By The Beachwood Booknotes Desk
1. From the Independent Publishers Group:
“On Thursday, August 20, Steven Lee Beeber will host a reading and signing of his highly praised book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press).

“The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s delves into punk’s beginning’s in New York City and discovers it to be the most Jewish of rock movements, both in makeup and attitude. Beeber interviewed more than 125 people integral to pre- and early punk; Tommy Ramone, Christ Stein (Blondie), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Hilly Kristal (CBGB owner), John Zorn and many others offer their thoughts on the early days of punk and the Jews who made the music happen.

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Posted on August 11, 2009

By Katie Buitrago
A preface: I have a complicated relationship with fruit. Meaning: I don’t like it. Any of it. Not apples, oranges, mangoes, watermelon . . . not even [insert your favorite fruit you can’t fathom anyone ever hating here].
I know this is shameful, and bizarre, and horrifically unhealthy. I know. I don’t know why I was made like this, and it frustrates me endlessly. In my adult life, I’m trying really hard to rectify the situation. I can occasionally stomach a tangerine. I went on a romantic blackberry picking trip in summery Michigan, and not even bumblebees and sunsets could overcome my aversion to their seedy enfilade. There’s just something repugnant about seeds or fibers or little hairs swimming about my mouth, raining on my picnic of tart, juicy delights.
Not so with the Fruit Slinger.

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Posted on August 6, 2009

By Scott Buckner
I was watching an episode of Route 66 a few days ago and, through the wonders of the disagreements that sometimes arise between the digital TV signal and my cheap-ass Radio Shack TV antenna that doesn’t quite work like it should sometimes, I spent the hour watching the program in a herky-jerky, stop-motion fashion. Normally, this would be a major annoyance. However, I’ve came to appreciate the cinematography that made Route 66 one of the best TV shows ever made some time ago; that’s why every third frame of any Route 66 episode would be an awesome photograph on its own.
This is why I thought of This Place On Third Avenue: The New York Stories of John McNulty, a book which I have come to treasure for no reason other than it’s what American newspaper-columnist journalism could be again if newspaper-columnist journalism actually started giving a shit about what happens to it.

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Posted on August 5, 2009

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

By Katie Buitrago
The Tribune has introduced its new beta platform for local blogs. Here at the Beachwood’s Chicago Blog Review Desk, we’ll be taking a look at some of the new – and familiar – faces you can find there.
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Blog: Arresting Tales
Description: Stories from Joe the Cop
Substance: Joe the Cop, a 20-year veteran of a suburban police department, posts reflections on criminal activity, analyses of cop-related news, first-person accounts of policing and its attendant madness, helpful hints, and answers to civilian questions (hopefully this last feature will happen more often). I admit: before I stumbled across this blog, I went in with some assumptions. “Oh, a cop blog,” I thought. “Another furious blog with a defensive cop ranting about ‘cop haters’ every time someone protests police brutality or a police DUI.” Not so, my friends, and I am duly chastened. Joe the Cop is both thoughtful and thought-provoking and by no means supports police no matter what godawful thing they do. He, combined with Whet Moser, changed my mind a bit about the sentencing of Anthony Abbate.

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Posted on June 26, 2009

By Steve Rhodes

Chicago famously taught the late Tribune editorial writer Leanita McClain, the first African American to serve in that function at the paper, to hate white people, as she told the nation in the pages of the Washington Post in 1983.
McClain, who had suffered from depression through much of her life, committed suicide a year later.
The 25th anniversary of her death just passed us on May 30th. Here are a few links and comments that appeared around town, followed by excerpts from Gary Rivlin’s indispensable Fire On The Prairie about McClain’s frustrations inside (and out of) the Trib newsroom.
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– “Twenty five years ago today, I discovered that Leanita McClain, my friend and colleague, was dead,” writes former Trib colleague Monroe Anderson. “It was a suicide that came as no surprise to me. For more hours than I care to remember, I sat in her office at the Chicago Tribune joking, cajoling and questioning her repeated proclamation that she was going to kill herself.
“During these discussions, I’d asked why. ‘There are black women who’d give their right arm to be where you are,’ I’d argue.
“‘But, I’m not happy,’ she’d counter.”

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Posted on June 18, 2009