Agents: Geoghegan, Eig, Perlstein, Kotlowitz, Karlen, Ethan, Conroy
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1. The Beachwood Inn: Memoir of a bar and its city. (a reporter, a bar and their city?) Or just BEACHWOOD. (a bar, an intersection, a city) (rise and fall of a great american bar)
The Little Bar That Couldn’t.
This isn’t Hamill: not a bar with literary lions, and not written by an alcoholic; that difference too with Bar Bar, which is not even a bar I would hang out in; The Tender Bar
Beachwood is so much better: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/books/guy-adopts-a-bar-and-tells-about-it.html?_r=0
not a literary bar. not a coming-of-age story. not a story about the author. has the subject been strip-mined? sure. but what story of a bar like this has been told? i’m not familiar with one.
Do you know why I’m one of the last dozen or so people on Earth who hasn’t read J.R. Moehringer delightful memoir, The Tender Bar? Simple: Its title. Yes, I get the turn-of-phrase, and even the possible double-meaning of “tender.” And yes, it’s sort of clever (in a not-really-clever sort of way). But it’s just so preciously cutesy. I always rolled my eyes when I saw it in a used bookstore, and never even considered picking it up — even though I know millions of readers have loved it.
http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.com/2012/12/the-tender-bar-bad-title-great-book.html
I havent’read it because i’m quite sure i hung out at a better, funier bar with beter stories, after eading reivew like janet maslins’. really? borrring. i’m not an alcoholic, i didn’t go to yale or work at the new york times.
not a drinking memoir. those, again, are by alcoholics. funnier, better stories and (real) characters, about the bar and the city.
I can tell the stories, it will be funny and colorful, but I can explain the meaning too – what made it so important to people, what it is that people sought out and got (and didn’t), and how the bar represented the changing nature of the city, from Polish blue-collar to Latino to artsy to yuppie/hipster … and how and why there is room for that bar there anymore.
*
There were nights in the ’90s when just the right mix of regulars crowded around the end of the bar at the Beachwood Inn – no matter if the rest of the room was empty; you wanted to somehow be touching the end of that bar – and just the right song on the jukebox would hit at just the right time and just the right mix of booze had been ingested and the inevitable singalong kicked in and it seemed like the whole place would lift off the ground and ascend to Heaven. This was peak Beachwood. It was, no doubt, the greatest place on the planet to be on those nights – and for awhile, those nights were plentiful.
It wasn’t that way back when Leonard and Lorraine Stepien opened the bar at Beach and Wood streets in Polish Wicker Park in 1950. It was a simple, workingman’s bar then – a rough one at that. In 19TK, Leonard was shot and killed during a robbery – witnessed by the youngest of his two sons, Bob, and Lorraine was left alone to run the joint. With the help of two women in the neighborhood who also ran bars – Lottie and Marie – she carried on until turning the place over to Bob and his older brother, Jim.
By that time, the neighborhood had Latinized but was still a tough place. Bob and Jim worked day jobs and at night sat behind the bar often serving three Mexicans and no one else.
In the late 80s, the artists starting moving in to the neighborhood and fell in love with the bar’s genuineness – it still looked like 1950 in there, from the green vinyl booths and formica tables to the big wooden cooler behind the bar. The place was adorned with movie posters and a variety of pennants – not all sports-related. Trinkets and “novelties” filled almost every available space – it looked like someone was holding a rummage sale in their father’s basement. And best of all, an old-fashioned jukebox loaded with guilty pleasures that cut across eras and genres.
For some folks, that first step into the Beachwood was transformative; love at first sight. Some of us tried to never leave. A community of disparate characters coalesced, united mostly by our love of the bar. And it was the true community of a neighborhood corner tavern – Ralphie the Postman, who was actually the postman for the neighborhood and would arrive after his shift still in his uniform; he was also a Vietnam vet, and as beloved as Ralphie was, you learned quickly not to get into the shit with him. He also loved his (dead) mother very much; Joe Mielnik, who grew up with the Stepien brothers and used to work at the A&P across the street; Joe was the most good-natured alcoholic you’d ever meet. In later years we used to joke about Joe’s Greatest Hits as we imagined his go-to jokes and habits scrolling up the TV screen on a late-night infomercial – the most popular being “Arrgghahahhargh!” or some approximation of his booming laugh, usually at his own jokes; and Longest Goodbye Ever. Old guys like Stosh, and the cranky, creaky bartender Chooch, who took up with Lorraine after Leonard died, lent credibility to the bar as truly an old man’s bar. If Chooch wasn’t in the mood, he would make last call at 10:30 p.m., or 11, or whenever he wanted, much to the consternation and confusion of patrons. That was just the Beachwood. But as a neighborhood bar, there was a tremendous mix. Ralphie and Joe hanging out with Patty, a hot twentysomething rock and roller who often brought her hot rock and roll friends around; a reputed mob associate – and his stripper girlfriend; a wickedly smart punkish paralegal whom I first spotted reading minutes from the Knesset under the one (dim) light over the bar; artists, musicians, truckers, a beer salesman – the kind of cross-section, by the way, that was a joy for a journalist like me. Mike Royko didn’t grow up far away down Milwaukee Avenue; I used to say that if Royko was alive then, he wouldn’t have hung out anymore at the tourist-laden and truthfully lame Billy Goat, but at the Beachwood, or a place like it. Joe worked for the county; Jash repaired trains for the CTA; TK worked for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. I knew a lot more than a lot of reporters in town just by hanging out at the Beachwood.
(Our alderman used to come in on occasion, but the best moment was after he was turned out office after the mayor didn’t back him. “I did everything Daley asked me to! I was a sellout from day one!” he complained. He stopped in a few months before the bar closed; now he’s driving for Uber.)
(There’s also the story of longtime bartender Carla turning Mick Jagger away at the door after the Stones played at the Double Door in Wicker Park because, well, it was bar time – and he wasn’t invited to the double-secret twice-as-fun after-hours scene. I used to say that legal time at the bar was just foreplay for after-hours; and you had to put in your time and earn your spot in after-hours, when the ash trays came out and the jukebox and booze were free and crazy shit went down. I walked out of that place at 6 a.m. too many times. Or not enough times.)
And then there was Painter Dan, whom me and my friend Marty used to call Pirner, because of his long blonde hair reminiscent of Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner. Everyone else called him Painter Dan because he painted and did other repair work for a living and often came in in his painter work clothes. He had once been in actor; but the farthest he got was a scene in TK. He still had stories to tell about those around him who went on to become somebodies.
Dan was the guy who took out the trash. He came to the bar every night, and when it was time to take all the empty beer bottles (no taps) collected through the night in plastic pails, his job was to take them out to the alley and dump them in the Dumpster. Bartenders also sent him out for change when needed, or limes, or dinner. He was never paid in anything but a certain number of free beers (how many depending on the bartender). He just did it. That was his role. He must’ve done it for 20 years.
When I took on a bartending shift for 17 months, a customer I became friends with became Dan’s “intern.” On Monday nights, my buddy Bill – a twentysomething urban affairs grad student – would come in and Dan trained him in how to take out the trash. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that never in the history of any bar in the world has anyone been so eager to take out trash. He got the religion, see. We just loved that place so much we all wanted to be a part of it any way we could. Now he had an official role. Oh, and when the Chicago police raided a Bridgeport apartment and arrested the dudes who would become the NATO 3, well, that was Bill’s apartment. Wanna get sources? Become a regular in the right bar – or work in one. And that means a neighborhood bar, not a downtown bar, not a Lincoln Park bar …
As Bob said recently in a news article about the bar’s closing, the jukebox was the soul of the place. The brothers each took 50 of the 100 slots for discs. This produced some spectacular contrasts. Mostly, Bob’s discs were the ones that produced the weekly Friday night singalongs. Bob doesn’t like people, and yet he created the community there. (I told a DNAinfo Chicago reporter this, and Bob begged to clarify with her: It’s not that he doesn’t like people, but that customers are a necessary evil. So, to clarify, it’s even worse!) For a good number of years, Bob would arrive for his Friday night shift and swap three CDs in and take three out, just to keep things fresh. Of course, we would rush over to see what Bob had brought us.
And when Bob would open up the jukebox, with its blinding internal lights, we liked to say, “Don’t look straight at it, Marion!” That’s how the jukebox came to be called the Ark of the Covenant. And given that there were two jukeboxes in my time, there was Ark I and Ark II.
One key to the jukebox was the “bounce” button behind the bar; a push would skip the box ahead to the next song. When a song came on that the regulars didn’t like, we would pound on the bar “We’re not going to take it! No! We’re not going to take it!” It didn’t matter to us that someone paid money for that song – probably a civilian. As inclusive as the bar was – and it was really inclusive; strangers were immediate friends if they weren’t dicks, and all races and sexual preferences were represented there, a rarity in Chicago – we *would* discuss everybody’s jukebox picks. Not with the snobbish indie attitude, though m any of us were indie-oriented, because it wasn’t that kind of jukebox. Just with an eye toward what is appropriate for a bar full of people, and not jealous. A jukebox pick is not just about you. We all have to listen to it.
Another feature of the bar was an old-fashioned telephone booth, but it wasn’t always old-fashioned. When I first started going there, the phone still worked – and got used. In fact, my friend Tim used it as his actual phone. He didn’t have one at home because he didn’t want the government to know his number or where he lived. So he got all his calls there. “Tim, your mom’s on the phone!”
One summer we had a softball team. Now, plenty of bars have softball teams. But this had to be one of the most unlikely bar teams ever. We just weren’t sportsy like that. And that’s what made it the most fun team I’ve ever been on – and I played on two University of Minnesota intramural softball championship teams! I’ll never forget showing up for our first game, because it was the first time many of us had seen each other in daylight, after all those years.
We were pretty awful at first, as you might imagine, but we made an improbable run in the playoffs that was pure magic. Some dude also got hit in the chest with a fly ball to right, but that’s who we were.
And after the games, we went to the bar.
When my floor hockey team – Moe’s Tavern – won its first championship, someone on the team – she now works for MLB.com – made a pennant with Moe’s face on it and we all signed the back and Bob put it on the wall above the door.
One night at last call, on a rare Friday night when neither me or Marty were there, there was a commotion near the door and the next day Bob noticed the pennant was gone. He was so heartbroken he couldn’t come to tell me at first. Then, maybe a month later, there was some strange activity outside the door, and Bob went to check it out and there was a plastic bag left on the door handle. Inside was the pennant. A Beachwood miracle! We surmised some dude’s girlfriend said you had to return it. The pennant went behind a frame and behind the bar for safekeeping.
Of course, there is the litany of drugs, sex, marriages of people who met at the bar, divorces of people who met at the bar, break-ups when Bob had to determine which party got to keep the bar … a litany of bartenders, some of whom made the place go, some of whom stole from the bar, a couple of whom killed the bar.
As the neighborhood gentrified, the bar lost something of its neighborhood quality. Gentrifiers aren’t really neighborhood people. They are neighborhood destroyers. New regulars became harder to cultivate; old regulars moved, went to rehab, aged out. Bob and Jim made their share of mistakes too. Suddenly, somehow, the bar stopped making money, an almost impossible thing to do given its location in a neighborhood that had become a hipster paradise. But the Beachwood was for a certain kind of person, and hipster wasn’t it any more than yuppie. After a typically inept Beachwood sale that dragged on for a year, the bar was finally sold and closed, to be reopened soon as a “reconceptualized” cocktail place.
It fits Chicago – blue-collar Poles to Latinos to artists to yuppie hipsters. In this case, old Chicago did not survive.
*
It wasn’t all romance. There is always a dark side to a bar. That dark side, essentially, is alcoholism. I’m reminded of the classic The Bar Bar, a renowned magazine article that detailed the rituals and mores of a bar that TK hung out at, much of which resonated with me but much of which didn’t. For example, the notion that a real bar isn’t a place where people drink beer. His bar is a lot darker than mine, and in a follow-up article years later, he wrote of how he romanticized the rituals of alcoholics instead of recognizing those rituals for what they were.
Bob once said to me, ruefully, that he made a living off other people’s misery. What he meant was serving alcoholics; studies show that alcoholics make up TK% of alcohol sales in America. And the Beachwood had its share of alcoholics – though the happiest collection of them anywhere.
It meant so much to so many people. Not just a third place, but our first place. We used to joke about the Beachwood time-space continuum. You walked in at 4 or 6 for one beer on your way to something else – laundry, a movie, grocery shopping, home, some other social event – and the next thing you knew they were calling last call (what I used to call “the saddest call of all.”)
It’s funny how the good things never last, but the bad things never end. The Beachwood was a good thing – magical. Even on the nights when nothing happened, we talked about how nothing happened. Every night had its own narrative, even if the narrative was that tonight was boring. That made it not.
For years I would go home and take notes – who was there, who said what funny thing. Sometimes I would send them to my friend Marty, who couldn’t be there as often as I. Me and Marty were “booth people” for years before Bob invited us to the regulars’ corner and we joined Beachwood Nation.
*
streetlights, people
1/2 way there
photos beachwood forever, beachwood remembered, dna … i named my website and company after it
Ed
Seattle Dan, OBG
NYE, Thanksgiving
Easy Rock: all pretense gone. walk in and be yourself, talk to anyone, like a living room. run around. sing, dance. connect two.
Zero
Rituals, catch phrases, characters, after hours.
Beachwood Radio
movies
A lot of bars have their tight-knight regulars, and a lot of books have been written about those bars. This is another, but with all the characters, the catch phrases, the obsessiveness (like the day we counted all the ceiling tiles, and then tried to recite every one of the 100 discs on the jukebox; also, the rankings of everything: Bathroom 1 (women’s), Bathroom 2 (men’s)
ight knt regulars and books about them. thi sis another, but with all the charcters, teh nicknames, the catch phrases, the bosessesiveness, like counting all the ceiling tiles, rankning everying (bothh 1 and 2; bathroom 1 and 2) seeing each other sin daylight for hte first time no the sfunnest softball team ever, the dramas, sex, marriges, divorces, omb guy and stripper girlfirend, after hours scene, rise and fall asfrom three drunk mexcians to artists to yuppies as the intersection chagnes like chcaigo and america untlt the bar is no more.
the novelties, the pohne booth , the barber chair, the jukebxo as ark of the voennet., the cooler with nuclear blast. the two borthers with 50 percent each dad shot there. cvhooch, the mailman ralphie, stosh, rock and rollers, alscoholiscs, the dark side – depression, anxiety, grduges, affairs, stealing bartenreders, race and politics.
The Bar Bar got some of the rituals right, but that was about drunks who didn’t drink beer and sing songs and play softball or kickball etc. etc., other books: not hamill’s book: no celebritiees here, not a aslon , bu a salon in a differne wy: modern day billy goat: cta, county, post office, paralegal in intelelctual property (crazy ptetnst, who read knesset minutes under the olone bar light)(, art restorer, musicians, truckers, evemn teh bothet had day jobs and were once married … accountant phtogorahper, aldermenan occionasly stepped in and complained about he mayor,
BW pitch: Pirner, Painter Dan, trash man, with intern, NATO guy; Ralphie the postman; Joe (where is joe mielnik); drummer, art mover, banjo player, CTA biker repairman, super smart paralegal reading minutes of knesset, stripper and mob guy, lesbians, photographers, marriages, divorces, affairs, softball first time in daylight, event guys, ravenswood studio, bob’s good luck movies: terminiator 2, dusk til dawn, anaconda, the singalongs, after hours. the scenario.
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2. The True Story of Barack Obama – And The Consequences Wrought By Both The Left And The Right Getting Him Wrong.
In 2007 and 2008, I watched dumbfounded as the Barack Obama portrayed by his campaign and by the media resembled nothing like the Barack Obama who was a state senator in Illinois. His campaign, progressives and the mainstream media depicted a change agent with great accomplishments when the record showed Obama to be an opportunistic backbencher with a pretty thin record; not at all a leader of change or reform, backing the Machine candidate, for example, over the reform candidate in *every single election* in which he offered an endorsement. He was moderate to conservative, playing poker with Republicans in Springfield and redrawing his district boundaries to capture wealthier campaign contributors while leaving his poor constituents behind. His self-described political mentor and “godfather,” respectively, were now-convicted felon Tony Rezko and then-state senate president Emil Jones, one of the state’s foremost personifications of our sleazy political culture.
At the same time, the right-wing media – either out of pure disingenuousness or racist and wrongheaded presumptions over what a black Chicago Democrat must be like – portrayed Obama as a wild-eyed socialist (if not a traitorous Muslim in some quarters) whose paltry relationship with Bill Ayers spoke volumes more than his relationship with, say, Rezko.
The result has been horrific. Obama has been a great disappointment not just to progressives, but to mainstream Democrats, who were sold a bill of goods about an untested, inexperienced candidate with virtually no identifiable agenda. Obama has also run into a buzzsaw of opposition in Washington among Republicans – egged on in many cases by their brainwashed constituents – who feel it is their duty to hold the line against an unAmerican imposter desirous of turning the country into a Marxist wonderland.
This is an undiagnosed cause of the bitter partisanship we’ve seen in Washington – and America – during the Obama years; both sides are operating from a warped perception of who our president is. The Obama campaign is partly to blame for running such a phony campaign – a campaign that reveled in the nuttiness of the right-wing in that it only helped solidify and gin up its side. The right-wing is partly to blame for its ignorance. But the media, perhaps most of all, is to blame for buying into and perpetuating the false image of Obama on one hand and not more aggressively knocking down the craziness on the other.
I reported on Obama for my website in those years based simply on what the record showed Obama to be. It put my business in peril as I was lambasted by the progressives who make up a significant chunk of my readership. They just didn’t want to know. In fact, I would argue that if anyone reviewed what I wrote in those years, they would find that nobody on the planet got Obama more right than I did.
I based my analyses, by the way, not just on the record, but on human sources around town who either weren’t talking to the reporters or other reporters were ignoring. (There’s the political strategist, for example, who decided against joining the Obama campaign because he was uncomfortable with their strategy to blunt the truth about his relationship with Rezko; the LA Times reporter who says his critical stories of Obama were rejected by editors who didn’t want to be accused of being racist; the community organizers who say Obama took far too much credit for an Altgeld Gardens campaign; the muddy behind-the-scenes media leaks and manipulations that reporters never made public even as Obama lectured about cynicism; my editor at Chicago magazine, who wanted an Obama puff piece after he became a U.S. senator but rejected alternate suggestions such as a look at what kind of state senator or how the Obama phenomenon occurred (after I was rejected when I pitched embedding myself in Obama’s Senate primary campaign and then general – before anyone knew who he was). (Obama himself has said that if this was the ’80s, he’d be a moderate Republican.)
There is a real story about Obama that still hasn’t been told, in all the hagiography by the likes of Jonathan Alter and David Maraniss. Having missed the real Barack Obama has cost this country badly in dashed hopes that have resulted in even more cynicism – brought to us by the guy who promised to end it, in the craziness of the opposition, and in policies Obama has brought such as NSA surveillance and drone wars that wouldn’t have been unexpected had he not been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for achieving absolutely nothing in the madness. (I got a kick out of those saying that, having won re-election, we would see the real Obama, as if we hadn’t been seeing him all along; the notion that we hadn’t was one borne of the media’s fawning campaign coverage.) We still need a corrective to really understand this guy – and to understand how badly served we have been by both parties and the media in his era.
3. My Journey Through America’s Dumbest Newsrooms: A reporter’s story.
Not really America’s dumbest newsrooms, but telling stories about the media and journalism from a reporter as he travels dumbfounded from jobs in Central Florida where the air was perfumed by the orange juice factories and deputy sheriffs used to kick the shit out of suspects on their way to the county jail; Northeast Iowa, where I lived on Main Street above a bar named Dean’s Place – my landlord was Dean and our lease was a dollar figure written on a cocktail napkin; Central Connecticut, where I arrived one summer after a long drive from Minnesota only to have the City Desk say, “What intern?”; Chicago, of course, where the Tribune offered the most dysfunctional newsroom I have to this day ever experienced. There are funny personal stories to be told, of course, but I’d really like to tell them in the service of explaining how hard it is to actually do honest journalism when you are surrounded by idiots. The larger story is one of a media mindset that is seemingly unbreakable – and has brought the newspaper industry beyond the brink of disaster.
4. High Achievers.
When I was in 6th grade, having been identified as “gifted,” I was taken out of my regular elementary school – and away from my neighborhood and my friends – and set to another school to participate in a class called “High Achievers,” 20 or 30 of us culled from the elementary schools of the suburban Bloomington, Minnesota school district. It ruined me. I lost my old friends, and after 6th grade we “High Achievers” were re-dispersed back to our respective junior highs, so I lost my new friends. More to the point, those of us in the class constantly wondered why we were there – and acted out. We may have driven our teacher to a nervous breakdown. I’ve always thought about tracking down everyone in that class and seeing what became of them – my guess is that we haven’t “achieved” any more than any random group our size. I wonder if I’m the only one who felt traumatized by the experience, which formed in me ideas about elitism and education, where the pendulum swings back and forth on “gifted” education.
5. Average Joe / All-American Joe / Everyday American.
When I worked at Chicago magazine, I got an idea to find the average or typical Chicagoan, via a workable set of criteria developed by a sociologist/demographer I know. My editor was interested, but insisted we include the suburbs in our field of study, because, well, Chicago magazine. My pal actually was able to locate the average/typical metro Chicagoans – a Hispanic family in Melrose Park. My editor was suddenly no longer interested, because, well, Chicago magazine. My new idea is to find the average/typical person for each state, and then America. The search for this person could be the topic of a book (or a reality TV show!). This book would tell us about ourselves by using a variety of sociological measures as well as data from the census and other sources. It may seem unattainable, but in fact it’s do-able with a little ingenuity.
Just as an example, from my pal:
Here is a rough sketch of IL:
An average person in IL would be the following (along with the description of the logic behind how it was derived):
Age – 37 (median age in IL)
Gender – Female (50.9% female in the state)
Marital Status – Single (not divorced but never married – 45.9% over the age of 15 are married, and then 31.7% are singles who never married)
Place of birth – United States (86%)
Race – Non-Hispanic (84%) White (72.5%)
Language – English only (77.3%)
Education – Some college/associate degree (31.6% of the residents have college degree or higher)
Housing – lived in the same house a year ago (86.7% of the residents)
Mode of Commute – Drives in car/truck/van alone (73.4%) with average travel time of 28.1 minutes
Occupation – sales and office occupation (36.2% are in Management, business, science, and arts occupations and the second highest was sales & office occupation at 24.9%)
Industry – Retail trade (Educational services, and health care and social assistance – 23%; Manufacturing – 12.7%; Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management services – 11.2% and then Retail trade – 11%: these top 5 make up 57.9% of all industries).
Housing – owner-occupied (66.7%) single unit (meaning a stand-alone house) built between 1980 and 1999, fueled by gas (83.4%).
SO, seems like we are looking for 37 year-old single, non-Hispanic white female with couple of years of college education living in a single family home that she own. She works in retail or office job, has approximately 30 minutes of commute in her car, and makes around $33,366 a year. Also, she does not speak any other language outside of English. She sounds swell.
Searching For The Average American.
6. What’s The Matter With Chicago?
Why is Chicago so corrupt? Why do we keep electing tyrants? Why do the city’s blacks make up the core support of those tyrants? Why can’t we have a real, functioning city council that isn’t simply a rubber stamp run by the mayor’s office? Reporters and pundits have written endlessly about these questions, true, but I’d like to put the deepest dive ever into book form to present to the nation – and to determine if there is a way out.
7. History’s Worst Chicagoans.
Let’s come up with a Top Ten, as determined by historians, political observers, reporters, community organizers, politicians, business people, etc. They each get a chapter. We will write it up in a breezy but compelling way to outline the impact each had on Chicago and why they were so awful.
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New Ward by Ward.
Flash
Ultimate Chiraq.
angel killer
new media madness, the broken promise of digital journalism
foundationland
Reporter Stories: Return to stories to see people, issues
A People’s History of Chicago
Fear and Loathing in Chicago
Robeson (Sister Schools)
LEGO
Why I am – and no longer am – a Cubs fan. Agony & Ivy.
How You Are Being Screwed Every Minute Of The Day
Faux Children’s Book About Chicago Politics.
The Five People You Meet in Hell/Thursdays with ?
TV Show idea: reverse of Arnold Coleman: Black family adopts a white
National Restaurant Show/Convention America … Trade Show Junkie
Alternative History of Chicago: the river isnÕt reversed, and hereÕs what happens … through Jordan, Daley, etc., Cubs! one alt history writer is Kim Stanley Robinson
The Minnesota Daily
The Good Things: Grateful Dead; Cubs/Wrigley; Wisconsin football (and UC band); past – apple insanely great; business attempt: southwest airlines;
The Notebook Project
Hypertext Cultural Essays
The Minneapolis Star
Settling Scores
Burning Bridges
Great ideas IÕll never do
Week of Newspaper Folly
Chicago Sucky Media (including Boldface Enemies … jokeÕs on Chicago. power should be radical.)
Culture of Deceit: How you are being screwed every day
The Journalism Book: include brief synopsis of media critics books and what the fallacies are. the answers are much easier….
chapters
1. inspiration
2. journalism
3. editing
4. agenda
5. hiring
6. white house
7. corporations (nasty)
8. consultants
9. generation x
10. labor/change
11. vs. TV
With Greenberg: The Inner World (five case studies of addiction)
1. the edgewater mob woman with the band son
2. the former club owner ad w
oman
3. a blue-collar
4. a white-collar
5. an athlete
Making Sausage: Inside America’s stupidest newsrooms
1. Premise: Media critics have advanced many theories in recent years, but what’s really wrong with the press is a complete lack of quality, standards and ability, as demonstrated by this inside account of how stories are shaped in America’s newsrooms. This would be a bright, funny but impassioned critique of the newspaper industry.
2. Marketability: The strength of this book is that it will compile actual accounts of newsroom stupidity for the general reader.
3. Bio authors:
4. Chapter headings: Aside from anecdotes, chapters will also include Hiring (usually shuffled off to an incompetent editor who gets the job because they’re being shoved aside); Class, Gender and Racial bias (not the cuture war jargon, but actual examples of dough-headedness); Salaries (entering salaries lowest of all majors, including liberal arts; idealists are driven out for being too challenging. Result: do you want these
leftovers writing your newspaper?) Focus Groups (the pitfalls of market-research driven content decisions – weather news is important but do readers need a whole page of it, or do they just want the day’s forecast somewhere on page one?); Best Practices (examples of good journalism – not just major investigative pieces, but the stuff of everyday newspapers, including a guide for how to read your newspaper); Hypocrites (comparing editorial stands to actual practices, i.e. pro-labor edits by anti-union newspaper companies, the use of temporary reporters, etc.) No Alternative (an attack on so-called alternative journalism, which is presumably that stuff between the bar listings); Making Moon Pies (a prescription for improving the daily newspaper by changing hiring practices, values, and viewpoint)
one formula: use one real life anecdote to exemplify each issue
modular scheduling
thro
ugh harryÕs eyes
haunted hall
Fiction: The Answers (What God Tells Us After We Die)
When I first arrived in the afterlife … There are donuts in heaven … Heaven has a waiting room … the afterlife has a waiting room (epitome of sucky waiting rooms, just to remind you one last time … then you enter what i would call the truth chamber, but is really just godÕs living room, or den. you learn everything at once, your brain catalyses … there is still conversation there, you talk about the things you got wrong, what you had right, have actual real conversations, make amends, itÕs all compassion all the time, but you keep certain parts of your personality, some are snarky, some are exceedingly polite, there just arenÕt any bad feelings.
the waiting room has those harsh lights, and really horrible old magazines, and a crying baby and gross people and mean nurse and thereÕs a problem with your insurance and the doctor is late …
In 2005, Steve Rhodes left a stable career in journalism that included stints at Newsweek and Chicago Magazine to launch his own blog. Named for his favorite bar in the hip Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, “The Beachwood Reporter” offers Rhodes’ wit and wisdom on politics, media, sports and any other topic that crossed his mind. Rhodes launched his site to capitalize on the dawn of the Internet era, and brought with him a loyal following from his mainstream reporting. He got limited support from investors, local foundations and individual benefactors, but has yet to see the riches role in. Today, the Beachwood survives on Rhodes’ tenacity and creativity, as well as the volunteer efforts of a whole community of on-line fans.
In “Why do I do this? The Life of a Blogger” Rhodes charts his journey from mainstream reporter to pioneer blogger. He reveals what’s wrong with the mainstream media, how it stifles some of the best reporters and restricts Americans’ right to free speech. He draws a map of the new media landscape, showing clearly where the valleys and the pitfalls are.
Rhodes has learned what works for on-line news and what doesn’t. ‘Why Do I Do This’ offers five examples of news web sites that work, meaning that they make money, pay their reporters, and produce news that meets American standards for objectivity and integrity. ‘Why Do I Do This?’ is a road map for news hounds, journalists, advocates and anyone that is concerned about the future of media.
O’Hare. Airport.
* My Journalism Manifesto/Guide To Digital Journalism/Models Behind Success Stories
* Alternative History: Chicago River not reversed
* The Good Things (Dead, Wrigley, Wisconsin)
* Culture of Deceit how you are being screwed every day
* Who Hired Angelo Torres?
* New Media Madness
* Most Loathsome
Wicker Park: An Exploration of Gentrification
* New Media Success Stories: Local/National. Why they work. The business model. The editorial model. The lessons to be drawn. Add Tavi to the list.
Convention
Fiction: reverse flow of Chicago River.
Movie: Hitler time travels to future …
Sitcom: Theme park; fantasy sports league;
The Good Things
Posted on July 12, 2015
Killing Auntie