Mysteries Abysmal

Century

(my neighborhood beach, nineteen-hundy and five.)

First real writing gig

On a bit of a whim I decided to email editor Joel Flegler at Fanfare: The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors. I asked him how one might become a contributor. He requested a sample review, so I wrote him one the following night: a Piotr Anderszewski record. He promptly responded back, liked my review, and offered me a position as one of their critics. It's a "trial basis" gig, so I'll have to prove myself. Fair enough. It's also nice that, because of my location, I will have some opportunities for interviews. They also feature book reviews, DVD reviews and a jazz column. And of course it doesn't hurt that it's a national publication. Free discs in the mail with compensation, and I'm floatin'.

kodachrome

for dad

(taken in front of a furniture store on Lincoln Ave.)

for Alex

(kinda wilde I found this)

for joshi

(not many of these in London, right? Trumped again by fly-over country)

Holla'n back

I tend to admire everyone I've met out of Indiana's music school. Marc Geelhoed, whom I linked to a couple weeks ago, is a local journalist who got his MA in Musicology there. Geelhoed writes for TimeOut Chicago, and is a relatively young hipster who knows his classical (obviously) and writes with a sense of humor. He knows jazz too! I was pleased to see he gave me a shout-out on his blog. He called me precocious. That's so going on the CV.

Okay now Marc, back to Chaucer.

audacious iPod shuffle

I love the dynamics that secretly exist between tracks: the static at the end of 'I want you (she's so heavy) to 'Here Comes the Sun' comes immediately to mind. Today, it was Beck's Earthquake Weather to Bruckner's motet, Graduale "Locus iste Deo factus est." These effective transitions are not as frequent as you would hope.

HEY Joshi : The Aristocrats was horrible. Left after 45 minutes; the only movie in 4 years I've bailed on since 'Sum of All Fears.'

Spiders

My fear of spiders has not lessened since my move to Chicago. They're everywhere. Disgusting little buggers in every window and doorway in this city. I'd soon be mugged and left for dead than touch one of those things. And their scary proliferation this summer remains conjectural. Let's hope the frosty nights of December freeze the bastards.

that Paul Schrader

Iris: Hey look. Sport never treated me bad. I mean he didn't beat me up or anything like that once.

Travis: But you can't allow him to do the same to other girls. You can't allow him to do that. He is the lowest kind of person in the world. Somebody's got to do something to him. He's the scum of the earth. He's the worst s-s-sucking scum I have ever, ever seen. You know what he told me about you? He called you names. He called you a little piece of chicken.

An Abyss of a Mystery

I once asked my film professor if he'd seen the movie 'Little Noises,' and he had not. The title for him did not even ring a bell. In fact, since I first saw this as a teenager, I've yet to meet one single soul who claims they've even heard of this movie. And might I ask why? In the short of it, it's one of the most subtle and funniest movies of the last 15 years. The problem, I think, is that it was horribly produced. You can only faintly hear the actors deliver their lines and the soundtrack seems to be off center with the action (although Jane Spencer, the director, gets some points for playing the lesser known of the two Debussy arabesques). There are also some issues with coloration and the representation of time.

If you can get by the embarassingly low budget, you're left with a movie every would-be writer should see. I'd by lying to you if I didn't say this movie inspired me in my writing almost as much as Finding Forrester or Love and Basketball. It's that good!

I won't give too much away, but I will say the character name list is pretty special in its own way. And everyone of them could be a band name:

Stu Slovack

Bart of Avon

Elliot Ardsley

Joey Kremple

Wayne Wacker

You will thank me when you find this. And I assure you you will not find it.

So scurry on now...

Brooklyn and the Eagle

***update***
(see bottom)

I am forever nostalgic for New York, and my trip there in January of this year was one of the most memorable, ephemeral moments of my life. My brother David Eagle (in spirit, not biologically) and I took a road trip there at points in our lives where anything could happen. We didn't know what next week or next month held for us, and there was that fun possibility of not coming back. We left Michigan at 8 at night and drove straight through, arriving car locked in the Holland Tunnel at 8 the next morning. We could barely keep our eyes open, but despite our lethargy, those cold, vibrant streets of Manhattan magically revved us up:

Of course our affable hotel concierge at the lovely Portland Square Hotel wouldn't let us check in for six hours, so we took various naps at other hotel lobbies around midtown. In retrospect, it is only now that I can laugh at how unshockingly shitty our room was:

Cramped for space, I rang up my friend Kenny and his girlfriend in Brooklyn where we stayed for the rest of the trip. That day, we played a bit of Brooklyn stickball: pea coat style.

On our last night, a Sunday, after hitting relatively empty bar after bar in Park Slope, Dave and I took the train into Manhattan around 10 pm. At 10:30 we arrived at the Slaughtered Lamb pub in the village. A few minutes later, our night took a Jay McInerney-esque turn for the suhweet --without the coke and the trim. An Aussie named Liam approached us looking for some chaps to bar hop with; he had come stag to the US and this was his last night in NYC. So we bar hopped, and boy did we ever bar hop: we went to dyke cowboy bars, cigar bars, library bars, trance bars, yuppy bars, dungeon bars, space bars and divey dumps. That Liam drank like Nick Cage in "Leaving Las Vegas," and he was generous with the rounds. I'm quite sure I've never had a better time in my life.

(some Columbia students we met -- Liam on far right)

(Liam had to see Carrie Bradshaw's "Sex and the City" stoop -- this is 4 in the morning)

(an austere looking Dave in Bklyn Heights on the morning of our departure. Davey boy, he belongs in the big city.)

FIN
***Amy from Newyorkology, the best NYC blog on the planet, caught glimpse of the photo Dave and I took of our hotel room. Credit goes to Dave though; it was his camera and his artful shot.

Nile Kinnick: worth remem'bring

On this college football saturday, I'd like to offer some of you artsy folks a little exposure to a very rare athlete. In 1939, Nile Kinnick became Iowa's lone Heisman Trophy winner (the highest award given in college football) when, just four years later, his plane went down in a training flight in World War II. Kinnick's name graces Iowa's football stadium for reasons far beyond his football achievements. Instead of a glamorous NFL career, he sought law school and volunteered his services in the military. Kinnick came from a well read household, and in Bill Pennington's wonderful book "The Heisman: Great American stories of the Men who Won," he acknowledges Kinnick's love of literature:
The Kinnick house abounded with books, and visitors often came to the parlor for readings of poetry and intellectual exchanges. Nile digested the works of Longfellow..."

Nile's love of reading paid off in what is now the most famous Heisman acceptance speech of all time. I am confident it will not be surpassed in eloquence:

"If you will permit me, I'd like to make a comment which in my mind is indicative, perhaps, of the greater significance of football, and sports emphasis in general in this country, and that is, I thank God I was warring on the gridirons of the Midwest, and not on the battlefields of Europe. I can speak confidently and positively that the players of this country would much more, much rather struggle and fight to win the Heisman award, than the Croix de Guerre."

But my personal favorite Kinnick memoir comes once again from Pennington's book: "Kinnick no doubt grasped gifts of such ethereal quality. Writing a friend who was visiting the Iowa campus in 1943, shortly before his death, Kinnick said: "It is like home and how do you define home? I hope you strolled across the campus just at twilight and felt the peace and quiet of an Iowa evening, just as I used to do."

It is fitting the new statue of Kinnick would portray the young man donning his books rather than his shoulder pads.