Brian Mackey

The Bost toss gets the GIF treatment.

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:36:49 -0500

The Bost toss gets the GIF treatment.

The mash-up that had to be made: Mike Bost vs. Moses.

Tue, 29 May 2012 22:35:56 -0500

The mash-up that had to be made: Mike Bost vs. Moses.

Illinois Sen. Jeff Schoenberg, D-Evanston, responds to his...

Wed, 23 May 2012 19:06:00 -0500

Illinois Sen. Jeff Schoenberg, D-Evanston, responds to his Republican colleagues during a debate on the budget.

The Help

Tue, 22 May 2012 01:05:34 -0500

It’s hard to watch a grown man berate another adult. This week, after a committee hearing, a senator had a question.

A staffer walks over to answer. She’s talking, then either turns away or starts moving away. A natural moment of conclusion? Or wanton insubordination? The senator knows what he saw, and there’s a sudden turn in his demeanor.

That’s fine, walk away. Go ahead, walk away. I’m trying to ask you a question, but you walk away? Go ahead. You should show more respect. But that’s fine, walk away.

She tries to diffuse the situation. But it’s too late — He Is Not Having It. He walks out of the room. She turns to a colleague and they exchange silent glances: “WTF just happened?”

This is someone who warms his seat by virtue of an appointment, who has not yet been elected. A back bencher. And a big man.

Photo

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:05:00 -0500

Disappointed to be missing Chanticleer tonight at the Krannert...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:44:53 -0500

Disappointed to be missing Chanticleer tonight at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana.

John Tavener’s haunting Village Wedding is on the second half of the program.

'I want them to see what they have done to Jack.'

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:19:20 -0500

The April 2, 2012 edition of The New Yorker has a remarkable piece on Lyndon Johnson’s experience of Nov. 22, 1963. LBJ awoke an alienated vice president, dogged by scandal and likely in the twilight of his political career. You know how the story ends.

The piece is an excerpt from the upcoming fourth book in Robert Caro’s five-volume biography of Johnson. You might have thought every angle on Nov. 22 had been dulled, but this account is fresh and immediate.

The motorcade enters Dealey Plaza. From Johnson’s convertible, far behind the president, they hear a motorcycle backfire, or maybe a firecracker in the crowd. Then Rufus Youngblood, LBJ’s Secret Service agent, saw one of his colleagues in a car ahead “suddenly rising to his feet, with an automatic rifle in his hands.”

Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted — in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird recalled — “Get down! Get down!” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, “Get down! Get down!” By the time the next two sharp reports had cracked out — it was a matter of only eight seconds, but everyone knew what they were now — Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor of the back seat of the car. The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down: now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down — Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

The piece is also a master class in transparent journalism. Caro carefully differentiates what is known, what is unknown, and what falls between. He treats certain sources with skepticism (“Carpenter, like Valenti, was an idolater …”) and is clear when he is speculating (“What was going through Lyndon Johnson’s mind as he stood there history will never know”).

Despite the apparent rigor, Caro glides from attribution to attribution, stitching a remarkably complete story. Jackie, her husband’s blood caked on her leg and glove, agreeing to appear with LBJ at his swearing-in on Air Force One:

Only once did Jackie’s voice change: when Lady Bird asked her if she wanted to change clothes. Not right then, Jackie said. “And then … if with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”

Gov. Pat Quinn is talkin’ baseball. “It’ll...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:10:53 -0500

Gov. Pat Quinn is talkin’ baseball.

“It’ll come down to the seventh game of the World Series …”

Here it is, Illinois government observers, your moment of Zen.

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:02:47 -0500

Here it is, Illinois government observers, your moment of Zen.

How the sausage is made. A lot of bills move through the...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:25:00 -0500

How the sausage is made.

A lot of bills move through the Illinois General Assembly every year, and most lawmakers rely on staff to help them navigate the endless stream. Some need more help than others.

Here Reps. Dan Brady and Luis Arroyo discuss a proposal to eliminate the tuition discount for children of university employees. You’ll hear the exchange twice, the second time with the volume cranked between Brady’s question and Arroyo’s answer.

But first, the news. Had a story picked up for a national NPR...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:04:00 -0500

But first, the news.

Had a story picked up for a national NPR newscast today. First time. It’s part of the second item, beginning 23 seconds in.

The power of silence. In this week’s episode of This...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:28:23 -0500

The power of silence.

In this week’s episode of This American Life, Ira Glass challenges Mike Daisey on his exaggerations and fabrications about the Chinese factories where Apple products are made.

There are many painful, cringe-worthy moments in the interviews with Daisey. But nothing is as powerful as when the show seems to let long pauses — awkward silences — play out in real time.

The waveform you see above begins at 28:55. Glass says, “… but instead, you lied further and you said — you wrote, ‘The workers were from Wintek, not Foxconn.’ Why not just tell us what really happened at that point?”

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …

Thirteen seconds. Eternity.

Finally: “I think I was terrified.”

At his farewell speech, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich finally...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:32:00 -0500

At his farewell speech, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich finally reveals his administration’s motto.

Who cares if a politician buys a newspaper?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:06:57 -0600

Who cares if a politician buys a newspaper?:

Jack Shafer:

In his 2004 book, The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calls the conversion of a newspaper’s assets, including the goodwill embodied in its good name, “slow liquidation.” A proprietor simply cuts circulation, cuts pages, sells the presses and outsources printing, and cuts labor costs by dumping staff until one day — poof! — the paper vanishes.

Sound familiar?

Well-written obits of lives lived well

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:58:00 -0600

The New York Times’ obituary of John Fairfax is making the rounds this weekend. There’s nothing like reading tight copy about an interesting person you’ve never heard of. It seemed like a good occasion to share a few of my favorite obits from the past few years.

Fairfax is best known for rowing across the Atlantic Ocean alone, and for rowing across the Pacific with his girlfriend. The latter seems the far greater accomplishment, and not just because crossing the Pacific took a year to the Atlantic’s six months. (“The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance,” the Times reports.)

What’s catching people’s attention in Mr. Fairfax’s obit are the tidbits about his early adventures: “At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate.” Suicide-by-jaguar? Sounds like The Most Interesting Man in the World.

There was another great obit last year, when we learned of the death of Nancy Wake, a “proud spy and Nazi foe.” The Times:

By her own account she once killed a German sentry with her bare hands, and ordered the execution of a woman she believed to be a German spy.

But my favorite is an obituary from 2010, on the death of Knut Haugland. He was a sailor on the Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific Ocean by raft, but it was his exploits during World War II that caught my eye:

As a radio engineer, Mr. Haugland had fought the invading Nazis at the battle of Narvik in 1940 and then, while pretending to be a typical worker at an Oslo radio factory, took a leading role in the anti-Nazi resistance, training radio operators and setting up secret transmitters.

Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol.

I’ve wasted my life.

"While liberals’ gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny..."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:26:25 -0600

“While liberals’ gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny rabbit, conservatives clearly focused on the negative images — of an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet, for example.”

- Fascinating study on the biology of political orientation.

"People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that..."

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:04:55 -0600

“People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. […] I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”

- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concurring in U.S. v. Jones (read the NYT story or full opinion)

Moonrise at sunset. (Taken with Instagram at Illinois State...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:04:23 -0600

Moonrise at sunset. (Taken with Instagram at Illinois State Capitol)

What Roger Ebert said

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:29:55 -0600

What Roger Ebert said:

Roger Ebert has a few hypotheses on why movie revenue dropped in 2011, when theater audiences were the smallest since 1995. His final point is the lack of choice at most multiplexes:

Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films. On many weekends, one or more of those titles captures first-place in per-screen average receipts. Yet most moviegoers outside large urban centers can’t find those titles in their local gigantiplex. Instead, all the shopping center compounds seem to be showing the same few overhyped disappointments. Those films open with big ad campaigns, play a couple of weeks, and disappear.

The myth that small-town moviegoers don’t like “art movies” is undercut by Netflix’s viewing results; the third most popular movie on Dec. 28 on Netflix was Certified Copy, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. You’ve heard of him? In fourth place — French director Alain Corneau’s Love Crime. In fifth, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — but the subtitled Swedish version.

This calls to mind a point I made in a recent column assessing AMC Theatres’ programming in Springfield:

This is a city that supports its own Route 66 Film Festival, two monthly movie clubs (Movie Geeks Club and Liberty Brew & View), the Springfield Art Association’s film series and the Foreign & Independent Film Series at the University of Illinois Springfield.

One wonders if AMC’s Kansas City-based programmers underestimate the local taste for ambitious cinema.

The list of recent art, indie and foreign movies that have not opened in Springfield includes The Artist, Melancholia, Like Crazy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Margin Call and Into the Abyss. There are many others, but don’t hold your breath waiting for them to open here.

Today, you can see My Week With Marilyn and Young Adult at a theater near you. The best way to let AMC and Hollywood studios know you want more indie films here is to vote with your wallet. They’ve got to try something different — instead of returning to the same pricey wells of blockbusters, 3-D surcharges and ginormous tubs-o-popcorn, why not try a little diversity in programming?

Then again, maybe the shareholders are OK with declining revenue.

FDR, rewriter: Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:08:00 -0600

Annotated Draft of FDR's "Day of Infamy"

Annotated Draft p.2

Annotated Draft p.3

FDR, rewriter:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in ~~world history~~ infamy, the United State of America was ~~simultaneously~~ suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan ~~without warning~~.

What a difference two words make.

(via todaysdocument)