By Rick Kaempfer

As a long-time radio veteran, and someone who has followed the story of media consolidation as closely as anyone, even I was appalled by the details of the Minot, North Dakota train derailment that Eric Klinenberg recounts in the introduction to his new book, Fighting for Air.
According to Klinenberg’s excellent narrative, local officials tried to contact the radio stations in Minot to declare an emergency because a toxic cloud five miles long, two-and-a-half miles wide, and 350-feet high was heading straight for town.
There was only one problem: Clear Channel owned every radio station in Minot, and all of its programming was automated. There wasn’t a single person in any of the local studios to answer the calls of emergency response officials to alert the public about the impending danger.
By the time the cloud had dissipated, one man was dead, and more than a thousand people needed medical care. If Minot’s radio stations hadn’t been consolidated and downsized, the town could have been easily evacuated before the slow-moving cloud reached the city limits.
And that’s just the introduction of Fighting for Air.

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Posted on January 27, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Urban Redevelopment
In the January 26th issue of Entertainment Weekly there’s a small blurb about Keith Urban, who, after seven months, is out of rehab for alcohol abuse. Now he’ll just start sucking sober.
Table of Incompetence
The February issue of Vogue might prove interesting, what with stories about Joyce Maynard (who once had an affair with J.D. Salinger), Renee Zellweger (who once had an affair with Thomas Pynchon), and Italian label Derercuny (who once clothed Harper Lee). Yeah, might be a cool issue but, goddammit, after thumbing through 1,200 pages of ads, I still can’t find the freakin’ table of contents.
Tupperwarrant
The CD era must be coming to a close because the good folks at Better Homes and Gardens are already thinking about repurposing. For example, in their February issue the BH&G staff suggests using stackable containers for Tupperware storage and a CD rack for the lids – filed by size.

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Posted on January 26, 2007

By The Beachwood Dixie Affairs Desk

So says Regnery, the right-wing publishing house founded in Chicago and once closely affiliated with the University of Chicago, in the following promotional copy that landed in The Beachwood Dixie Affairs Desk inbox.
*
From the Founding Fathers to the frontiersmen who tamed the West to the country music, NASCAR, Bible-thumping heart of ‘Red State’ America, the South is the quintessence of what’s original, unique, and most loved about American culture. Yet, thanks to the big-city elites, the South is under attack. The PC establishment is so intent on spreading the myth of the South as prejudiced and ignorant that it even wants to rewrite history.
But author Clint Johnson rises up in fierce resistance to the second war against the South. He reveals that, far from being the backwater of the nation, the South has always been the center of American culture and history, and that the South is truly rising again.

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Posted on January 23, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Soul Hole
The cover story of the January 25th issue of Rolling Stone is a warm tribute to the life, times, and music of James Brown. However, on page three there’s a picture of his corpse as well as a picture of Michael Jackson embracing Al Sharpton. And the only one who looks alive and well is Sharpton.
Space, the Capitalist Frontier
Richard Branson wants you to fly Virgin Galactic – into space. The December issue of Wired reports that Virgin is selling seats for just $200,000. Industry analysts say the real money will be made selling overpriced CDs to a captive market.
Fair Warning
I’m sure the February issue of Vanity Fair is pretty good. There’s a cover story on Demi Moore. There’s a story about John McCain and his possible 2008 Presidential run. There’s a story about the new Broadway show based on Joan Didion’s wonderful book, The Year of Magical Thinking. But I’ll never really know because I can’t get near it. Boy, you stink, Vanity Fair! Thank your cologne advertiser Acqua Di Gio for nothing.
Alternate Analysis
Am I supposed to read this magazine, or wear it?

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Posted on January 19, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
Part2/Daley denies there are slums in Chicago, then pledges to eliminate them within a year.
Part 3/Daley negotiates an agreement long enough to get King out of town, then reneges. His private feelings about King are revealed.
*
With the election safely over, the truth about the housing summit came out. Keane, the number -two man in city government and Daley’s co-negotiator at the summit, declared on the floor of the City Council that there was no open-housing agreement. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” he said.
. . .
[Daley] agreed with Keane that the housing summit had produced no enforceable agreement, although he did concede that there was a “gentleman’s agreement unded a moral banner” to address the concerns that were raised there. By backing up Keane, he was sending a clear signal to the white wards that they did not need to worry that the summit agreement would cause their neighborhoods to be integrated. At the same time, his talk of a “gentleman’s agreement” and a “moral banner” offered blacks just enough that they could probably be convinced to continue to vote for the machine.”

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Posted on January 19, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
Part2/Daley denies there are slums in Chicago, then pledges to eliminate them within a year.
*
The night before the summit began, [the Chicago Freedom Movement] cobbled together a set of proposed reforms. True to his character, Daley plotted his course of action more carefully. He assembled a team of experts who would be able to go head-to-head with the civil rights delegation on any subject they were likely to raise.
. . .
Daley’s approach, as it had been with the 1963 open-housing ordinance he drafted, was to blame the lack of fair housing in Chicago on the real estate industry rather than city government. Once again, it was a formulation that made Realtors and the civil rights movement the combatants, and avoided placing Daley in a showdown with King.
. . .
White working-class residents of the Bungalow Belt, accepting the open-housing language of the agreement at face value, were convinced Daley had handed their neighborhoods over to blacks . . . Black activists were just as convinced it was their side that had been betrayed.

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Posted on January 18, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
*
Coming back from an eight-day vacation with Sis and four of the children to the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico, Daley declared at the San Juan airport that there were “no slums” in Chicago, only “bad housing.” In a January 26, 1966, taped television appearance, he predicted that all of the city’s blighted buildings would be eliminated in the next two years.
Daley insisted that he was working as hard as anyone to improve conditions in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” he said. “Elimination of slums is the No. 1 program of this administration, and we feel we have done more in this field than any other city.”

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Posted on January 17, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Martin Luther King, who was by now leaning strongly toward bringing his movement north to Chicago, had his mind made up for him one sweltering summer night in Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, a California highway patrolman pulled over a black man for what should have been a routine driving-while-intoxicated stop. But Watts, a northern-style ghetto set down among the palm trees of Southern California, responed by erupting in rioting . . .
The depth and breadth of the anger that set off the rioting struck him as a powerful argument for extending the civil rights movement to the rest of the country, and trying to improve the conditions of blacks in places like Watts.
. . .
The SCLC considered serveral large cities, including New York, for its historic journey north. But there were many compelling reasons for choosing Chicago. In terms of racial segregation, it was as bad as any major city, north or south. In 1959, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had called Chicago “the most residentially segregated large city in the nation.” The racial separation that the Jim Crow system preserved by law, Chicago had simply achieved through other means: racial steering by real estate brokers; racially restrictive covenants on house sales; and the ever-present threat of violence if established racial boundaries were crossed . . . To King, Chicago was “the Birmingham of the North.”

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Posted on January 16, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Hard Foul
A Rhode Island man has received a $400,000 settlement because of a faulty penile implant he received. His erection lasted TEN YEARS. In the January issue of Harper’s.
Tent Revival
Interesting sidenote: The man hasn’t purchased sweatpants for a decade.
Anticlimactic
The rest of the January Harper’s ain’t bad either. Recommended: “The Swim Team” by Miranda July and “Catching Out: Travels in an Open Boxcar” by William T. Vollmann.
Fine Wines
The latest Wine Spectator gives props to the 100 best wines of 2006. The big winner? Chateau Leoville Barton St.-Julien ’03 ($75 a bottle). Second place goes to Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Washington ’03 ($85); third goes to Casanova Di Neri Brunello di Montalcino Tetuta Nuova ’01 ($70). My favorite, Fat Bastard Sparkling ’06, didn’t make the list.

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Posted on January 4, 2007