put the camera. UPDATE: Found the camera, here’s the pix.

And the biggest thanks of all goes to my ever-lovin’ wife, for indeed being ever-lovin’, as well as a terrific hostess. We had almost 100 people in that little space, and she made sure there were introductions and laughter all around. There’s where I’m most truly blessed.