Author Archives: brianhey

10-10-10 minus 8 Nike+

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NIke+ SportBand

Last “long” run before the marathon this morning: eight miles. Two weeks ago, that distance was a routine weekday run, so it was not really a physical challenge. Except: the weather. Cooler, yes, low 50s, but light rain and gusting 25 mile per hour winds. This would not be pleasant marathon weather, since running into the wind today was like a standstill. But the marathon weather forecast is promising: high 60s, 30 percent chance of rain.

I ran with three tracking devices today. (Four, including Jan’s.)
Nike+Sportband: 8.46 miles
Nike+iPod Touch: 8.32 miles
Nike+GPS iPhone 4: 8.25 miles
Nike+iPod Nano (Jan): 8.01 Continue reading →

10-10-10 minus 9 It’s All About the Weather

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This morning's view from my window: not a cloud

Three miles today, and it is a glorious morning for running, especially if you’re like me and do not get up at dawn and run when the air is in the forties. At this point, everything is sort of set for the race. I’m in shape—I’ve done all my long runs and I can’t lose much weight in a week, alas—so the one big factor that will influence the quality of my marathon experience this year is the weather.

Today’s the first day that ten-day forecasts incorporate the big day. My dream would be a day somewhat like today, where I could run in shorts and a t-shirt, and enjoy the city on a sunny day. Right now, the forecast is a high of 67 degrees, low of 51 degrees (perfect for me!) and some rain. Not very excited about the rain, though I’ve done my share of running in it, but if it’s light, and not freezing, it can actually help in some ways. My personal record in the half-marathon was set a couple years back in a pouring September rain. But the rain dampens the experience for spectators, and since Jan and I have a few folks coming to watch (including our daughter and her boyfriend from Seattle!), I want them to enjoy the day as well. Continue reading →

10-10-10 minus 10 Team Running

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Shh. I caught a secret snap of Jan running in last summer's Elvis is Alive 5K

Ten days till the Chicago Marathon, my second. (You can read my longish chronicle of my midlife journey from a sedentary state to distance runner, which I published last year, here. It was a finalist for the locally prestigious Lisagor Award, losing out to a Playboy article that broke new ground in the Barry Bonds steroids story. Imagine that: a jury thought the writer who broke the scandal about one of the greatest athletes of a generation had a better story than my navel gazing. Oh well. I just wanted to be able to put “award-winning sportswriter” on my resume!) This year, the focus on my running has been not on finishing the race, nor on improving my time. This year, it’s been about running with my wife, Jan, who will be running her first marathon this year. We plan to run together. Nike was kind enough to give us entry into the race via their sponsorship, so we avoided that moment of truth (and commitment) when you break out the checkbook to register back at the beginning of the year. (The race sells out earlier every year; this year registration closed on March 23.)

While I yap about my running to the point of fatiguing everyone who knows me, Jan’s the opposite. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s doing the marathon. Up until she did her first twenty-miler, she was still saying she might not go through with it, even though she’d been training for months. So don’t tell her I wrote this. I don’t want to get in trouble. Continue reading →

International Voices Project

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In my December retrospective about the amazing decade Chicago theater had just completed, I lamented the relative paucity of an international component to Chicago’s theater offerings. No sooner had I written such than I was asked to MC one of the events in the inaugural outing of the International Voices Project. I’ll be doing so tonight, when Trap Door’s Max Truax directs a staged reading of a French play, written by the Romanian Matei Visniec, WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE CELLO? It’s a fun one-act, with some nice existential elements that should make for a lively conversation. And it’s free. Come out and support this great new project, and get your catcalls in at the discussion host while your at it. Here’s the flyer copy: Continue reading →

The Tony Fitzpatrick Train

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Jan and I went to the opening of Tony Fitzpatrick’s one-man show, “This Train,” last night at the 16th Street Theater  in Berwyn. Tony’s an old friend—we’ve had various personal and professional interactions dating back more than twenty years—so I knew I could not review the show, obviously. And watching the show, I realized why you really could never do so: everything was so familiar, from his autobiographical details to his manner of story telling to his interactions with his “co-worker” on stage. We loved the show, but we love the guy, and there was no way to discern any critical distance.

That being said, Tony is a natural-born story teller. Most famous as a visual artist, he’s published and performed poems, acted on stage and in movies, and even committed a few acts of journalism here and there. But he’s no MFA-toting persona; he’s a street smart raconteur, a natural in every sense of the word. His style and substance harken back to the likes of Studs Terkel, his hero, as does his Everyman subject matter. In his show, he waxes poetic not only in his poetry, but also in his stories, especially in one that recounts his grandmother and why she “wasted food” on birds. Birds have long been a recurring motif in Tony’s artwork, and for those of us who know that, this story explains the source of his obsession. Continue reading →

One Year into History

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Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like the fine people of Massachusetts have, perhaps unwittingly, dishonored the legacy of their late long-serving Senator Ted Kennedy in a manner worse than if they’d dug up his grave and paraded his skull around Faneuil Hall on a pole? If there was one cause his entire career stood for, it was health-care reform, and if there was one way to honor him, it was to enact this first bit of progressive legislation in a generation. Instead, he had the audacity to die in office, and to punish him, his voters turned against him and made his death, in irony most cruel, the thing that might just prevent the enactment of that which he valued most of all.

Is it just me, or is it specious reasoning to infer that the Massachusetts voters who, in effect, voted against health-care reform in this election are thus against the principle of universal health care? Is it at all possible that, since they already have universal health care and are paying for it with their state tax dollars, that they just did not want to incur the cost of getting a redundant program?

Is it just me, or should Boston take back its Tea Party soon? Can someone to the left of center please spend a minute or two studying the semantics of shameless propaganda, American Revolution chapter? Continue reading →

Putting the Free in Freelance

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The LA Times is reporting on a not-so-secret secret of the media business: that the market for freelance writing has collapsed as a byproduct of the digital economy. We at Newcity have been as guilty as anyone in furthering this trend: our already rock-bottom rates had to be halved in order to survive about five years ago, and we still struggle to pay these new rates on any timely basis. That, in spite of the fact that we rely on freelancers more than ever.

This is a matter of considerable pain and sorrow for us, for we value the writer and artist above all. When we started Newcity as a print publication nearly twenty-four years ago, we had no revenue, no prospects. But we insisted on paying writers something for everything we published from day one, even though it was not unusual for small startups to operate on the efforts of “volunteers.” We were not a charity, and it seemed odd to try and build a business on the backs of folks working for free. (Interns are another matter, since there is a trade of education and career enhancement for their labors, which are defined by their temporary tenure.) Continue reading →

Ginormous: The penis enlarger of the lexicon

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I’m no semantic prude: I actually have a fondness for new constructions, new etymologies. Word purists are square, man. But sometimes language can go so wrong. And lately I’ve been obsessing on the need to put an end to the use, any use, of the monstrosity “ginormous.” I’m hating on that word.

It started so harmless; a word to describe, well, burritos and things. Things in need of a bastardized version of the language, befitting their street-food/drunk-food idiom. Im OK with that. But all of a sudden, this frat-boy street slang has slipped into the “real” vernacular, the language. God help us, OED. So make this your new year’s resolution: this is not a word you should ever deploy. If anyone uses it, though, be nice. They are not to blame. After all, the Tribune thinks it’s the raw material of art reviews. Hell, I want a ginormous burrito right now. But I can’t help thinking  of those penis-enhancement ads. Is it really bigger than “gigantic?” “Enormous” is just too small? Really? Two thousand years of largeness are not enough? Or is maybe your largeness not so large? Maybe you should use, or make up a new word to cover, well, the somewhat smallness of what you have to offer?

I understand, trust me. It’s the sign of a decade just vacated. We need big big words, bigger words than ever before, to describe, well nothing. A decade of nothing. Of nothing, but a decade older. It was a ginormous decade.

Now do not use that word, ever again.

Too Busy Writing to be Writing

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121709I may be the world’s worst blogger, with a two-month gap between posts. I’d promise to rectify that in 2010, but that would be too much like a resolution and those things never work out. So let’s just see how we’re doing at the end of January.

In any case, I’ve done a ton of writing for publication since my last post, so here’s a round-up to get caught up.

Lit: I did a short review/preview of Jay Ryan’s new book of poster art here, and a long Q&A with John Freeman about his book, “The Tyranny of E-Mail.” John’s most famous around these parts nowadays as the editor of Granta and the creator of their Chicago issue, but before that, John covered the books beat (from New York) for Newcity for several years. John’s book provokes thought about a tool that has profoundly changed my life, for better or for worse. One permanent habit change, suggested in John’s book: I changed my email to check for new mail every hour, instead of every five minutes. The result has been strange: I now have these long strings of minutes, even tens of minutes, where I can concentrate on one thing at a time. Concentrated effort is so old-school. Continue reading →