Cocktail Hour
Lundgren’s Lounge: “All Involved,” by Ryan Gattis
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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All Involved, despite its rather pedestrian title, is an astonishing work of fiction chronicling the events around and in Los Angeles in the six days following the Rodney King verdict. Over two decades after the riots that ensued following the acquittal of the three white LAPD officers, author Ryan Gattis offers up a riveting, nuanced, multi-perspective account of the six days of rage. In the aftermath of recent civil unrest in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore and the inevitable question (raised by mostly white pundits and talking heads), regarding why “these people” would destroy their own neighborhoods as a form of protest, Gattis provides some possible insights… regardless of whether or not it’s what we want to hear. Continue reading →
O is for Osprey
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The 15th anniversary of Return of the Osprey is coming up, and it might be time for a little repackaging. What do you think?
A Reality Show You’ll Love. No, Really.
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’m not a big reality TV person, though we did watch the first season or two of “Survivor” (ironically at first, with cocktails aplenty, but then honestly into it, caught up in seeing if Richard Hatch could lie his way into the winner’s circle), so it was partly out of obligation that I tuned into my friend Jim Campbell’s new show, “The Last Alaskans.” But by the time the first scene ended, I knew something different was going on than the usual reality fare–“Hey, Mildred, look at this idiot spearing a catfish!”–and I soon understood that I was witnessing something beautiful. The scenery was one of the stars and real star, Heimo Korth, was funny,soft-spoken and smart. The pace wasn’t frenetic and Heimo wasn’t required to throw a hatchet that would hit a target that dropped another trapper into a dunking booth. Instead he talked about the challenges and pleasures of living on the land.
Listening to Heimo felt a little like listening to an old friend, since I had gotten to know him in Jim’s fine book, The Final Frontiersmen. But I didn’t know Ray Lewis, who speaks like a mountain man crossed with a poet, or Bob Harte, who at first seems like comic relief but turns out to be more than he first appears (part of that more being he is a lot of fun). In just one small example of how the show flouts the usual reality conventions there is a nice moment when the usually invisible cameraman tells Bob that one of his plane’s wheels hit the water during a landing. Somehow this breaking through the wall seemed more real than reality,a natural thing that someone filming up in the middle of nowhere would say to the person being filmed. It’s just one of many examples of how this show is better than the rest of its kind.
And if you don’t believe Bill and Dave’s, listen to the NY Times rave: Continue reading →
The Washington Post Chimes in
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Just in time for the long weekend, The Washington Post chimes in on All the Wild:
Gessner’s book serves as an excellent primer to readers new to Abbey and Stegner, and an insightful explanation of their continuing relevance. Gessner, an important nature writer and editor in his own right, also uses the writers’ lives as a template for his exploration of the Western landscape they lived in and wrote about. He visits places that were important to All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner,… and Stegner, and draws trenchant conclusions about the current state of affairs in a region still battling over how to best protect and exploit its fragile resources…..
Gessner’s reporting, whether profiling Stegner and Abbey’s acolyte Wendell Berry or observing the consequences of Vernal, Utah’s fracking boom, is vivid and personable. In his able hands, Abbey and Stegner’s legacy is refreshed for a new generation of readers. Perhaps now even the Easterners will take notice.
with-sharp-pens/2015/05/21/3b4193e2-e1fe-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html
Getting Outside Saturday: Spring Blossoms (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Photo Haiku
comments: 2 comments
Blood root
Anxious is Back, but in a Minor Key
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Jukebox
comments: 9 comments
Anxious Bode
Rachmaninoff was a minor composer. Not minor as in of no importance, he just composed a lot in minor scale. Depressed third if you wish. I feel it, that’s why I don’t play too much Rachmaninoff. Except when I’m depressed, but then, it’s roll over Rach, you want to hear what depression sounds like, I’m the undisputed king, I get free depression just from waking up. I know, it’s unfair, why me. Because someone has to give. I get all the blessings, but the blessings mean nothing, if they’re not shared, that is given. I give, so I can live. My name is Anxious Bode, professor of panic and sleep disorders. I teach at night, when I can see more clearly. It’s also the time at which I wake up. I have Parkinson’s disease. My nights are short.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take my Graphic Novel Class!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am teaching my graphic novel class again at UNCW and somehow, mysteriously, only have 3 students enrolled. Please help me out and spread the word. I mean wtf? It’s a graphic novel class. Here’s a blog from the last time I offered it:
Last fall I taught a course on the graphic novel. I’m pretty sure it was the first time I 
taught a class where the students clearly knew more about the subject than I did. This was by plan. I’d been a cartoonist in college and when I decided I wanted to return to cartooning, and to possibly write/draw a graphic novel, I figured I had better educate myself in the genre. What better way to educate myself, and to force myself to read, than to teach a course to grad students? And it worked–for me at least. (The students may tell another story.)
It turned out I learned a lot, in large part thanks to my students, and next time round I’m sure I’ll do a much better job. But the funny thing is that while I had only read two graphic novels when I first conceived of the class, it was these novels that still stood tall at the end of the term. I guess it should come as no surprise that these novels were Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. But the class did hold surprises, and one of the primary ones were the books of Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics and Making Comics. I know McCloud already has a huge following but it should be even bigger, Continue reading →
Gessner Receives Four-Post Suspension for “Boothgate”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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The explosive photograph
The National Bloggers League today handed down a four-post suspension for David Gessner, Captain of the world-champion blog Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. Fans were left wailing and enemies gloating. “I feed off their hatred,” said Mr. Gessner in a rare comprehensible moment. He was suspended in part for his brazen capture of the Kenyon Review table at AWP 2015 in Minneapolis, but also for his comments afterwards. “I never denied it,” he says. And, “I have the utmost respect for the Ken Doll Review.” His partner in crime, head coach Bill “Billychek” Roorbach, who arrived on the scene late but in time for shots of contraband whiskey, received a lighter penalty–he must sit with Dave in the writing shack during the suspension–without alcohol. “Harsh, that’s what I call it,” says Roorbach, the best writer in America and beyond (rated slightly better than Dave in most polls). “…And besides, I was napping during the alleged piratical behavior.” As a final measure, the NBL will crash Bill and Dave’s four times in the 2015-2016 season, always just as Dave’s and Bill’s books have the usual big news to share. And no more AWP. Continue reading →
Farewell to Ivan Doig, Another Great of the American (North) West
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 5 comments
Growing up in the small town of Snohomish in Western Washington in the 1950s, it often felt as if the rest of the world had forgotten about us. Mountain ranges, desert and plains separated Northwesterners from the white hot center of culture in New England, and its glitzy pop cousin, Los Angeles. And Eisenhower’s dream of interstate freeways connecting us all, was 15 years from being realized. Not that I didn’t feel the pull of the world out there as I sat in the Snohomish Theater, transfixed by Around the World in 80 Days or staring agape as a young Elvis pretzel twisted his hips and sneered on our teeny-tiny TV, or tuning in to San Francisco’s KGO at night to listen to Ira Blue at the Hungry I as he birthed talk radio. But it seemed that in the Northwest we were free to invent ourselves. Thank God for parents who allowed us almost free rein to explore the Pilchuck River, or on one Sunday afternoon, to walk across the Snohomish River Valley on the railroad tracks to hunt for fossils at Fiddler’s Bluff; had a train come while we were on the last high trestle, we would have had a tragic Stand By Me moment. And to the east, the glacier-carved valleys and peaks of the Cascade would soon become an even larger playground. Our earliest jobs were outside, picking strawberries and raspberries and later wandering behind trucks in the pea fields with pitchforks or milking cows. Continue reading →
Here Come the Summer Birds!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 1 comment
Brown Thrasher
Today was a warm one in western Maine, sixty-some degrees and sunny. Warm enough for the bugs to wake, which means the arrival of the breeding crowd, our summer birds. I took the usual hour’s walk in the woods this morning and to the stream, a great meeting place of forest and field, stream and sandbar. And what singing! It always takes me a minute to remember my birdsongs, but they do come back. Black and White Warbler like a squeaky wheel. Common Yellowthroat, witchety-witchety-wichety. That kind of insistent and snotty-seeming and much-repeated Chestnut-Sided Warbler song: I’m a chestnut sided, what d’ya think of that? And the oven birds are back: Teacher! Teacher! Teacher! Also a Black-Throated Green Warbler, plenty to say. Continue reading →
