Photo Shoot for Sally Rand American Sex Symbol in Chicago

 She danced at the Chicago Theatre in 1933. That is where the Tribune wanted to have the photo shoot so I went down to the city after not being there for eight months. It was a strangely beautiful November day. We had a spate of warm weather for the week and the morning was warm, sunny, and felt like spring. The police were in the streets and the stores were boarded up including the Chicago Theatre. The usual crowds were gone leaving some street people, security guards, the police and one author waiting for the lights to get set up outside the theatre.

And then we started shooting.  The photographer wanted me to think about Sally Rand. She could have related to 2020. She crashed the Worlds Fair during the worst year of the Great Depression. She had been in Hollywood where her career disintegrated then ended up sleeping in alleys in Chicago before a tryout at  the Paramount Club gave her an idea to use seven foot ostrich feathers to hide her nudity. It worked and she got the job and then set her sites on the Worlds Fair. 

Sally Rand tried out but the fair wasn't interested. So she got a boat, a horse, covered her body in white makeup and then took the boat to Northerly island on the opening night and galloped into the celebration which was for only the money set of Chicago. The horse reared up and Sally Rand was arrested and then became famous for forty years. And so that was what I thought about while the photographer snapped away. It was a desperate move during desperate times. In the year 2020, we can relate.  Sally Rand American Sex Symbol

Every Ghost Story is a Love Story: The life of David Foster Wallace

Just finished this biography of David Foster Wallace but it was strange since his death still seems very recent. I had tried Infinite Jest before he died and fell off the wagon around page 200. I should say it was too difficult for me at the time. I did read A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again his book of essays. Very good. So I had not given the either of these books much thought and then I read his biography and started reading Infinite Jest again. But to the biography.

Wallace is a fascinating character and as a writer just about the top of the mountain .There are few writers who can make Franzen seem like easy reading but Wallace does. This is hard because Wallace had such a crippling disease so wrapped up with his writing. His genius and his virulent depression seemed to occupy the same room. And when the depression overtook him there was little he could do but wait for the drugs or electroshock back it off.

But the story of his life between all this and his brilliant fiction he wrote while he wrestled with the beast is illuminating. And like Wallace and his writing this review will not sum up the writer or his work because he is too complex. The biography does seem to skim though his life at times and it does end very abruptly with his suicide. Shocking in a way.

And so really all one is left with is Infinite Jest. Which is the way it should be. I think he is all in there and so really it is the book that has to be read. I am making my way through it slowly and with respect. If not awe.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Holiday Blues

The holiday blues come in different forms. There is the usual loneliness that people feel and then there is the utter dysfunctionality of family. Lets face it these are people you no longer live with and there is a reason for that. If no one shoots anyone or offends anyone for life then it has been a good holiday. Maybe juggling nitro glycerin would be the metaphor for interacting with egos bruised from history and time. But there is another sort of blues that comes in that is much darker than the normal run of the mill holiday blues. It is an existential threat that hovers right next to the ungodly amount of work and then just outright boredom.

Holidays are for kids. Well put. They are and if you are an adult then you go into a quasi combat mode of "getting things done." At a point there is too much to be done so you settle for controlled chaos and a "lets just get through this." Work on Monday  never looked so fine .But  then you tell yourself these are the best times with family and you try and find those moments. But you are bloated and tired and there is that strange empty isolated feeling. It is an existential dread.

You are another year older. Your friends have drifted to points unknown. You bust your ass routinely and can take a nap in a nanosecond. You are one step closer to the end. You do not dwell on these thoughts but they run in the background like a computer program blinking time is limited time is limited. And so you try and account for the year passed and really all you see is that is going faster and you are strangely edgy now. You can barely perform the niceties but getting up the tree and decorations have fried you out. What does it matter if we are going to die anyway. Some  of us sooner than later.

But that passes too and you think; what the hell, this is the holidays. Why aren't I more happy? Why does everyone else seem to be doing cherry things and having a great time? You have no idea. All you know is that like the holidays, the holiday blues come but once a year. And all you can do is grin and hold your glass high.

This too shall pass.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

The Real Cost of Black Friday

Granted Black Friday is consumerism gone bad. Getting up at the crack of dawn or going to the store at midnight is slightly mad, but what is the real cost to save a buck? If you went down to the store at midnight then the cost is obvious. You leave your family on one of the few days you have off to go to a store and fight with thousands of others for a deal you may or may not get. The cost is psychic yes but it is also economic.

You will spend money to compensate for leaving: gas and food for one. Loss of sleep for another, somewhere you will have to catch up. Maybe you take the kids to a movie or dinner to compensate. You are not home and there is a hit there too. Dad or mom is gone again. A day home from work to be with family has turned into another parental absence you cannot make up. The number of days we as Americans have to spend at home is diminishing as the recession drags on and on. People are already working Saturday as standard operationg procedure to keep their jobs.

But lets say you don't take a hit anywhere else. You have succumbed to the oldest bait and switch on the planet. You are in the store to get hat IPOD for fifty dollars less and maybe you get it but then you get hit with all the other deals. Impulse buying kicks in and now you are getting the switch. Statistics prove people buy unwanted items just by entering the store and that is what Black Friday is all about. Even if you get suckered just a few times the savings that got you up in the middle of the night is gone.

So save yourself some time and money and let Black Friday pass. The deals you miss will be more than paid for by hanging with your kids and your wife or husband. And we all know that time is not money. Time is much more precious.

www.billhazelgrove.com

The New American Dream: Downsizing

It is the first thing off someones lips who is selling their home now. I'm downsizing. Used to be people whose kids had gone off to college would downsize, now everyone is doing it. Apologies to all those still in search of the perfect McMansion, but everyone I bump into including myself talks about one thing: getting into something smaller with less taxes and less mortgage. It has become the new American Dream.

In my last novel, Rocket Man, the main character finally  gets his dream and is able to short sale his house away and go back toward the city and live in a bungalow. This is the polar opposite of the steady march of America which probably began with the first Puritans who decided a bigger log cabin was better and from then on the implied assumption was that materialism was next to Godliness and a big house put you into the Big Mans Favor.

Gatsby, right? Jay Gatsby's pride and joy, his magnet for Daisy was his home. A mansion he resurrected on the Long Island sound to show the world he had made it. The American Dream was at its zenith during the twenties and there was nothing more American than a bigger home. Bigger does not only belong to Texas, it is wrapped up in the swagger of American prowess. Let the Europeans live in their bungalows and row houses...we live in Giant Homes. We live in mansions.

But then of course that all came crashing down much like the Hindenburg with all the concomitant horror. Suddenly the big house no longer represented prosperity or at least upward mobility, now it had become an albatross around our neck...a prison of debt and sinking good fortune. Our homes could literally make us homeless now with the specter of upside down mortgages and foreclosure.

So the race is on to downsize. Who knows where it will end, but like Dale Hammer says at the end of Rocket Man  and is sitting in the small yard of his new home: I was finally where I was meant to be.

Lucky him.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man


http://www.bi/

The Great Secret of the Suburbs

I was was talking to a friend the other day who said his kid had lost their food card. I stared at him and said your food card? He shrugged and said yeah. Our food card. We’ve had it for a couple years now. And then it hit me. Food stamps. This friend lives in a comfortable five hundred thousand dollar suburban home but his kids are on food stamps and he is on medicaid. He had been a realtor and basically lost his job. But then it go me to thinking, how many other people in the land of wide lawns are on food stamps?


It turns out a lot. Forty six million people or fourteen percent of the population is now on food stamps. That is an amazing amount of people depending on the government so they wont go hungry. And here is the kicker, half of them are in the suburbs. The suburbs are no longer the place where people go to raise their kids. For a lot of people it is where they went to go into debt and lose their homes. And what has happened now is we have created a huge subclass of people living under the radar.

This type of family is probably your neighbor or lives down the street. They drive old cars because they can’t afford the payment of a new one. They are on food stamps because they need every nickel to pay utilities and keep their kids in clothes. They are on medicaid because there is no health care when you are broke in America. They might or might not be in foreclosure or in a loan modification. They are living in a twilight land of the American nightmare.

It now takes years to get someone out of their home. If they know how to file in court they can stretch it out indefinitely. This is exactly what is happening. There are now squatters in their own homes. The American Dream depends on a vision if not a mirage and this must remain intact for the kids and the neighbors. And outwardly everything seems normal. The lawn may not get cut and the cars may be old but it is all stitched together with rubber bands and paperclips. One catastrophe can bring the whole thing down.

Yet there are millions of families living this way. We have a huge underbelly of people who have fallen out of the middle class but like a ship that refuses to sink, they can keep pumping out just enough water to keep the mirage in place. But eventually they will take water. Once the banks catch up with them or someone slashes entitlements then it is game over.

Until then, the dirty little secret of the suburbs remains just that.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans struggle to find the American Dream

The old cars of the middle class

Old cars are making a come back. Or maybe it's just because I drive old cars. Used to have really nice cars with really nice payments. Five hundred. Four hundred. Big thirty thousand dollar monsters that broke down pretty quickly just the same. Amazing how that new car smell went away so quickly. I guess there is a spray out there you can get so you can keep it going. And those first dings. Rough man. And then that first time you don't get by the wash and your thirty five thousand dollar ripoff looks old.

That sucks.

So then you get rid of it or you pay it off and it becomes your old car. Ten years old with a one hundred and fifty thousand miles. You quit washing it years ago.  You just keep it going. You don't have any payments and you don't want any. Now you have two old cars and the air goes out or a window doesn't close or a door doesn't open and the upholstery smells like a junkyard with that sun baked smell of old clothes in a trunk. And the floor is covered in leaves and dirt and old junk food wrappers.

But it still runs.

And so you cruise around with your loud muffler and then some dude pulls up next to you in a Beamer. You look over and you feel the pang. Man I want that car. I want to get into a car that smells good and looks good and I want that new feeling man. Because if your car is new then you are new. You just feel better about everything. And that lasts about... a month. And then you are staring down those payments and you start thinking about the fact you are paying up to five hundred bucks a month just to get from point A to point B.

No thanks.

And so the Beamer dude pulls ahead and you get your jalopy up to speed. Throw in a CD of old songs you dig. And look for a McDonald's. Life aint so bad.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...losing a house should not be this funny

1929 All Over Again

There was a great financier who stepped in on the second day of the Stock Market Crash in 1929. He was the richest man in the country and he had decided enough was enough. He would personally save Americas bacon by bailing out the stock market. He went around and bought shares in every large company, infusing millions and millions of dollars  all over the stock market horizon. The market would not crash on his watch and for a while it seemed to work. The crash paused while people took heart that the richest man in the world had just rescued the market and by proxy the American economy. Then it went to the floor.

Now we seeWarren Buffet bailing out Bank of America with billions. Bank of America stock goes up nine percent and people are taking heart that one of the richest men in the world is giving the bank a vote of confidence. Too bad he gave the money to the wrong people. Bank of America is in the toilet because our homes are worthless and becoming more worthless. He should have just given the money to the homeowners. The bank mirrors the market and the derivatives that killed it and is now on the hook for billions in litigation. The great ship Buffet will not stem this tide. Bank of America is too big to fail but it seems destined too.

Because no one is doing anything for the very people who can bail out BOA: their customers. The bank prefers to just let everyone default while they foreclose on people whose only sin was to own a home that is now worthless. Bank of America is the Titanic of the Housing Crash. She holds tons of soured mortgage securities pawned off to people who are now suing them. She bought Countrywide. Talk about an iceberg laden with sub prime garbage. And she is taking water so fast that even Warren Buffets patch will not work. What is scary is that Buffett had to do this.

And what will the government do? Bail them out again? More money after bad. President Obama better do something for housing or he will be the Captain John Smith of the SS BOA breaking in two and heading for the icy darkness of our second Great Depression. Oh, that financier who tried to bail us out the last time: JP Morgan.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man

Pensions are DOA

The world has changed. Look at Greece and London and America. The old days of doing a stint of thirty years and then retiring are gone. Pensions are DOA. The problem is that you now have millions of people with absolutely no safety net and that is sucking down the people with a pension. The people who have nothing because of our prolonged recession do not want to pay for anybody. They have nothing and have nothing to lose. The bottom line is there is simply not enough pie to go around anymore.

One group has taken more than their fair share and this has left millions holding the bag. You have to question the worker states set up under capitalism where people are plugged into jobs with the promise of gold at the end. This scenario worked for a long time as along as people were making money and there was still enough pie to divvy up. This is not the case any longer. One group is taking a good healthy twenty seven percent of the wealth pie and capitalism has simply run out of gas. With so many people displaced, the old promised gold is now under attack.

The protected groups are no longer protected and this world is ending quickly. There is simply too much economic devastation globally to fund the people who cut the deal way back when. The metaphor of people drowning and swamping those in the life boats is too easy too resist. But it is no less true. The pension lifeboats are being swamped by those with nothing. Conversely the governments have nothing to pay and they are letting everyone know now: you have been the victim of the biggest bait and switch in history.

There is no gold at the end.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in July

Maybe this is as good as it gets

As a writer you are used to hard times. You do not question those hard times and think well easy times are on the way. You just accept the hard times as the way things are and deal accordingly. This allows you to navigate the very hard existence that is the writers lot and get on with the business at hand. After you accept the situation then you are empowered because you are not waiting  anymore. This is the way it is. This is as good as it gets.

Our economy might be as good as it gets. If you turn off the crack cocaine of easy credit for the last twenty five years and accept we now live in a global economy with no lock down on markets, then you start to think well maybe this is really our economy  Take away that rocket fuel of stimulus credit and the good ship prosperity does not seem so close anymore. It is a sobering thought.

We are waiting though. We are waiting to uncork the champagne when the good times return. We envision a starting gun going off or damn being opened or a tidal wave of pent up  demand to sweep over the country and the good times will be back and we will all wipe our brow and say, wow, glad that's over. But what if the situation we are in right now is the real economy? If you take away the artificial stimulus of money for nothing and accept we must compete in world markets, then maybe this is what our revved down economy feels  like. Not a Mustang, but maybe a slow steady Buick.

This would mean millions of people are waiting for nothing. Millions of people are not taking bad jobs or menial jobs on the bet that the good ship prosperity is just over the horizon. I know twenty somethings who have come out of stellar Universities who have been out of work for years. They are waiting for their anointed jobs to return. But maybe the straight commission job of the insurance salesman, the door to door salesman, the Amway salesman, the copier salesman, the telemarketer, the fry cook, the MacDonald's position, the cable technician...maybe these are the real jobs of our economy and we better start going after them. Maybe, this is as good as it gets.

Bestselling author William Hazelgrove is the Hemingway writer in residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. He has written four novels, reviews and features for USA TODAY and been the subject of stories in the NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and NPR'S All Things Considered. His forthcoming novel is Rocket Man. More information can be gathered at www.billhazelgrove.com

President Obama should go to Foreclosure Court

You do get the feeling the President just doesn't get it. There is a Herbert Hoover quality to his pronouncements that the economy should be doing better with the stimulus packages his administration has passed and that many jobs have been created and people really are doing better. The President should go sit in foreclosure court. That might just jump start his awareness.

In foreclosure court you sit in the back and wait while the attorneys for the banks march up to the judge. The attorneys sit on the other side of the low wainscoted divider in high backed leather chairs. They are there for the banks. The people getting foreclosed sit in wooden benches next to each other like criminals waiting trial. There is no talking in court. Many of the defendants need a interpreter who gets up and speaks loudly in Spanish so everyone in the court will hear. On this particular day the judge makes the announcement that there will be no more interpreters after today because of cutbacks.

So then you wait and watch. One by one people go up before the judge and plead for time. That is the best you can do. The banks lawyers have foreclosure orders in hand and they want to foreclose...now! The judge gives some people twenty eight days, but others he grants the order of foreclosure. The people shuffled out glumly knowing they have to leave their home or the sheriff will evict them.

The President doesn't seem to understand this reality. The people in the courtroom are from all walks of life. Some people come as husband and wife, many times only one spouse shows up to get the bad news. Foreclosure court never ends. The court fills up as fast as the judge gavels the cases along. The lawyers troop in and out. The banks have at least five attorneys present. It is always the bank versus the individual. It is an assembly line in reverse. This is not production, but destruction. Destruction of an American Dream gone horribly wrong.

So I think President Obama should stop in just for a little while. You sit there for an hour and you get it. Sometimes there is a tearful woman and everyone feels really bad for a moment. Everyone remembers these are peoples homes and not just judgements of default on loans. The lawyers pause, the cops look away. The judge waits for the woman to compose herself, then everything gets rolling again. The sad assembly line of our bleeding nation.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man trying to hold onto his home. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

All The Sad Lonely Men of Starbucks

Market is up. Recession over. So who are all these men in Starbucks? I have been coming to coffee houses for many years to get a little release from writing. I usually shuffle in the afternoon to a Starbucks and flop down in an old wing chair and get lost in some Fitzgerald, Yates, Whitman...just anything to cool the brain cells. But lately, all the chairs are taken. And they aren't taking by women, they are taken by older men. Middle age dudes of the forty something fifty something variety. They sit in their comfort jeans trying to look inconspicuous. These men do not read fiction. They stare at newspapers or some jabber away at a laptop and some have the thirty yard death stare. They all have a deep look of shock and disbelief. When I first saw these men I thought maybe it was a fluke, but everyday they increased until yesterday the place was overrun. We might as well be sitting in a union hall. They look like they should all be in offices. You see the hands reaching for something to do, expressions trying to navigate the strange duplicity of sitting in a Starbucks in the middle of the afternoon when the rest of the world is working. They go to the bathrooms, order more coffee, sit with legs crossed staring intently at nothing. They just don't know what to do. In Britain they call them being made redundant. And there is that feeling that for a lot of these guys they are now redundant. They are of the middle management variety and that is something the new economy will not carry. The day passes and one by one they look at their watches and finally rise to put on their coats. The fact they have nowhere to go yells at you. I have lived a life of uncertainty as a writer, but you can tell these guys did not bargain for this. They are now redundant men, put out to pasture too early in a Starbucks in a small town: the sad lonely men of our time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

The Pickel Barrel

When I was growing up my family was always in debt. We were like the United States is today, always running behind, one step ahead of the rent, the utilities, the milk bill. My dad did the best he could, but he was a traveling salesman and so we were subject to commission checks and the vagaries of an impersonal economy. Some times, when things were really bad and Christmas gifts were being shorted and hot dogs were served again or a vacation was cut then my dad would say to me in the car, "it's only money." He followed this one up with: you are not the sum of your liabilities and assets. We were Southerners with a healthy disregard for capitalism and so I didn't think too much of these epigrams. But now one can glean from those statements all sorts of things. We were all still healthy. No one had died. Somehow we would muddle through to the next check. We always did somehow muddle through and all my brothers and sisters went to college. We never did catch up and to this day my father pays a high price for living in debt. But I can't say I didn't have a happy childhood. Now we are in financial straits that are about as perilous as they can be. OK. So maybe we are in a depression. Maybe the auto companies will fail and the banks will be nationalized. Maybe we will all be eating Mac and Cheese and drinking canned beer again. I don't think there will be rioting in the streets. The government will keep the social programs going and the lights on and the water running. No one will invade us because our 401K's tanked. The military will still have enough missiles and guns and tanks and weapons of mass destruction to keep hostiles away. So what are we afraid of really? Losing our homes, our jobs, our position? Homes and jobs can all be replaced. If you have your health and your family is doing all right then you're Ok. What we really have to deal with is our relation to a currency that for two hundred years has given us our sense of self worth. The Puritans set the bar, if I am rich I am good and if I am poor I am bad. My dad had another phrase: everybody has their day in the pickle barrel. He pulled this one out when I lost a girl, didn't make the team, didn't get a job. The implication was that yes times are bad today, but they will get better. Everybody takes their turn. The pickle barrel is pretty crowded about now, but we'll get out. As my dad said many years ago...it's only money.

Carpe Diem Baby.

Seize the day. You bet. I am the lone shopper now in a thousand stores. I walk the aisles as a man from the old economy, holder of a house no one wants, a car that sucks gas, carrier of no spendable credit. The last hurrah of a party that ended but no one told us. I cruise the lanes of Home Depot and Target and Menards besieged by a thousand people with red vests and radios and badges. Do you want this? Can I get you that? No, I'm just looking. I am the lone shopper among the tons and tons of goods from a twenty year binge that ended overnight. Middle class families run by while daddy looks over his shoulder for the job he lost. They aren't buying. Hell, I'm not even buying. A man with Carpe Diem on his shoulder, making his way through the detritus of greed and billions of dollars in bonuses given to the few. One percent makes ninety nine percent of the money while the rest split the one percent. Something like that. Pillage and burn. Move on. No buyers here in the stores. What to do with all these malls and houses and cars and things we no longer need? What did the Russians feel like when it all fell apart? Hope the man in the White House is at the top of his form because we need it. Still, I need to buy something, do my part for our moribund economy. If only everyone would quit looting. Where did that first three hundred and fifty billion go? Search me? Somebody got it. Junkets and Las Vegas and Jets. Right on baby. Carpe Diem. Seize the Day. They seized the day and everything else. Brother can you spare a dime? No! I'm with you there. How about a little credit? Lost your mind. Move on no buyers here. Here they are...May I help you sir. Nope, I found it. Got my plunger, head for the register and head for the car and drive home with no gas in the tank. Carpe Diem Baby.