Features

“Friends of Bill” (on the writer’s visit with WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS), Chicago Reader, August 14, 1997. “‘William?’ Michael called as he opened the screen door and led us inside. Burroughs had been puttering around the kitchen at the back of the house; he padded into the living room, his mouth bent into a pained smile, and shook hands as Michael introduced us. His head had grown balder since any photograph I’d seen and was bare on top but for a tuft of gray at the widow’s peak that gave him the appearance of a wizened old rooster. His bright blue eyes were exceedingly clear and well focused; taking his hand, I had the unsettling impression that he was reading my thoughts.”

“Salvage Love” (on STUART GRANNEN, dealer in architectural art), Chicago Reader, May 16, 1997. “Stuart Grannen is frustrated. It’s the morning of February 27, and the Goldblatt’s demolition has been scuttled. Grannen, a local dealer in architectural fragments, has bought 14 terra-cotta finials from the condemned Goldblatt’s on Chicago west of Ashland and is scheduled to pry them from the face of the building at ten. But a demonstration by angry neighbors the previous day has generated enough negative publicity to win the building a stay of execution from the mayor’s office. Grannen can’t understand what all the fuss is about. ‘It’s really a nothing building,’ he gripes. ‘We’ll try again in a couple of weeks. I’ll get ’em eventually.’ He usually does.”

“500 Years of God’s Word in Common Language: The True Story of MARTIN LUTHER‘s ‘September Testament,’” Living Lutheran, October 31, 2022. “To understand the significance of [Luther’s German translation of the Latin Bible], we need to step through the looking glass from this irreligious, hyperconnected, media-inundated century into a time when people’s lives were usually confined to their town or village. Most people in northern Europe were illiterate farmers, fearful of bad weather, disease and strangers (not to mention the supernatural). Nearly everyone professed to be Christian, knit together socially in local parishes that guided every aspect of daily life but were obedient to the pope in Rome. Only 5% of the population could read, and for most people, the Bible was something that came from the mouth of a priest.”

“Out of the Wreckage” (on the writer’s acquaintance with novelist RICHARD YATES), Chicago Reader, November 14, 2003. “Many of those interviewed for [Blake Bailey’s biography A Tragic Honesty], myself included, remember Yates with great affection: at his best, which is how I saw him much of the time, he could be disarmingly candid and grimly funny, especially regarding himself, and the compassion for life’s losers that made his stories heartbreaking was evident every time he spoke. Despite all the pathetic and horrifying incidents chronicled in the book, there are just as many moments that made me miss his company.”

Reviews

“Voice of a Preacher, Heart of a Nomad” (review of Raoul Peck’s JAMES BALDWIN profile I Am Not Your Negro), Chicago Reader, February 2, 2017. “As Peck’s archival clips illustrate, Baldwin was a captivating speaker, his bold language and dramatic cadences drawn right from the pulpit. His forbidding stepfather, David Baldwin, had been a Pentecostal preacher in Harlem, and 14-year-old James had followed him into the ministry, preaching the gospel for three years, before he’d turned his back on organized religion. Baldwin understood the theatrics of the sermon, and the apocalyptic tone he brought to his pronouncements on race is no less arresting now than it was 50 years ago.”

“Reading Is Fundamental” (review of the spoken-word CD box set The Best of WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS From Giorno Poetry Systems), Chicago Reader, May 8, 1998. “Less than two months after Burroughs moved back to the [United] States in 1974, he gave the first in what would be a long string of live readings, at Saint Mark’s Church in New York. For many readers, the Saint Louis twang in his oaken voice forever altered their understanding of his work, and his short hair and conservative suits drew a wild contrast to his stories about modern mad doctors performing unspeakable procedures and baboons taking over the Supreme Court. Burroughs insisted that he was reading only for the money, but he obviously relished his ability to make an audience rock with laughter.”

“Gondry Doodles Chomsky’s Noodle” (review of Michel Gondry’s NOAM CHOMSKY documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?), Chicago Reader, December 5, 2013. “Gondry is no match for[Chomsky] intellectually, and in their two conversations … Chomsky responds to the filmmaker’s innocent questions with a master class in philosophy and cognitive science. Yet Gondry … contributes a powerful visual response by pairing their audio track with wildly imaginative animation sequences that illustrate and sometimes reflect on Chomsky’s ideas. … The end result is a striking inquiry into how we comprehend the world, neatly divided between a man of words and a man of images.”

“Portraits of Artists” (review of Jessica Yu’s HENRY DARGER documentary In the Realms of the Unreal and Peter Watkins’ drama EDVARD MUNCH), Chicago Reader, January 21, 2005. “Yu wisely leaves blank the spaces in Darger’s life story that can’t be filled. But as Taylor Hackford’s recent biopic of Ray Charles reminded me, the answers about an artist are usually found not in his work but in his going about his work. In this respect Yu’s decision to bypass the literature about Darger is unfortunate, because it contains so many fascinating details about his source materials, methods, creative problems, and aesthetic development.”

“You Know the Type” (review of Gary Hustwit’s HELVETICA), Chicago Reader, June 15, 2007. “The story of Helvetica encapsulates the postwar struggle between individuality and the common good, as a typeface created in the spirit of democracy gradually became a symbol of blind obedience.”

“The Love Vote” (review of GEORGE S. KAUFMAN, MORRIE RYSKIND and George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, performed at Chicago Symphony Center), Chicago Reader, November 7, 1998. “Truth be told, Of Thee I Sing hasn’t aged particularly well: its once-brutal satire of electoral politics has been far outstripped by our venal culture of focus groups, negative ads, and tabloid journalism. But the unique blend of temperaments that created it still speaks to us at the close of this godforsaken American century: like the play itself, we seem to swing wildly between naive sentimentality and heartless cynicism.”

Review of RITHY PRAN‘s The Missing Picture and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Chicago Reader, March 13, 2014. “In The Missing Picture, Panh dramatizes his experiences using dozens and dozens of little clay figurines, only two or three inches tall, which he carves, paints, and assembles against large dioramas re-creating his neighborhood in Phnom Penh and the muddy farms where he and his parents toiled. … [T]he practice of carving the figurines paradoxically turns these victims of mass dehumanization back into people with their own individual hopes, dreams, and sorrows.”

“Political Suicide” (review of Mort Sahl’s America, comedy CD by MORT SAHL), Chicago Reader, August 7, 1998. “Sahl’s alliance with Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who investigated [President Kennedy’s] assassination and later became the hero of Oliver Stone’s JFK, may now be his most recognizable pop-culture credential to people under 30. At the time, though, no one wanted to hear that the Warren Report was a lie or that the president had been murdered by the CIA, certainly not from a stand-up comedian.”

“Huck Meets Chuck” (review of Chuck D reading an excised portion of MARK TWAIN‘s The Adventures of Hucklberry Finn for the spoken-word cassette The New Yorker Out Loud Volume II), Chicago Reader, November 27, 1998. “I would point out that in many respects what we were studying was a piece of history, that ‘n—–‘ as used in Huckleberry Finn was essentially a denotative term, and that the whole of the book charted Huck’s moral growth as he rejects society and accepts Jim as a friend and equal. But Twain was a captive of his times as well, and as the more liberal students struggled to articulate the novel’s humane but ultimately paternalistic message, I could see the black students thinking, Yeah, fuck that.”

“Brush With Greatness” (review of DK and Hugh Welchman’s VINCENT VAN GOGH documentary Loving Vincent), Chicago Reader, October 19, 2017. “Turning Van Gogh’s death into a sort of memory play is a masterstroke, given the painter’s own growing appreciation of memory as an artistic resource. Throughout his career Van Gogh had drawn strength and inspiration from observed nature, but during the two months he spent working alongside Gauguin, who urged him to abandon the physical world for pure imagination, he painted from memory the garden of his father’s home in 1875… Memory, Van Gogh learned, is more susceptible to emotion, and thus to exaggerations of color and form.”

“The Real GORE VIDAL–WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY Debate Happened on the Page” (review of Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies), Chicago Reader, August 5, 2015. “Best of Enemies ends with a closing montage connecting the Vidal-Buckley debates with our present-day cacophony of cable-news opinionators, none of whom possesses a fraction of the wit or erudition the older two men brought to the tube. Yet the Vidal-Buckley feud also broke past the boundaries of television into publishing in 1969, when each man published a lengthy account of their TV clash in Esquire. Gordon and Neville treat the Esquire chapter briefly, near the end, but in those two print pieces lies the larger story of Vidal and Buckley’s personal antagonism.”

Columns

“Good Prose From the Past” (on Chicago Reader contributor CLIFF DOERKSEN), Chicago Reader, December 20, 2010. “Reading Cliff—who died on Friday at age 47—I never knew exactly where he was going to take me; every paragraph was like a college road trip, bound for adventure and possibly big trouble.”

“LEE SANDLIN, Scourge of the Small Screen” (on the Chicago Reader‘s sometime TV critic), Chicago Reader, December 16, 2014. “Lee always wrote from the perspective that words should mean what they say and that—even more crucial for someone writing about TV—reality was the most important word of all. Most TV critics are so worn down by the inherent falsity of the medium that they claim a documentary authenticity for anything that might get a degree or two closer to actual human experience. Lee wasn’t having any of that.”