Dan Clowes event in Chicago June 13

Dan Clowes is on the road promoting his latest novel, "Wilson." He'll be in Chicago June 13 at the Printers Row book Fair; I'll be moderating. Some recent Clowes interviews are here.

Far. And Near. two photo shows

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Two shows begin October 1 and October 2. Details at Far. And Near. [Click for LARGER images.]

You want to travel blind: portraits

An exhibition of portraits of film figures and friends is running in Chicago through July 26 at the Rainbo Club. The address, more information and other pictures are here. [Takeshi Kitano; Azita Youssefi; Michael Ondaatje]

this is 606: a photo exhibition of "chicagoesque" images

Ten large photographic landscapes of Chicago, or "606," open Friday, July 3 at The Architrouve in Chicago, 6-9-m. [Location and daily hours through August 2 here.] The set is drawn from the ongoing daily photographic project, "this is 606," which is here.

Please, go ahead, craft a better lede

In a day where journalists are regaling the world with Michael Jackson encounters, Lucian K. Truscott IV trumps them all on another topic: "I was perhaps the unlikeliest person in the world to cover the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. It was June 27, 1969. I had graduated from West Point only three weeks earlier and was spending my summer leave in New York before reporting for duty at Fort Benning, in Georgia. After a late dinner in Chinatown, I was about to enter the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout on Christopher Street near the Voice’s offices, when I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar a couple of doors down the street. Even a newly minted second lieutenant of infantry could see that it was a story." Truscott is also blogging his new novel, which he introduces, in part: "Being under contract is a nasty business in the writing game and should be avoided if at all possible. What used to happen was, you signed this lengthy document of many paragraphs… referred to quaintly as “clauses”—by which you surrendered pretty much everything deriving from the fruit of your labors other than your byline, which the employer reserved the right to fuck up in every way up to and including misspelling it, and then you went into a room and you closed the door, and you were allowed out when you are able to carry, depending on the nature of the contract, 30, or 120, or 800 pages of manuscript, which you would then deliver by hand or dispatch by mail to the employer in question. Today you are instructed to send the same numbers of pages with clicks of a mouse, but otherwise, the task expected and the toil extracted and the rights surrendered by the resident of the writing room–whomever he or she may be—remain the same. Then at the leisure of the employer, some weeks or even months in the future, they send you a check for an amount which will buy you significantly less beans and rice than the same amount would have when you first entered the writing room and began the work which earned the paycheck. And then they send you back into the writing room so that days or weeks or months from now you will come out with even more fucking pages, and they send you another fucking check at their fucking leisure that will buy even less beans and rice than before, and so you go back into the writing room in order to maintain some fractional modicum of hope that you will be able to keep yourself and your family in beans and rice until… well, until when exactly? Until you reach retirement age? What fucking retirement age? In his 80s, Gore Vidal is still lashed to a chair in his writing room and they had to pry Norman Mailer’s fingers from his pencil the day he was found dead at age 84 and when Philip Roth finally goes into the ground his publisher will send out a crew of interns to dig up his corpse and tie 14-gauge wire to his big toes and put a zillion watts into him hoping that he’ll rise from the dead and crank out another masterpiece and get maybe one more chance at the Nobel and thus double or triple or maybe even quadruple profits from his final masterpiece and then there’s the explosion of earnings to be gleaned from reprinting his backlist with the fucking Nobel emblazoned on the cover bigger than his name…"

Free! wants to be information

The blue Bic pen glides along the page, and surprising things always spill out of it

In BOOKFORUM, novelist Richard Ford talks about creating his "everyman", or at least how he writes. "I [wrote] with the certainty that even if I were working straight from life, and was trying to deliver perfect facsimiles of people directly to the page, the truth is that the instant one puts pen to paper, fidelity to fact—or to one’s original intention or even to sensation itself—almost always goes flying out the window. This is because language is an independent agent different from sensation, and tends to find its own loyalties in whimsy, context, the time of day, the author’s mood, sometimes even maybe the old original intention—but many times not. Martin Amis once wrote that literature “is a disinterested use of words. You need to have nothing riding on the outcome.” Another way of saying that is: The blue Bic pen glides along the page, and surprising things always spill out of it."

You are young

[Chicago Avenue east of California Avenue]

Keyboard cat plays off Roland Burris

Fallen

[Chicago Avenue at Leavitt Street]

Frank Bruni amid the "carniwhores"

In a laudatory review of Chicago's months-old Publican restaurant, outgoing restaurant cricket Frank Bruni tries out what at first appears to be a neologism, one that looked like a typo at first glance: "The menu is frustrating, in that just about everything on it reads as if it shouldn’t be missed. I didn’t get to the beef heart or the sweetbreads, just two of the ways the Publican acknowledges the necessity of offal in any restaurant that cares about its carniwhore credentials." As it turns out, Bruni took "carniwhore" for a spin on March 18: "The carniwhore school holds that no beast bests the pig in its multifaceted pleasures, that offal shouldn’t be relegated to just one or two dishes on the margins of the main feast, and that if you think something might taste better fried, go ahead and fry it, arteries be damned." Google searches lead to Bruni, an odd band, and a definition by Urban Dictionary in February 2008: "Derogatory term for a vegan or vegetarian who has sex with meat-eaters. The antithesis of a vegansexual."

A New Yorker cover drawn with an iPhone

Here's one among the dozens and dozens of links blogged about this today after an article in The New York Times... The June 1 issue of the New Yorker was drawn with Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone application, by Jorge Colombo. Details at The New Yorker, which announces Colombo will do one each week for their website.

Roughed up in Thessaloniki

FACE DOWN ON THE TABLE IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, I hold stock-still as the young doctor with the needle poised to pierce my scalp deadpans, "How are you enjoying our Greek hospitality?" Two female doctors in training, tall, longhaired brunettes, giggle at his banter between instructions in their language: he's fascinated that I'm calm after being attacked by a mob. "So you're a photojournalist?" "Po-po journalist, it seems," I joke, using slang that's an all purpose "oh-oh." The women giggle. "I don't get it," he says, as he pulls thread through my lacerated skin.

It's been a little more than a month since that Sunday night and most aches have subsided. My insurance covered the CAT scan and other tests once I was back in the States, assuring nothing might be permanently awry. Cumulatively, I've spent almost six months of my life in the north of Greece but this is the first time I've been taken for an anarchist infiltrator and roughed up by a gang of nationalists. [Machine translation]

Thessaloniki is a city of just over a million. Street protests are common, prevalent, even. One cloudy afternoon a couple of years ago, I asked a cop in knee-high black boots standing beside his motorcycle as a main artery was filled with red flags of a communist youth party and black flags of some anarchist faction, what's this one about? "Just another regularly scheduled spontaneous demonstration," he answered.

That Sunday was the last of ten days of the eleventh Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. I had been watching films and talking to directors and photographers and programmers for a print piece for Filmmaker magazine. The usual suspects: homelessness, globalization, genocide. Earlier, I'd had conversations with a young Rwandan director who made one of several films about that last topic as part of a section of films made specifically by African directors. I had a drink with a few filmmakers and colleagues and chose to stop by a friends' apartment rather than ending the event on the bloody note of his film: he is a good storyteller and I'd gotten more than the gist of the horror, physical and moral, of that tragedy.

Along the eight blocks to the apartment, a square bristles with a crowd of middle-aged men listening to an energetic older man. A rank of blinding bright white lights stands between the speaker and the Byzantine edifice behind him. This is the square of Agia Sofia, the "Church of the Holy Wisdom." It's a neighborhood I know well; I feel safe. The words of his urgent peroration that I understand are mostly along the lines of "homeland" and "patriotism." Riot police stand at the perimeter of the gathering. I have my DSLR camera with me, walk past without even framing a picture. I move along. "Homeland." "Patriotism."



Journalists watch, movie reviewers watch, photographers watch, used to seeing. Seeing without being seen, as well. I was about to get a simple lesson in observation. The speaker's voice resounds through the shutters of the flat several blocks away. "Homeland. "Patriotism." I take the same route half-an-hour later, 9:15, after dark. Observing, I reach toward my unzipped camera bag, more to protect its contents than to take out any equipment. Three, then four middle-aged men are abruptly in my face shouting in Greek, "Who are you?" "Who sent you?" "What are you doing?" I'm surrounded. I move to protect my bag as punches fly and fall.

Sloppy punches and kicks from a dozen men in a mob scrum are always to be preferred over two guys in an alley. If you get dragged free soon enough, it's more roughing up than being beaten stupid. Still, there's blood. The velocity of the event? Under two minutes, I would guess.



I was told later the men who kicked, swung, slapped, as I crouched on the ground to protect my face, might have taken me for "an anarchist infiltrator." Fast, furious. Less than two minutes and about a pint of blood later, soaking my hair and cascading down the back of my jacket, police pull me away, to insure "bodily integrity," as the term of art of Greek law has it. Adrenaline brings clarity. My upturned palms are covered with blood from the gash on the back of my head. I hold them up. "American… Journalist… NOT political. What do you need?" My fingerprints blood my press pass as I hand it across.

A rare incident, I'm assured later by Greek friends, the police, the U. S. Consulate. And a modest one compared to the blood that had run through the aisles during so many of the thirty or so documentaries I'd seen in the ten days prior. Greek friends expressed concern about the temperature in their streets: these were the middle-aged fed up with riots in the streets of cities since the December shooting of a 15-year-old boy in the Exarchia district of Athens. What had I done? What a reviewer, a journalist, a photographer does. Just looking. My "crime." Just being seen looking. And remembering the image of my two bloody hands, red, La chinoise-red, which I could not take a picture of.

CODA: Last week I saw Z for the first time in memory. Costa-Gavras' restored thriller is the most authentic representation of getting your head lacerated in Greek street violence that I know. My injuries were in almost the same place on the back of the skull as those that kill Yves Montand's political figure. I sat stock-still, rapt with fascination.

Inside Rod's Head: There's a Monster in this Box

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Politicians are not meant to speak in full sentences

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An English gentleman shows how it's not done.

Media Rare returns in April

America's Favorite Snack

A perfect passage in a sweet Sunday profile of Budd Schulberg

Robert Chalmers in the independent goes a round with Budd Schulberg. This is by far not the best paragraph but it is great: "A well-preserved and alert 94, Schulberg sits by a log fire while his fourth wife Betsy Langman, a former actor and magazine journalist who protects his interests with formidable devotion, is discussing percentages on the phone. Budd seems more interested in looking out for the swans that visit Aspatuck Creek, the stretch of water just beyond his window. Some of them will take corn from his hand. If you didn't know, you would never guess that this gentlest of ornithologists, who speaks with a slight stammer, would be a legend even if all he'd ever produced was his boxing journalism.

'Did you ever fight, yourself?'

'I tried to box,' he says. 'But I had two major flaws: I never liked being hit on the nose. And I never developed a strategy to avoid being hit on the nose.'"

Photographers to become terrorists in UK

Reports the Guardian, UK photographers fear they are target of new terror law. "Taking photographs of police officers could be deemed a criminal offence under anti-terrorism legislation that comes into force next week. Campaigners against section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which becomes law on Monday, said it would leave professional photographers open to fines and arrest... The National Union of Journalists and the British Press Photographers' Association said the law would extend powers that are already being used to harass photographers and would threaten press freedom... Under section 76, eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers which is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" will be an offence carrying a maximum jail term of 10 years... The new powers would be too vague to prevent abuse... "They will now be able to arrest you if a photograph could potentially incite or provoke disorder. But isn't that any protest?" ... Val Swain, a member of Fitwatch, a collective which photographs police intelligence teams taking pictures of protesters, said: "I took a picture of an officer on my camera phone and he walked over and said, 'you are going to delete that'. We're in a public place, he's in a public role and he knew that. They've been gearing up for it but so far they've stopped short of arresting people. Now they will have the power to do it." Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, said: "Police officers ... believe they have the power to delete images or to take editorial decisions about what can and can't be photographed. The right to take photos in a public place is a precious freedom. It is what enables the press to show the wider world what is going on."

CNBC anchor does not speak same English as Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Talleb

"Dr. Doom," aka economist Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan" seem to have been invited onto CNBC for comic relief as the anchor doesn't seem to understand, or care to understand, a single thing the lucid pair have to say. It's a fairly stunning ten minutes that suggest mass media may have been dead for far longer than we care to realize.