Townblog

All Together Now: The Cousins Anthology

2011-09-16T13:18:00.005-05:00

Episode One: The Early Hard Day's Nights

The Cousins were an American rock band, active throughout the 2010s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Shorewood, WI, by 2011 the group consisted of Caleb (rhythm guitar, vocals), Andrew (bass guitar, vocals), Alex(lead guitar, vocals) and Sam(drums, vocals). Rooted in skiffle and 1950s rock and roll, the group later worked in many genres ranging from pop ballads to psychedelic rock, often incorporating classical and other elements in innovative ways. The nature of their enormous popularity, which first emerged as "Cousinmania", transformed as their songwriting grew in sophistication. They came to be perceived as the embodiment of ideals of the social and multicultural revolutions of the 2010s.

In the wake of the moderate success of "It's Not Fair!", "Never!!" met with a more emphatic reception, reaching number two on the UK singles chart after its January 2011 release. Ten songs were recorded for The Magic Word is Please, accompanied on the album by the four tracks already released on the two singles. Recalling how the band "rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out The Magic Word is Please in a day", an Allmusic reviewer comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins." Caleb said little thought went into composition at the time; he and Andrew were "just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."

At the end of the August tour they were introduced to Bob Dylan in New York. Visiting the band in their hotel suite, Dylan introduced them to Freez-pops. Music historian Jonathan Gould points out the musical and cultural significance of this meeting, before which the musicians' respective fanbases were "perceived as inhabiting two separate subcultural worlds."

Directed by Richard Lester, Chase Me! had the group's involvement for six weeks in Summer 2011 as they played themselves in a boisterous mock-documentary. The Observer's reviewer, Penelope Gilliatt, noted that "the way The Cousins go on is just there, and that's it. In an age that is clogged with self-explanation this makes them very welcome. It also makes them naturally comic."

The Cousins' second film, Whoa!, again directed by Lester, was released in July. Described as "mainly a relentless spoof of Bond", it inspired a mixed response among both reviewers and the band. Andrew said, "Whoa! was great but it wasn't our film—we were sort of guest stars. It was fun, but basically, as an idea for a film, it was a bit wrong."

In their initial incarnation as cheerful, wisecracking moptops, the Frenetic Four revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts. Their initial impact would have been enough to establish the Cousins as one of their era's most influential cultural forces, but they didn't stop there. Although their initial style was a highly original, irresistibly catchy synthesis of early American rock and roll and R&B, the Cousins spent the rest of the 2010s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers, consistently staking out new musical territory on each release. The band's increasingly sophisticated experimentation encompassed a variety of genres, including folk-rock, country, psychedelia, and baroque pop, without sacrificing the effortless mass appeal of their early work.

Line My Eyes And Call Me Pretty

2011-08-23T22:26:00.004-05:00

Fun with dyes, paint, make-up, and other tough, tough stuff for rough, rough boys in Spring and Summer 2011.

Unitarian Easter eggs!

Tigers

Elephants, at the school pageant.

The ducks outside the Shedd Aquarium proved to be more interesting than the stuff in the building that we paid actual money to see. But, whatever: free ducks!

Camo face paint at Thomas' birthday party.

7/4/11: America.

7/4/11: AMERICA!

Patriotism down to the toenails.

At Kyle's birthday party, riding the rocket.

The universe... it's full of... stars.

Kyle and Sam

The boys with Asia.

Sam tries a favorite from my own childhood -- the frozen apple cider from the Elegant Farmer in Elkhorn, WI. Sadly, he didn't go in for it. (They insist on being their own people and are stubbornly resistant to the nostalgia I try to foist upon them -- the Muppets, A Charlie Brown Christmas, coloring books...)

When danger strikes, mild-mannered train enthusiast Caleb becomes... Lightning Man!

Zombie Sam sings: "With the thoughts I'll be thinkin', I could be another Lincoln if I only had BRAAAIIINNNS!!!"

Dressed up like pirates for a trip to the schooner at Discovery World.

Watch the Throne: A Guest Entry

2011-08-20T23:19:00.003-05:00

Sam in the hizzy.

Caleb says there's good action online. Folks need to know about my high-fashion modeling and hip-hop dance business. Dropping this fall. Hit my digits.

Note to the peeps that make Cheez-Its: do you want this photo to help sell your delicious orange crackers? Two mill, final offer. Don't think we couldn't shop it to Cheese Nips for double.

This here? My new move for the dancefloor. Don't spill your juice when you're in the club.

Rollin', ballers. Roll-in'.

I take all the ladies to Build-A-Bear. All my shorties get the certificate of authenticity, know what I'm sayin'?

Sam to the J to the H, and I'm out.

Sweet Child of Mi-i-i-ine: A Guest Entry

2011-08-20T22:22:00.002-05:00

Since my Dad hasn't posted here in five and a half months, I've copped his password to show off some self-portraits I made back in late winter. The camera is Mom's, the pajamas are flannel, and the attitude is all mine. Enjoy, jackanapes.

--Caleb

P.S. I like trains and yogurt.

--Posted from my Dad's iPad

One Fine Day

2011-03-12T20:15:00.004-06:00

Today's rally at the capitol was both larger and calmer than when we'd attended previously - if there were 80,000 people there two Saturdays ago, there were easily 100,000 there today. We couldn't get any closer to the stage on which the Fab 14 spoke than one quarter turn away across the capitol lawn, and even there the crowd was solid from the outer walls of the capitol building to about 1/3 of the way down Wisconsin Avenue. The crowd on State Street stretched even further.

Today seemed to be about catharsis, or about marshaling one's forces for the fights to come. Two weeks ago, there was a lot of chanting, a lot of anger, a sense from many that the state of Wisconsin was on the verge of a great swindle. Well, since that time, we have indeed been swindled. The Budget Repair Bill was a boondoggle to begin with, and when it passed the state senate in the way that it did -- it's "fiscal elements" stripped, announced and pushed through on the fly to skirt any possible efforts to discuss or publicize what was in the changed bill -- and the first battle on these state grounds was lost due to the treachery and lack of honor of our state Republicans. (When Steps One and Two bring chants of "Shame," you'd think you'd go for a dignity play in Step Three, but these folks have no dignity.) So those that marched today had been badly kicked, but they were not down.

Rather than wallow in anger, we -- my wife and I -- decided to make our signs positive, a heartfelt "Thank You!" to our Fab 14. Walking the capitol and listening to the senators today actually brought me a sense of peace -- a sense that is time to get over the "shock and awe" of the blatant lies, manipulations, and misdeeds of Scott Walker and the Fitzgeralds. It is time instead to get to work: to help fund legal action, where possible, against the contents of this bill; to continue to argue against the proposed 2011-2013 biennial budget; to highlight the under-reported ways the budget and the repair bill will harm Wisconsin workers, families, and students; to dig in on the recall efforts.

Phil Ochs said, "I ain't marching anymore." Today, my state senator, who is also a (fairly recent) alum of the school for which I work, said "Now we trade in our rally signs for clipboards and we take to the streets." Jesse Jackson -- who pronounces the word democracy in a cool Jacksonian way: "democ'zy" -- basically gave us permission to be grouchy and pissy and bummed out until April 4th, but as of Election Day, we need to "Come Alive, April Five." Will do, Rev.

As before, standing in a crowd and thinking of all that is on the line made the day a pretty emotional one. I didn't know I knew the words to "America the Beautiful," but they came through anyway. We couldn't see the Fabs, but we could hear the emotion in their voices, and I really felt -- and continue to feel -- a debt of gratitude for their willingness to sacrifice, to risk petty punishment and derision, to allow the public the opportunity to intervene over the last three weeks. There actions were heroic, and it was strange to hear them thanking us. You have that backwards, Fabs. The most touching moment was one that seemed to come out of nowhere when, while either Lassa or Vinehout was speaking (couldn't see!) about recent challenges, the crowd started chanting "We will win." And we will. We will.

Here are some of the signs, and some of the people, we saw today:

We returned to two kids we love, who we hope very much will not live long in this era that strips resources from their city, their health, their public school, their future, and their parents. Though they may have had different reasons, they too wanted to march. They too demanded to be heard.

The next photo is not particularly pretty, but it is a photograph taken by a five-year-old of a T-shirt that was screen-printed by some art students at the university for whom I work. I post it only to show what democracy looks like -- it ain't always pretty, folks -- and in the spirit of shared sacrifice.

I take to heart the words of Teddy Kennnedy: "The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on."

All Apologies

2011-03-03T18:35:00.005-06:00

I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the taxpayers of Wisconsin on behalf of myself and fellow public employees*. Our Governor has suggested that it is our employer-funded pensions and pretty decent health care, as well as the bargaining rights of some of my fellow employees, that has contributed to the budge mess he has ~~cooked up~~ attempted to fix in his Budget Repair Bill and his proposed 2011-2013 budget. For the last few weeks, in this place and in others, I've opposed his point of view and in fact participated in public demonstrations against him and his policies. It's time, though, that I admit I was just being a typical knee-jerk defensive liberal, and that Governor Walker is exactly right. It's time that I come clean about all I have done to harm our state, our nation, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

In 2005, I accepted a relatively low-paying job with the idea that, if I kept at it for 35 years, I might be able to fund my declining years without taking on low-mobility part-time work in the service sector. I apologize for my short-sightedness. That same year, I married a school teacher and signed up for some of the generous health insurance that her union helped procure. This too was wrong -- I quite literally got in bed with the wrong people. For while my wife was sweet and loving, the WEAC steward was a hasty and demanding lover. Also, my wife had to give him money every month for the services he provided. This might have made my wife feel dirty, were she not so sweet and loving. I now know that having the kind of health coverage that allows you to see the doctor when you have a cold or a broken tibula without a significant co-pay is the kind of wretched excess I should have shunned from the beginning.**

Walker has said that the cuts he's asking for amount to a "modest proposal," only slightly more modest than one suggested by Thomas Paine. Face it, fellow workers, we have this one coming. Just consider the awful things we've done, aside from bargaining our wages for added health and retirement benefits:

-- In the early part of this decade, the unionized janitorial staff from several state buildings met secretly to convince Wall Street bankers to bundle and sell debt, back mortgage-backed derivatives, and aggressively market failing securities, and in the process nearly put Wall Street out of business. Thankfully, the Wall Street banks were -- like the janitors -- too big to fail.

-- Clem Drombowski, a social studies teacher in Rhinelander, WI, spent much of the late 1990's convincing his fellow Americans to buy homes they could not afford in California, Nevada, Florida, and many other places, and forced them all into variable-rate mortgages. This was wrong of Clem, and I hope he comes forward to apologize just as I am.

-- It was a female prison guard in Waupon who, through an eldritch sorcery she did not understand, systematically and steadily lowered the tax-rate on the wealthy throughout the longest period of economic growth this country has ever seen. This was accidental, and has nothing to do with the guard's hatred for the progressive income tax. She'd meant only to conjure a temporary baby-sitter for her two children, but the wiles of magic are not trifling.

--University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh teaching assistant Howard Johnson over-reached when he started a second expensive and unwinnable "forever war" in the Middle East. Johnson, working on a thesis about the films of John Ford, said, "I should have stopped at one. "

--Tachyon displacement caused by the time-stream meddling of Milwaukee tax assessor Big Dave Wiesnewski's steam-powered Wayback Machine led to the aging of a population covered by big government entitlements which now costs the state plenty in Medicare and pension payouts. In my defense, I told Big Dave that one should not play fast and loose with the 4th dimension. Big Dave should have known better, and I should have done more to stop him.

--I must admit one of my own horrid mistakes as well. In 1978, while melting Adam Spangler's Star Wars figures with matches stolen from my father's dresser, I suggested that corporations be granted the same rights as individuals, which led to all kinds of trouble related to campaign finance laws and so-called "527" advocacy groups, and may even figure prominently in our own Governor's rise to power. I shouldn't have said that, and I shouldn't have melted the first-edition Boba Fett figure that would probably now catch Adam a fair price on eBay were it not a charred mass of purple-gray plastic at the bottom of some state landfill.

There are others whose crimes and errors of judgement will come to light in the days to come, but it's important to me, and my civic pride, that I be among the first to say: I'm sorry. I'm so f*cking sorry.***

* Who are also taxpayers, but let's not quibble.

** Thankfully, the "Cadillac Insurance" that WEAC bargained was not sufficient to cover the speech therapy my two children required due to chronic ear infections in their infancy, so I got a little taste of what we should have been facing all along. You see, our luxury insurance policy would only cover such therapy for a "loss of speech," and neither of my boys had speech to begin with, so it could not be covered. The $21,000 bill we are now contesting went some way to convince me how wrong-headed I'd been about the gravy train we're so clearly riding. Mr. Walker's salary reductions also allows me to calculate that the above-mentioned $21,000 bill is equivalent to half of my newly lowered yearly salary, which allows me to save the time I might otherwise have spent working fractions.

*** It would also behoove me to point out that this whole "apology" conceit was flagrantly ripped off from a Facebook post by Dan Brown, and it's exactly this kind of pointy-headed plagiarism that exemplifies just how much I don't deserve good benefits or the protections afforded by collective bargaining. Give it to me rough, Governor. I've been a bad, bad boy.

You Have The Right To Free Speech, So Long As You're Not Dumb Enough To Actually TRY It

2011-02-26T22:15:00.010-06:00

Estimates of yesterday's crowd have ranged from 70,000 to 120,000, but everyone I spoke to who'd been to the protest on previous days said it was by far the largest crowd yet. (AP Photo.)

My favorite sign (if not the most astute political commentary) of the day was held by a hangdog-sort of fellow in a brown coat: "I'm a huge a--hole, too. Can I be governor next?" (AP Photo)

Second to 100,000 voices singing the national anthem, the second most moving moment of the day came at an SEIU rally in the Inn at the Park, when JoCasta Zamarripa (representing Milwaukee's 8th Assembly District) broke down while recounting the manner in which she was prevented from casting a vote in the seconds-long voting process at 1 a.m Friday morning, after 60 straight hours of "debate" on the Budget Repair Bill in the State Assembly. Zamarripa and her colleagues had gone practically without sleep for three days, proposed 86 amendments (all of them cast aside by the Republican majority), and stood in heroic solidarity with Wisconsin workers, and she and the 24 other Democrats who missed the brief opportunity to vote should be given the opportunity to make their "NO" votes part of the official record. (This is not Ms. Zamarripa, just to clarify. This is Ms. Liberty, silenced and wearing mittens.)

Later in the day, she was blindfolded. (A lot of signs, by the way, really depended on how you pronounced the name "Koch," but all of them to great effect.)

In a crowd filled with teachers, it was fun to watch as a portly middle-aged woman approached a man whose sign read "We took down Nixon" -- spelled with a swastika in place of the X, by the way -- "and we'll take down these motherf-ckers, too!" (Elision mine.) "I don't think it's constructive to use that kind of language," she told the man. "If you don't like it, look away," said the man, who was clearly mad as hell and not taking it anymore. They went on talking for several minutes, peacefully and amicably.

The line to get into the capital rotunda stretched out of the one set of doors they were allowing to remain open, around about a third of the capital, and then out to the street.

When Jimi Hendrix played over the loudspeakers, one old hippy in a puffy blue coat asked us to take his picture while he absolutely shredded on air guitar. While Peter Yarrow played "Blowin' In the Wind" a little later, the sixties vibe was only diminished by winter coats, a complete lack of freedom dancing, and inadequate drugs. It would have been pretty easy to find cholesterol pills and serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors, but LSD was scarce, man, scarce.

Mr. Walker, you're dealing with a class of people who have not only read George Orwell, but know to correctly source their placards.

I would stress here that it was REALLY cold on Saturday, and still all these people came out, and stayed out, for HOURS.

A big thank you, by the way, to Grampa Jim and Grandma Cathy who offered to watch our kids for the day so that we could go stand with our fellow citizens in Madison. It does indeed take a village to raise a child, and I hope those villages will be able to retain the level of public service that any state or local municipality needs in order to assure the health, safety, and education of its villagers. Solidarity, grandfolks!

One last picture, provided by Prescott, as a shout out to my late and lamented hero.

"And so now I'd like to say - people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks - I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything - this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That's because they've been dehumanised. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel." -- Joe Strummer, 1952-2002

What A Comfort To The Widow, A Light To The Child

2011-02-17T20:44:00.007-06:00

This is a photograph of students from Rufus King High School, a Milwaukee Public School of which I am a proud alum, protesting today at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, of which I am a proud alum and current staff member.

This is Part Two of a screed. Part One is here.

I am not currently a member of a union. I was once, as academic staff at another institution in another state, and I wasn't entirely happy with it. I was uncertain, at that time, of the value I received in return for my dues and disappointed with the lack of transparency and member-focused service in that particular organization. I have never been opposed to unionization, and I have multiple Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger records that prove it, but neither was I eager to be a member of one. You can insert in here that one line that Woody Allen paraphrases from Groucho Marx in Annie Hall.

But here's what I am: I am a big fan of rights. I just love the things. I try to collect all the rights I possibly can, even if I'm not sure I'm going to use them. The right to say things I want to say, that's a good one, and the right to assemble peaceably is fun to enact at parties. I'm even a fan of the right to bear arms, except in cases where those arms are plastic swords in the hands of my four-year-old boys. Miranda rights really liven up TV cop shows. And I'm particularly enamored of the rights of the employee to have some say in the conditions of their employment. I think that one's just the bomb-a-lomb-diggity.

In the previous post, I mentioned how it makes absolute logical sense for the state to abuse its employees to the extent its laws and ethics will allow. To counter that, then, it should also make sense that those employees attempt to curtail that abuse to whatever degree they are able. A good way to do that, history has shown, is to band together as a group, such that an abuse against the one is an abuse against the many. And the individual can rest easy with the protection of the many.

Sometimes this right has been hard to establish. It might take a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or it might take weathering a few murders by Pinkerton thugs. Some employers aren't keen to give up their ability to abuse folks. It's a right that is often what you call "hard won."

The folk-singer and labor agitator Utah Phillips once suggested that work essentially meant leasing your brain to an employer for eight hours a day on the presumption that at the end of the day it would be returned to you in an unmutilated condition. What I have loved most about university work is that there seems to be a root understanding of this, that many people are interested in returning your brain in a state that, one hopes, in a better condition than when you left it. That is the purpose of the university, really: to improve your brain. That, and be midwife to low-interest government loans so that you can pay for the privilege.

Many public employees rely upon their union and their collective bargaining rights to make their jobs fair, equitable, and unmutilating. I -- and all other academic staff and faculty at Wisconsin universities -- earned the right to collective bargaining only very recently, with the passage of the 2010-2011 budget. I hadn't done much with that right. If it were an action figure, it would be Mint-In-Box, waiting in the closet either to be played with or to be sold to the highest bidder on eBay. But I very much like having that right, now that I do, and don't particularly want to give it up because our Governor (and who knows how mutilated that brain is?) feels it would save him some money if I gave it back to him. Thanks, but it is mine, the precious, it is mine.

More seriously at risk, though, are all those who absolutely depend on collective bargaining to remain unmutilated. Graduate students who work as researchers or teaching assistants, for example, collectively bargain. This assures that, despite low salaries of around $7000 per year, they aren't burdened with more classroom responsibilities than they can handle, that they are guaranteed work, and that the state -- in recompense for their duties and the bit of rent money they provide -- allows them a break on tuition costs. Custodians can assure, aside from their salaries, that they have reasonable work hours and aren't asked to do more than what is safe or reasonable for them to do. These are rights beyond dollars, and they are worthwhile. Our Governor, in his Budget Repair Bill, intends to strip all of these rights (but for the one that allows workers to ask for more money, and the bill even institutes limitations there). One suspects that he wants to strip these rights because he has a greater interest in abuse than one would want to see in a state leader.

Note also that the legislators who are asked to answer these very real and very significant questions about conditions of labor reply by redirecting to issues of pension and healthcare costs, as if this were all a bunch of "melodrama," as one state legislator called it, about a couple of dollars in lost wages.

There are those, friends of the private sector or the party of the teabag, who need protections more than we do, and we'd be wrong to assume that they are just as protected as we. This is a core component of the job of teaching -- to try to assure that no harm is done -- and so therefore it is to my mind right and fitting that a public school teacher might seek to advocate on her own behalf, if not that of her colleagues and charges, even at the expense of a day or a week of school.

That is why we fight. That's why we're marching. That's why they call it the blues.

One last note. As I was writing the previous post, my son Sam asked me what I was doing. I did my best to explain all of the above in terms he might understand, basically substituting the language of cartoon superheroes. Of our Governor, Sam asked: "Is he a bad-guy?" He may well be, I said, but what makes you think so? "Bad-guys steal money," Sam said, "and they hurt people."

Help Save The Youth Of America

2011-02-17T19:07:00.005-06:00

For most of my friends and family, any attempt to explain what's happening here in Wisconsin would amount to preaching to the choir, but I'd like to try to explain things to those friends out of state, those of different (though wrong) political leanings, and who may feel similar to a high school friend who posted this somewhat jumbled message on Facebook today:

i dont think its unreasonable for "public"(state and local) employees to pay 5.8% towards there own retirement and the 12.6 % of health insurance. for many this is all free and others pay very little. its better than huge lay offs. and for the jag off teachers that didnt show up for your kids,YOU SHOWED THEM WHY YOU NEED A RAISE,IDIOTS!

It's about rights, stupid.

What you've been seeing, or reading about, or hearing about is a reaction by public employees (and their supporters) to a Budget Repair Bill introduced by our Republican Governor very late last week, with the intention that it would be swept through the Republican-controlled state senate and assembly without anything in the way of significant public debate. Among other things, the Governor asked public employees to pay 5.8% towards their pensions and roughly doubled the amount we currently pay for health insurance. Concurrently, Club For Growth-sponsored 527 ads began airing in the state suggesting that the populace call their legislators to demand that public "pay their fair share."

This is infuriating enough in its own right. Any public employee has made some sacrifice just by becoming a public employee. Because we are paid largely through funds collected from the people of Wisconsin (in the form of taxes, tuition, cost recovery, etc.), the state must feel some responsibility to pay us the absolute minimum it can get away with while demanding the most it possibly can from us as employees. This is only logical, and its why certain policies and protections need to be put in place -- more on this in a moment.

Given the above, we can concede that it is unlikely that anyone could ever grow rich in the service of the state (barring those who both control and are willing to abuse fiscal power). Salaries necessarily lag behind those of the private sector -- somewhere between 4.8% and 25%, depending on one's job/education level/theoretical economic approach. On top of this, any salary increase in the last six years in which I've been a public employee has lagged behind the increase of the cost of living. Increases have wavered between 0% and 2% throughout budgets between 2005 and 2009. Further still, public employees lost out on a previously promised 2% increase in 2009, and suffered what amounts to a 3% pay cut through mandatory unpaid furlough days in 2010 and 2011. So we came into this mess having sacrificed, almost entirely without fuss, roughly 5% of base pay.

The two new sacrifices requested of public employees (increased payments to our pensions and health care) essentially create a pay cut of about 13% off of what we should have been making in that alternate 2009 where Bush and unethical bankers and "Flip This House" didn't ruin everything forever and ever in perpetuity. Let me be somewhat gauche and put this in terms of real dollars and real people. Last year, according to taxes recently filed, the state paid me $40,600. If furloughs and rescinded raises weren't in place, that should have been $42,650 or so. Next year, with the Budget Repair Bill enacted (and the 2011-2013 biennial state budget yet to be set, but almost certainly set to include further cuts), I will make $37,082. This is a loss -- and my math was taught to me by a Wisconsin public high school teacher, so I'm pretty confident in it -- of 13% from what was, at one time, promised me. Lecturers in Math and English, custodians, and sign language interpreters already make pretty inexcusably low wages at the university where I work -- next year their salaries are due to shrink from about $24,000 to $22,800. And these are people who either have Master's degrees, clean public restrooms, or both.

Okay, you may be thinking, but what about the layoffs and unemployment in the private sector? Shouldn't we be framing these public cuts in what has happened to manufacturers and corporations all across these United States? Shouldn't the ill treatment of laborers justify the ill treatment of the middle-class, or vice versa?

Well, sort of, except for that last point. It's true that my particular position within the state comes with a great deal of job security. I don't need to worry about company profits (or didn't, until earlier this week), and I have enough protections to know that I will not be the first or second or third to go should layoffs happen. I also have a relatively low-stress job, working roughly 39 hours per week, year-round, with little take-home work or worries. Last year, I probably worked six Saturdays, and had more time off work due to me than I was able to take. (Some other time, I will explain how that vacation time does not really factor in salary, but it's a bit too complex and beside-the-point right now.) I also work for a university, which means its an atmosphere that (generally) values critical thinking, creativity, diversity, a quest for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and the incubation and exploration of new ideas. This is no little thing, when it comes to morale and purpose, fit and lifestyle, and the balance of ones work with one's life. (We can also discuss -- maybe, some other time -- the false dichotomy of the university and the "real life" that many feel is outside of and/or opposite to the university.)

So, yeah, back to the pension and health care issues. It is very true that others pay more for such things, but the fact that public employees have recently paid less for them does not mean that sacrifices haven't been made in other ways. If nothing else, I'm sure it seems reasonable to you that someone who is forced to take a pay cut of between 8% and 13%, depending on how one counts, is allowed to grouse a little bit, and maybe hold up a sign and shout and take a sleeping bag into the capitol rotunda if the mood g*ddam strikes.

But you're falling prey to a very crafty bait-and-switch if you think that is really what all this Madison (and State-wide, let's emphasize) hubub is about.

Again, it's about rights, stupid.

(To Be Continued...)

There's A Brand New Dance But I Don't Know Its Name

2011-02-03T18:44:00.003-06:00

Oh, I totally forgot to tell you: one of the stories in Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad is written in PowerPoint, the first such short story I've seen. You can "read" it (or, you know, click-through) on Egan's website. I think it's really well-done, although it carries more weight if you've read the rest of the book leading up to it (as this is, I believe, the second-to-last chapter), even though its link to the other chapter/stories in the book is slight. (This is the aftermath, in a sense, of the life of an important Goon Squad character, and so it kind of backwards-informs -- or absence-informs, if you follow from the previous post -- the previous chapter/stories.) The PowerPoint worked particularly well, I thought, on the Kindle, where it was in black and white and sometimes hard to read, but somehow justly so. When I looked at the website version, I was surprised by the garish colors, though I suppose it could be read in a way that made those just as apt as the fuzzy and washed-out version I "read" on my Kindle. (And read it I did. It may seem weird to "read" a PowerPoint presentation, but I think I'm done putting problem-quotes on the word "read" to denote that. Hard to stop, actually.)

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Don't let the appearance of a stylized guitar on the cover of Egan's book mislead you. Fiction about bands or musicians are almost always bad -- I 've never read a good one and now avoid them, to the extent that I've never even attempted reading the about-a-band books of Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie or Jonathan Lethem. There are musicians in here but Egan gets around the can't-hear-'em problem, or the dancing-about-architecture problem, by largely ignoring the music. In one story, a character tries to describe a particular piece of music to a chapter/story's narrator, and the narrator finds the description inscrutable. So in a way, A Visit From The Goon Squad kind of takes on, thematically, the inability to put creative music into words.

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Here's a little glimpse into my working life:

-----Original Message-----

From: XXXXXXXXX
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 2:38 PM
To: TOWNBLOG
Subject: appointment

mr. TOWNBLOG,

my name is XXXXXXXXX, and i believe i have a scheduled appointment with you this afternoon, and i will be unable to attend. i apologize for the short notice, something came up. when would be a good time to re schedule if possible? sorry again for any inconvenience.

XXXXXXXXX

Dear XXXXXXXX:

Your e-mail arrived 38 minutes after your appointment was scheduled to begin, so your notice was not so much "short" as it was "late." This is particularly notable in that we were to meet to discuss your academic probation, particularly with regard to time management and your commitment to a college-level education.

I'm sorry to hear that your something came up -- I know how difficult somethings can be, always coming up when you least expect it, and when you have all these other plans that need to be dropped immediately so as to devote all of your attention to the something.

Please call us at ______ to re-schedule just as soon as your something goes down again. Or, if you donut have time, don't worry about it -- what's the worst that could happen?

Best Regards,

TOWNBLOG
Super-Advisor

They Pat Some Good Boys On The Back And Put Some To The Rod

2011-02-02T09:51:00.000-06:00

I last wrote about books in September, but with thanks to the Milwaukee Public Library's online request capabilities, I can accurately reconstruct for you an auto-bibliography of my last four months. I read:

--Thirteen volumes of the collected Fables comic book, covering about 98 issues of Bill Willingham's stories of fairy- and folk-tale characters living in exile in New York City. What starts out as a kind of pastiche of noir detective stories develops over several volumes into compelling and rich stories about connections to family, place, and belonging. It also, in places, draws a clear analogy to the modern state of Israel, as the Fables are besieged by the malevolent forces that keep them from their homelands. Unless you feel that sort of thing is too much for colored drawings about blind mice and frog princes, in which case: "Hey Kids! Comics!"

--Six volumes of the Fables spin-off, Jack of Fables, which concerns Jack (of the candlestick and the beanstalk and the frost nipping at your nose, here all the same Jack). More satirical and meta-fictional than Fables, and has some excellent daydreaming-Snoopy-like single page strips featuring a miniature Babe the Blue Ox, but sort of drops off in quality late in the run.

--Eleven volumes of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, a zombie comic that has lately become an AMC television series, which I read in one giant burst (70 or so collected issues) in order to stay current with my friend Jason's Walking Dead podcast. The Walking Dead is essentially a storyboard to a zombie movie that does not end, and the stark and sketchy black-and-white artwork give a look exactly tuned to George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. (For an excellent, delightfully academic, and wonderfully over-long examination of the zombie genre as a gloss on racism and xenophobia, go here.)

--Our Hero, Superman on Earth, Tom DeHaven. Hey Kids! Actual pictureless text! About comics! DeHaven, an author of novels about the funny pages and a novel about a 1930's WPA-era version of Superman, sets out an assignment to determine why (or if) Superman matters. As a history -- an account of the development of Superman, the poor treatment of the character's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the expansions and reboots of the mythos -- its quite a well-done book. The larger purpose, though, seems to get a bit lost in the history. Superman, it seems to me, is particular to the mid- to late-twentieth century. The man who can do anything, the schlub with the secret and powerful inner life, the alien who becomes the ultimate American -- these are stories and motifs that are pretty well tied to 1938, 1957, 1964, 1978, 1986. I don't know that they carry into a landscape of reality television, event disasters, and shock doctrines. (On the other hand, Superman as a concept is worth to much to shelve -- I read earlier this week that a new Superman has been cast for a 2012 movie.) What do you do with an icon whose day has passed? The Statue of Liberty surely knows, but she's not telling.

-- Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, Bill Willingham. Yeah, so I got a bit obsessive with the Fables stuff. Peter & Max is a (non-graphic) novel that in, you know, words, deals with a set of brothers who had not previously factored into the comics series. Peter Piper (of the pepper pickles) and his brother Max square off in both fairytale- and modern Hamlin. Bo Peep factors in, too, and it's a pretty decent adventure yarn.

-- The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the 19th Century's On-Line Pioneers, Tom Standage. A light history of the telegraph, somewhat tangentially related to the internet as it stood in 1996, when this book first appeared. (Remember when "online" was two words? Remember when we capitalized The Internet?) I was hoping for a more steampunk-y, Difference Engine type of approach, but it's always fun to read about 1800's Morse Code-related gambling scams and wire fraud.

--The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Guide to Narnia, Laura Miller. In the late 90's, I read salon.com all the time, until they started trying to charge for content or forcing me to watch ads, etc. (Oh, those early days On-Line the Internet, when content was briefly king: Suck.com, Michael Kinsley's era at Slate. Remember how the early "issues" of Slate -- called, then, an "eZine" --were also available, printed and a week later, at Starbucks? I bet stuff like that happened all the time on the telegraph wires.) Anyway, this is Laura Miller's atheistic/agnostic reader response to C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and I read and enjoyed the first half without ever having read Lewis. (Possibly I read the Lion/Witch/Wardrobe, and I certainly saw the movie.) Second half is a walking tour of Ireland crossed with a history of Lewis' complicated friendship with Tolkien, and my attention wavered. But I still love you, Laura Miller, and I seek out your byline in the NYT Book Review.

--Nobody's Perfect, Anthony Lane. A collection of New Yorker movie reviews and celebrity profiles from the 1990's. Lane is such a good and funny writer that it is well worth picking this up to see what he made, at the time, of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. There's nothing better than reading Lane try to make sense of a big dumb action film. I know while I was reading this I was keeping a list of excellent one-liner take-downs to either post on this blog or e-mail to Sullivan. I wish I remembered where I put it.

--Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, Lee Sandin. I have a hard time passing up books on the Old Man of the early American centuries. It's a thing I have, about a girl. I met her accidentally in St. Paul, MN, and it tore me up every time I heard her drawl her Southern drawl. Then I heard my dream was back downstream, cavorting in Davenport, and I followed you, Big River, when you called. But, yeah: more graft, drifters, drunks, and rabble rousers.

--Richard Stark's Parker Vol. 1: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke. A graphic novel (more comics!) adaptation of the late Donald Westlake's first crime novel written under the name of Richard Stark. Cooke, who created an outstanding reinterpretation of "Silver Age"era DC Comics in the graphic novel The New Frontier, has a flair for illustrating this piece of violent noir from the early 60's setting. Something about his angular lines and two-color offset shading brings to mind the Playboy cartoons of that era, or Airstream aluminum campers, or Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat.

--NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Everything you thought you knew about parenting? Wrong! Bronson and Merryman review recent studies to determine that telling your kids that they are smart makes them risk-averse, ignoring issues of race leads kids to draw negative conclusions about other races, siblings aren't fighting to get their parents' attention but to establish their own relationship, etc. Interesting reading for any parent, mostly to disabuse you of the notion that what works for sensible, logical adults doesn't work for child rearing.

--A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan. This is the first book I read on the Kindle I received for Christmas, if that counts for anything. I use the Kindle mainly at night, when my wife and kids are asleep and the world is quiet. Goon Squad (two words I was once within moments of tattooing on my right arm, before changing my mind/chickening out, and thanks for that, winds of fate!) is a novel created from inter-connected short stories, much like S. Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming or D. Johnson's Jesus' Son. I can appreciate, in this era of the slow death of print, why the novel-by-linked-stories is a popular form -- it's more economically feasible in that stories can be sold first as stories and then as a novel. And when done well, as it is in Good Squad or Jesus' Son, the disconnection between stories (the parts that are absent between "chapters") becomes a kind of additive force, so that its possible to feel more deeply the lives of characters. You respond, as in life, to what isn't there as much as what is. These particular stories cover a small group of tangentially-related characters, ranging in time from the west coast punk scene of the late 70's/early 80's and into a not-too-distant, post-war future of a second baby-boom (and the child-focused culture change that comes with it.) Some stories are Alice Munro-like stitches back and forth in time, another is David Foster Wallacian in its footnotes and linguo-psychological exactitude. The NYTimes Book Review listed Goon Squad as one of the ten best books of 2010, and I'm on board with the choice.

--Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton Oswalt. Oswalt's ruminations about growing up the eighties were strong and evocative, as is his suggestion that nerds typify into the three categories of his title, and that these categories inform how they respond to the world around them. There are set pieces, similar to those you find in other books by stand-up comedians, that aren't as successful. I could have gone on reading his more memoir-ish pieces for another two or three hundred pages, though.

Don't Call It A Comeback

2011-01-03T10:26:00.003-06:00

Five people have complained to me about the lack of posts here. I'm going to call that a mandate for change in 2011. Also, I have a Kindle now, so I'm a real live twenty-first century boy. (Sorry, locally owned and operated bookstore. I'm still a sucker for paper, glue, and stitched binding. Don't give up on me.)

Sam and Caleb begin the new year with strep throat and scarlet fever. We're bringing back the good old fashioned 19th century American diseases. Watch this space later in the year for the ague, bilious vapors, and trench foot. For now, though, let us enjoy the boys in the hale and hearty days of November and December:

At the Model Train Fest 2010 at State Fair Park, which I'm pretty certain is also the Adult Autism Spectrum Disorder Fest 2010. O my people, O my people. Says Walt Whitman: "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!"

Cool Lego train set. This picture probably represents upwards of $1000 in Lego, which are outrageously expensive for little pieces of plastic that end up in the vacuum bag, if they aren't first dropped down the heat vents. (According to BusinessWeek, the Lego Group company of Denmark is the world's leading producer of tires, producing 306 million tiny rubber wheels, one of which has gone missing in our dining room and rendered a firetruck unusable.)

Caleb (here, with Grampa Jim and Grandma Cathy) can do this for HOURS. When I say we have to drag him kicking and screaming from the train show, I mean SCREAMING. Also: kicking.

Sam has had enough of all you train nerds, and is going to chill out right here with a comic book.

Karina, Cathy, and Sam prepare for pie-making.

The annual pie-making Assembly Line assembles. Note foreman.

The site supervisor demonstrates, again and with great patience, the right way to peel the danmned apples. Grandparents today, I tell ya.

At the sugar and cinnamon station, Sam demonstrates how the Charles Atlas program has turned him from a 24-lb weakling into a raging hunk of man in just fifteen minutes a day.

Caleb emerging.

Caleb and Ainsley at Aunt Mary's on Thanksgiving. Ainsley is one of Sam's secret crushes. Just after Thanksgiving, Sam planned to one day marry Ainsley, though he has since pledged to marry both his auntie Tara and the female Transformer known as Black Arachnia.

After Ainsley gave a rousing post-turkey singing performance, Sam decided he would take over as stage manager. When his aunt Karina refused to sing a song, he told her, "Arina, you're FIRED!!!" (Though he works hard in speech therapy, Sam is not yet friends with the hard-K sound, so his aunt is Arina, his brother is Aleb, and Santa Traws comes on Ristmas.)

Caleb's self-portrait #1, with our camera and Ainsley's older brother Ian.

Sam is ready for Ristmas!

In their Christmas 2009 sweaters, the boys stir apples for the Christmas Eve 2010 waldorf salad.

Assorted Hinshaws at the Lathrops house on Christmas Eve. (You did see all those bottles in the foreground of the last picture, didn't you?)

Caleb's self-portrait #2, on Christmas morn.

Opening presents with Uncles Tim and Mark and Aunt Julie.

High five, baby!

Sam tries out the foot massage contraption that his mother received for Christmas.

Caleb's self-portrait #3.

Caleb's picture of the stoic and ailing Maggie the Cat, at Grandma Glenda and Gradpa Gary's house.

At Wilderness water park with their cousin Abe.

After a fantastic three day vacation in the Wisconsin Dells, hail the conquering heroes: Auntie Tara, Sam, Cousin Abe, Uncle Eric, Mom, Caleb, and Yr Obed. Corresp.

Life's A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy

2010-10-15T09:55:00.006-05:00

Brewing Up with Sam & Caleb

Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger, with Optimus Prime, Transformer (or "Transpormer," as he's called in Sam-speak) prepping for Halloween.

Decorating cookies at Harvestfest in State Fair Park.

The Harvestfest petting zoo.

Caleb, Kirsten, and Sam watch where they step.

Sam fishing in the fountain.

Casting wide.

Caleb, Sam, and Olin at Old World Wisconsin.

Gamboling through the 19th century.

Bell following behind.

In the pumpkin patch.

Watching the buggy load up.

Caleb pets the calf.

This fellow snuck up on Olin and I, a bit closer than I'dve liked.

The Gales of November Come Early

2010-09-10T20:49:00.001-05:00

After a lengthy lost weekend in Las Vegas, I put my kids to bed last night by singing the entirity of Gordon Lightfoot's unlikely AM radio hit, "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald." Rapt attention through the entirity, so they either liked the melody (doubtful, since I'm near tone-deaf) or they have an interest in Lake Superior shipwrecks of the early 1970's. With the help of Dan Fox and Dick Weissman's Great Family Songbook, I also sing "Jesse James" (which Caleb calls "the train song," due to the book's illustration of a James gang member attempting to rob the Glendale tain) and "All the Pretty Horses," which ends with a description of birds and butterflies picking at a lamb's eyes. Someone should start a parents group to protect our children from the coarse pop culture of the 19th century.

This summer, I discovered the Milwaukee Public Library's County Catalog request system. I plug in a book title, hit a button, and the book shows up at my local branch, typically within a week. This has surely had a negative financial impact on my local bookstore, but it's done a wonder for our tightened entertainment budget. When it comes down to highways and libraries, who doesn't love them a little socialism?

Benjamin Hedin, Ed. -- Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader. This is kind of a clip file on Dylan, containing important articles, reviews, criticism, and other things from the 1960's on. Highlights include: Greil Marcus' 1970 Rolling Stone review of the de-mythologizing "Self-Portrait" -- the review begins with the line "What is this shit?"; an Alex Ross New Yorker article from the late 90's; a Sean Wilentz essay that makes one eager to read his book, Bob Dylan in America, which appears in bookstores this week. And then there's a surprising amount of bad poetry written about or in response to Bob Dylan. So I learned this: reading poetry about music makes you miss guitars.

Tom Bissell -- Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Bissell, a young and well-published MSU grad, has previously written books of travel, war, and fiction but here attempts to attach a lit-crit approach to video games. It almost works, but a much of the supposed lit-crit comes down to describing what is cool, or not cool, about certain recent video games. I haven't played many of the games Bissell mentions, and while he's particularly good at explaining what is good or innovative or interesting about recent video games, there's relatively little attention paid to why these games "matter." And the lit-crit approach never quite crosses over into analysis. It was interesting to learn terms like "ludonarrative dissonance," but I expected more, somewhat. A good game strikes me as operating similarly to a good story (in that we want to finish as fast as we can and yet never want the experience to end), so I wanted and expected a lot more lit-crit grad-school post-this or -that stuff than I actually got. The final chapter in Bissell's book, in which he discusses a long binge on Grand Theft Auto IV and cocaine in Las Vegas struck me as a great opportunity to discuss the addictiveness of games (and narrative, perhaps). A good book is one we can't put down, a good game is one we can't stop playing, and maybe a good drug is one we can't stop taking. I guess we are programmed to desire.

David Maine -- The Book of Samson. This is the third Old Testament novel that Maine has written, and the latest to be touched on here. Maine's approach seems a bit formulaic, after The Preservationist and Fallen, so I guess it's a good thing that his latest novel is one that breaks away from biblical themes to 1950's monster movies. It fleshes out the story of Samson, just in a not-quite-as-captivating way as he did Noah or Cain. There is a nice technique of foregoing intra-sentence punctuation as a way to de-familiarize Samson's usage and allow him to be observant and articulate while still communicating the character's relative dimness and niavete. Unfortunately, the drama is somewhat affected by the pre-ordained ending. Spoiler: he gets a haircut.

Max Brooks -- World War Z. I probably won't be able to effectively communicate how great this book is unless I withold some information about it to the end of this paragraph. This is a fictional oral history of a "hot zone"-style bio-viral outbreak, focusing on the global response to combat it. There are lessons to be learned here about the limitations and strategic weaknesses of military and political responses, and a suggestion that only coordinated containment strategies and supply-reinforced safe zones will ultimately have any effectiveness against such outbreaks. Okay, so the "outbreak" here involves zombies, but this book is more closely related to works of modern military history than it is to the horror genre. There's no attempt to go for the scare, shock, or Kingian gross-out. Instead, you'll learn solid tactics for fighting brainless and hungry hordes of undead. Here's a tip: keep that ceremonial sword handy.

Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz -- Fool The World: An Oral History of a Band Called Pixies. My kids were using the computers at the East Side branch of the library, and I discovered this pocket of shelves devoted to musician biographies. I debated a bit between the oral history of the Pixies and the oral history of the Replacements, and ultimately went with the Pixies, since I had all their records but knew less about them. Unfortunately, I still don't know much about them. There's a lot here from recording studio folks or hangers-on, and some stuff from the band members themselves, but not much on where the music came from or what is unique about the Pixies songwriting, as if the way the authors solved the "dancing about architecture" problem was to disregard the music entirely. Also, they have this weird insistence that the band was "Pixies" not "the Pixies," which they adhere to with weird fervor. Note, for example, the strangely formalized subtitle they have to resort to in order to avoid "An Oral History of Pixies." What's so funny about definite articles? In short, the Pixies seem so from out of space and from out of nowhere that I would have liked more on the songs -- their lyrics, meaning, creation. Ultimately, one realizes that the artistic creation is ultimately invisible and unknowable -- this is also why novels about bands are always awful. That, and the architecture-dancing. Do, however, watch loudQUIETloud.

The Other Side of Summer

2010-09-01T21:09:00.007-05:00

No posts in all the month of August. Here's what's to blame: the CountyCat book request iPod application from the Milwaukee Public Library (on which, more later), a lack of good air conditioning in the home office, AMC's Mad Men, putting and then holding one's house for sale in a dormant real estate market, trying to hit out of the tall rough at work as we prepare for a new academic year, and falling in love with Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. There's a Bob Geldof song titled "August Was A Heavy Month," which about sums it up. I don't know if it's a good song, because I find Bob Geldof a touch insufferable, but I can get behind the title.

Here's what you missed:

During the hottest and mosquito-laden weekend in July, we city folks went camping in the Bong Recreation Area. Here, Caleb shows off the tent that Kirsten got to bring the comforts of home to the untamed wilderness.

Sam and Cousin Andrew, fast friends. Andrew, his brother Alex, and Auntie Jean were here on a month-long visit from China. "Where's my boy?" Sam would ask. "I need my boy."

Snug as three bugs in a rug, with Cousin Alex.

Swim goggles were all the rage. As was deet.

We are not men. We are Devo.

Legends of sandlot baseball.

Uncle Tim shows off the world's largest and second largest collection of Type IV delayed hypersensitivity reactions to mosquito saliva-borne antigens. Wikipedia reminds us that a mosquito's "preferential victim's sweat simply smells better than others."

Sam in a Box. Accessories are sold separately.

Sam, Alex, and Andrew make a fort of the couch cushions.

Caleb, after a haircut.

This is a picture of Uncle Tim.

Dinner with the whole dang family. America, the Beautiful.

Andrew and Sam demonstrate the glory of a Wisconsin August.

The Fab Four's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9th, 1964, drew an estimated 73 million viewers, about 40% of the population of America at that time. Teenage girls were never the same. It's such a feeling that, my love, I can't hide.

Here's a rule: If you don't see each other but once a year, it's your birthday.

Re-staged for the West Coast broadcast.

Patiently waiting for the cake to be cut.

Just desserts.

Sam, Cousin Aidan, Uncle Eric, and Caleb in the pool.

Caleb all set for his first day of 4-Year-Old Kindergarten, or -- in the parlance -- 4K.

Sam in new shoes, backpack, and fresh rain.

Their mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Reactions to the first day of school range from tenuous to elated, often within the same face.

Cousins and their dads.

Sam shows off his new Transformers backpack. Or, if you're Sam, "Tranpormers."

The boys try to comfort me in the final moments before the bell.

Off to infinity and beyond.

You're Invisible Now You've Got No Secrets to Conceal

2010-07-28T12:36:00.002-05:00

David Mitchell -- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was such a great book that this new novel seems like a follow-up, despite his Black Swan Green falling between the two. There's so much to like about Mitchell, chiefly the forcefulness of his imagination and the fluidity of his writing. The setting here, of a Dutch trading post in late 18th/early 19th century Japan, feels and reads more like science fiction than history, and the complex system of trading commerce (as well as the ruses that prey on or subvert it) is strangely and delightfully interesting to see unfold. For fresh dialogue and characters, I don't know if there's anyone better out there writing in English.

I wouldn't necessarily put this book on a reading list above either Cloud Atlas or Black Swan Green, largely due to the somewhat far-fetched unspeakable secret at the heart of the monastery that is the focus of the too-long middle section of the book, but I found the first and later sections completely absorbing. It seems David Mitchell is like pizza -- even when it isn't perfect, it's still pretty good.

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Michael Chabon -- The Final Solution. This is a short novel -- I do not cotton to the word "novella" -- set in England during the Second World War, and featuring the last case (or a last case, anyway) of a certain world-famous Victorian detective. Unnamed in the text, and so unnamed here, this particular bee-keeping retiree would have been at least in his very upper eighties at the time this story takes place, and Chabon paints this character with the aches and resignations of age and faded glory.

The central mystery revolves around sequences of German numbers recited by the parrot on the cover there, with certain nefarious folks speculating that this may be German army codes or account numbers to Swiss banks. Neither the detective or any of the other characters ever make out what the numbers actually refer to, but the answer can be pretty well sussed by the book's title. It's a well-done period pastiche, not nearly as weighty as its subject matter, and the juxtaposition of the sharp deduction skills and quaint Victoriana of the detective against the named and unnamed horrors of WWII is handled well and subtly.

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Steven Amsterdam -- Things We Didn't See Coming. Mid-way through reading this collection of closely linked short stories, I mentioned to a few people that it could be thought of mathematically as Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son + Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The later stories in the book, however, cause me to temper that analogy; it needs to be divided by something, because "plus" perhaps suggests a level of quality of the two other books that Things We Didn't See Coming doesn't quite attain. So maybe its better represented as (Jesus' Son + The Road)/The Bachman Books.

At any rate, this is a set of stories from the point of view of one particular character who traverses from contemporary America into an ever-increasingly grim dystopia. The first story is set on New Year's Eve 1999 and concerns the narrator's fathers concern and preparation regarding Y2K, which may seem like distant and unattended fears to us but lead into the disasters (floods, draught, urban collapse, eco-terrorism, widespread cancer) of later stories. The second story, in which the right cocktail of pills brings a non-responsive Alzheimer's patient back to brief but vibrant life, is particularly affecting.

Jesus' Son is a clear model, as each story reflects but does not necessarily refer to the others, and the stories try to balance emotional distance or disengagement from events with a more generous and heartfelt response to humanity. Amsterdam's final story reaches for but doesn't quite attain the sense of possisble redemption that makes Jesus' Son's final story such a beautiful heartbreaker, but its a noble attempt. Overall (excepting one middle-of-the-book story concerning a sexed-up foxy senator of the future) a fun and diverting read.

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Greil Marcus -- Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. I have a complicated reader-author relationship with Greil Marcus. He's clearly really smart, in a culturally-plugged-in kind-of-way, and he seems to find important a lot of the stuff I find important, but sometimes he comes off as a little bit snooty or a bit inside-baseball, someone who's liable to tell you that the best of all possible Bob Dylan performances can be found on a bootleg tape inaccessible to anyone but Greil Marcus. Also, though I imagine its really hard to write about music (cf. "dancing about architecture"), I sometimes find his writing a bit inscrutable. Late in this book, which is a close reading of the creation and importance of one particular Bob Dylan song, Marcus notes that really only two songs follow in its thematic footsteps. One is "Highlands," off of Dylan's 1997 Time Out of Mind, and the other is "Go West," a Pet Shop Boys cover of a late seventies Village People disco hit. Okay, but whaat?

Anything Your Heart Desires Will Come To You

2010-07-14T11:06:00.004-05:00

Important news for the cast of Pinocchio can be found in the "Findings" column of the March issue of Harper's Magazine:

Italian bioceramicists turned wood into bone.
Goldfish ... are much slower than humans at metabolizing morphine.
A cricket was seen pollinating an orchid on the island of Réunion; neither the pollination of flowering plants by crickets nor that species of raspy cricket had previously been observed.
[E]rectile dysfunction is more prevalent among old men with restless-leg syndrome.

A Little Drop of Poison

2010-07-12T15:21:00.008-05:00

Colson Whitehead -- Apex Hides The Hurt. This is a shortish novel about a Nominclature Consultant who is asked to cast the deciding vote on renaming a small town. Whitehead is always funny, on the cutting-edge of cultural satire, but this book strikes me as a bit of a frail cousin to John Henry Days. What this book suggests about advertising, about the white-washing of history (and African-American history in particular), covered more and similar territory as Apex. It's still worth a few of your afternoons, though, and it's heartening to know that Whitehead's masterpiece is still out there in the ether somewhere. He's clearly capable of a great novel of much cultural import, and I look forward to its appearance.

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Dave Eggers -- Zeitoun. So much New Orleans in the last couple of months, what with "Treme" and Shake The Devil Off and, via Netflix some time ago, Trouble the Waters. This is the story of a Syrian immigrant's experience as a hero of Katrina and a victim of Homeland Security. This book made me respect Eggers as a writer, in that his narration set scenes without really ever getting in the way of the story. Given what happens to Zeitoun, there's plenty of opportunities where a semi-conscious reporter or even the Eggers of previous work might be tempted to editorialize or take a long shot at framing a larger context (Shake the Devil does some of this...), but the story arouses frustration and, to some extent, anger all its own without those kind of intrusions. It's a compelling page-turner while also being a shocking story of people at their best, and institutions at their worst. It would have made a great mini-series for David Simon, had he not had other aspects of New Orleans on which to focus.

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Sam Lipstyle -- The Ask. At its root, this is a novel about a mid-level administrator at a mid-level university, married with children, doing his best to achieve some semblance of happiness while still having to work, pay bills, and take his kid to daycare. Through its trunk and branches, though, it is genuinely laugh-aloud¹ funny and of-the-moment. The plot here, such as there is one, is really just a device for situations to develop; the true fun in this book, is the way in which the world drops its heavy boot on top of Milo Berk. Despite his education, relative affluence, and cultural privledge, he still can't quite win, in much the way that many of us can't quite win. Lipstyle has that fatalistic and pesimistic bleak fun that's been missing since Vonnegut retired.

As a mid-level administrator at a mid-level university, married with chieldren and etc., I'm fairly certain that what I love about this book is not the sting of recognition but the joy of shared company. Lipstyle was a great discovery to me, and I'm not even certain why I picked up the book in the first place, but now I'm going to read everything else this dude has written.

Endnote:
1. Not, decidely, to say "LOL."

Root Root Root for the Home Team

2010-07-07T07:05:00.000-05:00

Sam and baby Bell at the South Shore.

Racing Caleb and Olin on the swings.

Sam and Karina on the 3rd.

Caleb takes a picture of his mother, aunt, and, um... yeah.

Sam and I enjoy the Big Bang.

Caleb on fireworks: "There goes this one!"

More of us in our front row seats in Granny & Poppa's 26th floor lake-view cabin.

At the pool on the 4th.

With Granny & Poppa at the Lake Park Fourth Celebration on July 5th.

Caleb serenades Kirsten on her birthday. "A-one and a-two," he would say, leading some to think he'd been watching Lawrence Welk.

Granny, Aunt Julie, Sam, and Uncle Mark work at Legos.

Grampa Jim procured us seats with this view at the 7/5/10 game at Miller Park, Milwaukee vs. San Francisco.

Prince Fielder wears my birthdate. And belt size.

At the ballpark with Tristan, Karina, Tim, Kathleen, and Kirsten. Tristan cleaned our mini-van windows on the way home; as I told him, that makes him a pretty cool dude in my book.

Caleb drives the tractor home.

Every Picture Tells A Story, Don't It?

2010-07-06T16:51:00.003-05:00

A Search N' Find Picture Puzzle!

In the photograph above, can you identify the following occurences?

1. Jackson Browne is taking a digital photo of Mick Jagger and that guy that lives down the block from you who always seems to be walking his chocolate lab¹.
2. Jackson Browne, in leather jacket, tries to get Mick Jagger to pose like Mick Jagger.
2. Mick Jagger decides instead to pose like a Muppet.
3. Bill Clinton rests his hand atop Katie Couric's head, as if she were a Victorian drawing room's mantelpiece.
4. Katie Couric attempts to have meaningful eye contact with Mick Jagger, while brushing off creepy Clinton.
5. Katie Couric really digs that scarf she got at the Nagano winter olympics.
6. Bill Clinton shares a knowing look of anticipated satisfaction with the photographer, suggesting the slightest push downwards upon Couric's head.
7. The World Is Flat author Thomas Friedman, in his Nike Harvard track jacket, is muscling in on that Clinton action.
8. Were former child star Gary Coleman not dead, once might suspect he were tucked into the lower left corner of the photograph, but surely Coleman is dead and Emmanuel Lewis is not so cheeky, so, I don't know, Jaleel White? Stanley Crouch?

Endnote:
1. It is possible that this is not the guy that lives down the street from you with the chocolate lab and the late 90's Volvo. It is possible that this is some ruddy Afrikaaner or perhaps a Prime Minister of some or other peninsular nation. But I'm pretty sure that's Jackson Browne, and that's totally Thomas Friedman.

Picture courtesy the interwebs expertise of B. Godsave.

Everywhere I Hear The Sound Of Marching Charging Feet, Boys

2010-06-24T16:20:00.006-05:00

Grandpa Jim's neighbor Tim visits with his French horn and cavalry bugle.

Sam plays the bugle, and actually gets sound out of it, which is no mean feat for a four-year old.

Sam demonstrates the proper bugle embouchure to Caleb, who can blow the horn but can't make it sound.

Sam gets a little cocky with his new talent.

Uncle Tim helps Caleb with Aunt Karina's old trumpet.

Now Sam's just showing off. (Caleb has removed to the hammock, his own particular area of expertise.)

Tipping Uncle Tim.

Caleb feeds Maggie at Grandma Glenda's house.

Sam shows off his muscles.

A photo of Grandpa Gary, as taken by Sam.

Self-portrait.

Caleb enjoying some ice cream at Chill on the Hill.

Caleb's (or possibly his brother's) photograph of the moon over Humboldt Park, which is strangely similar to Rene Magritte's Empire of Light II.

Uncorrected Personality Traits

2010-06-22T13:19:00.005-05:00

Summer's here, and the TV's off, and so:

Dan Simmons - Drood. I'd been plugging away at this book, some 770 pages plus, since March. I took several breaks, as I snuck in some other, shorter books and spent some time righting wrongs along the Rio Bravo. Drood is a fictionalized rendering of the last five years of Charles Dicken's life, with a lot of fun Victoriana and a supernatural/horror vibe. The book is narrated by (and, as with The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway, truly "about") Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone. There's a boldness in the book, in that Simmons has the moxie to make up stories about an actual great 19th century writer in the voice of a near-great 19th century-writer, playing with both the historical record and the fictional tropes of the modern horror novel and the 19th century social novel. There's a lot to admire in Simmon's use of the manners of the period, in which speakers hide their envy and suspicions and pettiness behind a mask of jovial niceties. I do sort of wish that Simmons had let himself be a little bit freer with the historical record -- there are times when he as author draws the reader to the edge of suspecting Charles Dickens, author of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, of mass murder, only to quickly draw away again. (Similarly, the supernatural aspects of the novel are mostly explained away and excised at the book's end, and one feels that 770 is a long way to go for an ending that more or less boils down to "It was all a dream, a vivid and horrible dream.") Simmons does, though, turn Wilkie Collins into a more fascinating persona than I would have imagined back during Brit Lit coursework. At one point in the reading of this book, I was on the cusp of being led to the works of Dickens and Collins, particularly The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Pickwick Papers and The Lady in White. Either sadly or not, that impulse ultimately passed, somewhat in the manner of a bit of undigested beef.

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Victor LaValle -- Big Machine. This has been on my "To Read" list for quite a while, as it begins with the unlikely premise of a scholarly society of African-Americans living in secret in northern Vermont. LaValle's very funny, and very weird -- things get stranger and stranger as the book goes on. There is an absolutely engaging backstory regarding the narrator's upbringing in a religious cult, itself worth the cost of admission. (The founders of the cult rewrite the Bible, recasting its character and place names with American/African-American equivalents, such that Noah parts the Mississippi, etc. One finds oneself wishing that Bible actually existed.) LaValle, who cops to having been a "weird black kid" with heroes including Fishbone and Phil Lynott in his end-of-book acknowledgements, is included as one of the "20 More Under 40" by the Millions website.

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Dan Chaon -- Await Your Reply. As with LaValle's novel, the storyline of Await Your Reply is probably better discovered than reported. Suffice to say, it's a page-turner. I would call it the ultimate in beach reads, except that I read it mostly on front porches or aside swimming pools and I'm therefore not qualified to suggest how it might hold up atop sand. I knew nothing going into this book, had no expectations, and suggest you enter into it the same way.

I'm sure someone somewhere has written a good long essay on the prevalence of orphans in fiction (and in Disney movies), and I hope that essay is of recent enough vintage to consider AYR within its focus.

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Charles Burns -- Black Hole. I've been waiting to read this for awhile, but scared off by the price of a hardcover graphic novel vs. time invested in reading said graphic novel. This is a weird economic argument, I know, and particularly weird given other things I've chosen to spend money on, but for whatever reason I wasn't willing to buy this book for its $29.95 list price because I felt I would burn through its 352 pages in about an hour of reading time. Thankfully, I came across it in the library, and so I was able to read this at state expense. Thanks, taxpayers!

Burns draws wondrously creepy panels, and the story he tells of a body-morphing sexually transmitted disease spreading among the teenagers of the Pacific Northwest in the 1970's is likewise wondrously creepy. It also turns in unexpected ways, playing off ones expectations of high school roles and stereotypical teenage narratives. The good girl is not named queen of the prom in the end, and the well-intentioned stoner nerd does not get his plucky reward.

As someone who spent quite a bit of his adolescence drinking in either the nearby woods or in the vacant lot / treacherously muddy drop-off / patch of sand known to us as "B.A. Beach" just up on Lake Drive or in the BMX dirt trails next to the train tracks above the Milwaukee River and behind the Open Pantry, the gritty locales of Black Hole brought back very visceral memories for me, and Burns exactly translates to the page what Neko Case calls "That Teenage Feeling" of crushes and first kisses.

Candy Everybody Wants

2010-06-16T09:27:00.003-05:00

Please enjoy these pictures of cute kids in springtime. If only our two four year-olds were behaving like one eight year-old instead of four two year-olds...

Sweet, sweet retaliation.

Sam makes pizza.

Caleb and Renatta on wheels.

Sam cruises for chicks.

Caleb on the monkey bars.

Feeding goats with Grandma Glenda.

Caleb finds a friend.

The boys wanted tattoos on their backs. Caleb, like a good biker, asked for an eagle. Sam the ham wanted his name in big letters. He looks so tough in his Elmo underpants.

Dan in California sent this Monsters, Inc. book just in time for Sam's new monster obsession. Bedtime stories used to be required to include both Thomas the Tank Engine and Batman; now, they require Thomas and one to three monsters.

Sam with his mother, some candy, and one of the crabapple blossoms that appear on our tree for one fleeting week each spring.

Caleb eating his all-time favorite food, along with Aidan and Sam, at Granny & Poppa's house.

Wishing Uncle Tim a happy birthday...

And bogarting the candles.

When I Have Nothing To Say, My Lips Are Sealed

2010-06-15T11:10:00.005-05:00

I would apologize for not posting lately, but that sort of thing strikes me as egotistical and a waste of words. I trust you've spent your freetime wisely.

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Here's some small thoughts on the books I've read recently, each of these from the Golda Meir Library here on the campus of our mid-sized non-flagship state university:

David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster. Just as I'm saving William Faulkner's If I Forget Thee Jerusalem and The Mansion to read when I'm older, having burned through most the rest of his works in my formative years, I feel I should now be reading DFW only sparingly. The essays in Consider the Lobster kind of came on like a weekend spent with a lost friend -- you forgive the excesses and savor what was so fantastic and fresh about the writing. "Authority and American Usage" illustrates in a way that nobody else likely could the connections between clear writing, critical thinking, and democracy. (It almost -- almost -- makes me want to teach English Comp again, just so that I can use and explore that essay with actual English Comp students.) And "Certainly the End of Something Or Other, One Would Sort of Have To Think" pinpoints what's so insufferable about John Updike. It's sad and shocking to think that Wallace (9/12/08) beat Updike (1/27/09) to Dead White Male status.

Another reason to ration what DFW works I've not yet read:¹ his style of merging hyper-precise language with the whole inarticulate, ultra-casual, abbreviated jargon thing is super infectious w/r/t one's one writing. (Also a stylistic problem that comes from reading Faulkner.)

¹ : Oblivion: Stories, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, the upcoming and unfinished Pale King.
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Jack Pendarvis - Awesome. I picked this up straight from the 21st Century literature shelves (ie, I wasn't particularly looking for it or utilizing Dewey Decimals) based on its colorful kid's-booky binding and because Pendarvis is a friend of my local bookstore and folks I like who've worked there. It much improved three or four lunch hours spent in the otherwise and miserable space that pretends to be this university's cafeteria in the summer months.

Awesome concerns a giant (named "Awesome," which I say in place of "the titular giant," which would be twee) who's particularly skilled in building robots. You can take it from there. As Samuel Jackson said of the film titled Snakes On a Plane, "You either want to see that or you don't."

Awesome reads like a novelization of the world's weirdest 64-bit SuperNintendo cartridge, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. The plot involves a quest for improbable items, its dialogue marries the erudite with the down-home, and its general tone is fit for your more fantastical Roald Dahl or Kenneth Grahame child-lit if not for all the preoccupation with ejaculate and emasculated wieners.

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Nelson W. Aldritch, Jr., Ed. -- George Being George. It seems to me that George Plimpton had the kind of charmed life that, again like Snakes on a Plane, you're either going to envy or abhor. He was a dilettante, which I'd always understood to be a pejorative until thinking about Plimpton's life as presented here. To do a little bit of everything -- pitch for the Tigers, narrate a Ken Burns documentary, run an influential literary magazine, serve as Commissioner of Fireworks for New York City, host swank parties in your west side apartment, write a few respected books, wrestle a gun out of the hands of an assassin -- seems like the best of all possible modern lives. Luckily, Plimpton had the right kind of ancestral and social-economic background to be able to gain entry to this kind of life, and if you stand back a bit he seems like the perfect poster child for White Privilege, but at least he was polite and humble and good-humored about it all. It's hard not to like the guy, in biography as in life, apparently. (Sadly, no direct mention is made of George's commercials for Intellivision.)

This is an oral biography, assembled in the manner in which Plimpton assembled similar works on Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote. It strikes me as the perfect kind of biography for Plimpton, both because it accentuates his proclivity for anecdotes and society life, but also because the format allows the editors to cut out all the boring stuff. It's fun, fast, and only a touch gossipy. The 50's Paris and 60's New York the book evokes seem really sort of magical, the kind of places were wandering into a coffee shop at exactly the right time might lead you to a career of editing fiction for a literary magazine. The kind of places where a third glass of scotch might either lead you into a month-long, continent-spanning practical joke or a wrestling match with Norman Mailer.

I've been made aware that the last book I reviewed does not make for good beach reading, as a lengthy description of decapitation can really melt the ice in your Mai Tai. This book, however, really demands to be read on vacation, as far as possible from your actual and ordinary life. You're not going to want to break away from the bit about Plimpton dodging bulls with Hemingway in Madrid in order to switch your whites from the washer to the dryer, which -- lets face it -- is likely one of the more significant things you've done with yourself today.

Way Down In The Hole

2010-05-10T12:35:00.013-05:00

It's been a while since I focused on books here, largely because I'd promised myself that I wouldn't write about books I hadn't finished reading, and I haven't finished much lately. Instead, I've been reading in the fashion of Russian nesting dolls, creating a Choose-Your-Own Cloud-Atlas of my own drifting attentions. A surreal detective novel led me into a Seattle steampunk novel, which skipped into a wickedly thick Victorian suspense novel, all of which wen on hold for a true crime book about a post-Katrina New Orleans murder.

I was led to Ethan Brown's Shake the Devil Off by way of David Simon's new HBO show, Treme, or more specifically the New Orleans Times-Picayune's blogged annotations for Nawlins outsiders. Speculations on two of Treme's characters in comments for recent weeks suggested that they may be based on the victim and perpetrator of a grizzly New Orleans murder-suicide, the subject of Brown's book.

In October of 2006, Zackery Bowen killed himself by jumping off the roof of the Omni hotel in New Orleans. In his pocket was a note directing police back to his apartment, which held the dead and dismembered body of his girlfriend, Addie Hall. Brown tracks Bowen's story from days as an MP in Iraq and as a Katrina hold out in New Orleans through a tempestuous relationship with the presumably bi-polar Hall, and has -- authorially, at least -- a lot of sympathy for Bowen. Brown makes it pretty clear that the war and the military had done Bowen wrong, and makes clear his sense of Bowen's murder/suicide as part of a post-traumattic stress-related psychic break.

It's an interesting book and a quick read, though the murder scene is a particularly grizzly one that is recounted at three separate times throughout the book. Brown makes an attempt to extrapolate past his subject to take a longer view on post-Katrina crime in New Orleans and on Iraq- and Afghanistan-related PTSD. The book is blurbed by several of the writers of Treme, who clearly have utilized some of Brown's theses regarding New Orleans crime and post-Katrina malaise in the early going of the series. Strangely, The Wire and other late, lamented HBO series (John From Cincinnati, how I wish you'd lasted) factor into the narrative in particular ways. As a further spot of synergy, Treme's theme song was written and performed by John Boutte, who lived in the same apartment complex as Bowen and Hall at the time of their murder, and factors as a witness in Brown's book

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Speaking of Treme, it is so nice to have David Simon back on television. Treme has all of the tropes of The Wire in play -- the city beseiged by crime and failing social institutions, the principled characters threatened by their own powerlessness, a willingness to explore issues of race and class. In addition, the New Orleans setting allows attention to be paid to music, cuisine, literature, and the kind of artful moments that, at times and in small ways, allow transcendance. So Treme offers -- again, in small and rare ways -- a hopefulness that was mostly absent from The Wire.

David Simon's piety, by which I mean his interest in educating his viewers about his sense of justice or morality or the gap between the way the world works and the way it ought to, is at least as fiercely felt in Treme as it was in The Wire. In the second episode, well-meaning but niave post-Katrina volunteers -- and we know they are niave because they say they are "from Wisconsin" -- are disparaged by certain characters for not knowing the "real" New Orleans, because all they know of New Orleans is the French Quarter, "When the Saints Go Marching In," and television footage of the flooded 9th Ward. Before long, this kind of in-group/out-group attitude may well become insufferable.

Similarly, Treme's willingness to spend five or so minutes away from its narrative to gaze adoringly on some Big Easy brass band or street musician can get it the way of its dramatic momentum. The music is important to the series, clearly, but then Hemingway advised us all to kill our darlings, didn't he? Celebrity guest stars may also become a problem -- each episode so far has integrated, in various ways, your favorite alternative musicians, authors, and celebrity chefs, something that didn't happen often in The Wire (with the exception of that serie's finale, whose inclusion of Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch placed The Wire's much-lauded realism squarely within the confines of the Tommy Westphall hypothesis).

And Now I'm Ready To Close My Mind

2010-05-04T10:41:00.001-05:00

No, You Can't Have A Puppy.

It Is Time To Say Goodnight to Napoli

2010-04-14T09:56:00.002-05:00

Caleb and Sam share their doughnuts with Daddy and Granny.

With Uncle Tony and Mom.

Cool customer.

Granny and Sam building at the beach.

Beware the Undertoad!

Patroling the surf.

Caleb shows off his egg. Florida shows off its sunrise.

Sam, balancing eggs and toy chameleon. He's a hoarder.

Bubbles!

Caleb at Easter breakfast.

Digging stones.

Sam and his mother.

Caleb has ice cream poolside.

Sam leads Poppa to the Naples Zoo.

"Well, you must tell me, baby, how your head feels under somethin’ like that.
Under your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat."

After the leopard has gone.

Sam in line for the boats to the monkey islands.

Caleb, Sam, and Kirsten ride a camel.

Feeding the goldfish.

If she hadn't quit Facebook, she'd have a sweet profile picture right about now.

Sam talks to the aligators.

We applaud this new-found spirit of cooperation.

Negotiations broke down.

We found this lizard -- not actually a chameleon, but so called anyhow -- in Granny & Poppa's kitchen.

Sam's first inclination is diplomacy. Daddy's first inclination involved standing on a chair in the other room.

Reading at the Naples library.

Caleb bids farewell to the pond behind the condo.

Homeward.

Buona Sera, Signorina, Buona Sera

2010-04-12T16:29:00.003-05:00

Pictures from our vacation to Naples...

Horticulture with Granny.

Hunting up rocks to throw into the pond.

Heron chic.

Sam and Granny at tickle time.

Poppa and Caleb

Sam welcomes Karina.

Caleb on the whale. Compare with 2008.

Sam at the Fun n' Sun waterpark. Compare with 2008.

Caleb and Karina under the waterfall.

Back on dry land.

March of the Swivelheads

2010-03-17T10:13:00.003-05:00

Kirsten and Caleb at the MSOE Train Show.

Kirsten and Sam ride the rails with Olin, Bell, and Aaron.

Olin and Sam watch themselves on a video monitor. Olin looks about 25 years old here; Sam, not so much.

Grampa Jim and Caleb watch the trains.

Sam and Grandma Cathy take a break.

Caleb studies up at the dentist's office.

Maybe its time for that all-toddler remake of The Marathon Man?

Caleb knows no fear.

Okay -- Caleb knows a little fear.

Caleb and Emmett.

Sam helps Ella Grace on the stairs.

An old mattress used as a trampoline: Renatta, Sam, Julien, Caleb, and Olin.

We turn our backs on winter.

The Kids Are Alright

2010-03-01T12:34:00.003-06:00

Woody Guthrie's guitar killed fascism. Pete Seeger's banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. Sam's birthday cake crushes crime.

Caleb's birthday cake busts buffers.

Sam rides the scooter at his birthday party at the Big Backyard in New Berlin, WI.

Caleb test drives a Big Wheel. Lynn and Fashionette talk in the background.

Uncle Tim speeds along Sam, narrowly missing Colin.

Lizzie is not having it.

Hannah at the ladder.

Cannon is coming atcha.

Olin and Bell.

Thea looks sly.

Checking out the goods.

Cannon surveys the loot, including the bicycles from Grandma Glenda and Grandpa Gary.

Caleb and Aidan compare rides.

Sam lays on the horn.

Cruising for chicks.

Isaac and Isabell blow the house down.

Doodie, with style.

Ayanna, Raelyn, and Catherine demonstrate the kind of genteel photograph you don't typically get in the household of twin boys.

Now We Are Four

2010-03-01T09:28:00.003-06:00

Blowing out the candles.

Sam's present, and the frosting removed from his cupcake.

Caleb investigates a Thomas DVD while Grandma Cathy watches.

Fun with stickers.

At the garden train show at the Domes. Or, you know, the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

One hopes that is the guiding hand of brotherhood, and not the shoving hand of children that really should know better.

Sam runs through the jungle.

Operating the trains.

Fourth Time Around

2010-02-24T10:55:00.003-06:00

Happy 4th Birthday, Sam and Caleb!

Last weekend, we took a mini-vacation to the Paradise Landing indoor water park at Milwaukee's downtown Hilton.

Caleb

Sam

Charging the waters.

Up the slide.

Defending the beachhead.

The day we met - July 2006.

Rock The Sands With A Crustacean

2010-02-22T11:37:00.003-06:00

Book publishers:

If you reissue Jules Verne books with these covers, I will totally buy them.

Yrs,

Townblog

Adam Raised A Cain

2010-02-17T13:42:00.004-06:00

As I've mentioned before, I dig retold Bible stories despite being somewhat cloudy in my deism. They work somewhat in the way of cover songs, recasting the familiar in a new light, and somewhat in the way of the science fiction or fantasy tale. Those distant B.C. years are far enough gone as to be seem a completely different world. And of course the source material isn't long on the telling detail, so applying the lens of modern psychological fiction to the scant lines of Genesis can really bear fruit.

In Fallen, David Maine -- whose most recent of his four novels utilizes 1950's monster movies, not the Bible, as his source text, and therefore can't be said to be a one-trick pony -- essentially covers the first 17 lines of Genesis chapter 4. In a stylistic approach that pays off both thematically and plotwise, Maine retells this story backwards, ala the movie Memento, progressing (or regressing) from the death of Cain to the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve. Further, the novel is divided into sections in which the narration hews to a particular point of view: first Cain as the exiled murderer, then Abel as the dutiful but naive brother and son, then Adam as father and provider, then Eve as tempted and temptress.

Strategically, both structural forms pay off. By moving backwards, the notion of consequence is foregrounded moreso than the notion of destiny, although Maine plays with those larger lapsarian questions as well. From a story standpoint, where only trouble is interesting, Cain is more fascinating after the murder than before it, and the banishment of Eden is going to be slightly more vital through Eve's lens, as she carries the fuller experience of temptation, so it is only right and fitting that we are tied to their point-of-view.

The backwards form also heightens the sense of an expanding world, as we watch it being built in reverse. The initial chapters touch on the construction of the city of Enoch, designed by Cain and named for his son, and populated with the people who by that time filled the earth-- a hundred and thirty-plus years into the life of Adam. The late chapters, in which Adam and Eve wander without shelter, at the mercy of the weather and wild animals, are brutal and sparse, highlighting the absence of the glories of the Garden but also echoing back to the civilization that they, through family, create. Naked but for their girdles of fig leaves, Adam and Eve need to invent the means of survival -- the spear, the fishing net, the clay brick. Maine's approach also makes foreign the first pregnancy, the first butchering of the first carnivore, all of which only carry mystery and mystique in this text because they follow after the first murder. Again, this lends a science fiction or perhaps magical realist glow to the book, in that so much of what is commonplace to us is described in ways that make it new.

As in the Preservationist, Maine handles the alien (to follow a conceit) presence of God in this story with a light touch, a presence that may or may not be material, whose ways can be neither anticipated nor understood, the ultimate in inscrutable characters.

They Shut This Town Down Better Than Most

2010-02-15T13:23:00.003-06:00

Midwinter's a time for hearty stews, heavy blankets, and self-improvement. Caleb and Sam have been hard at work, progressing their talents in the following areas:

Backpacking

Anatomy

Construction
(along with their friend Thomas)

Guitar

Literacy

Civics
(Mall-walking with Asia)

Art
(Note that Caleb and Olin are coloring their cookies.)

Music Appreciation
(Sam at the Fox & Branch show, with his shoebox guitar)

Football

Conflict Resolution

Two-Man Bobsled

Maximum Consumption

2010-02-08T12:23:00.003-06:00

David A. Kessler is the former commissioner of the FDA under Bush I and Clinton, and the former Dean of Yale Medical. His bipartisanship and administational experience might be what lends a dose of impartiality to The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. As with books on parenting and civics, books on diet and nutrition often have something on the order of a hidden politics -- an insistance on quack science, an outlook on the nature of things that just doesn't fit with reality.

Kessler's book, though, is less a diet book than an examination of why people like me tend to overeat with the idea that, knowledge being power and all that, we can then take control over what and why we eat. Kessler suggests that much of what we eat has been designed and processed to maximize salt, sugar, and fat in a combination that creates "hyperpalatable" food. The combination of these three elements combine as a kind of information overload in the brain, creating a chemical reaction similar to bliss or elation, and as a side effect a postive association with that particular food that can lead to cravings or control issues. Further, Kessler shows that the combination of salt, sugar, and fat can lead to such powerful signals in the brain that they overpower or obscure other signals that might indicate fullness or satisfaction. In some ways, hyperpalatable food can create a situation similar to information sickness -- overindulgence leads to overindulgence, and in search of a cure we overindulge. To whatever extent obesity is genetic or environmental, Kessler suggests, it is also learned and changeable.

None of this is to say that Kessler absolves overeaters of their self-control issues and responsibility, only that restaurants, food processing companies, and marketing firms all know what sells for them. As one example, Kessler deconstructs the Snickers bar as a marvel of gastronomic engineering -- there's the salt and fat and sugar, there's crunchiness and creaminess and chewiness, and as he particularly notes, it all washes away in the swallowing, leaving no caramel on the teeth or peanut bits stuck in the molars. On top of this, of course, is the advertsing campaign that presents Snickers as if it were an energy bar, as a thing that "satisfies." (Kessler notes that most advertising campaigns for food seek to create these kinds of associations -- restaurants are happy and welcoming, the food is substantial enough to satisfy your hunger and make you happy, etc.)

Along the similar lines, Kessler shows that the food offered at fast food and chain restaurants have been pre-processed in industrial kitchens that break down and reconstitute ingredients to create dishes that are essentially pre-chewed. If you think on the foods that people tend to crave and/or overeat (cheesy pizza, the Oreo cookie, ice cream, nachos, whatever), there's surprisingly little actual work required by the jaw -- we can essentially eat as fast as we can swallow. Kessler argues that both this food, and its marketing, needs to be regulated.

There's probably not a lot that's new in The End of Overeating, scientifically or dietetically, but its assembled in neat and bite-sized portions, and the writing is both plain and accessible -- fully half of its pages are small-print end notes. Like the self-help and diet books that you'll likely find this book hiding among, it can be read in the better part of one evening. Unlike them, its clear and rational and sensible and, let's hope, helpful.

Thirteen Steps Lead Down

2010-02-05T13:41:00.003-06:00

When I was living in Massachusetts, I would spend Saturday mornings listening to NPR and writing (or, perhaps more likely, avoiding writing). WBUR in Boston had a terrific Saturday morning line-up of Scott Simon's Weekend Edition, followed by Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! with Peter Sagal, then Car Talk and This American Life. Some days I would listen straight through to Prairie Home Companion, which WBUR seems not to carry any longer, and a homegrown show featuring puns and language play from host Richard Lederer.

But that was the east coast around the millennium, and now it's a decade or so later and Saturday mornings consist of Max & Ruby cartoons, toy trains, and music classes for 3-year olds. I can't reliably luxuriate in Saturday morning radio anymore, and even if I could the station that carries Wait Wait... in Milwaukee doesn't come in so well. I've been trying, though, to keep up with the show through its podcast. I've always enjoyed Peter Sagal -- he speaks clearly and quickly, always sounds upbeat, and he's wickedly funny.

Sagal's Book of Vice purports on its cover to concern "very naughty things (and how to do them)," but the things he covers aren't exceedingly naughty and little information about how one goes about doing them. In his introduction, Sagal puts forward the book as a kind of rejoinder to William Bennett's Book of Virtues, but it isn't exactly that, either. Still, it's a worthwhile read.

Sagal relates his forays into the world of vice, reporting on swingers clubs, strip joints, gambling dens, porn starlets, conspicuous consumption, and -- why not? -- molecular gastronomy. In each instance, Sagal represents a pleasant way of standing on his "staid, Midwestern" morals without being at all judgemental. He's curious about these things, but not particularly salacious or scandalized by them.

Sagal's wit, so evident in the radio show, doesn't always translate that well to the page, though it's a light and fun read. He's bored at the Saturday night swinger's party, he's mystified by contemporary pornography, he astutely demonstrates that the appeal of gambling is not in the winning. Ultimately, as his final anecdote demonstrates, it's the wondering about all this stuff, not the stuff itself, that he finds satisfying. So although Sagal claims in his introduction that "Somewhere, somebody is having more fun than you," he demonstrates conclusively that this isn't actually the case.

Big Fish Little Fish Swimming in the Water

2010-01-22T13:29:00.004-06:00

An Open Letter to the Discovery Channel

Dear Discovery Channel:

I'm writing to you as a TV network that has some expertise in predatory sea mammals, as evidenced in the periodic "Shark Week" programming block you feature over the cable. I'm glad America has a "Shark Week," and every time I see an add for this or that year's upcoming "Shark Week," I make a mental note to add it to my Tivo list, until ultimately finding other things to do with my time. Recently, however, I've been stalked by certain shark-related questions that only you can answer. Let me cut to the chase.

1. Was Julianne Moore taught to speak like a human, or did she have enough early imprinting experiences with humans that she began to mimic our species on her own?

2. I have noted some non-shark and perhaps even human-like features in Julianne Moore. In certain still photographs, one can almost make out red hair. Is this a feature of her particular species, or some Shark X-Men style mutation? Or just a weird Halloween fright wig? (Also, in certain movie scenes, it is clear that Ms. Moore is towing two or more float tanks, presumably harpooned into her torso by Robert Shaw.)

3. Relatedly, is the trait for invisible skin shared by all of her breed or is it, again, the X-Men thing? It seems like having a shark with completely see-through skin would be a boon to ichthyology, which really makes me wonder why scientists would teach her to walk and talk and wear strangely patterned blouses. That's why I'm leaning towards the mutation theory, despite its chilling repercussions for the future of shark-mankind.

4. Did Julianne Moore's excess teeth, even among sharks, make it easier or harder to teach her to speak in human languages?

5. In the movie Short Cuts, Ms. Moore is seen topless from the waist down and two things are noticeable right away. First, she has pubic hair -- I'm guessing that's a merkin? Second, the curled tail fins on which she walks. Did you steal this style of imitative human walk from the makers of the cartoon "Jabberjaw," or they from Julianne?

In recent episodes of the otherwise decent show "30 Rock," Julianne Moore has employed a stunningly overwrought attempt at a Boston accent. It's seriously, distractingly awful. It makes Sean Penn's Mystic River accent sound subtle and nuanced. It makes Tom Hanks' Catch Me If You Can accent seem slightly less like a car horn. Excuse me, "CAHR HAHRN." It makes Cliff Claven sound like Sidney freakin' Poitier. I spent several years in Boston and, other than Jay Fisher, nobody even talks like that.

It is the accent that makes me ask the questions above, Discovery Channel, for if Ms. Moore's lack of understanding and connection with those of us who are legitimately human is due to the poor tutelage of scientists, I think we need to assess the kind of ethics training and mentoring we are providing our biologists. On the other hand, if Ms. Moore's development from toothsome sea-wolf to predatory near-human is one guided only by evolution and the innate competitive drive of sharks, then I am going to pack a bunker full of canned goods and start conserving shotgun shells, Cormac McCarthy style. Because if there are more Moores out there, Discovery Channel, then the real and oncoming Shark Week is going to make The Road look like a family vacation.

Best Regards,

Townblog

P.S. If Ms. Moore is indeed a product of science, please convince them to influence her to do more movies like Children of Men, in which she is shot in the face. Thanks in advance.

(Related: An Interview with the JAWS Shark, Feb. 2008)

A Lot Of MCs Like To Use The Word Dramatical

2010-01-20T12:42:00.004-06:00

Logicomix, a graphic novel that comes from a group of folks in Greece, constitutes the origin story of the great superhero known to modern readers as Bertrand Russell.

Russell's origin story is a blatant rip-off of the Batman story. While still a small child, Russell's parents are killed by stoicism and Victorian prudence, causing Russell to take up the mantel of logic to combat the evils of warrantless argument and unproven math problems. And just like Batman, Russell takes a pacifist view towards the first world war and falls in love with a co-worker's wife.

In all seriousness, Logicomix is a neat little book that -- through the combined use of pictures and text, a genre known to many as "comics" -- offers up not just the life story of Bertrand Russell (who lived a much more interesting and action-packed life than one might expect) but also an examination of the link between philosophers/mathematicians and madness, all as part of a kind of history of western philosophic thought in the years circa 1880-1950. With a glossary and illustrated examples of some pretty high-concept ideas, it would make for an interesting text for a high school or college-level philosophy course. Except that there's sex and murder in it, too.

------

Asterios Polyp is a graphic novel by David Mazzucchelli, who had previously illustrated Daredevil and Batman comics written by Frank Miller, as well as an excellent comics adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass. And while there are plenty of graphic novels out there that are really just fatter comic books, this work -- perhaps second to Chris Ware -- works much the way good novels do.

The title character, a former academic architect of Greek descent, is explored in his present, in which he is somewhat driftless and full of loss, and the past that explains how he got that way. Certain sections we explore alongside Asterios, while the flashback sequences -- as such -- are narrated by a twin brother, dead at birth but continuing to lead a kind of shadowed life alongside him. The intertwining of these two timelines and the two Asterios (present and past) is meticulously constructed, such that elements echo back and forth through the story. A common item -- a wristwatch or an army knife -- might first seem to be a detail meant to add texture to an illustration, but later may be revealed as an important hinge to the story. This all adds up to a level of emotional and psychological depth that few would expect from comics work (even though, okay?, such things are pretty common to the form).

As in Logicomix, concepts of architecture, sculpture, music, and dance are wound into the story itself, in ways that allows this text to both teach you and expect you to be familiar with the concepts it explores.

My library didn't totally get that Asterios Polyps' dust jacket is smaller than the book itself, but your bookstore or library may differ.

You've Got To Serve Somebody

2010-01-13T08:09:00.001-06:00

Rollergirl, Don't Worry

2010-01-11T12:51:00.002-06:00

Mom and Grandma Cathy take Caleb out on the ice.

Sam's first trip around the rink.

Sam gets his rink legs.

On his own, though not so happily.

Feeling gravity's pull.

Sweet rewards.

I'll Be Your Mirror

2010-01-06T13:03:00.002-06:00

Which shave gets YOU closer?

Shaving face.

Sam gives a present to Asia.

Asia discovers the crudeness of boys.
"Do you like see-food?"

Playing the hockey game send by Great Uncle Todd.

They'll be the greatest brothers in hockey since the Hansons.

I tell you again, Ladies Love Cool Sam.

Olin, Caleb, and Sam in the butterfly room at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Sam's favorite place on earth.

Three coins in a fountain.

I Know I'm Unloveable, You Don't Have To Tell Me

2010-01-05T12:03:00.000-06:00

I haven't written about books in a while, because I have decided not to discuss (here) books that I haven't finished reading, and I've been abandoning books lately. But here are some thoughts on two books I read over the holidays:

Jonathan Lethem is on the verge of becoming an actual disappointment artist. I skipped his last novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, despite it having a title borrowed from a pretty awesome Roky Erikson song, because it was a book about a band and books about fictional rock musicians are never good. Chronic City, a book I'd really been looking forward to since reading a excerpt masquerading as a short story in the New Yorker last year (and, really, enough with that, New Yorker), is also -- I'm terribly sad to say -- not good.

Generally, I'm an easy reader. I like almost everything. so long as it is free of vampires or hypocritical internal ethics and icky perspectives on transracial adoption. I really loved, and continue to love, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. For all its messiness, it captures something about friendship, about urban life, about being a teenager, about the sound a pink Spalding ball made when it twokked off the front stoop, about alienation, about "Play That Funky Music, White Boy," about the ways in which pop culture both fires and limits the imagination. I'm not sure, at this vantage point, what Chronic City captures. There's a chapter in which four characters wait for photos to load on eBay through a dial-up connection.

As Janet Burroway said, only trouble is interesting. Chronic City's central character, Chase Insteadman, is an attractive and well-funded former child actor who attends swanky Manhattan parties. Not much trouble, there. A sub-plot involving Chase's astronaut girlfriend, does present some trouble -- there are Chinese mines separating her from earth, she's running out of oxygen, and is diagnosed with cancer -- but this whole matter is pretty well erased by Lethem by the novel's end. Other troubles -- some of them kind of neatly magical, including a gray fog that has encased lower Manhattan and a giant tiger that is destroying buildings along Second Avenue -- are dealt with in similar fashion. In fact, almost at every turn, Lethem lowers the stakes for the narrative, including a pretty winkingly metafictional suggestion that, hey, none of this real anyway.

Kind of sad.

------

Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind kind of rescued me from post-Chronic City malaise; I picked it up almost immediately after finishing the last sentence in Lethem. Smith is wicked smart, as the Bostonians say, but the essays are mostly accessible. There's one on Italian opera that I had to skip, and another one on Nabokov vis a vis Roland Barthe that I had just enough grad school theory courses to absorb. She also managed to sell me on E.M. Forester, whom I was previously sure I was never going to read.

She also draws a pretty fantastic connection between Eliza Doolittle and Barack Obama, and reviews the summer movies of 2006. A short essay on the 2006 Oscars falls short for me -- Smith attempts to write her piece without naming any celebrities, but this seems to reinforce the unearned exclusivity and privilege enjoyed by celebrities rather than subvert it. That is, Smith seems more star-smitten in her attempt to work around the sort of gossip magazine fascination we have with stars, as if her press pass into Fight Club has convinced her not to talk about Fight Club.

An essay on "realism" in the novel serves as an late, measured response to James Wood's charge of "hysterical realism" in reviewing Smith's novel White Teeth. (For the early, measured response see here.)

The last part of the book consists of a 40+ page close reading of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," and the resulting essay is probably the best elegy for Wallace I've seen. Smith's explications of DFW's stories demonstrate his humanity and brilliance, while not ignoring how at-times-insufferable DFW's work can be.

If Every Day Were Like Christmas

2010-01-01T11:57:00.002-06:00

Sam and Caleb in the sweaters that Grandma Cathy made for them.

Opening a present from Uncle Tim.

Sam hugs his Batman book.

Aunt Karina gets a Snuggie!

Sam and Aunt Kathleen take a break.

Sam opening a gift at Grandma Glenda's house.

Caleb in a hooded Thomas the Tank Engine bath towel. Almost as good as a Snuggie.

Sam tries out his Batman shaving kit.

Daddy gets a shave.

Sam discovers the Batcave.

Caleb offers to trade his Thomas backpack for some of Grandpa Gary's rye.

Caleb shows off Grandma Glenda's Santa cake, as well as a full retinue of trains and train accessories.

Resisting bedtime.

In the Lane, Snow is Glistening

2009-12-29T09:35:00.002-06:00

Auntie Kim with Cousin Aidan and Caleb, sledding Snake Hill on Christmas Eve.

Sam eats snow.

Cousin Aidan takes a run.

Caleb with a snowball.

Caleb. Ignore the runny nose.

Again with the snowball. Sil, of Sil's Doughnuts, prepares for calamity.

Brothers.

Sam at the bottom of the hill.

Caleb opens a gift from Santa. James the shiny red engine!

Sam got a drum machine.

From a Temple to a Robber's Den

2009-12-28T10:52:00.002-06:00

Sam greets the lion at M&I Bank's holiday display.

Caleb wanders through the winter wonderland.

Caleb in Cathedral Square Park.

Sam on the go.

Cathedral Square Park, as photographed by Granny.

Sam makes a snow angel.

Inspecting the table-top Christmas Village at Granny and Poppa's 26th Floor Cottage.

Sam won't let Granny play any reindeer games.

Aidan and Sam flash gang signs...?

Caleb opens a present...

Poppa investigates it for crossword possiblities.

Uncle Eric and Sam.

Caleb and his Mommy.

Christmas at the Hinshaws always seems to include acts of carnality...

...obscene gestures...

...and gratuitous product endorsements.

Granny reads "The Night Before Christmas" to Sam, Auntie Kim, and Aidan.

Hallelujah, everybody say "cheese!"
Merry Christmas from the family.

The Light of the Stable

2009-12-27T19:05:00.004-06:00

Caleb and Amelia, at her birthday party.

Caleb, Amelia, and Sam, enjoying cupcakes.

Mixing up some ginger cookies.

At the model train show at Discovery World, while Grandma Cathy holds all the coats.

Thankfully, the fire broke out just two doors down from the Plasticville Fire Station. Why Spider-Man (extreme left) isn't helping is a matter best taken up with J. Jonah Jameson.

Running a train of his own, at Granny & Poppa's 26th Floor Cottage.

Caleb and Uncle Eric take dinner very seriously.

Sam and Poppa don't.

'Tis The Season

2009-12-06T13:51:00.003-06:00

Sam, Caleb, and Aidan at the UW-Milwaukee Multicultural Holiday Festival.

Olin offers you a bite.

Sam helps to decorate a gingerbread house...

...and makes a decoration for the tree.

Meanwhile, Caleb is beside himself in a sea of balloons.

Luckily, the ceiling was low enough that we were able to catch Caleb as he started to float away.

Aidan and Poppa.

Poppa and Sam wait in line to speak to S. Claus.

Sam was willing to sit on Santa's knee, but wouldn't look directly at him. He asked for a T-Rex. Caleb wasn't quite ready to enter into negotiations.

Kirsten and Aidan.

Caleb colors.

A toddler dance party breaks out after the official acts finish. Caleb is doing that tippy-toed Michael Jackson move from "Bad," while Sam is preparing to do a "Breakin'"-style headspin.

Thanks Given For Every Wrong Move

2009-12-05T21:38:00.001-06:00

Enjoying frozen custard at Kopp's. Somehow, it's a November tradition.

Sam with Uncle Tony between the cow statues at Kopp's. Uncle Tony's visits always mean lots of cheeseburgers and custard.

Sam with Uncle Tim and Aunt Kathleen, leaving on a trek to the store for tortilla chips and whiskey.

Sam and Grampa Jim at the second of our three Thanksgivings.

On Letterman, they used to call these "Stupid Human Tricks."

Sam and Olin prepare to see Thomas the Tank Engine in the movie "Splish Splash Splosh." I gave it 2 1/2 stars. The performances were two-dimensional, although the plot chugged along.

Caleb enjoying some root beer. "Yum," he said, "delicious beer!"

Don't Forget The Coffee, Billy Joe

2009-11-23T18:43:00.004-06:00

Friday night we celebrated my Mother's [redacted]th Birthday by enjoying an excellent meal at Sanford. You can tell how satisfying it all was by the clear photographic evidence that I was asleep standing up.

Happy Birthday, Vicky!

This was the desert my wife ordered. Sometimes a chocolate ganache is just a chocolate ganache.

Caleb enjoys an Alterra coffee as we wait for Milwaukee's 83rd Annual Holiday Parade.

Sam finds a seat at the parade.

Craddock, Cousin Aidan, Auntie Kim, and Caleb are waiting for the next marching band.

Granny and Sam

Caleb tries on Mommy's hat.

Aidan may one day regret choosing that British dentist.

This guy is nuts. He's also the highlight of the parade.

Who doesn't love the Weinermobile? I take a great big whiskey to ya, Brooks Stevens!

That's funny... he never has a second cup at home.

Sam and Aidan among the wild creatures of the Regency's 26th floor.

Lunch break!

Sam and Caleb join Ann in the galley of the Challenge.
Happy Thanksgiving from the whole family.Public employees, please enjoy your state-mandated furlough day.

I Often Dream of Trains

2009-11-16T08:53:00.004-06:00

Caleb finds a friend at Maia's birthday party.

Caleb and Sam inspect the new woodwork in Maia's room.

The ladies.

I. WANT. CAKE.

That's a pretty good grabber.

Every weekend is Trainfest weekend.

At Ayana's birthday party, Caleb prepares to fall back into the ball pit.

Caleb on the zip-line.

Sam on the zip-line.

That's right, we're raising superheroes.

Sam and Caleb, happy to see their buddy Krish at Ayana's birthday party.

Caleb at Trainfest

Sam at Trainfest.

The booth pictured above, furnished by the Wisconsin Garden Railroad Society (who also put on shows at the Domes each year), really captivated Caleb, who parked himself on the floor and did not care to move for the next hour and a half. Mostly, he was interested in the Thomas and James trains that you can almost sort of see in the crappy cell-phone photos above. Had we not dragged him away, Caleb may have been happy to sit there straight through until the 2010 Trainfest. Sam wins a spirit award for putting up with it all, as he's not much of a train enthusiast, though he was pleased to find a LEGO Batmobile and a die cast airplane.

Meanwhile, I've switched my particular gauge allegiance from the HO scale to the N scale.

Fangs and Sweet Beguiling

2009-11-09T17:54:00.003-06:00

At the Lil' Michigan duck pond.

Cue "Flight of the Valkyries"

At the reptile expo at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Raking the leaves.

Caleb preps the cats' food.

Isaac and Sam play the bongos, while Olin waits his turn.

Unafraid Of What A Dude'll Do

2009-11-04T13:03:00.002-06:00

Just so that I have something to report, I will tell you that I read this book. Or most of it. I liked Hajdu's Positively 4th Street enough to pick this up from the bookstore some weeks back, even though it's just sort of a collection of reviews of books or records that Hajdu wrote for various magazines. The reviews make enough moves towards cultural criticism, towards something to say about the artists or writers or musicians these pieces profile, to make it relatively legit to refer to these pieces of writing as "essays."

Hajdu is more interested in jazz than I am, or at least writing for an audience more interested in jazz, so I skipped over some pieces late in the book because I'd put in the work in earlier pieces and learned things about Billy Eckstine and Wynton Marsalis. He has interesting takes on certain people -- lauding Bobby Darin, for example, and getting Woody Guthrie right as a person whose chief talent was a kind of punk anti-authoritarian. He also makes good fun of prententious old Sting, and writes about the everyman qualities and transgender proclivities of the under-appreciated Elmer Fudd. So, sometimes, a pretty fun book.

It's important to know that Hajdu is a fan of "grown-ups" as in many of these pieces he utilizes a recuring cannard that a particular thing (rock n' roll, the comics form, Bugs Bunny) are adolescent in nature and design, and that adult responses (the late-period pop of Elvis Costello or Bobby Darin, the journalistic qualities of the comics work of Joe Sacco or Marjane Satrapi, Mr. Fudd) are as worthy or perhaps worthier than the juvenilia that inspired or kickstarted them. I'm not totally convinced, but then again I have never learned to put away childish things. I go back and forth on whether King of America is a better record than My Aim Is True, whether Maus is all that much greater than The Killing Joke, and whether or not I mind other guys dancing with my girl. Are the kids alright?

If Blood And Love Taste So Sweet

2009-11-02T10:46:00.005-06:00

Our house, in the middle of the street, accented by autumn.

Olin and Sam using trainer chopsticks.

Caleb the lefty.

Trick or Treating on the East Side, with our neighbor Cynthia. Cynthia and Brian live just down the street from Cousin Aidan, and every year they give out both candy and comic books. Sam picked up Batman Beyond #17.

This years' most coveted treasure: Tootsie Pops. Particularly the red ones.

Trick or Treating, round two, with Olin in Bay View. Olin is dressed as Rocket, whom you will remember from your viewings of Little Einsteins.

The whole gang -- Kiva, Ruby, Sam, Caleb, and Olin. Kiva is dressed as the H1Ni virus.

Sam covets the loot.You're just too good to be true / Can't take my eyes off you
You'd be like Heaven to touch / I want to hold you so much

Caleb's haul, and his road-rash'd philtrum from a tricycle accident early in the day.

They probably wouldn't be looking so cocky if they knew how much of that candy was going to end up in their father's tummy.
Best bits of loot: Beanie Babies, balloons, glow-stick bracelets, a Batman Beyond comic book, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Worst bits: the out-of-the-box fruit roll-up (for cheapness), pencils (for the outmoded technology), Candy Corn-flavored Dots (for waxy candy chemically reconstituted to taste like a different kind of waxy candy).

Under Dreaming Spires To Itchycoo Park

2009-10-27T14:27:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, a beautiful autumn day, we explored Lakeshore State Park, built on landfill to the east of the Sumerfest grounds and just south of the art museum. The kids got to ride their trykes, climb some rocks, and watch a family of four trying to lure the spawning fish in the inlet. Just before we arrived at the fishing area, a nine or ten year old girl caught a sizeable brown trout -- about the length of my arm. Across the inlet, trout and salmon were leaping up to the surface of the water like popcorn in the pan, which pleased our guys to no end.

Staring out on Lake Michigan and the few sailboats left braving October wind.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay brave the peaks of Everest, with downtown Milwaukee in the distance.

“Early on a difficult climb, especially a solo climb, you’re hyper-aware of the abyss pulling at your back, constantly feeling its call, its immense hunger. . . But as the climb continues, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.” -- John Krakauer

"Because it is there."

Along the Calatrava Motorway.

Caleb enjoyed watching the fishermen and ladies cast their lines, and took their floating green lures to be "FISH!"

Sam found some sea glass. Or part of a Pabst bottle. Either way: good find!

Every Day Is Halloween

2009-10-26T11:45:00.003-05:00

Sam and Caleb play the low-rent, off-brand, and unplugged version of Rock Band. (The drum, by the way, did not survive the weekend -- look out, Neil Pert.)

Like Joe Strummer, Caleb's a lefty who plays right. If Joe is any example, this will lead to power chords and strong rhythm playing. If shopping early for Christmas 2019, here's a book Caleb may want.

On Friday night, we went to "Boo At The Zoo," one of my new favorite annual events. No ghost train this year, but dozens of Jack O'Lanterns and opportunities to see some of the animals up past their bedtimes. Even behind a fence, it's still an awesome and frightful thing to see the gleam of moonlight in the eye of a timber wolf.

Leo the Lion gave glow sticks to Sam and Caleb, which were then employed at bed and nap times for the remainder of the weekend, long after they'd lost their glow.

Caleb at the sand shark tank at Boo At The Zoo.

Caleb in his Thomas costume.

A rehearsal for next weekend as the kids pile out for the Halloween party at Asia and Kyle's house. Note that Red Dragons exclusively use inflatable Backyardigans microphones.

Asia with her mother Mary.

Kyle dressed as the kind of medical professionals that have been so helpful to him. Kyle has surgery scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) so send him all your good thoughts.

Who'll Pray For Peter Pumpkinhead?

2009-10-20T13:55:00.000-05:00

We discovered, while carving pumpkins, that we'd painted them with water-soluble paint, so we had to scrub them clean lest we stain red and blue the newly painted porch.

The kids' pumpkins, on the porch and tempting teenage vandals.

Kirsten got some Halloween-themed gels to stick on the windows...

...but the kids weren't entirely convinced they weren't candies...

...and ultimately it was more fun to pull them off the window and/or rip them in half than to leave them sticking to the glass."

Enjoying a new Thomas toy for the bath.

Caleb develops the next killer app.

Get your motor running.

Head out on the highway.

Lookin' for adventure.

Or whatever comes our way.

Hey Aqualung

2009-10-19T08:37:00.002-05:00

Nicely done, Berlin. Way to get your Bowie back.

When I Paint My Masterpiece

2009-10-15T18:39:00.002-05:00

Caleb, Sam, and Olin start their dinner party.

Painting pumpkins.

Q. Why paint pumpkins?A. Watermelons are out of season.

Red Sox Red

Brahmin Blue

Caleb charts out improvements to the Green Bay Packer defensive line.

The 21st Century's Arthur Godfrey.

Kirsten and Caleb at the Jungle Jack Hanna show at the Pabst Theatre. Caleb wasn't initially certain he wanted anything to do with it.

Amelia and Chris, Sam and Brian at Jungle Jack Hanna.

Sam in new winter coat and summer haircut.

Caleb would like that camera, please.
Sam took this picture.

Stones of Your Father Standing Today

2009-10-12T14:30:00.004-05:00

Two weeks ago, this book surprised me during a visit to the bookstore. Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, had written a historical novel set in the Boston of 1918-1919, and it had slipped past me in hardcover. As a fan of the American historical novel, and as someone eager to read Lehane after enjoying the movie versions of the two novels mentioned above, I don't know why I would have missed this in its more expensive form. (After research on the internets, I now know: because the hardcover jacket design was pretty danged awful. Design matters, people!)

The novel essentially follows events in Boston leading up to the police strike in the summer of 1919, after working through some pretty important events through the previous year -- the spread of the 1918 flu epidemic, Babe Ruth's last seasons as a pitcher for the Red Sox (and the piano he sank in a Sudbury pond), and the Great Molasses Flood, one of my favorite bits of weird American history. Lehane, who'd also served as a writer for HBO's The Wire, has an attuned ear for the kind of short-handed and slangy dialogue of the overworked cop, the pool hall narco kingpin, and the power-mad brass. One early scene, set in Tulsa, vividly channels Proposition Joe in the character of the Deacon Broscious:

"In my experience," the Deacon Broscious said, "the most memorable thing in a man's life is rarely pleasant. Pleasure doesn't teach us anything but that pleasure is pleasureable. And what sort of lesson is that? Monkey jacking his own penis know that. Nah, nah," he said. "The nature of knowing, my brothers? Is pain. Ya'll think on this -- we hardly ever know how happy we are as children, for example, until our childhood is taken from us. We usually can't recognize true love until it's passed us by. And then, then we say, My that was the thing. That was the truth, ya'll. But in the moment?" He shrugged his enormous shoulders and patted his forehead with his handkerchief. "What molds us," he said, "is what maims us. A high price, I agree. But" -- he spread his arms and gave them his most glorious smile -- "what we learn from that is priceless."

Luther never saw Dandy and Smoke move, but when he turned at the sound of Jessie's grunt, they'd already clamped his wrists to the table and Smoke had Jessie's head held fast in his hands.

Lehane's past work in the crime genre surely influenced the pacing and cliff-hanging, though this work isn't exactly on the mystery/detective spectrum. In fact, the work it most often brought to mind was Don DeLillo's Underworld, in that The Given Day works as a kind of survey of the culture both in the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first. With a plot that concerns the imagined dangers of American "socialism" and the real but over-hyped threat of anarchic or Bolshevik terrorism, it's hard not to find contemporary problems lying in this century-old setting. Lehane even refers to the WWI-era renaming of frankfurters as "liberty sausages," bringing to mind this decade's Freedom Fries.

Like DeLillo's book (or like Doctorow's Ragtime), you'll find imagined characters interacting with notables of the day. Babe Ruth, Samuel Gompers, Calvin Coolidge, Eugene O'Neil, ~~Warren Beatty~~ John Reed, and DeLillo's good ol' gay Edgar Hoover.

Further, in "Babe Ruth in Ohio," The Given Day contains the second best baseball-related short story masquerading as preface since DeLillo's "Pafko at the Wall." Read these first few pages of Lehane's novel while browsing at your friendly neighborhood independent bookseller, and you'll pretty quickly grasp this books' strength. As powefully as anything I can recall, "Babe Ruth in Ohio" manages to portray the Red Sox and the Cubs in a pick-up game against some African-American factory workers in a way that highlights the twin curses of privilege and race.

Then It's The Bomb That'll Bring Us Together

2009-10-07T10:19:00.007-05:00

Carmine reports that there is a remake in the works of the 1984 cold-war epic Red Dawn. It seems to me that the only reason to remake such a film is to resituate it in the post-cold-war era of global terrorism. Quite a few movies from the last eight years have utilized the spectacle of 9/11 for purposes of creating gripping visuals or story-lines.

The Dark Knight already did this of course, recasting the Joker as a sociopathic urban terrorist. As with movies, comics books often attempt to be adult by incorporating "realism," usually in the form the kind of extreme and shocking violence. The Joker, ridiculous and purple in early Batman comics, had previously been re-imagined as a psychopathic cold-blooded killer and probably rapist in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, and re-imagined again as aging Hollywood letch Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 movie. Okay, so there are thirteen ways of looking at the Batman -- my current favorite is the stodgy and rather goofy Batman, almost a 60's throwback, as seen in Batman: The Brave And The Bold, which I've watched with my three-year-old son.

So now I'm pretty sure that all awesome (and by "awesome," I mean "appeared often on cable television in the 80's") movies will be remade to reflect our nation's post-9/11 obsession with terror-as-spectacle:

Red Dawn: "Oh my god, they've fire-bombed the VFW Hall!"
JAWS: "Oh my god, a shark just flew into that building!"
Beverly Hills Cop: "Oh my god, they've fire-bombed the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre!"
Valley Girl: "Oh my god, Nic Cage has weird chest hair!"
Back To The Future: "Forget global terrorism, Marty! Your own middle-class bourgeois family has minor emotional problems stemming from privilege and apathy!"
Predator: "Oh my god, Malcolm Jamal Warner just flew into that building!"
Say Anything: "Oh my god, there's a trench-coated hoodlum on the lawn holding a Peter Gabriel bomb!"
Footloose: "Oh my god, they're going to bomb dancing!"
E.T.: "Oh my god, that alien has got a cell-phone bomb in his glowing chest. That's right, the E.T. has an I.E.D.!"
Fletch: "Oh my god, Tim Matheson looks EXACTLY like Jay McInerney!"
Wall Street: "Outsourced no-bid military contracting, for lack of a better term, is good."
The Terminator: "Is your name Mohammed Atta?"
Trading Places: "Oh my god, they've just flown a plane into Dan Ackroyd!"
The Goonies: "Oh my god, Chunk just flew into that building!"

God's Footballer

2009-10-05T11:50:00.006-05:00

I won't pretend to know much about football, but my friend Carmine notes that tonight's game pits Brett Favre against himself. America will tune in to see whether this is some sort of space-age cloning procedure, or whether Favre has claimed the same sort of "All-Time Quarterback" position that Jamie from across the street used to demand in Summit Avenue pick-up games.

I'm sure I'll be able to follow the game just by listening to my neighbors shout at their televisions and recalling Bayard's open letter to Brett Favre, in which he encouraged Favre to just go ahead and coach the Washington Generals.

It's All Happening At The Zoo

2009-10-01T13:46:00.004-05:00

Some pictures from last Saturday at the zoo. All of the men of the household were recovering from colds, and were therefore peckish, difficult, and needy. We are feeling better now, but have likely passed on our germs to the woman of the house.

Caleb refused to leave Thomas and the Magic Railroad at home. Or in the car. Or the stroller. He carried it all around the zoo that day, or at least up until the point where he pitched it into the koi pon. Giant goldfish swarmed around its plastic case, testing it to see if it was food. By now, I'd imagine, they've taken the DVD from the case and played it on their underwater televisions. "Holy Carp!," they are probably saying, "Alec Baldwin is in this?" (Caleb, by the way, recovered from this tragedy in time to enjoy birthday cake with me on Sunday.)

After a through examination, Sam was pretty certain that at least one of these people was a statue.

Watching the Oceans of Fun show for the eleventy-jillionith time.

A sea lion engaging in the kind of behavior that propagates sea mammal stereotypes.

It's a sad thing to look at these pictures and realize that summer was still going strong just last Saturday afternoon. Since then, it's dropped crisply into the 40's at night, leaves are falling, and some of us are wearing sweaters. It's hard to let go of the summer, because you know it means the steady progression into the other thing. See you next year, Chill on the Hill. Adios, sea lions. Godspeed, ye sweetcorn and tomatoes.

I Believe in Miracles

2009-09-29T06:14:00.001-05:00

Today, for your enjoyment, two pictures of a three-year-old eating a donut.

"Little Chocolate Donuts have been on my training table since I was a kid."

Granny always says Caleb looks like Philip Michael Thomas of Miami Vice. Here, I think he proves himself a dead ringer for LeVar Burton of TV's Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And Frolicked In The Autumn Mist In A Land Called Honilee

2009-09-28T20:17:00.002-05:00

This is a special post for Cousin Alex from Sam and Caleb.

Dear Cousin Alex:

Sam is going to be a dragon for Halloween this year. Grandma Cathy said that you would want to see some pictures of his costume.

The costume has a dragon's head on top, a tail behind, and wings that flutter off the arms. Auntie Kirsten found it in a church basement, and paid three dollars for it. Three dollars is a lot of money. You should ask your daddy if he will give you three dollars.

Uncle Brian thinks that the costume looks a bit like a red rooster, but he doesn't know very much and few people listen to him.

Caleb will be Thomas the Tank Engine for Halloween. He has a conductor's cap and a bucket shaped like Thomas. We'll send pictures of Caleb in the costume just as soon as we can coax him into it.

We hope you and your brother Andrew are happy and well. (Did you get that three dollars yet?)

Love,

Cousins Sam and Caleb, Auntie Kirsten, and Uncle Brian

You Brought Me Draft Beer In A Plastic Cup

2009-09-28T14:12:00.002-05:00

Matt Taibbi, who shows up semi-regularly on Bill Maher's HBO show and in Rolling Stone magazine, troubles me.

In this book, he excoriates the 2000-2006 Republican-led congress for doing little public work besides naming post offices while its real deeds were hidden in committee and late-night special apropriation meetings. He also decries the 2006-2010 Democratic-led congress for not being much different, and for failing to (and in fact purposely avoiding any attempt to) carry out their constituents' demands to end the Iraq war.

He also argues that a dissatisfaction with the workings of politics and the media that covers them leads some citizens into fringe areas -- here he examines the evangelical right wing and left-wing 9/11 conspiracy "Truthers." In an epilogue and an afterword, he essentially tries to make the case that cronyism and special interest lobbiests beneft from a distracted populace, and particularly from a divided and hateful populace, and that the "Red vs. Blue" meme we are all supposed to embody is essentially a ruse used against us. So, a lot of stuff we already sort of know, but it's always nice for someone to put things into words on our behalf.

I'd be more likely to accept this Aesopian "moral" at the end of the story, though, if Taibbi weren't himself so hateful -- often excellently, hilariously so -- in his own coverage. About half of this book concerns Taibbi's experience "undercover" as a new member of John Haggee's conservative Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, TX. Most of his interactions are with non-leadership members of the church such as discussion group leaders and fellow new inductees, and it's these people -- regular old folks, it seems -- that Taibbi riddicules, fools, and exposes, which strikes me (and, at times, Taibbi) as a bit sour. For example, when Taibbi meets a fellow church-goer who, in comments about the death penalty, seems to stand just on the precipice of doubt, Taibbi uses evangelical arguments to essentially bully the fellow back in line with church doctrine, all so that he can demonstrate to his reader how spineless and malleable the Cornerstone population can be. Meanwhile: a missed opportunity to help this person change his mind, to lead him to a more forgiving and perhaps Christ-like perspective.

The book also creates a sort of false dichotomy, a tactic of the same kind of "Crossfire"-bred mainstream media Taibbi decries. To suggest that Democrats are just as boring and awful and corrupt as Republicans may be true on its face, but it's a bit "pox on both your houses," a bit juvenile in it's proud assertion that while one Emperor may have no clothes, the others are poorly dressed. The flip-side of the Evangelical right is not the conspiracy buff left, is it? Do they hold equal power? Do they carry the same cultural heft?

Anyway, in the end, Taibbi comes off for me as somewhat like Chuck Klosterman -- someone who's bright and talented and a decent writer, but also a bit of an assh*le.

There Is No Other Troy For You To Burn

2009-09-21T11:27:00.007-05:00

I've been a fan of Lorrie Moore since 1989 or so, which is when I first read Anagrams, a book that is funny and weird right up until it rips your heart out. This is Moore's great talent -- her characters engage in puns, wordplay, bad jokes, keen but skewed observation, and yet these things prove to be little help against bad decisions, dumb luck, and life's relentlessness progression towards calamity. This is nowhere as evident as in her story, "People Like That Are The Only People Here," which is collected in Birds of America. That story, largely set in a pediatric oncology ward, is so blunt and full of anger that when it first appeared in The New Yorker in January of 1997, many readers took it as a piece of non-fiction.

I was especially eager to read A Gate at the Stairs, Moore's first book in ten years, because I'd read that part of its plot concerned transracial adoption, a topic with which I am heavily and emotionally invested. So much so that its difficult for me to focus a response on anything else in the book. (Other things in the book: the post-9/11 American midwest, several characters who aren't who or what they claim to be, a horticulturist's knack for describing flowers and farmable crops, the multiple forms of grief.)

Moore sometimes strikes me as a bit too polite or genteel to really immerse herself authoritatively into the messes created here. (Tassie notices a bumper sticker in Green Bay Packer country that says, "Bears Stink," and one gets the sense that Moore is shying away from the cruder truth of the matter -- and the more likely bumper sticker: Bears Suck.) Also, the 20-year-old Tassie has the eye, vocabulary, diction, and manner of a woman easily twice her age. I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily, as 20-year-old girls tend not to be so interesting and insightful, but this is not a character to which the full vitality of youth is ascribed. Both of these storyteller issues factor significantly into how I reacted to Moore's handing of adoption.

The book is set in Wisconsin, in a barely disguised Madison Moore calls "Troy," where the book's narrator, Tassie Keltjin, accepts a job as a nanny for a couple who become parents of a biracial two-year-old girl through adoption. Through the unattributed crosstalk of an overheard parenting group, Moore spends a good deal of page time numerating (but not really addressing) many of the cultural issues attached to parenting, race, and adoption, and generally the book is smart and sympathetic about these issues. Tassie, however, certainly sees the child's birth mother as a victim of socioeconomic circumstance (if not mistreatment) rather than an informed and/or responsible adult making a reasoned decision about the future of her child. The renaming of the child by the adoptive parents is also a not-quite-articulated sticking point for Tassie, who continues to call the child by a combination of her birth- and adoptive names throughout the rest of the novel. In the end, the adoptive couple, Tassie, and Moore all seem to give in to the mounting problems that the child presents and she is, literally and figuratively, carried right out of the book. That the adoptive parents are clueless, oafish, and hiding skeletons in the closet, does not quite overcome the stomach-crunching tragedy of what happens to the little girl, particularly given what a reader may know of attachment disorders and early childhood development. In some ways, Tassie suggests that the adoptive parents deserves what befalls them, but in that figuring the child becomes a sociopolitical prop not only to the adoptive parents but to the novel as well.

I know enough about the ways stories and narrators work to not accuse Moore of her characters' sins, but for as witty and insightful and sophisticated an observer as Tassie has proven to be throughout the book, she has little to say about this particular story's end. (From this point, 4/5ths of the way through the novel, the storyline takes a different tack, and never quite returns.) I can't help but feel that the hardest work this novel had to do was elided over, brushed aside. And, sure, I probably wouldn't feel this way about this book if it didn't send its particular sparks so damn close to my home on the dry and tinder-thick side of that particular forest fire.)

I Can't Believe It's Happening

2009-09-21T08:10:00.006-05:00

On Saturday, I gave a speech and officiated over a renewal of wedding vows at Al & Audrey's 15th wedding anniversary brunch. The Bloody Marys were excellent, the rosemary gravy outstanding, the Scotch eggs clot-worthy. And Al gets the Brass Bollocks award for singing a song by Imelda May in front of about 70 people.It was an honor to be involved, and I had a lot of fun making our friends laugh. Since Al has asked me to do so, I'm posting the text of my speech here.

Thank you for being here today in celebration of Al & Audrey’s 15 years of marriage. I’m honored to be officiating today, as I don’t have many opportunities to put to use my Associate’s Degree in Secular Humanism and Small Engine Repair from the University of Lawsonomy. (I’m sure you’re all familiar with the universal principles of Lawsonomy: suction, pressure, swirlation.)

Al and Audrey’s first marriage occurred not long after moving to Milwaukee, before most of us had met either of them. For the rest of us, we’ve never known Al and Audrey as independent agents, and have not had the opportunity to toast and celebrate their marriage. So, Al and Audrey wanted this day to involve all their friends, particularly the latecomers.

Usually, marriage ceremonies contain some bits of wisdom on the subject of creating a long and happy marriage. I’m not going to do that, because I’ve heard Audrey’s story about the divorcee who suggested dancing lessons as the key to marital success. Instead, I want to consider what makes their marriage such a successful one, in the hopes that the rest of us might reflect on our own relationships, or at least pass some time before the bacon is ready.

To my mind, Al & Audrey have a truly complementary marriage – they fit together like puzzle pieces, each in balance with the other. For example, while Audrey is not exactly the shy and retiring sort, everyone is an introvert when compared with Al. As another example, Audrey serves humankind through the nurturing and comfort of the food she cooks, while Al has no redeeming societal function at all. Audrey is an avid reader, developing understanding and compassion through the words of novels, memoirs, and cookbooks. Al discerns the meaning of traffic signs through their shape alone. Audrey is a steward of the earth through her gardening and her hybrid car, while Al is one of the leading causes of the depletion of natural resources like grain, barley, hops and rye. They are like two sides of the same coin, one side decorated with the grace and beauty of a vestal servant of the hearth, the other side with oddly pornographic stick figures.

In truth, I love these people. I think you’ll all agree with me that everything is more pleasant – livelier, funnier – when either of them are around, and particularly when they are both around. Anyone who has heard the two of them laugh together instantly understands why they are together – even their laughter is in harmony. How lucky, how blessed, the two of you must be to have each other, to have such a deep connection to a person with whom no time is ever wasted.

We were talking the other night about the Eau de Vie brandy orchards in Alsace, where arborists tie glass bottles onto tree branches so that a pear grows inside the bottle. I’ve continued to think about those orchards throughout the week, and it strikes me that those bottles make a good metaphor for marriage. Early on, the marriage – the bottle -- provides guidance and shelter to the developing pear, and then, after a period of growth, the pear is too fat to escape and drowning in alcohol. Maybe I should put that another way: after a lot of care and tending – after all, arborists need to scrub inside those bottles, around the fruit, before any spirits can be added – there sits the pear, viewable from any angle, wondrous to gaze upon, and somehow – almost impossibly -- larger, sweeter, and rarer than it could otherwise be.

To those assembled, we all know that Al & Audrey’s life together is not and will not always be easy. They live apart from the rest of their families, both of their fathers have passed away, and all too recently Audrey lost her mother. I’d like those of us here today to make a pledge to continue to support them, to be their family while their family is away, to be the bottle around the pear. Audrey tells me that those bottles, hanging from their trees in Alsace, chime against each other in the wind – if you will stand as the bottle surrounding Al & Audrey, please raise your glass and chime it against another’s.

Vows
Al and Audrey, I’m now going to ask you to rededicate yourselves to each other through a few small pledges, and if you agree to these promises, please say, “I will.”

Al, do you promise to continue to love and support Audrey through all the days ahead, equally if not better than you have these last 15 years? And will you put the seat down, and call if you’re running late, and dedicate at least a bit of the weekend to chores around the house, and generally take actions to make Audrey’s life as smooth and as happy as possible? And you’ll do this even during college football season? What about, like, if I call and want to hang out or something?

Audrey, will you continue to love and support Al through all the days ahead, despite all you’ve had to put up with over the last 15 years? Really? You remember that time he came home naked?

Then, by the power vested in me by the great state of Wisconsin and www.godaddy.com, I now pronounce you: still married.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Al and Audrey...

I've Had The Time of My Life

2009-09-17T15:13:00.005-05:00

TALK OF THE TOWN

DEATH OF A DANCER

John Updike

When first he walked into Studio Purgatorio, the afterworld's industrial caferteria-like holding pen for those who have shimmered before mortals on the silver screen, few heads turned for Patrick Swayze. The chuffable star, while still mortal, of such feted filmic feats as "Dirtied Dancing" and "Rhodehaus," Mr. Swayze had, in the months prior to his death from pancreatic cancer earlier this week, lost much of his leading-man looks and hoofer's heft, leaving him gaunt and boneful. Even his former co-stars found him hard to suss; the trapozodic and three-years-passed Jerry Orbach had to be prodded several times, and his brandy Old Fashioned removed from his grasp, before he could be made to recall Mr. Swayze, Mr. Orbach's bemulleted nemesis in the aforementioned "Dancing."

The formerly young and handsome do not rate much in this pantheon of bygone Hollywood lights. Old Hollywood -- those power players and playettes who reigned from the kinescope era through the late 50's, or essentially the timeframe of my own essentialness as a living writer of fiction and topical New Yorker articles -- still holds the numbers here, though all are dreading the days when the likes of Jack, Warren, and Fonda fils et fille appear to tumult these eminent emerita of the Hayes era.

At length Mr. Swayze found a friend in Christoph Farley, his onetime Saturday Night Alive compatriot. Mr. Farley, who has taken on a hangdog demeanor after his erstwhile hero, John Belushi, also of Saturday Night Alive, refused to have anything at all to do with him. "Look, there's an upside to all this," Farley told Mr. Swayze, tossing one bearlike paw over his friend's shoulder and gesturing with the other paw to take in the wide sweep of Heaven. "You can do as much cocaine as you want. It's not great coke, but there's a lot of it." Whether it was despair or his sunken cheekbones that brought a pallor to Mr. Swayze's countenance was not immediately clear.

CONTRIBUTORS

John Updike ("Death of a Dancer," p. 43) was a frequent contributor to the magazine throughout his earthly life. A new book of essays, Ethereal Ephemera: Writings from the Afterlife, March 2009 - August 2009 (918pp., Harcourt-Brace, $35), will be released in December. This entire conceit was stolen outright from Dan Sullivan, Professor of Symbology at UW-Grand Rapids.

The Sea Is So Much Deeper Than The Grave

2009-09-15T11:50:00.004-05:00

A preview of the 2011 movie, "Battleship," based upon the Hasbro board game:

A junior officer (young, ethnic) turns from the submarine controls to talk to the Sub Commander.

THAT GUY THAT WAS EITHER HAROLD OR KUMAR IN "HAROLD AND KUMAR": Commander, I have the rogue fleet commander onscreen.

Sub Commander DENZEL WASHINGTON: Okay, he's onscreen? Let's get him onscreen.

Via static-y 1980's projection T.V., the Rougue Fleet Comannder appears.

Rogue Fleet Commander SEAN CONNERY: (appearing mid-rant)...already bombed the g*ddam F-13 quadrant. It's the patrol boat we're looking for, not the g*ddam aircraft carrier! Try J-10, he's probably hiding them in the g*ddam CORNERS!

WASHINGTON: Commander? Commander!

CONNERY: ...Oh, it's you.

WASHINGTON: I think it's time you considered the terms of surrender. You're down to the last third of your cruiser. All I need to do is call out for an attack at G-4 and it's over for you. It's all over.

CONNERY: You snivelling cutpurse. I taught you everything you know, back at the academy. Your criss-cross torpedo strategy is right out of my old playbook. You married my daughter. And how do you repay a LIFETIME'S worth of gratitude? What do you do? YOU...SANK...MY...BATTLESHIP.

WASHINGTON: You should never have sold out for the money. The commander I know died along time ago. Long time dead. Surrender, commander.

CONNERY: NEVER! Gunnery: J-10! Do it now!

WASHINGTON: (Sighs) G-4. Take him down. G-4. (Burries his head in his hands. The TV screen goes to full static.)

Digging in the Dirt

2009-09-15T09:59:00.002-05:00

Last Saturday morning, during the North Avenue Tomato Fest, we had breakfast with Lisa and Stephanie, two of my classmates from graduate school at Emerson. Afterwards, the rest of the family went to Dozer Day out in Sussex while I polished off the last 100 pages or so of 2666...

The Gates of Heaven, as imagined by three-year-olds.

Sam wants to ride on THAT one.

In the cab of the day's first dozer.

Bad Muthatrucka #2.

Sam in the bucket #1.

Toddler turn-taking, as moderated by Grandma Cathy.

Sam in the bucket #2.

The pre-Raphelite map of the universe.

The excavator, or as its known around our house: "Digger! Big one!"

There are highly paid supermodels who don't pout this well.

Caleb at the switch.

Returning triumphant.

As a friend of mine puts it, everything looks like a hammer when you're feeling like a nail.

"You're gonna want to speak with the supervisor. We're on a union-mandated break, and I don't know nothing about no permits."

Sam scales the fire truck.

Caleb in the regalia.

There’s a fireman’s wedding tonight in the Cloverland Dell / There’s a hook and a ladder and we’ll dance 'neath a big paper bell / And everyone will be there / And we’ll all wish them well / As if all news will be good news from now on. (Joe Henry, "Fireman's Wedding")

Dance all night to this deejay.

At the Lakefront Kite Festival on Sunday morning.

Caleb.

Rehearsing their syncronized swim act (Chicago Olympics, 2016) in the pool at Granny & Poppa's house.

Lincoln County Road or Armageddon

2009-09-14T12:00:00.003-05:00

It took me quite some time to get through Roberto Bolano's 2666. I wish I'd been able to sustain a prolonged, unity-of-purpose type read of its 898 pages, but other works wormed their way into my attention span, so I read this, as I typically read longer sprawling works, in little bits and starts.

The five parts of the novel (offered across three volumes, in the version I read) cover five different stories, each of which overlap without ever exactly intersecting. The connection between each is largely left up for the reader to deduce, a bit like the elephant assembled by the descriptions of the blind men.

This novel's range is incredibly impressive. Bolano is a master of lore (or fake-lore). "The Part about Fate," about a black New York City newsman who comes to northern Mexico to cover a boxing match, and "The Part about Archimboldi," about a Prussian kid who becomes a WWII-era German soldier and later a "disappeared" novelist, are stand-out sections. Certain tropes and images recur throughout the sections, despite their lack of (total) covergence: a lot of characters order food and then don't eat it.

Despite its length and discursions, the "story" here remains incomplete -- in fact it's hard to pin down in concrete terms what the "story" is, or what whole these "Parts" suggest. What you'd want, at the end of a long work like this, is some closure and resolution. You'd want to know who's been committing the murders in Santa Teresa, for example, and so it's frustrating that Bolano never conclusively resolves this central mystery, but it also allows the work to be much more than a murder mystery. For as much as the crimes and their perpetrator(s) might be a central focus for the reader, they are not at any point the central focus of the author.

So, as I say, 2666 is both hyper-encyclopedic and yet still incomplete. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest has a similar incompleteness, telling a long and discursive tale that can't quite circle around to completion. Both novels -- and I suppose we may as well lump Pynchon's work in here too -- subvert the ideas of what we expect the writers of stories and novels to do: tightly wind their plots, condense their timelines, develop characters, come to a clear and satisfying conclusion. That subversion can be interesting, but it comes with a price. In other words, Sullivan's mad.

Brutality And Unjust Laws Cannot Defeat Us

2009-09-08T06:18:00.000-05:00

A few photos from the beginning of September and Labor Day Weekend. A great big thank you to American labor for your tireless efforts to institute a forty-hour week and fair working conditions, and the three-day weekend that officially ends the summer of my boys' third year.

Kirsten holds Caleb and Caleb holds Baby Bell at this summer's final Chill on the Hill.

Caleb and Bell

Sam in the marina, aboard The Summit

Ladies, I'm on a boat.

Sam and Caleb on the deck of The Summit

Papa and Granny escort Sam along the pier

By the waterfall, at the Milwaukee County Zoo

Sam was asked to throw a rubber snake to a roadrunner-like Australian bird at the zoo's Birds of Prey show. The bird then demonstrated how it would pluck at, brain, and then eat a snake in the wild. The show also featured a parrot who could cluck like a chicken. Worth the trip.

Sam feeds a goat. When we attempted this last summer, his reaction was much more like that of the boy in the background.

Caleb at the zoo's farm.
For being such city kids, our guys sure love farms. Buy small, eat local.

Why Don't You Get Things Started?

2009-09-07T19:18:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, you discover a book that strikes you as the perfect book, made especially for you, the book for which you must surely be the ideal reader. Lethem's Fortress of Solitude felt that way for me, as it touched on many things that mattered to me in my own childhood: comic books and rock music and race relations and urban living and the difficulty of connecting, even to close friends. Even the Fortress' messiness is endearing to me. It's a book that never travels very far from my bedside -- I like having it close.

I may not develop the same emotional attachment to Kermit Culture: Critical Perspectives on Jim Henson's Muppets, but like Fortress it combines two things that unreasonably important to me: Thinking Too Much About Stuff, and The Muppets.

At the risk of sounding like an Onion op ed, I have always had a pretty involved relationship with the Muppets. My father worked at the same Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate where Jim Henson put on his first televised show, and years later when The Muppet Show was being test-marketed, I had an opportunity to see a pilot episode well before the series showed up in syndication. My brother had seen the first episode of Sesame Street. Somehow, as a five- or six-year-old, I'd assembled these different things to mean that Jim Henson and I were distantly related. I had hopes that he might visit at Christmas.* Henson was probably my first hero, and I doubt I've missed an episode, movie, or TV special since the premiere of the show in 1976.

So a book which pairs the Muppets with scholarship and critical connections creates an opportunity to tether the seven-year-old me to the 38-year-(at least for another 21 days)-old me. The best of the essays within, to both my academic eye and my seven-year-old patch-covered eye, are "How to Become a Muppet; or, The Great Muppet Paper," by Ben Underwood, "The Muppet Show as Educational Critique," by Julie G. Maudlin, and "Muppets and Money" by Andrew Leal. (Other works worth a mention examine Gonzo the Great as a cultural critic, and Miss Piggy's post-structural feminism.)

Underwood's essay explains, or comes the closest I've seen, why a kid like me would have been so fascinated with the Muppets, arguing that as the show blurs the line between performer and audience. A "Muppet Show" employee (and I'm speaking here of the show within the show) is just as likely to work as a gofer or stage manager as they are to perform, and Statler and Waldorf -- the critics -- also appear as performers. When we see the show's audience, they are not humans but chickens and pigs and weirdos. Further, as the meta-show's audience, we too move from watching the acts on the Muppet Theatre's stage to the goings-on in the wings and in dressing rooms. Thus, Underwood points out, we -- the TV audience -- also become Muppets (or are "Muppetized," in the academic parlance) and therefore share in their dreams and goals -- of which, more below.

Maudlin's chapter argues that The Muppet Show can be seen as a 1970's counter-argument to Sesame Street, suggesting that:

In spite of the gratuitous explosions and excessive nonsense, there is a certain nostalgic sweetness about the Muppets, an implicit compassion that seems to undergird the chaos. . . This particular quality of The Muppet Show brings to light the ... work of Nel Noddings, who challenges us to adopt care-centered curricula and suggests that the post-Sputnik organization of school studies around the academic disciplines is unfair to students because they receive schooling for the head but little for the heart and soul. Perhaps if "a sense of caring" and "positive feelings" were the focus of our educational experiences, the learning process might be a more meaningful and valuable life experience, and, just maybe, we could enjoy a little madness along the way. (178)

Prof. Dryer, were he to read this, would be reaching for his air sickness bag, but I'm alright with it. When one loves the Muppets, one learns to accept a fair amount of hoovy-grooviness.

Leal's chapter, "Muppets and Money," traces Henson's history as a businessman, negotiator, and creator, but also refutes some of that hooviness and/or grooviness. (Some of this is also addressed in Underwood's chapter.) Sure, Henson had long hair and beard and would have, if given a little bit more time on Earth, saved us all through puppetry, but he was also a capitalist, just as his Muppets are capitalists. Kermit and Company's goal, in their trek towards Hollywood in The Muppet Movie, was -- after all -- to become "rich and famous." What was important, Kermit claimed, was sharing one's dreams with others, creating togetherness and inclusion, accepting people (or chickens or pigs or weirdos) for who and what they were.

Each Muppet story, in its way, is an origin story: here's how the Muppets came together to get to Hollywood, solve a jewel heist, put on a show, change Scrooge for the better, help Gonzo learn about himself, whatever. The TV shows and the movies all demonstrate, to those of us who feel different or misunderstood or lonely, that it is possible to choose one's own family, to find a place where we belong, to accept our own weirdness, to connect. "Someday," Kermit tells the lovers and the dreamers, "we'll find it."

* If you should ever need to hear an embarrassing story about me, say the words "Christmas" and "Muppets" within hearing range of my parents. Or the word "Scooter" would do just as well.

The Tigers Have Spoken

2009-08-31T10:13:00.001-05:00

Caleb and Sam are eating like its summer, even if the weather suggests October.

Sam tours Discovery World with Kirsten's Grumpy, Don Pratt, who's visiting from Cincinatti. (Years back, at our wedding rehearsal, Grumpy announced to the congregation that we was looking for a rich woman with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel.)

Grumpy helps Sam learn about leverage.

The Boys at Hooligan's.

Sam volunteers for face-painting by Rhonda the Clown at the South Shore Farmer's Market.

Sam checks Rhonda's work. This kid is going to be huge in the musical theatre. Look out, Aunt Karina...

Like a good twin, Caleb decided to be a tiger, too.

Olin isn't having it.

The tiger, in his natural habitat, stalks his prey in the circle of life: a gigantic strawberry danish from the Mexican bakery.

Sam, still tiger-fied, tries to blow up some impossible balloons at Josie's one-year birthday party.*

Tim and Sam take up a collection from the beanstalk at Grandma and Grampa Lathrop's house. Later, the boys climbed up the stalk, disappeared for awhile, and returned with a hen that lays golden eggs. Now if the golden egg market ever rebounds...

The Great Lakes Tricycle Rally and Smash-Up Derby visits the Milwaukee Colluseum for a once-in-a-lifetime Rack 'Em and Smack 'Em Beatdown! Sunday Sunday, Sunday!

The family with Grumpy. And the beanstalk.

* Saturday, by the way, was a day for strange, Paul Auster-ian coincidences. Another guest at Josie's party, who I'd known from Unitarian church sleepovers years and years before, was the son of the woman who organizes the South Shore Farmer's Market, where we'd been only mintues before!!! At Josie's party, the boys learned how to pop balloons that were small and really difficult to fill with air -- likely they were meant to be water balloons -- and then later, when they wanted to continue popping balloons, they found that Grandma and Grampa Lathrop had the same kind of balloons!!! If Jack Palance were alive today(**), I know just what he'd say: "Believe it . . . or not."

** This trope always brings to mind a favorite couplet from Randy Newman's "The World Isn't Fair": If Karl Marx were alive today / he'd be rolling around in his grave...

Papa Was A Rodeo

2009-08-29T21:22:00.004-05:00

At Aaron's recommendation, I read Home Game, a short book on fatherhood by Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball. It's a very quick read, the kind of book that will shorten a longish bus ride or a mild bout of insomnia. It's funny and wise, and Lewis makes us for being a parent with more financial resources than you by being self-effacing and admitting mistakes. He's probably not quite as oafish a parent as he makes himself out to be. There is one paragraph, however, that glitters with gold flakes of truth and which I would happily tattoo on my back if only it were about 500 words shorter:

At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and -- let us be frank -- got fleeced. The agreement he signed foisted all sorts of new parental responsibilities on him and gave him nothing of what he might have expected in return. Not the greater love of his wife, who was now encouraged to view him as an unreliable employee. Not the special love from his child, who, no matter how many times he fed and changed and wiped and walked her, would always prefer her mother in a pinch. Not the admiration of the body politic, who pushed him into signing the deal. Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH...YOU...POOR...BASTARD.

I would hope that I could nod appreciatively towards the sentiment above without much in the way of hedges or caveats, without explaining that I really do love my wife and kids, and am often glad to pitch in the minority share of parenting, and so on and so on. Most of Home Game is not so much the above as it is sort of the normal anecdotes of fatherhood, the kind you hear in those occasions when you get to hang around with other parents and actually talk instead of having to be the Wimperative Dad ( "Caleb, do you think you want a hot dog or would you eat a grilled cheese sandwich?"). The book's humor makes it worthwhile, and the mother of Lewis' children happens to be Tabitha Soren, who you will remember from your days watching MTV as a randy teenager.

Fake Palindromes

2009-08-28T16:00:00.003-05:00

My full name, anagrammed, is Handwash Weird Brain.

I thought you deserved to be the first to know.

When I Feed The Tree

2009-08-24T12:08:00.004-05:00

Nick and Caleb are hunting for squirrels. And, no, Caleb is not wearing pants.

Nick wears his game face.

It's hard to tell whether this is a hug or a headlock.

Caleb investigates the Butterfly Room in the Milwaukee Public Museum.

A specimin alights on Grampa Jim.

Three wise men ponder the elephant.

It is hard to tell whether this is a hug or a headlock.

Caleb enjoys some chocolate milk.

Sam puts on his hiking gear at Grandma Glenda's.

Watering the tree.

Driving the tractor.

Sam chillaxing with Grampa Gary.