By Steve Rhodes

Filling in for Shipley on the magazine beat.
Wicker Fair
The June issue of Vanity Fair calls Wicker Park-Bucktown “the latest burgeoning pocket” of Chicago – umpteen years after Billboard magazine featured the area on its cover and hundreds of stories after the one-time coolness of Wicker Park has been chipped and glossed into Lincoln Park West. “Over the past few years, this run-down area has blossomed into a square-mile pulsing with sassy boutiques . . . and heavenly restaurants,” writes Punch Hutton.
Well, more like 16 years after a landmark district was first proposed for the neighborhood, which once featured anti-sassy boutiques and anti-heavenly restaurants.
Hutton praises the neighborhood’s upscale “novelty and furniture stores” without any hint of knowledge about the affordable novelty and furniture stores they have replaced, making the area safe for Vanity Fair readers.
In a final coup de grace, Punch recommends relaxing at day’s end at “one of two old-fashioned bars,” the Northside or Piece, which are about as old-fashioned as the BMWs and Hummers parked outside them.
As Keith Olbermann would say, Punch Hutton, you are this week’s Worst Person in the World.

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Posted on May 8, 2007

By Steve Rhodes
Catching up with the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Katrina Myth
You know how crime has gone up in Houston because of all the Katrina evacuees who have ended up there? It’s not so.
An analysis of the data by Houston television station KHOU, retold in the March/April journal of Investigative Reporters & Editors, found that a recent spike in the crime rate – murders, in particular – cannot be blamed on Katrina victims despite what police officials have been telling the public.

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Posted on May 3, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup of what’s on Shipley’s nightstand.
Swallowing the Spit
There’s really nothing cooler than sword swallowing. Well, maybe dueling. Dueling, and those old Secret Squirrel cartoons. Be that as it may, there’s a great blurb (fourth item) in the May issue of The Atlantic that discusses the medical issues sword swallowers have to contend with on the job. Some common occupational maladies include, well, sore throat, along with chest pain and perforations of the esophagus. Half of the sword swallowers surveyed for the story noted that when they removed the blade it was smudged with blood. Sometimes they vomit blood after the show.
Another Brick
“In the spring of 1929, a man named Patrick Murphy left a bar in Bisbee, Arizona, to bomb the Mexican border town of Naco, a bunny hop of about ten miles (16 kilometers),” writes Charles Bowden in an article about the expanding wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, in the May issue of National Geographic. “He stuffed dynamite, scrap iron, nails, and bolts into suitcases and dropped the weapons off the side of his crop duster as part of a deal with Mexican rebels battling for control of Naco, Sonora. When his flight ended, it turned out he’d hit the wrong Naco, managing to destroy property mainly on the U.S. side, including a garage and a local mining company. Some say he was drunk, some say he was sober, but everyone agrees he was one of the first people to bomb the United States from the air.”
And so it goes.

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Posted on April 20, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup of what’s on Shipley’s nightstand.
Scout’s Honor
James Calderwood has earned every Boy Scout merit badge possible – 121 in all, according to The Week. He’s also earned a badge not officially offered by the Boy Scouts but tough to achieve anyway: Virgin for Life.
Beam Them Up
After 300 years of unification with England, the Atlantic says, Scotland may finally achieve independence. Its president-in-exile is already making plans.
Make ‘Em Dance in the Aisles
NBC News anchor Brian Williams tells Men’s Vogue his secret: “To be taken seriously, make them laugh.” Because the news is so funny.

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Posted on April 9, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup of what’s on Shipley’s nightstand.
Historic Poop
Fascinating tidbit (second item) about the Dead Sea Scrolls and a Jewish sect called the Essenes in the March issue of Natural History. It says that Josephus, Jewish historiographer of the 1st century A.D., wrote that the Essenes, who probably penned the scrolls, were “adamant” about defecating in “retired spots” and burying their feces. Sadly, my puppy is an Essene and his “retired spot” is on my pillow.
Dino-mite
Spanish paleontologists have found a nearly complete skeleton of a new 150-million-year-old sauropod, the largest European dinosaur ever found, according to the March issue of Discover.
Italy on a Budget
A Travel & Leisure reader asks in a letter to the magazine: “Can you recommend some affordable B&Bs along the Amalfi Coast?” Why yes, we can. In Positano, check into the Villa Rosa Positano. Also popular is Villa Lara. Finally, there’s Al Borgo Torello.
No joke, just being helpful.

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Posted on April 4, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The fifth and last in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Claudia left him with a smile pitched carefully to linger. She approached Rémy who was in temporary, appreciated solitude. He saw Claudia and straightened, a redeemed light rising to fatigued eyes. They stood momentarily jangling and puppet-like before closing so he could lightly wrap hands around her shoulders and she laid a solitary soft kiss on his hard-boned cheek.
“Hello Claudia, I’m very glad you made it,” Rémy Larquey murmured as she parted; he still held her shoulders, looking her up and down. “You’re looking better than ever. Except in the eyes. You look a bit tired.”
“I don’t feel tired. Maybe a dash of ennui. You look well.”
“No I don’t. I’m yellow skin and bone, like Miss Havisham.”
“No, really, you look much better than last time.”
“I am eating these days,” Rémy granted, and smiled. It was an unfamiliar shape for his face, especially this evening, and the strain showed. “You don’t look to be eating at all, you’re thinner than ever. I bet you go days without food trying to keep that ridiculous modern damn scarecrow look.”

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Posted on March 30, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The fourth in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
In March of that year, four months prior to Claudia’s birthday, Rémy Gaston Larquey had been given the honour of a solo exhibition at the Herbert Bourne Memorial Wing of the New South Wales Art Gallery, to celebrate the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It was a special event for the art community in general and Rémy Larquey personally, the crowning achievement of a long career riddled with both great success and abysmal interludes of private and commercial failure. Despite years of proven worth as a seller and exhibitor of paintings world-wide, Rémy had not yet become truly fashionable in his adopted homeland. This event was destined to make him at last highly popular with the mass-media whose gears he had failed so conspicuously to grease by reducing his work or himself to a fine homily, and his art retained its savage dignity so that even phrases like ‘enfant terrible’ still seemed apt, indeed could hardly encompass him. Rémy was now finding acceptance, perhaps because he was passing into a grandee age few had expected him to reach, and he could be safely categorized even as he remained a terrifying, terrific sage. The floodgates of society page money would now open to him.
Claudia Rossi had received her invitation by mail a week before the event. She had glanced at it casually, wondered how she had made it on that mailing list, then noticed it had been signed by Rémy himself, a detail which started Claudia’s belly boiling. Rémy meant very little to her and she had built good things for herself without him. She would not go. It would be easy not to go. Too easy, perhaps. It could not bring much pleasure, although the event might be looked upon as little more than an excuse to filch hors d’oeuvres and explore the finer entrails of the social scene. She had surely hovered around the edges of many of such events. There was the chance to inspect Rémy’s art, which defied all her anger. She still worshipped Rémy as a creator. She would at some point go to the exhibition, so it made sense to take this opportunity and step into a social centrifuge. The price she did not know yet. There was certainly a price.

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Posted on March 29, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The third in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
When she was done with a client, Claudia would walk, feeling empty and hungry and lonely, enjoying the sense of money in her purse, the freedom, the knowledge she had bought her place in the world for another spell. She could march in any direction with confidence, hypnotise any man and any girl, and have herself for her self and whoever she wanted.
On this day there was a fair fresh wind waving in from the sea, shattered cloud rolling in, and the day had a dirty amber-etched tone. Claudia settled at an exterior table of the City Extra, under the Expressway’s vaults, having ordered a cup of flat white coffee and a slice of Chocolate Bavarian cake that looked fine under the glass. She sat and bantered with waiters and diners and slowly forked away chunks of cake and read the morning’s Herald. Though she had cleaned herself thoroughly before leaving Matsuo’s hotel room, she still felt a sheathe of divorcement from the world. It enclosed the heat of fine flesh and the smells and whispers that she carried into the evening cool and the grubby-toned days.
She took out Matsuo’s cheque and shook her head over it. She had friends, from university and from childhood, waiting tables, running the office photocopiers, temping, teaching, scraping by. She knew artists keeping themselves tawdrily alive, dole-cheque dilettantes, and here she was, for one night rolling with a pretentious Japanese prick, holding four thousand dollars worth of the Bank of Tokyo’s watermarked paper. The wages of sin? Merci fucking beaucoup. It could buy her the world. Tokyo, indeed? Perhaps. Matsuo’s suggestion was ripe. She studied, next, the card Matsuo had given. Joaquin Van Gelden, proprietor of the Red Curtain Club. A gentleman, not a sleazy pimp. Well, you’re a gentleman, Matsuo, but perhaps not all your friends are. I know many people that I like and would not trust so far as I might spit them.

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Posted on March 28, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The second in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Appointment at the Sheraton by Circular Quay. Walking the rim of the Quay studying the colour-daubed veins of the waving black waters, Claudia felt the harbour had welled out to flood the city, all the gleaming lights were the polyps and phosphorescent shoals and glowing-gutted fishes, the night wind swam upon her like the current, swooning as in inky dark, tendrils of human limbs thick and enfolding as the long wavering weed. The Rocks rose in twisted Georgian lanes and vaulted terraces of glowing sandstone and dew-bleeding granite. A white cruise ship sat with sharp thrusting bow and elephantine lines at the Passenger Terminal. In Campbell’s Cove a tethered sailing ship marked the beat of the tide with the creaking of its intricate rigging. The black arch of the bridge rode the gap of water with ribs of light, the spot-lit pedestals. The Sheraton in a half-moon of earth-coloured brick and gold-stained glass. Everything was alight and perfect and the people looked successful and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some were setting off for voyages or had just arrived from them. They were drinking with fine-looking friends and eating within the silver and brass of the tourist restaurants.

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Posted on March 27, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The first in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Claudia Rossi had been working as a prostitute for nearly five years. She had come to enjoy, amidst the scattered pleasures of that line of work, the arts of dressing and painting herself for a rendezvous. It offered a sensation of transformation, of stepping out of her corporeal self, so badly washed by inconstant sleep, her menstrual cycle, her careening moods and psychic integrity. The bitter circles of iron oxide around her eyes spoke of burning herself in nightly arts of drinking and chasing good techno music. In her apartment, she began in the bath and scrubbed herself down until she had no smell, no dirt, just smooth and glistening skin, an embryo of possibility. Like all achieved simplicity and beauty, hers came from great effort and attention to detail. She read magazines and books on eroticism and icons of style. She found herself pulled to noir heroines, French starlets, waif singers, flappers. She was aware of her minatory charge of sexual ambiguity. Though her style was feminine, a coltish grace in the length of her body, her mouth turned a defiant pitch with an almost masculine tension. She could turn on all the girls and all the guys. Her eyes, black curves framing lucid green irises, were dreamy when still and studying, but sharp at the corners, curved and swinging with the efficiency and final intelligence of a sabre.

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Posted on March 26, 2007