The second of a two-part excerpt from Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover and What It Says About the Economic Crisis. Published by Melville House.
Part One: It was like they were mocking us.
By Kari Lyderson
The workers organized a surveillance team that would keep watch outside the factory after hours and on weekends, when the plant was closed. One Saturday, Robles and Revuelta were lurking in the parking lot north of the factory, Robles with his wife Patricia and their young son Oscar in tow. They could see the plant’s front entrance on Hickory Street, where boxes were being loaded onto two trailer trucks. They hopped into their cars: Revuelta drove out after the first trailer, and Robles followed the second one. He wasn’t frightened or intimidated, only determined to see what the company was up to. The union’s contract covers any activity within a 40-mile radius of the plant, and rumors were circulating that the equipment was being moved to Joliet, an industrial town exactly 40 miles outside Chicago.

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Posted on July 31, 2009

The first of a two-part excerpt from Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover and What It Says About the Economic Crisis. Published by Melville House.
By Kari Lyderson
“Turn out all the lights right now,” a supervisor at Republic Windows & Doors told Armando Robles as he was wrapping up the second shift at the factory on Goose Island, a small hive of industry sitting in the middle of the Chicago River. It was about 10 p.m. on November 5, 2008. Robles thought the order strange, as other employees were still finishing up. “Everyone has to leave right now,” the supervisor said. For a while Robles and other workers had been suspicious about the health of the company and strange occurrences at the factory. They knew business had been bad for the past two years. The housing crash meant not many people were in the market for new windows and doors, neither Republic’s higher end ornate grooved, wood-framed glass panes nor their utilitarian vinyl- and aluminum-framed windows. At monthly “town hall meetings” that the company had started holding over the past year, managers were constantly bemoaning how much money they were losing. And the workforce had been nearly cut in half in the past few years, from about 500 to 250. Something seemed to be up, and Robles felt sure it wasn’t good.

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Posted on July 30, 2009

By The Beachwood Nanostories Affairs Desk
“You might have seen Bill Wasik’s byline in Harper’s, where he’s a senior editor,” M.J. Fine writes in the Philadelphia City Paper. “Or maybe you don’t recognize his name but remember one of his Web projects: a satirical one-off called The Right-Wing New York Times, the short-lived buzzkill blog Stop Peter Bjorn and John, or the political-smear repository OppoDepo. But, as his publisher has realized, Wasik’s most notable as the guy behind 2003’s flash-mob craze.
“In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Wasik connects the dots between the overstimulation that we perceive as boredom and our Internet-driven culture’s short attention span. He covers multitasking and memes, compulsive clicking and corporate co-optation of viral ads, and the sped-up news cycle that turns nonentities into microcelebrities and nanostories. (How’s Jon and Kate Gosselin’s marriage today?) And he makes keen points about what our tastemakers’ relentless appetite for the next big thing means for artists and creators as their efforts are disseminated out of context and with more emphasis on novelty than on talent or importance. Witness the backlash that starts almost as soon as a band’s been discovered. (Of one indie-rock group’s debut album, Wasik quotes a DJ saying, ‘This is a great movie – I hope there’s not a sequel.’)”
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Well put. And with that we bring you an excerpt from And Then There’s This, reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright Bill Wasik.

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Posted on July 24, 2009

A roundup.
Immeasurable Awe
“Frank McCourt would have left this world full of accomplishment and regard had he never written a word, at least not for publication. That he survived the poverty and misery of his childhood, let alone wrote about it in such memorable and heart-piercing prose, stands out decades later as an act worthy of immeasurable awe,” the Albany Times-Union writes.
Aged Perfection
“Like a rare Scotch that has aged for a lifetime in an oaken wine cask, the story that Frank McCourt served up in Angela’s Ashes had aged in his bones until the moment of perfection had been reached,” Tom Phelan writes in Newsday.
“At the age of 66 he threw Angela’s Ashes into the wind with a ‘like it or hate it’ bravado and caused a publishing sensation. Critics loved the book. Millions of readers adored it. And yet more than a few despised it, because McCourt refused to polish the picture of the Ireland he grew up in – a country where fathers got drunk while their children went unfed, where living conditions were often dire, and where the clergy were often pompous fools.”

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Posted on July 23, 2009

By Max Eddy
I approach all links sent to me with trepidation, but it is with actual fear that I click on a link that I know leads to a webcomic.
In some ways, the Internet is where comics go to die, as demonstrated by the seemingly endless parade of anime-inspired, video-game jokey grotesqueries that will go unnamed. The ease of web publishing apparently uncorked the latent artist in everyone, often burying the best stuff under a menagerie of vile and twisted creations. Only a few gems shine out from amongst the eFeces, and Eliza Frye’s online mini-comic The Lady’s Murder is perhaps an exemplar for other would-be online comic artists.

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Posted on July 19, 2009