The Beachwood Gyroscope Affairs Desk

NEW YORK – David Blaine’s latest stunt is as much about charity as publicity.
The 33-year-old magician stepped inside a gyroscope Tuesday in Times Square. His hands and feet will be shackled to the spinning scope Thursday afternoon. He will then have until Friday morning – a total of 16 hours – to make his escape.
If he’s successful, Blaine will lead 100 children selected by The Salvation Army on a shopping expedition at Target. Each child will receive a $500 gift certificate from the retailer.
– Associated Press
Blaine Fails To Escape In Time. Result:
– The hopes of a hundred children locked in the Target vault slip away as the oxygen runs out.
– As terms of his contract dictate, Blaine is forced to take a job as a Target gift wrapper.
– David Copperfield makes him disappear.

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Posted on November 23, 2006

By Maude Perkins

Now that Thanksgiving 2006 is but a glowing, tryptophanic wino reminiscence, Christmas is officially around the chronological corner! Aww, hell – November may as well be over, let’s just turn the calendar now so we can see the exciting announcement typed permanently into the 25th box!
Knock off all that unmarketable thankfulness bullshit; it’s time to celebrate warm tidings and peace on Earth – with just a dash of religious undertone in place to anchor and justify the actual horror of what Christmas has become, including the tragic irony of such peaceful tidings in the first hateful place! I mean, can’t you just feel the love knowing that holiday shopping is now a high-risk undertaking, sometimes resulting in human casualty? God, I love peace.

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Posted on November 23, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

A tsunami just hit the film world. America’s greatest living director has left us. No, not Martin Scorsese. Robert Altman. Who would have thought that his claim to that title would be in dispute. But it was. In just one example, when The Guardian‘s list of the top 40 living directors in the world came out in 2005, Altman wasn’t even named. When I think about why Altman has such an ambiguous place in the directors’ pantheon, I have to conclude that the film school generation has muscled out the yeoman filmmakers like Altman, John Frankenheimer, and Hal Ashby, who learned on the job making television shows, industrial films, and documentaries, and found their own forms of expression that “high concept” can’t begin to express.
Altman himself lampooned high concept – the movie factory’s new formula for success – in The Player. Seeing his fatuous characters pitch “The Graduate, Part II” or “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman . . . it’s like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the Coke bottle is an actress” highlights exactly what the Hollywood establishment and much of the public finds troublesome about Altman – his eccentricities as a filmmaker.

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Posted on November 22, 2006

By Steve Yaccino

Tonight the sky is clear, and a light breeze envelops the street with a chocolate aura. I’m sitting across from the Blommer Chocolate Factory on the Northwest edge of downtown Chicago and I’m 5 years old again, waiting for my grandmother to take cookies from the oven.
Tonight the factory, at 600 West Kinzie, is awake, glowing in the presence of the city to my back. It breathes in and out, with a soft snort and a sigh, whispering a silent happiness down into my lungs while men, dressed in white, walk to and from their cars. They are wearing plastic shower caps and Mickey Mouse gloves; they resemble a strange crossbreed of scientists, Martha Stewart, and Saturday morning cartoon figures.
For the last two months I have attempted to discover who complained about the chocolate smell that’s now aesthetically paralyzing me. Who, I wanted to know, could be against chocolate?

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Posted on November 19, 2006

By Maude Perkins

Boy am I glad I wrote all that nice gooey stuff last week because I don’t think I’ve ever had a more trying time in terms of restraining my tongue and wishing I owned an automatic weapon than I have since then. Yesterday alone, I uttered the words “I’m going to shoot up this place” no less than once every fifteen minutes. Luckily, I work in a coffee shop and not an airport, or else I’d be writing (or not) from a torture room right now, which, don’t get me wrong, my editor would more than encourage for the sake of fresh unparalleled material.
Alas, I am just a weaponless barista, teetering on the sanity fence, ready to fall clear off the next time I am expected to read the mind of some yuppie scum on a cell phone who mouths her order to me and then gets pissed when the drink is made incorrectly. Silly of me not to assume that when someone mouths “Grande Mocha,” they really mean, “Venti non-fat, no-whip, three-pumps of mocha Mocha.” This may seem comical now, but at the time I wanted so badly to kick this woman in the fucking head. Repeatedly.

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Posted on November 19, 2006

By Maude Perkins

I realize that more often than not, I am ranting about the gloomy side of working for a corporate coffee chain. I may have mentioned before that the customers are not always the friendliest, nor even often bearable, for example. Perhaps I have referred to them as “assholes” once or twice. I even recall complaining about my district managers and some of the company’s policies with which I may not entirely agree.
But despite my sanity-sucking hatred of corporatism, fast food, the general public, and, worse yet, the combination of the three in harmonious capitalism delight, I really do have a soft spot for my job. In sheer anticipation of the madness about to ensue now that the holiday season is officially underway, I want to reflect, even if only briefly, on the few enjoyable elements of my job.

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Posted on November 12, 2006

By Maude Perkins

It is officially time again to unlock the hard liquor cabinet. And leave it unlocked.
At least that’s my approach to the next two months of holiday fucking bliss. Hopefully I’ll be just lucid enough to remember the safe codes, but just hazy enough to forget it all ever happened by February.

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Posted on November 5, 2006

By Andrew Kingsford

Whittling the pool of acceptable heterosexual dating options for a single man in Chicago.
Chicago and its suburbs: 9 million people
Subtract the suburbs: 3 million remaining
Subtract for gender: 1.5 million remaining
Subtract for age: 500,000 remaining
Subtract for married and monogamous: 250,000 remaining
Subtract for unmarried but in a monogamous relationship: 125,000 remaining
Subtract those you will never be attracted to: 62,500 remaining
Subtract those who will never be attracted to you: 31,250 remaining

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Posted on November 1, 2006

By Maude Perkins

My struggle with catering to the whims of every belligerent customer who comes through the door reached comic proportions the other day when a patron especially sensitive to breast cancer came in for a skim latte and left in a huff. How was I supposed to know?

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Posted on November 1, 2006