Chicago - A message from the station manager

By Steve Rhodes

Publication: New York Times
Cover:: “Say What You Will,” a review of Anthony Lewis’s Freedom For The Thought That We Hate.
“[A] heroic account of how courageous judges in the 20th century created the modern First Amendment by prohibiting the government from banning offensive speech, except to prevent a threat of serious and imminent harm,” Jeffrey Rosen writes.
“Still, the most surprising and provocative occasions are those when Lewis himself departs from civil libertarian free speech orthodoxy.”
Indeed. The restrictions to speech favored by Lewis and his faith in the judiciary is simply naive.

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Posted on January 14, 2008

Reviewing the Reviews

By Steve Rhodes

We’ve been remiss with this feature the last few weeks, so let’s catch up. Unfortunately, the news in book review land isn’t good.
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Publication:Sun-Times
Cover: Well, here’s the thing. The Sun-Times doesn’t really have a book section anymore, though it does still carry reviews.
“We’ve been fortunate over the past few years to have had an expanded number of pages to run many full-length book reviews, local author features and interviews when many newspapers cut back to abbreviated reviews or eliminated their book review sections altogether,” books editor Teresa Budasi wrote on December 23rd in “How The Grinch Stole The Books Section.”
No longer. Now book reviews appear in the Sunday Showcase section.
What’s so funny about it is that it was only last May when former books editor and now editorial page editor Cheryl Reed bragged about her paper’s commitment to its books section and attacked the Tribune for moving its section from Sunday to Saturday.

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Posted on January 9, 2008

Language Arts: Pushback

By Nancy Simon

First in a series.
Within the past six months, the term pushback, loosely defined as “resistance from an opposing force,” has been used in association with phenomena as varied as the presidential campaign, the competitive domain of retail shopping, and Apple iPod customers.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, pushback is defined as “the name of a mechanical device used in motorized devices that serve the function of opening and closing a door or other object, e.g., ‘the pushback on a subway door.'”
AHD also recognizes pushback for its military connection, e.g., “the forced movement of troops back from the line.”
Along similar lines, Wikipedia links pushback to aviation, referencing it as “an airport procedure during which an aircraft is pushed backwards away from an airport gate by an external power.” Note the inclusion of the word “external,” emphasizing its origination from an outside source.
From the aforementioned definitions, we come to the conclusion that pushback’s traditional meaning was based upon the idea of a physical act being performed by an outside force which, in turn, jostled someone or something from his, her or its chosen position.
Over the past couple of years, however, pushback has gotten a makeover of sorts and, thus, taken on a whole host of fresh and colorful alliterations.

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Posted on January 8, 2008

The Beachwood Best Books List of 2007

By M L  Van Valkenburgh

I read a recent study that said one in four American adults read no books last year – a rather appalling statistic. Bibliophiles everywhere must take action! Here are my picks for the 12 best books published in 2007.
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Genre: Adolescent
Title: The Dangerous Book for Boys
Authors:Conn and Hal Iggulden
This book is the rarest of gems – it teaches boys how to be boys. In an age when video games are the norm and playing tennis means turning on the Wii, boys have forgotten their roots – and some of the magic of childhood. The Iggulden brothers originally published this in England in 2006, but this is the updated American edition. Soon your son will be fashioning complicated knots or palming a coin. And while it’s unlikely your boy will actually ever end up needing to know how to tan a skin, better prepared than not.
Genre: Biography
Title: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
Author: David Michaelis
This eye-opening look into the life of a man dedicated to making us laugh (and sometimes think) reveals Schulz as an ultimately profoundly unhappy and depressed man who turned the comics industry on its head. Discouraged from being an artist by his parents and at school, Schulz persevered nevertheless, in some cases writing and drawing his own life into his work, such as an extramarital affair that came to the papers in the form of Snoopy’s crush on a girl dog. Schulz detested the name “Peanuts,” but was forced to use it by his publishing syndicate. The book contains 250 Peanuts strips, in addition to memoirs, interviews and personal correspondence.

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Posted on January 4, 2008

The Periodical Table

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

Reviewing the Reviews

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.
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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

The Periodical Table

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

Reviewing the Reviews

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

A Hole to China: Part 5

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.
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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

A Hole to China: Part 4

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.
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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

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