Publish

I am now editing a journal. So far we have a website, but it will be a print journal come November 2008: Packingtown Review.

Went to Suzanne Vega's Show Yesterday

Twenty or more years ago, I felt that a twelve-year-old girl could choose only one of the two biggest female pop stars of that moment to look up to: either Madonna or Suzanne Vega. In my mind, one canceled the other out. I wonder what kind of a 33-year-old I would have become had I chosen Madonna at that particular junction. I'm sure I would have been fine, but I probably wouldn't have become exactly as I am now, and I like what I'm like.

Protest Poetry

I'm sensing that, as both the brutality of the endless war and people's sense of powerlessness increase, the dissent that falls on deaf ears in the political arena finds its way into art. Case in point: two excellent recent poems in two different periodicals. "Pan" by Stuart Dybek and "Driving Home" by Charles Simic. If you read the poems, let me know what you think.

Lewis Black on Emmys

I didn't watch the whole award show, but I did catch Lewis Black's routine. He cleverly couched his most radical statements in some less subversive comments, and censors obviously didn't realize that, they let him do his thing. I hear that they did bleep Sally Field (on Fox?) for her anti-war comments during her acceptance speech. Anybody has more details and perhaps a clip of Lewis' performance?

Katrina

I recently watched Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" on DVD, and then, masochistically, I went to the theater to see another post-Katrina documentary, called "Kamp Katrina." The first one is four hours of "what, when, who" and especially relentlessly "how and why" with numerous oral histories of ordinary people, experts, officials, celebrities. "Kamp Katrina" features none of the fore-mentioned categories of people. Instead, it's all about extraordinaries, starting from Ms. Pearl, a woman of many costumes, who sets up a camp for the homeless Katrina survivors in her backyard, fourteen of them at one point. The survivors are what Jon Dee Graham would describe as strugglers: seriously down-on-their-luck (even pre-Katrina) sufferers of addictions, mental illnesses, abusers and the abused... Later on, on the bus back to my place, the catalog of strugglers continued, this time up close: the beyond-tired proletariat in dirty work clothes filled up the seats, and the bus ride ended up with a monologue of a very troubled young guy straight out of Cook county jail, not wearing a shirt really, putting the laces back into his shoes while complaining about not having a girlfriend and being depressed.

Macedonian Splendor

While in Cleveland last month, I read "Macedonia: What does it take to stop a war," a recent comic book by Cleveland's own Harvey Pekar. He co-wrote it with Heather Roberson, and Ed Piskor drew it. Unlike "American Splendor," it's not about Harvey. It's about this Berkeley peace studies student who goes to Macedonia to study peace. More precisely, Heather goes to Macedonia to collect evidence to support her thesis that war is not only not unpreventable, but that conflicted parties avoid wars all the time around the world. It's just that peace is not photogenic, while wars and genocides make the headlines. Which reminds me of an old Top Lista Nadealista (Bosnian Monty Python) fake-news skit in which breaking news is: "this just in: peace keeps breaking out all over Yugoslavia!" And the skit was funny and sad because it was filmed as armed conflicts were breaking out and Yugoslavia was sinking into horror. But, at the same time, the southernmost part of Yugoslavia, known as Macedonia, stayed peaceful, though rife with ethnically-based conflicts, which did escalate in 2001, but nevertheless the country has always managed to keep all-out war at bay.

Pilsen, Chicago

Last night, after surviving a hot day, I took a nice and paced bike ride around the neighborhood. It was past midnight and still very warm, but there was a comforting breeze. Almost no one was outside anymore. I passed by several landmarks built by the Czechs, when they were the majority in the 'hood, and that inspired me to blog again. Since there are many such landmarks, and I'm aware of five, this won't be an extremely brief entry.

Thalia Hall on 18th and Allport used to be a theater with apartments upstairs. Now the downstairs is empty, no one is using it, but there are apartments or condos above. The building really stands out, I believe it's Neo-Classicist, but it doesn't look like the severe American Neo-Classicism (like in DC) to me, it's more flowery than that. Architecturally illiterate as I am, I'll refrain from any other remarks.

Dvorak park (roughly Cullerton and May) was named after the Czech classical hit-maker Antonin Dvorak. It's a beautiful little park, it even has two swimming pools, one for adults, one for kids, but no lifeguard, so the pools are not open to the public. So, basically, both of these landmarks--Dvorak Park and Thalia Hall--are half-languishing. Couldn't the well-to-do people moving into the 'hood, along with the local community leaders etc., do something to finance the full revival of these public facilities? I'll keep dreaming.

St. Procopuis church, Allport and 18th, now has service in Spanish and English, while their web site says: "Welcome! - ¡Bienvenidos! - Dobro došli!" I'm guessing they believe that the latter greeting is in Czech (they talk about the Czechs building and initially congregating in the church), but of course it should be vitame vas! Dobro dosli is in Bosnian/Croatia/Montengrin/Serbian. Anyway, St. Procopius also runs a nearby elementary school on Allport, another old building that has a stone plaque in Czech: Nechte maličkých přijít ke mně, or Let the little ones come to me. Google says it's a quote from Jesus.

Another elementary school, only public, Perez School (19th and Allport) used to be Komensky School, which is what the stone plaque still says. Jan Komensky was a Czech and European renaissance education reformer. If I remember correctly from my undergrad studies, the guy wrote the first ever illustrated Latin textbook, aimed at teaching Latin not through endless memorization, dictation, and physical punishment, but through gradual acquisition of vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, etc. He did for education what Gelilei did for science, or Descartes for philosophy.

All of those landmarks can be found in a rectangle of four by three blocks. Czechs have never been a numerous population anywhere, but from the late 18th century all the way to the end of WWI, when they finally got their nation-state (together with the Slovaks, of course) they went through a huge national revival that obviously had strong ripple effects in the diaspora. And the Midwest was a favorite destination. Voila Pilsen.