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RIP Joey Bishop

The last of the original Rat Pack passed away yesterday, at the age of 89. Hammer another nail into the coffin of pre-hippie sixties cool, now only remembered in tribute acts and strained journalistic references to current flashes in the entertainment pan. And “Mad Men”, I guess, though I haven’t watched it yet.

What a year it’s been. Is there anyone left alive who sat on Johnny Carson’s couch when “The Tonight Show” was still based in NYC?

UPDATE: For an interesting historical perspective on the Rat Pack, and a clip from The Joey Bishop Show, check out this link to Crooks & Liars.

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Bum Joke

As I was walking the dog this morning, a rather sun-burnt old fellow stopped me in the alley and asked, “Ya wanna hear something funny?”

Me and my buddy were going to go to see that western movie, “3:10 to Yuma” up at the Davis. But y’know, they don’t let you go in there in the middle of the movie no more. We needed a way to kill time, so we went over to Welles Park to take a nap.

My buddy has this bottle of…of…of booze that he’s usin’ f’r a pillow. When the cops come by, they tell us, “Hey, you can’t have an open bottle of liquor in the park. What are you guys doin’ here?”

My buddy says, “We’re waitin’ for ‘3:10 to Yuma’.”

And the cop says, “Well, you just got yourself the ‘4:45 to Belmont and Western’.”

True story. At least, my part of it was.

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Cornhole vs. Baggo

I’d like to thank my niece for pointing out that I am a man ahead of my time. Among my many far-sighted obsessions (the mayonnaise glue stick applicator, for one), I have been chronicling the controversies surrounding the state of the beanbag in recent weeks. You can read the posts here and here if you have so little to do today.

Well, my niece points out that Newsweek is reporting a new controversy over nomenclature among tailgating afficianadoes. Ever alert for the latest trend that affects our lives, the magazine states that there now exists a fight brewing about the proper name for this new generation of steroidal beanbag toss games. The contenders? Cornhole and Baggo.

Remember when George Carlin catalogued the “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television”? While that list is not completely taboo anymore, I’m betting that the words “cornhole” and “baggo” can’t be used in the same paragraph on TV without getting the FCC worked up. Let me rephrase that: I’m HOPING those two words can’t be used together. Of course, I’m probably wrong. There’s probably a cop show in development for FX named “Cornhole and Baggo.”

And did you know that there was something called the American Cornhole Association? Aren’t you glad now that you do?

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Poetry Grand Slam: Wait til Next Year

The Bardball.com season came to an end last night in an entirely predictable fashion, as Poetry Slam poobah Marc Smith used his commissioner’s powers to steal victory (and pork chops) from the jaws of defeat.

Our team was definitely the underdogs, as we took the stage in the smoky confines of the Green Mill Lounge. The Bardball Irregulars acquitted themselves mightily and almost pulled off the upset. Stu Shea delivered a fresh and powerful ode to the blue-balled Cub season and how it reflects the local civic character, and a moving rendition of “For Rod Beck”. Charles “Sid Yiddish” “Double Duty” Bernstein came through as MVP on the team with strong readings of “Seventh Inning Stench”, “Caught Him Looking” and “Mr. Cub’s Autograph”. Sid earned the nickname “Double Duty” for his amazing throat-singing of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” during our seventh inning stretch. Hey, you don’t see Carlos Zambrano running up to the broadcast booth to do that, do ya?

My game started out slowly. Slam poetry, with its jazzy rhythms and sleeve-worn emotions, is obviously not my regular style, but I’m not looking for excuses. The reason for my poor scoring was obvious: unbeknownst to anyone, Smith had appointed a YANKEE FAN as one of the three slam judges. I went up blindly confident and performed “The Silver Lining, or At Least the Yankees Lost.” The entire Chicago crowd was behind me on this one, chanting the chorus of the final line, and yet this self-hating Gothamite judged that I had “popped up” on my first try. (Apropros of nothing, she also complained she couldn’t find a decent 24-hour deli in this town, and that Midwesterners talk so slowly it’d drive ya nuts.) On my next at bat, I performed ““On Being AJ Pierzynski,” but because the poem didn’t mention Jorge Posada, the judge again ruled me a pop out. I redeemed myself slightly with “On the Inaugural Season of the Israel Baseball League” and knocked it for a homer. Now, had mercurial Marc Smith changed his scoring rules BEFORE my last at bat instead of after, the Bardball Irregulars would be enjoying a victory parade right down Dearborn Street this lovely morning, swigging champagne from silver cups. But it wasn’t meant to be.

With the score tied, we went into extra innings and sent Sid up again. But we gave him an unfamiliar poem to bat with, and the power just wasn’t there the last time. For the bottom of the 10th, the Green Mill team sent up — who else? and So What?? — Marc Smith, who hammed it up through his poem “Ball Park 65”. The partisan crowd went wild, as the cult of personality Smith has built up over the past two decades came through again, a poetry patronage army if ever there was one. Organizer, commissioner, scorekeeper, judge AND pinch-hitter? Apparently there’s nothing Smith can’t do except admit defeat. As a friendly little side bet, the Bardball team now owes the Green Mill squad a bucket of pork chops, kraut and apples from the Chicago Brauhaus, which I’m sure Marc will share with everyone since he’s the clubhouse manager and team chandler as well.

So our magical year ends on a dissatisfying note. The Bardball.com team, which didn’t even exist when the season began, came within one hit of the championship. Apparently Marc Smith’s rabid appetite for overcooked pig flesh (not to mention his overcooked poetry) was incentive enough to flambe the rule book and steal victory for his team. But before we move on to “Wait Until Next Year,” we should savor this season, the ups and downs, the stresses and meters, the rhymes both internal and external, the moxie of writers in love with the spirit of the game pushing themselves past what even they themselves thought they could do.

My hat is off to Stu and Sid, as well as the poets on the Green Mill squad who were great competitors and fine poets. We will welcome them in the pages of Bardball.com in the future. The Poetry Grand Slam will rise above the petty machinations of the organizers, and remain etched in the hearts of our countrymen and women for years to come. Vita brevis, ars longa.

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No Cubs No

Well, that trip to Arizona was a disaster. In the days leading up to the playoff series, all the Chicago sportswriters were saying this would be a walk, and the real challenging matchup for the Cubs would be the Colorado Rockies. I think it was a misprint. The challenging matchup would’ve been the Mother Macauley Junior Varsity team.

It’s one thing for Lilly to have a bad night, and for Marmol to give up a couple of runs. But where have the fabled Cub bats gone? They’re flailing at the plate like a bunch of sea lions. With the exception of Theriot and Soto, the Cub batters look like they’re waiting for the cold medicine to wear off. The rookies that make up the D-Backs, on the other hand, are acting like the canny, cunning veterans, hungry for the pennant. And that’s exactly where they’ll be in a week, looking to beat the Rockies for the title. Are we ready for an all Rocky Mountain NLCS this year? Break out the Coors and elk jerky.

There’s one more game to go, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope, not judging by what I saw the past two nights. I don’t wait for miracles in the post season, after watching the Tigers completely choke last year.

At least if the Cubs are eliminated this weekend, I won’t have to endure the coverage on “SuperStation” WTBS. Why does it take three guys to say nothing on the air? Couldn’t they do with one? And the sound engineers ought to be fired, with the psychedelic way the crowd noise kept roaring up and then disappearing. When Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field gets loud, then you’ve got an excuse for fiddling with the knobs to make it sound okay at home. At Chase Field, you need to cheat to get the crowd noise UP on the air.

Remember in the early days of cable, when you only had 60 channels to choose from and the “Superstation” was something you actually tuned in once in a while? Now they’re completely lost in the static. Well, never fear–I bet that show “Frank TV” that they’ve been pushing during the games will be a smash hit for them. A fat unknown impressionist starring in his own late night series??? Set the TIVO!!

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New “Recut Madness” Video !!!

Some of you may have been nodding your heads in a sympathetic way when I blathered this summer about a “really cool video we shot to promote Recut Madness.” An exhausted writer on the verge of delirium, you may have thought. A liar. A crackpot.

Well, maybe you feel like a chumbalone now, b/c we finally got the film up on that very exclusive web server, YouTube. Check it out! And tell your friends! The future for book promotion is here!

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A Glimpse of Human Nature

Number One Son has always been awkward in social situations. Talks too long, doesn’t read body language, only declaims on the topics in which he himself is interested, etc. It’s caused some consternation over the years, and worry and frustration, because, of course, I’d like to live his life for him to save him any hard lessons, and I’ve been a social wizard since I was 10 days old, y’see. As adolescence looms, my worries about his future social agony loom so large that I sometimes don’t even notice them anymore, as they fade into the background like traffic noise.

So today was the first day for Liam to have cello lessons at school (which of course he fought, but that’s another story). He needed to carry my wife’s cello in its heavy old case three blocks to school. As I walked the dog a discrete half-block behind him, I saw he was struggling with getting the grip. Every 20 feet, he stopped, got a different grip, and hobbled on his way. I worried about the continued health of the instrument, and his having to look like a beleaguered music geek on a tough city street.

Then, one of his classmates gained on him on the sidewalk and approached him. A girl. They acknowledged one another and started to walk to school together, sort of, nothing serious please. And what do you know? He carried that cello in one hand by his side like it was a ukulele.

It was cheering to witness this small attempt to impress someone of the opposite sex. Maybe he’ll manage to fit in sometime after all.

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Stuart Dybek a Real Genius

Congratulations to Chicago writer Stuart Dybek for being awarded a Macarthur Foundation Genius Grant! He’s one of my favorite writers, and I urge anyone who would like to have a taste of what it’s like to live and grow up in Chicago to check out any of his books, I Sailed With Magellan, The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. They are the types of reads that I get halfway through and then place on my bedstand for months, because I never want the books to end.

The grant awards Dybek $500K, which he told the Sun-Times will allow him to concentrate on three books he has on the burner.

Of course, the process of choosing a Macarthur Genius is a murky affair worthy of the Skull & Bones. Anyone can apply, but few are chosen. For a peek at the official application, click here. Try as I might, I never could get that spoon to hang from my nose.

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Pro Team Fight Songs: Curse or Blight?

Don’t you just love pro team fight songs? More specifically, don’t you love the songs for your hometown teams and find those for other teams absolutely horrifying?

Then check out Zulkey.com today, where the irrepressible Miss Claire has put together a mix tape of all the fight songs she could find. Disco, heavy metal, dixieland, mambo–it’s all there. She even found a song for the minor league Lansing Lugnuts. Minor in stature, only, but big in spirit. I’m sure the people of Lansing just dance the night away with “Go Nuts!”

Most of the nation no longer has regional beers, local department stores, or non-chain restaurants, but at least we can still enjoy some pep for the local team!

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Versifying is the New iPhone

This morning my wife tossed the Trib Tempo section at me and said, “Julia Keller is stealing your thunder.”

My immediate response: “If she’s stealing it, it wasn’t much thunder to begin with.”

Then I looked at the page, and saw that Keller was doing what the scribes at BARDBALL have been doing for five months: Trying to capture the spirit of the baseball season in rhyme.

I don’t know what to feel about this. Keller is one of my least favorite local journalists. She may have won a Pulitzer (at least that’s what the paper trumpets), but that doesn’t excuse her for the typical mulligatawny of cliche observations, stale trendspotting, strange analogies and Tourette’s-like transitions she ladles out with rash-inducing regularity. Reading one of her columns is like listening to a radio that changes its channels and volume on its own. I personally think she’s a few steps away from bag-womanhood, and expect to see her on the middle of the Michigan Avenue bridge someday screaming about rabid space bats and their overlord, Justin Timberlake.

So should I be happy she’s delving into baseball poetry, and thus giving the field a bit of exposure? Should I be proud that I’m once again a few months ahead of the cultural curve? If the cultural curve is measured by the Keller-o-Meter, though, should I scuttle the whole BARDBALL operation and hope my friends will forgive me? Is it inevitable, if BARDBALL is dedicated to “baseball doggerel”, that it’s style would be copied by hack writers nationwide?

Her limericks about the Cubs aren’t bad, really, no worse than some of the ones BARDBALL has published this summer. You can check them out here at the Trib, along with a neat little music-slide show. (It pays to have a little corporate funding, I guess.) So what will probably happen is, I’ll realize any like-minded effort is good publicity, even if she didn’t mention BARDBALL, which was profiled in the Trib two months ago. Then I’ll go into schmooze mode, make a note to invite her to any BARDBALL readings we have, and if the opportunity arises, stroke her a little for the effort. It’s bad practice to start literary feuds over a limerick.

(And I’d like to point out that BARDBALL, as of today, has now published 110 poems, and has included at least one poem about every team in the major leagues, as well as the Israel Baseball League. Which is no mean feat. It’s easy for writers to praise the present successes and mock the disasters, but how do you get excited enough to write about the middling teams, the .500 teams, the teams with no tradition? Well, one way is to make fun of players’ names. But I’ll write more about poets’ secrets at a later time.)

UPDATE — The Trib site asked readers to contribute their own limericks to the mix, so Stu Shea and I started working on some to oh-so-subtly advertise Bardball. I submitted the limerick below, but as of now, it’s still not up. I think the Trib wasn’t ready to handle reader submissions, b/c the last one they list is from 10:29 in the morning.

A limerick contest’s the bomb
To salute the Cubs’ current aplomb.
For the rhyme and the reason
For the WHOLE baseball season,
Just log on to BARDBALL.COM !

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The “Peer Pressure” Defense

Last week saw the end of the first phase of a mob trial that has captivated Chicago throughout the summer. A jury returned guilty verdicts on every count of murder, extortion and racketeering against four aging mafia hoods and a former Chicago cop. Some say this trial—the culmination of “Operation: Family Secrets”—will be the last “old school” mafia trial this city will ever see. (For you out-of-towners who want to know more on the Chicago Outfit and the “Family Secrets” trial, check out Trib columnist John Kass.)

Although the charges are ugly (among them, 18 murder charges), some aspects of the trial have had high entertainment value. For starters, reporters have felt compelled to describe what the elderly defendants were wearing on the witness stand. With the white suits, yellow ties, black shirts, and the rest of it, it’s impossible to keep pictures of Paulie Walnuts out of your head.

One of the most interesting elements was the defense put forward by three of the reputed crooks. Taped conversations recorded them speaking in a convoluted code with their friends in prison. When asked what they meant by the code, the defendants have said they were just playing along to impress their associates and relatives. Along with being mobbed up, they’ve also denied they understood the code, even though the conversations were lengthy.

“I gave him lip service,” former cop Anthony Doyle said from the witness stand. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t wanna look like a chumbalone, an idiot, stupid.”

(Note to self: start using “chumbalone” frequently in conversation and while cursing out other drivers.)

Could this peer-pressure defense—“I just wanted to look like one of the guys”—be used successfully in any other pariahs currently in the news?

Senator Larry Craig: “I heard sleazy anonymous hook-up in the airport john were all the rage with commuters, like having an Admiral’s Club membership. Just because I’m trendy doesn’t mean I’m gay. And I pleaded guilty because the prosecutors said it was the best solution. But I take it all back. I still want to serve the people of Idaho, who need a strong senator who can stand up to pressure and think for himself. Unless I’m talked out of it again. What do you think?”

Alberto Gonzales: “I only pretended to have terrible memory lapses when I testified before Congress. So many other aides ‘couldn’t recollect’ when they testified, I thought it would be bad manners to actually remember what I’d done. Hell, does anyone really think I’m THAT absent-minded?”

Nuri al-Maliki: “I didn’t want to go on vacation for the entire month of August, but everyone in the Iraqi Parliament seemed to have their plans already set up and I didn’t want any of them to lose their deposits. They told me the break would make the people think we knew what we were doing. More pictures of us on the golf course equals more confidence in the government.”

Michael Vick: “If a guy asks you whether or not you’ve got a ‘dog rape machine’ at home, what are you gonna do, act like you don’t know what he’s talking about?”

OJ Simpson: “My buddies just said they wanted to ‘raid the mini-bar’. I never bothered to ask why we needed guns for that, or needed to kick down the door. And there on the bed, was all my stuff! You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Gosh golly.”

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Phraseology 102

1. I was very upset this summer, while reading an excellent piece by Alex Kotlowitz in the NYT Magazine, to see a glaring error that had passed through their proofreaders’ fingers. In an article about the gee-not-racist-and-xenophobic-at-all efforts of the people of Carpentersville, IL, to make themselves an English-only city, Kotlowitz interviewed a woman heading up the efforts to pass such a resolution, even though, basically, some of her best friends are (or used to be) Mexican. Describing the difficulties of her quest, at one point she mentions she didn’t want to get her “things caught in the ringer.”

What “ringer”? An alarm clock? A doorbell? Quasimodo? Is it a reference to horseshoes?

Of course not. She meant to say, “tits caught in the wringer,” a phrase made most famous by WashPost publisher Katherine Graham. (For all you Gen Xers, we’re talking about a hand-cranked clothes wringer that would pinch laundry dry on wash day.) But by getting all Midwest prissy and trying to craft a PG version of this vulgarism, she confused the copy editors (and possibly Kotlowitz) and gutted any meaning from it. Hell, woman, if you spend your time rousing up your neighbors because your Mexican neighbors aren’t “American” enough, saying “tits” in a national magazine is the least of your worries.

2. On Monday, I was having lunch in Heaven on Seven on Ontario Street for the first time in a long time. Mmmm-mmmm, so good. On the way out I used the washroom, which was tucked in a very quiet corner of the restaurant. The room was silent when I entered it, but the ambient music soon kicked in and gave me a start. A snare drum started popping away, and a chorus of voices started chanting, “Feets, don’t fail me now, feets don’t fail me now….”

And I began to realize how much I love that phrase. “Feets, don’t fail me now.” Just the concept of taking time during a moment of imminent danger to talk to your feet and counsel them, abjure them, BEG them to do their duty and rescue the body they’re attached to. Apparently in the past, the feets had in fact “failed” this person? The instinctive fight-or-flight reaction is short-circuited just long enough for the speaker to address his appendages and confer on a plan for survival. Do the feet argue the point, or do they do their duty quickly enough? Does the man thank them later and apologize for his lack of faith? Do the feet resent the pressure being put on them?

When was this phrase first used? I have no idea–probably in some old movie full of Stepin-Fetchit stereotypes. How nice for a Cajun band to use it as a refrain in the song and reclaim it from its racist origins. I look forward to the day when I can use such a loaded, inherently-contradictory phrase without worrying about getting a punch in the mouth.

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The Day After 9/11

So the 6th anniversary of the WTC bombings has come and gone. I didn’t want to write anything about it yesterday, because perversely, it felt better to honor those victims and the firefighters and police who died there with a silent prayer than with some half-baked exposition. When the whole world is beating its chest, it feels more sincere to honor their lives for what they were, than to use them to measure how deeply we can grieve.

That kind of selflessness, of course, couldn’t survive in the swamp that is Washington, and so we had the spectacle yesterday of Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker testifying before Congress, the latest pep talks designed to make it look like progress can be made in Iraq, however glacial and bank-breaking it may be. It’s of course no coincidence that they testified on 9/11, because the White House, in its New-Coke efforts to get us all to see what they see, never passes up a marketing opportunity, however tasteless. As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman wrote, as quoted in James Wolcott’s blog:

“The symbolism of getting General David Petraeus to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the anniversary of 9/11 appealed to the White House. It should not have. It is crass.”

Which goes without saying, or should. But the ghouls and marketeers who run the White House wouldn’t know crass from ground glass. What was it Bush told us just after the WTC bombing? That we should get on with our lives, and show our enemies they can’t destroy what’s good about our way of life? Remember what he told us to do?

Go shopping.

No more confirmation was needed for me that W and those pricks in Washington were a step removed from the rest of us. In their eyes, honor equals money, specifically keeping the economy rolling so portfolios remain high and they stay in the graces of campaign contributors. In an enormous application of that “Prosperity Gospel” claptrap, America is good because it is wealthy. And we can be gooder if we just keep getting richer.

Now the memories of the WTC victims are smudgy and threadbare. They’ve been relegated to the status of those people who died at Gettysburg and Bunker Hill, trotted out for rhetorical purposes and chest beating but far removed from the present reality. Only problem is, they’re only 6 years gone. Real lives are still in pain because of their loss, and hundreds of New York police, firefighters and citizens are still sick from what they inhaled in those weeks after the disaster. And all the pledges of federal help in helping NY rebound are so much debris from a distant time. Did even the most cynical among us realize how badly Bush & Co. would screw things up in this country, in the September weeks of 2001? How they’d piss away our goodwill in the world with the invasion of Iraq? Wipe their asses with the Constitution? Exploit our national resolve for justice to keep themselves in power?

I don’t want to go off on a litany of their mistakes here. It’s been said before, and by better writers. I’ll just say it beggars the imagination what they’ve done in the past 6 years, supposedly in memory of the people who died on 9/11. And what will be done in the next 50.