By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Island Hell
“Settled in 1790 by mutineers from the storied H.M.S. Bounty, Pitcairn Island is one of the British Empire’s most isolated remnants, a mystical hunk of rock that was largely ignored until 1996,” Vanity Fair reports (not available online). “Then Pitcairn’s secret was exposed: Generations of rape and child molestation as a way into life.”
Warning: this story may make you sick.
“It just seemed to be the normal way of life back on Pitcairn,” one accuser testified.
Indeed. The transmission of culture – be it abuse, torture, slavery, or corruption rationalized by those who benefit most – is society’s most powerful force. Often for evil.

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Posted on December 20, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Publication: Tribune
Cover: “Favorite Books of 2007.” One-hundred and fifty of them! Each with a single paragraph of small type devoted to them and crammed into four of the most unappealing pages ever published.
Other Reviews & News of Note: Of course not. Worst Book Review Ever.
*
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “The Final Ballad of John and Yoko.”
Other Reviews & News of Note: “Holidays 2007: Coffee Table Books.” A more readable offering than the Trib’s list; a somewhat eclectic set of choices made by Sun-Times staffers, which makes it more fun.

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Posted on December 17, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Gangs of America
“National polls show that, as an issue, immigration is far behind the Iraq war, terrorism, the economy, and health care as a concern to most Americans; a recent Pew poll shows that, nationally, only six percent of voters offer immigration as the most important issue facing the country,” Ryan Lizza writes in The New Yorker this week in “The Return of the Nativist.”
And yet, even the Democrats are trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo.

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Posted on December 13, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Catching up on a few weeks’ worth, starting with the most recent editions.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Another paean to Studs Terkel, featuring this quote from reviewer and author E.L. Doctorow: “The memories of this nonagerian author are free-associative; they dance along the synapses of his ebullient brain.”
Huh?
Overwrite much, E.L.?
In other words, Terkel’s latest is an unfocused mess that moves from one tangent to another as if he just turned on a tape recorder and started talking?

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Posted on December 11, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The fifth of five parts.
Part 1: She left. I asked for it, I think.
Part 2: They met in a bar.
Part 3: Favoring the He-Fucked-It-Up version of events.
Part 4: A nuclear desire for revenge.
*
Billy remembered the proud day he told his parents what he wanted to be, finally, after they went into a semi-autistic trance just harping: “What are you going to do?” over a period of about 5 years, and so Billy got into his sailing jacket, white Sansabelts, and blue Keds to announce his true and final decision.
“Mother and Dad? I want to be Goethe.”
They were silent.
“Gerta,” Billy enunciated, trying to be precise.
Yet, silence.
“A fine writer and musician and scientist and philosopher and politician. CAN-DO, you know?”
“That Nazi just liked to drink and fuck!” went Pharaoh McMann in silence to only himself.
And Billy did harbor the pathetic delusion that such work lent itself to mostly drinking and fucking. That it really wasn’t work at all. He was thinking (cleverly, he thought) he’d be a Renaissance Man in lieu of having a real job, no?
Yes.
Good one, Billy.

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Posted on December 7, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The fourth of five parts.
Part 1: She left. I asked for it, I think.
Part 2: They met in a bar.
Part 3: Favoring the He-Fucked-It-Up version of events.
*
It was starting to be cold in the morning and stay cold until night and Anna wore black tights under her formless (“sexless,” she called it) black wool dress. Absolutely formless, and absolutely capable of freeing Anna to center her thinking and seeing self even further within. A dark-gold, fake-fur-lined pseudo-cossack hat she went specifically to Oak Brook to get, gave her head a slight point, particularly in shadow. You could see not only breath now but the shadow of breath, and it though it was warmer as close to Lake Michigan (“a stone’s throw”) than inland, cold was cold. A calico scarf, wool and scratchy, and driving gloves from Lord & Taylor at the Water Tower. And a burgundy leather bag that was her sister’s first.
Anna had no idea, really none, of how her boss Ray Johnson longed for her. There’s a reason people use the word long. Ray was living, breathing proof. To him, she was never, ever sexless, think what she might.

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Posted on December 6, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The third of five parts.
Part 1: She left. I asked for it, I think.
Part 2: They met in a bar.
*
They were digging the same band. She asked him to dance. He danced.
Billy could dance.
Billy was 21 and about to graduate from Lincoln University. Bethany, born and raised in New Lincoln, Illinois, a university town sprung up not much taller than the Illinois corn around a river grove, always wore beautiful pleated, paisley or scotch-check skirts over blue jeans and cowboy boots. Her round face shone like a ripe summer peach. Her soul shone and simmered with the angry passions of a smart girl from a broken home. She loved to ride on the back of Billy’s bike, a ’73 Honda CB-750 he “inherited” from his older brother Art, and close her eyes and hug Billy’s back hard. Burnt-orange gas tank. Billy wiped it on I-74 between Champaign and New Lincoln, after a Gang of Four (featuring Ms. Sara Lee) show at Mabel’s that he’d taken Bethany to but they got in a fight and she disappeared, and he started to drive home alone on his bike drunk. The last thing he remembered before waking up in a hospital room were the orange-lit letters “O’s Gold,” a hybrid corn seed, on a barn off the highway, orange letters shimmering through black rain and drunken tears.
Billy wiped out.

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Posted on December 5, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The second of five parts.
Part 1: She left. I asked for it, I think.
*
Yes: Billy hated poetry, or, more specifically, poets. Mimes, it was like being a mime to him, or any other legerdemain proffered by anyone calling themselves an “artist,” some who, maybe too much like Billy, was trying to find a way out of the normal Hell that life can be. He’d get a chill of rage up his spine whenever he heard anyone refer to themselves as an “artist.”
“If they were really artists,” to himself Billy would go, “they’d never say it aloud.”
He felt that such discretion was the rest of the world’s due.
Soon, he’d learn a long, if not hard, lesson regarding such matters, such certainty, such cynicism. Not quite yet.
Billy wanted to be a genius, but he didn’t know (yet) that he’d have to become an artist first. And in order to become the artist he could be, he’d have to develop some serious, late-hour humanity. Period.

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Posted on December 4, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The first of five parts.
She left.
I asked for it, I think. Yes. Come to think of it, I believe I did ask for it quite specifically. Well. There. There you go.
I wanted to get back to her.
It would be like digging a hole to China.
Not like a slow boat to China, because that is a reality, something that could readily happen. This hole is a hole in my soul, rendered by the arrow having been pulled back out by Cupid, crudely and diagonally back through my heart, as though through a flesh globe, and which to fill would require the dirt dug out from a hole to China. Cupid breaks the arrow over his chubby knee.
Another hole. They keep happening. There goes a ghost of me. I put it on the payroll. Kind of thing that happens a lot here in Stinkweed.

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Posted on December 3, 2007