A dimness nearby


Backyard, 3 inches of snow under a full moon

There are a few things to mention… first, my beloved 4th generation 20gb iPod is dead. It was a sudden, random passing (as these things often are) and I’m now waiting on delivery of a slightly used 8gb iPod Nano. A simultaneous downgrade/upgrade!

Secondly, I’ve discovered my size 12 feet are really a measly 11. I had a sneaking suspicion the last time I ordered shoes online, so I got out the measuring tape and made the conversions. ELEVEN. Sniff sniff.

And finally, I had a remarkably long day that ended with bread pudding 30 minutes from Peoria. I even witnessed the entire light-cycle today, a rarity for a second-shift man. We’ll discuss that tomorrow.

An open letter to Judd

Dear Judd Apatow,

I feel it necessary to break rank and tell you just how much I dislike your “brand” of comedy. I’m man enough to admit that I did love one creation of yours, the defunct TV series “Freaks and Geeks.” At the time, it was a fresh approach on the nerdy life. It was the start of what I will coin “The Apatow Approach.” You’ve received critical acclaim and now have a slew of new movies in production. Entertainment Weekly ranked you as #1 on their list of 50 Smartest People in Hollywood. But could you tell me the difference between “40 Year Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” and “Superbad?”

Plenty of directors/producers/writers stick to a formula. Wes Anderson comes to mind, with his twee-drenched, 60’s pop-accompanied flicks. He casts the same actors and actresses over and over again, and so do you. But while he seems to have a greater inspiration in his work, you appear to have never left the beer-stained, beta-male college existence you no doubt experienced. Weak female characters emphasize your adolescent terror of women, sickly family values somehow give you an excuse to toy with profanity like a 6th grader might. It’s time to grow out of that.

Your latest, “Walk Hard,” was a disappointment. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post said it perfectly: “The best part of ‘Walk Hard,’ oddly enough, is the music. I might not care to see ‘Walk Hard’ a second time, but I can’t wait to hear it again.” Most of the gags were three times longer than my attention span. And when we’re talking about a penis protruding in the top-right of the screen for minutes on end, I think we can all agree that shorter is better. (ahem)

But what really brought this to a head is my recent viewing of “Superbad.” I was excited to see Michael Cera, an actor who I believe has enormous comedic potential. But Jonah Hill, a tubby, strident whiner who clings like a parasitic lamprey to Cera, ruined this goddamn movie. As Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe said, “it mostly made me understand the case for staying a virgin until you’re 40.”

So, what’s the solution? I propose a two-fold fix. First, consider tinkering with small-budget indie movies. Learn how to flesh-out your characters and how to portray someone beyond a 16 to 25 year-old middle-class white kid. And two? I’ll avoid any and every project with your hillbilly name attached to it.

Of pucks and thin ice


all photos by Adam / Journal Star. more found here

“Chicago – this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.” -Hunter S. Thompson

Welcome to hockey: land of fights, plentiful beer and open-leering at women. It’s perhaps appropriate that I shot my first NHL game last night at the United Center in Chicago.

Chicago Blackhawks vs St. Louis Blues, my editor tells me. I nod and pack my things. It’ll be a long day, most of it on the road. Rush-hour to jostle with, another checkbox to check. Bears, White Sox, Cubs, and now Blackhawks.

It wasn’t all unpleasant; hockey is a fifth-tier sport in the Second City. Pro-football, two baseball teams and the Bulls make up a tangle of worthless teams that clog the pages of the Trib and Sun-Times each day. There might be six photographers total, a measly number in Chicago sporting events. In fact, if you drain 10,000 of the 17,000 fans out of the arena, you might fool it for an AHL game in Peoria’s Carver Arena. Pro, semi-pro and college sports are all congruent, anyway.

Hold on. Joni Mitchell is blaring here in Starbucks and I’m getting on edge. I don’t mind JM at all, but goddamn, why do places crank their music so loud? To stifle thinking men and women, that’s why!

I’m sitting on a cold cement floor rink-side, catching the wet spray of ice as it squeezes through the fist-sized hole in the glass, my picture porthole and a horrific liability should an errant puck decide to pass through. Later, after transmitting photos between periods, I find my little window in disarray, the entire pane of plexiglass knocked loose from its neighbors.

Soon the game is over, a 6-1 blowout over the Blues. A 20-1 game in baseball, a team zeroed in basketball, and a complete bore. I walk out of the arena into an empty Chicago, a neighborhood where thugs roam and the law gives little comfort. I waste no time fleeing.

It’s time to hit the road, traversing that unimportant space between Chicago and Peoria in the middle of the night.

On journals (better than this)

“Someday I want very much to get all these journals together and publish them intact. I think they should be eventually published that way with footnotes by their author, since they may have some usefulness as a history of an individual’s fight for survival, emotional travail… — very few bits would have literary value, I am afraid, as I wrote them purely the way that Catholics talk through a black cloth to the priest in the next cubicle. Except that I was both Father Confessor and Son Confessor.” -Tennessee Williams

Pencil pushers

Maybe it’s something I ate, but I’ve had an incredible appetite recently for newspaper columnists. They’re a dying breed, these “pencil pushers.” When the bean counters start looking at places to cut staff, why pay for someone’s inflamed ego?

“I think columnists have become less of a priority for some newspaper editors. One, they simply don’t understand how important good columnists are to their franchise. Two, good columnists can be a handful to deal with, and if they’re really good, they provoke controversy on occasion. And three, good columnists generally cost real money.” – Ellen Soeteber, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Reporters serve meat and potatoes. I make goulash, which, depending on luck and ambition, may include facts, opinions (well-founded or half-baked), and suppositions (right, wrong or we’ll never know). It could be my particular column is not to your taste and, of course, whether to spit or swallow is your call.” – Amy Pagnozzi of the Hartford Courant

(more from “What ever happened to local columnists?)

I recently ordered a book called “Baker’s Best: Selected Essays of Rick Baker.” See, Rick Baker was a columnist at my place of work in the 1980s before his life ended suddenly in a car accident. The only reason I’d know such a thing is because our managing editor Jack Brimeyer recently retired and decided to print a previously spiked column about Jack’s heralded arrival at the Peoria Journal Star. Baker didn’t think much of it, to say the least. But the frankness and simplicity of his writing sent me on a mad dash to find some of his old work. (more memories on Baker)

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Something is horribly wrong with the controls!


Moon-lit walk in the Forest Park Nature Center, Christmas Day. (Olympus XA, handheld, with Kodak 800)

I give up. My entire wardrobe is on standby; will it be the uncomfortable sandwich of three heavy coats or merely a long-sleeved shirt today? When the high screams from 15 degrees one day to 65 degrees three days later, it’s time to lock yourself in the basement and prepare for the end. Bombs away!

To top it off, we had a few tornados in the area last night. TORNADOS IN JANUARY. Maybe you’re not the sort of person who climbs into their rusted Chevy and gallops toward the nearest funnel cloud. This is Christmas in July, folks, Ron Paul winning the Iowa caucuses*. And if you’re not a lucky resident of tornado alley, take a quick gander at this: the Federal Signal Thunderbolt 1000T. Ladies and gentleman, this “caution-yellow” cold-war relic is what I grew up with in Wichita, Kan. It’s the tornado-chaser’s Bettie Page; industrial, sturdy and ready to serve.

Stop, before you hurt yourself!… you’ve probably started wandering the vast YouTube-wasteland of tornado siren recordings. That’s not a way to spend New Hampshire primary day!

*It is neither July nor has Ron Paul made a significant stand in recent political polls. Apologies.

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Post-mas

We’ve made it through the trifecta of Christmas/Hanukkah/New Year’s once again (and feel free to deem it a “quadfecta”, if you celebrate Kwanzaa.)

I spent Christmas Day with co-workers, in a day strikingly similar to Thanksgiving Day. There were saccharine displays of holiday cheer, including the Journal Star Christmas Sing: an annual event where an age-old tradition is wielded like a knife at a younger generation, forcing them to spend an arctic evening singing carols with their families at the Peoria Courthouse Plaza.

But let us not forget the earthquake-strength pressure of New Year’s Eve. A simple calendrical change suddenly causes us to sweat and panic: do our plans sufficiently reflect the scale of celebrating an entire year passed? We put on our finest – even sloughing through snow, this year – to toast each other with plastic champaign flutes and blow our noisemakers.

“Then fill the cup, fill high!”
-James Russell Lowell

Bill Sharpe watches the falling snow from the parking deck adjacent to the Jansen building as he takes a break from work in downtown Peoria. (Adam/Journal Star)

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