On the bus today I saw a man with a tattoo on his face. It occupied about as much space as a mutton chop sideburn would and it was a line drawing of a rat. The rat's nose was pointed towards the man's ear, the tail curled down towards his chin. The guy was late 30's or early 40's and the tattoo had that blue, blurry quality that aging, homemade tattoos can get.

It seems like a rat facial tattoo is a goal-oriented tattoo. It is there to please a friend, perhaps a gang, or to alienate someone. Maybe he snitched and this was his punishment, to go through life branded as a rat for all to see.

The man was riding with a woman and a little girl in a flowery dress. At one point the girl climbed into the rat man's lap and put her arms around his neck, tucking her head under his chin in that way that kids do when they want to feel secure. I was glad that somebody saw him as safe, not scary. Also glad that I wasn't obliged to be that person, of course. But glad for him all the same.

This may be my weirdest nightmare ever.

Last night, I had a dream where a brassy woman wearing too much makeup came up to me in a park and said that Karl Rove had told her that I told him she and I met in Tennessee.

I knew that I was in trouble and began trying to spin my way out of the situation. When I was done I looked down to see that the belt had been removed from my pants (which were now around my ankles) and the belt was holding me to a tree.

It had all been a prank by this woman and Rove...the accusation was just a ruse to distract me so that I could be tied to a tree. For no purpose other than simple humiliation.

Fucking Karl Rove.

I missed an important anniversary recently-the 25th anniversary of The Blues Brothers Movie. Which I have never seen. I say that and people are shocked and amazed, like I'm missing out on something truly wonderful. Perhaps I am but so far I'm not feeling the loss.

A reporter from the Chicago Sun Times went to the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, IL which is where the movie's shopping mall sequence was filmed. Harvey was already something of a dump and the mall had been closed for a year when the movie set up shop. The article had all sorts of cool info in it, for instance the extras kept stealing stuff from the sets.

The Dixie Square Mall is still standing and, as you might imagine, is fairly horrifying inside. The story mentioned offhandedly that the mall is beloved by enthusiasts of dead malls.

Dead malls???

"I calmly and politely told them I was working on a website devoted to the decline of retail ventures in suburbia" notes one dead mall enthusiast, writing on deadmalls.com about the cops who wanted to know why he pulled into the parking lot of the Dixie Square Mall. He has lots of pictures and is excited to find some original signage in a Sears.

The site has a map of the U.S. which takes you to dead mall info throughout this great nation. Good to know that 100 Oaks which I remember as a shitty mall in Nashville as evolved into a shitty big-box retailer. And our friends to the North aren't left out either...The Galleria in London, Ontario gets a mention.

Deadmalls.com is not the only game in town. Casino Death Watch, while much less stylish than deadmalls is pretty much what the title suggests. Groceteria looks at supermarkets from the 1920s to the 1970s. And DefunctParks.com talks about amusement parks that aren't here anymore.

I checked out the Defunct Parks site to read about Riverview, an amusement park that used to be on the north side of the city (and which now is, ta da, a strip mall.) Open from 1904 to 1967, I've seen it in documentaries and heard about it with some misty nostalgia.

Laura Flamm, writing in what was apparently an A.P. History paper published on the site, paints a less rosy picture.

One of the midway games that started out as a "Dunk the Bozo the Clown" game in which contestants threw balls at a target that would release a man into a tank of water turned into "Dunk the Nig**r" during the 1940’s.

African American men were hired to sit in the tanks and taunt white passersby, who often would throw the balls at the African American in the tank rather than at the target. The title of the game was later changed to the more politically correct "African Dip" and was eventually closed by Schmidt in the late 1950’s after much pressure from the NAACP.

The game left a lasting effect, as well. It allowed ethnically diverse Chicagoans to define themselves as "white" and to develop a sense of racial solidarity that "obscured the particulars of their own ethnic backgrounds." This development served to further segregate the city.

Fights sprang up more frequently at Riverview after this, and by the 1960’s Riverview required its own police force.

"African Dip"?

Two good music stories this morning.
One is the "Jack" format. I feel every so slightly ahead of the curve on this one. Last year, while riding the subway in Toronto, I saw a poster advertising JACK radio with all sorts of artists swirling around demonstrating what a darn eclectic format it was. I missed the point and thought J-A-C-K were the call letters for the station and tried to figure out what the naming protocol was for Canadian broadcasters.

Nope, "JACK" (which American stations are importing from Canada) means eclectic, broad playlists. The country version is called "HANK". The Chicago Tribune thoughtfully published a playlist:

The Doors, ''Love Me Two Times''
Switchfoot, ''Dare You to Move''
Sonny and Cher, ''I Got You Babe''
a-ha, ''Take on Me''
Toad the Wet Sprocket, ''All I Want''
Manfred Mann's Earth Band, ''Blinded by the Light''
Del Amitri, ''Roll to Me''
Tom Petty, ''I Won't Back Down''
Five for Fighting, ''Superman''
The Pretenders, ''Back on the Chain Gang''
Cracker, ''Low''
Boz Scaggs, ''Lowdown''
Prince, ''1999''
Cheap Trick, ''Don't Be Cruel''

So far, this seems like it might be Jean Teasdale's ipod but I'm willing to give it some time. Hard to argue against radio broadening playlists, even if it does mean adding that fucking Del Amitri song.

A great, great story in Slate by Jody Rosen about the musical genre "chill". An NYC radio station has changed its format from "smooth jazz" to "chill" and the helpful press release has described chill thusly:

It's an "attitude," a "lifestyle," an "audio aphrodisiac" whose "smooth hypnotic texture" enables listeners to "transcend from stress."

Which means what exactly? The story is great and well worth reading but I've pulled out a large chunk below.

Pop genres are famously nebulous things—just corner a music critic and ask him to explain postpunk or microhouse—but chillout may well be the most elastic category of them all, encompassing virtually any moderately laid-back music you can name.

Chillout really is just the latest brand name for easy listening, a genre that gets reinvented every decade or so. Lounge, soft rock, adult contemporary ballads, smooth jazz: As successive pop generations have rounded the corner toward age 30, each has lowered the volume, embracing music geared toward relaxation in the home. (Nineteenth-century parlor songs were the easy listening of their day—chillout for Victorians.) The current boom market in chill music is an indication that many former ravers now have jobs and mortgages and children, and have traded in nightlife for bourgeois domesticity. Sooner or later, every club kid has to grow up and make peace with dinner music.

But the genius of chillout is how it plays it both ways. The sounds are mellow, perfect for folding laundry to, but the sleek album-cover graphics, which could be on a club flyer, and the images of young bodies splayed on Balearic beaches, insist that the party's not really over. Your hairline may be receding, the baby might be screaming; but stick a Hotel Costes CD on the stereo, and your living room becomes the Chillout Room. As altered states of coolness and hipness go, it's hard to beat incipient middle age. For millions of record buyers, chillout offers an antidote.

Indeed.

A good news morning thusfar.

From the Washington Post, a nice story about Tokyo's Akihabara district which is believed to be the first urban enclave that caters to nerds (or in Japanese "otaku")

In a Chinatown you will find dim-sum restaurants. In a gay-borhood you'll find rainbow colored doo-dads. And in a nerd enclave?

Well there are "costume cafes" where the waitresses wear anime outfits and speak in squeaky voices. There are transparent lockers where nerds can arrange little dioramas of their action figures to show them off. There are comic book stores, of course, and game arcades. Also eyeglass adjustment kiosks.

As the story points out, there is a very weird undercurrent in some anime. One of the otaku, a 34 year-old computer programmer, maintains a collection of 130 life-size pillows of female anime characters.

"There are some people who do lose their grip on reality, but that is not me -- or most of us," said (the nerd), a chubby man with glasses who this year started dating a woman steadily for the first time. She's an anime artist. "For me, the pillows have been my source of unconditional love, a reminder of when I used to be hugged by my parents. There is nothing strange about it."

The other story that I find totally fascinating (and I'm afraid I don't have a better transition than this very sentence) is the phenomenon of "Trucker Bombs".

Roadside litter comes in all shapes and sizes — from dirty diapers to syringes — but there's one category that out-grosses the rest: trucker bombs.

Most drivers whiz along the nation's highways largely oblivious to their roadside surroundings. But next time you are out there, take a closer look.

"As soon as you look for it you’ll see it," says Megan Warfield, litter programs coordinator at Washington state's Department of Ecology. "You just see them glistening in the sun. It’s just gross."

They are trucker bombs, plastic jugs full of urine tossed by truckers, and even non-truckers, who refuse to make a proper potty stop to relieve themselves.

The link has a lovely photograph of several bombs arranged on a grassy slope.

As you might imagine, when mowing roadsides, these bombs do indeed "explode" when mowers hit them.

Other than the total gross-out factor, my favorite part of this story is how very on-message Leigh Strope, a spokeswoman for the Teamsters union, is when discussing this topic.

"You won't find Teamsters urinating in jugs and littering the nation's highways," she says. "Our drivers are guaranteed rest and dinner breaks because it's in their union contract."

Go Union!

I'm incredibly agitated about a story I've just read in the New Yorker.

As you may remember, one of George Bush's lines, particularly when he was discussing education was the concept of "the soft bigotry of low expectations." To paraphrase: rather than assume that a (black, latino, female, minority) student can accomplish, I will assume, at the start, that you lack the right stuff to compete. I will assume that you can never achieve as much, to be so smart as to do well on this here standardized test.

Bush, of course, was referring to testing and suggesting that it was wrong to suggest that, say, someone who grew up poor and raised by his grandmother might perform differently on a standardized test than a kid born to affluence who never had to worry if there was enough milk in the fridge. It's wrong to change the standard because someone, due to his circumstances, might perhaps have difficulty meeting the standard.

I'm twisting this example, for my own purposes. Although Bush used the concept of the soft bigotry of low expectations as a trojan horse to do all sorts of nasty behavior, I am using it to talk about gay men.

David Feinberg wrote a couple of great comic novels before he died of AIDS and, in one of them, he suggested that the travesty wrought by HIV infections was so great that gay men would get the hint and never, ever let it happen again.

Well, as this New Yorker article indicates, this is completely not the case. As soon as the drug cocktails went on the market, gay men went right back to their 1970's ways, screwing as much as possible, taking drugs to enhance their libidos (the article references crystal meth and viagra) and the explanation for it all is that we ("we" means "gay men") have lots of unresolved sadness and it is understandable that we would try to address it by having lots of unsafe sex.

Ugh.

Gay men, of which I am one, embarrass me all the damn time. Some of the time this is because I am a little bit too highly strung. Some of the time, however, it is because political correctness can, in fact, go too far.

To wit:

The New Yorker articles references the idea that it has become a bad idea to emhpasize the fact that you should, you know, stay HIV negative. Because this emphasis might make those who are positive feel bad about themselves.

Huh?

You mean it's wrong to counsel teen-age girls not to get pregnant because it would make the teens who WERE teen moms feel bad? It's wrong to ask people not to smoke in a public place because it might make those who are addicted to nicotine feel bad?

It's a cute trick to suggest that the only reason all of us don't fuck as much and as often as we care to is that societal norms prohibit it. Or that women (obsessed with that whole womb-thing) stand in the way of men (eager to spread that seed.) Or that disease and preganacy, easily curtailed by antibiotics and contraceptives, are the only barriers to fucking as much as we want, whenever we want.

Fucking a lot of strangers seems to be a bad idea, biologically speaking. It's possible that cultural taboos have risen up against this practice, in the same way that a cultural taboo might develop against shellfish or pork in a culture with little hygeine and no refrigeration. But you really do need that hygeine and refrigeration. If it's that important to have sex with a lot of strangers, it's not possible to put on a condom?!? It's not just a prissy, sex-negative society that rules against sticking your un-shielded dick inside lots of folks.

I appreciate that people who have been told for so long that their desires are wrong would resent anyone suggesting that their desires may be problematic. However, gay men really need to get a grip. Straight men do not assume that they are entiteled to bed every woman who expresses interest. Gay men should not assume that they are somehow entitled to something more. Gay men get to struggle to find a mate, there ya go. Not to endlessly dick around with a bazillion partners, how ever willing those partners might be and however enticing that might sound.

And if these men are refusing to curb their behavior; to not even adopt the norms of safe sex but to abandon them entirely--if we give these men a pass, if we say that they are unable to curb their desires because of the failures of society...well isnt' that just the soft bigotry of low expectations?

If I don't stop looking at Chicagocrime.org then I'm going to be late for work.

It's a database of crimes in Chicago. You can sort it geographically, here's my neighborhood, you can sort it by crime, here's all the embezzlement, and also by date and police district.

And as if this wasn't enough for me to geek out regarding my kind of town, The Encyclopedia of Chicago is now online. The ordinary, published-book version came out last fall and I haven't bought it yet but the online version is awful nice.

For purposes of comparison, here's what the encyclopedia has to say about my neighborhood. Sadly, there is no embezzlement-specific entry but here's a nice little entry that addresses our reputation.

As one journalist put it in 1930, “In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence and wickedness than does that of Chicago.”

My heart swells with pride. Okay, gotta get going.

Turned in the fucking toupee story yesterday so I'm winding down this term.

Tonight I went with my friend Rosemary to see David Rakoff read from his upcoming book titled "Don't Get Too Comfortable." He was great, one of those writers like Sarah Vowell who I would rather listen to than read. Anyway during the Q&A someone asked him about writing this, his second book. His answer won't be as good on the page as it was on the stage since you won't have the benefit of timing.

"Writing is like pulling teeth. Out of your dick."

Yes, that seems about right.

It's the beginning of May, the time when Chicago residents wonder to themselves where they put their winter gloves. We are supposed to get some snow flurries today.

Ugh.

Feeling a little sad this morning over the death of Wanky the elephant. Wanky was living in Lincoln Park Zoo but her companions have passed away and, being social, it wasn't good for her to be alone. Animal rights protesters have argued that, being the kind of place that snows in May, Lincoln Park Zoo isn't good for ANY elephants (apart from the general, grim feeling of giant animals confined to very small albeit "natural looking" settings.")

Anyway, Wanky was loaded into a truck bound for a secret location (they didn't want protesters to show up THERE which could, I suppose, result in an elephant circling the nation's highways like a cargo load of toxic waste, unable to find a place to stop), the secret location turned out to be Salt Lake City (today's high 63 degrees so at least that's something).

On the way there Wanky lay down and began exhibiting difficulty breathing. Upon arrival the decision was made to euthanize her and that, it seems, is that.

I've gone so long without blogging that I wasn't able to talk about the giant mob round-up last week or my trip to Seattle or any of that; I have to return with a dead elephant. Ugh.

In happier ailing elephant news, the Washington Post is headlining Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP By John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president's poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Instead, some political analysts say it is just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon -- the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad.

Six months ago it seemed like we were all totally doomed. Now I'm feeling only partially doomed. Hey, every bit counts.

Headline from Today's Sun Times: Acting River Grove mayor defeats genital-piercing rival

Ending one of the more bizarre suburban mayoral races, acting Village President Marilynn May stomped challenger Paul Collurafici, a tattoo parlor owner who argued the suburb was being left behind but found his occupation a bigger campaign issue.

(Village Trustee Raymond) Bernero questioned why Collurafici made no mention of his tattoo studio on his campaign Web site and why he removed photos of pierced vaginas, nipples and other body parts from his company's Web site after launching his mayoral campaign.

"I'm a big fan of vaginas, but this is really gross stuff," Bernero told the Sun-Times. "This is close-ups of women's vaginas with stuff stuck through there."

Bernero later sent a letter to the Sun-Times, apologizing if he offended anyone but sticking by his "blunt honesty" in attacking Collurafici's honesty.

"Finally, please let your readers know that there is no 'fan club,' " Bernero wrote. "It was a joke. All requests for membership, along with submitted dues, will be returned promptly."

About a quarter of the two dozen supporters at Collurafici's election night party sported tattoos, ranging from Grim Reapers and skulls to naked women. One supporter who identified himself as "Tattoo Mike" had Frankenstein-style electrodes inked on his neck.

Collurafici says he has no tattoos or piercings, but inherited the business from his brother, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1996.

Bernero wasn't buying.

"He said he kept the shop as a memorial to his dead brother," Bernero said. "Most people light a candle. You don't pierce vaginas."

I would agree with Bernero that conventional wisdom is that folks don't express grief via genital piercings. But I'm hopeful that with the recent deaths of the Pope, Teri Schaivo, et al that I might be proven wrong.

It's a little bit of nerd heaven today.
In my office while rice boils and fish thaws for dinner.
What has brought on this nerdy bliss?
A few things.
For one, last night I took the first in a series of classes from 500 Clown. You know of The Blue Man Group, right? Well, if the Blue Man Group is U2 then 500 Clown is The Ramones, the scrappy, less exalted version of the same thing (in this case, European art clowning rather than guitar based anthemic music.)
There was a time in my life when I thought that I was going to write screenplays or do standup or otherwise be an entertainer. So when I took classes like this I thought that I was actually doing something worthy, I was developing my craft. Because when you try and describe a theater/improv/acting class to someone it's hard to not sound like an idiot.
For instance
Here's the first exercise we did last night. We divided the dozen people into two groups. Here were our instructions. "Everybody has to carry everyone else and everybody will get carried by everyone else. You can speak if you have an injury or other safety issue that needs attention but otherwise no talking. Okay go."

Well what the hell do you do with that? In the retelling, I mean, not in the doing. I remember the first class I took with Del Close, he divided us into two groups and said, "Invent a ritual. It might take an hour or so. Go."

It is, as you might imagine, difficult to re-tell these stories of how one spent one's evening without adding in, "one day, I will be developing sitcoms and we will be rich, rich, rich!" Pretty much everyone you've ever heard of who has come out of the Chicago comedy scene-John Belushi and Bill Murray through Tina Fey passed through Del.

These days I don't think I will be having much to do with sitcoms and so taking a class like the one 500 Clown offers, the one where I learned about being physically expressive on stage, are just for fun, a hobby.

It says quite a bit about me and sports that the thing that pushed me to enroll in the workshop was that I signed up to play on a volleyball team which was so, so not my thing, that when I thought "I can think of a MILLION things I would rather do than this!" that the thought of having to figure out non-verbal ways of carrying and being carried by a bunch of strangers sounded like a huge improvement.

Anyway, I totally loved it and if you don't get it, that's okay. It probably won't translate into something mainstream and lucrative for me down the line. It's just my idea of fun.

Today I learned that I don't have to leaven my story for Advanced Magazine writing with the elements I had thrown in there just to make it sound better. I can focus on what I want to focus on. Which is toupees. More another time...the timer on the rice just went "bing".

I bought the new ATLANTIC today, the one with the David Foster Wallace piece about Talk Radio. DFWallace makes me happy, except for the times when he gets on my nerves. If you've never read him try A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again where he writes about his week on a cruise ship.

The DFW style is to go deep, deep, deep into a topic, with a million footnotes which themselves have footnotes. He is the master of the tangent, the aside, the trifle that earns focus.

So two things; one is that he has a piece, a fucking humongo 35,000 word piece (for frame of reference, 500 words is about 2 double spaced pages) and the designers of the Atlantic have come up with an ingenious system for his footnotes making them more like hypertext. Really, even if you don't care to read 35K words on right wing talk radio, pick up a copy of the magazine (the link doesn't seem to lead you to the story) and see what they did.

Basically, everyplace where you might put a footnote, they've put the word in a color. Then the footnote appears in the side of the text, in that color. If you've ever used the feature in Microsoft Office that lets people write their notes in little bubbles that appear next to the text, that's what the effect is like. And it works wonderfully.

Nerdilicious.

Enough with the pope nerds already. Yes, yes he was a very spiritual man, we get it.
My favorite was when NPR dug up one of the pope's boyhood friends from Poland. So the poor man was 1)incredibly old and hard of hearing and 2)not a native speaker of english.

Fortunately the 80-something told us that the pope was a very spiritual man. So at least that's cleared up.