Review: Doin' The Cruise: Memories From a Lifetime in Radio and Rock & Roll

Doin' The Cruise: Memories From a Lifetime in Radio and Rock & Roll by Ken Churilla
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Autobiography of the radio career of long-time Chicago DJ Mitch Michaels. As many DJs do, Michaels bounced around a lot of radio stations in his career, starting in Ohio, then moving in his 20s to Chicago for the rest of his career. He talks about the personal stuff, the marriages and divorces, the kids, the relatives. He talks about his being in the right place at the right time, like WLUP the Loop when it promoted the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park, and when that station started. The Chicago stations Michaels worked included WXRT, WDAI, WKQX, WLUP and WCKG. He more recently worked stations in the Western Suburbs.

This was interesting to me on many levels. Growing up far from Chicago's FM reach, I didn't know these stations, but I'd heard a lot about them from Chicagoans at the University of Illinois. It was difficult to pass a day without seeing at least one Chicago station t-shirt. I ended up moving to Chicago and experiencing the tail end of the FM rock boom. Michaels described it well, and since I've always been interested in radio, this was very interesting.

Also interesting was that when Michaels wasn't living downtown or on the Michigan shore, he lived pretty close to where I lived in the Western suburbs, a couple miles away. I never knew that. He describes the area and the times well.

Michaels does come across as a bit pushy and a bit arrogant. He seems to fall back on threatening people a lot. Given his radio DJ career, I kinda expected this, so was not surprised, but he doesn't come across necessarily as a guy you want to be friends with. Funny thing is that it seems he doesn't realize he comes across negatively - he's kind of oblivious. He also is that way in some of the business stories he tells, like starting a clothing store in Michigan and quickly expanding, that watching it fall apart in months. I'm not sure how much of that is Michaels directly or how much came from his co-writer.

Overall I liked the book, a better than average DJ life story, with the added benefit for me that it covers local stations and the Chicago area.

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Review: The awakened eye: A companion volume to The Zen of seeing, seeing/drawing as meditation

The awakened eye: A companion volume to The Zen of seeing, seeing/drawing as meditation by Frederick Franck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frank goes beyond his "The Seeing Eye", which describes his method to look at scenes and draw them quickly. Here, he describes how he teaches others, or attempts to teach others, how to do the same thing in a workshop format. He doesn't have a great success rate at this, but it is interesting in how he choses to present the material to the class and how he makes them practice.

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Review: Broken Glass: Mies Van Der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece

Broken Glass: Mies Van Der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece by Alex Beam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I visited the Farnsworth House a few years ago. I took the tour with a number of European and South American visitors, and, I believe, no other Americans. This was an interesting experience, to see an architectural icon (close to my home!) with only visitors from far away to appreciate it. To learn more about the drama involved in the building and the managing of the house (love affairs, lawsuits, money problems, flooding, headstrong architect vs headstrong doctor,...), this is the book.

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Review: Skeleton Man

Skeleton Man by Tony Hillerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I actually quite enjoyed this one in Hillerman's series. I didn't give it 4 stars because there were some logical and character inconsistencies that puzzled me throughout the book, taking my mind off of the action, as well as dropped lines of action. Leaphorn plays a minor role here (well, he IS retired at this point) but he pulls his girlfriend in and you think the characters would reappear, but they just disappear from the story. This one was more to move forward on the Bernie and Chee romance, with some action thrown in. But it worked for me.

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Review: Washington Square

Washington Square by Henry James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've found Henry James to be a bit overwhelming for my reading tastes, too many flowery phrases. Yet I find I remember parts of this book more than the other flowery books that I've read. I think it was because the story was tied to a particular house, and I related to having a house know my history, so to speak. I'll be trying another James, wish me luck...

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Review: Summerland

Summerland by Michael Chabon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had wanted to read this book for a long time. Chabon, Summer, Baseball, Fantasy -- what could go wrong? I found that I just wasn't into it, though. Perhaps it was because I read it in the fall, at the end of baseball season. The book felt too constructed to me, written to a specification. I did find myself very interested in some scenes, but the whole story - the connectedness of the scenes - just didn't grab me.

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Review: Poem a Day, Vol. 1

Poem a Day, Vol. 1 by Nicholas Albery
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It only took me about two and a half years to read this poem-a-day book. I'm not good at doing what people tell me, I guess. Instead of a daily read, I tended to read this in short chunks of a few days at a time. I appreciated the variety, although I enjoyed the more modern poets much more than the ones from centuries ago -- there were way too many of those classics in there. I enjoyed reading these, slowly. I was impressed to read in the foreword that many people would memorize a poem a day. That would be quite an accomplishment with this collection, with so many rare and/or dated words. But the poems are mostly one pagers, so memorizing might be more readily accomplished than longer poems. Overall, I enjoyed this but would have liked more modern and fewer classic poems...and maybe even more American poets -- this is the American version of a British poetry book, and some British poems were traded out for American poems, but not nearly enough for my liking...

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