The Beachwood Media Company Proudly Presents:

Poems by J.J. Tindall
Selected from The Beachwood Reporter
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You have before you the greatest collection of American poetry published in the new millennium. By a Chicago author. For a Chicago website. If you like that sort of thing.
But then, maybe, truly, it is the best-in-class. After all, who else can claim Ode to a Hoover Bagless Cyclonic Action Quik-Broom with On-Board Tools (“Quiet machine, soft machine, I machine”) in the same breath as Five Boys On a Golf Course (“We who remained drove a van to Arlington, VA, for the military funeral, smoking joints and telling stories. The Navy bore pall for us all.”)?

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Posted on July 26, 2010

By The Beachwood Book Bike Bureau

“After all the drama last week over the fate of Gabriel Levinson’s Book Bike, cooler heads have prevailed and we now have a happy ending,” Marcus Gilmer reports at Chicagoist. “The Chicago Public Library, who’s been fighting a battle of their own lately, reached out to Gabriel and the two parties have now become partners which will allow Gabriel to continue doing what he’s been doing without having to pay the steep fees.”
A couple videos about Levinson and his bike.
1. “The whole purpose is just to give away books.”

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Posted on July 13, 2010

By The Beachwood Excerpt Affairs Desk

A young girl. A world war. And her fight to save her family from the Imperial Japanese Army. An excerpt from Olga’s War, the new memoir of Olga Zervoulakos Owens, by Beachwood contributor David Rutter.
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Manila, 1942:
Olga was walking with her family to the market on Wednesday. Upon orders from the Japanese controlling all traffic, their path took them down Vito Cruz Boulevard. And then past the Rizal Memorial Coliseum, one of the jewels of the city. “It was a truly a lovely place,” Olga recalled. “They played baseball and basketball there in the open air and thousands came to see the games. There were these massive trees that ringed the Coliseum in a park.”
But as they walked down the sidewalk past the park that encased the Coliseum grounds in green, Olga peered into the near blackness under the massive acacia tree canopy. And then peered again, straining to see more clearly. Something was there under the tree.
And there. And there. And over there, another. And more.
And then she recognized what she was seeing. They were bodies. They had been strung up over the sturdiest branches of the old trees and been left to hang upside down under the limbs. The long ropes were taut around the legs, and the bodies swung in the breeze. To and fro. Gently, all the while, because the wind was but a whisper.

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Posted on July 7, 2010