Artist Bioraphy: A Lull (2008)

There’s a little room on Chicago’s Northwest side where this thing is happening. There isn’t much to say about the room itself. It has walls that give if pushed and would fall over if pushed hard enough. There’s a wood floor. There’s a dirty, thin carpet on top of the wood floor. There are old cigarette butts that belong in other mouths that live on the carpet, in the burn marks they have created. The history of the room has been scribbled in mostly tacky, generic markings by its past inhabitants, drawings of tattoo style roses, dragons and lists of the best group of friends who will never die. There are pipes near the ceiling. There are Christmas lights wrapped around them. Their ends have been cut, so they can’t do what they were born into this world to do.

But what matters is what happens within those walls, on those floors, under the unlit lights and pipes, among the burned out cigarettes and black marker drawings that grace the walls. Somewhere in the midst of all of these things, sounds that belong in other places find their ways together and make a home with each other, market places of old world Baghdad, choruses of classic Bollywood, forests filled with beasts and fields where flying, flickering fairies brush the tops of the long grass and swaying wheat.

The people who bring all of this together and carefully form it into A Lull are Nigel Dennis, Mike Brown and Todd Miller, among others, various friends who have been kind enough and willing to lend a hand or two along the way. All three are formerly of other Chicago based bands, Nigel and Todd (and Mike briefly) of The Evaluation, and Mike of The Skies We Built and Mike (and Nigel briefly) of Ateriavia.

A Lull’s debut single is entitled “Skinny Fingers/Little Echoes,” and they are currently hard at work molding, crafting and perfecting their debut full-length album entitled “Confetti.”





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Exerept from "Vacation," a short story (2008)

Then, one day two months ago, after work, Madeline asked Will if he wanted to go to the movies. He innocently accepted. This is when she told him about Paul Mason. Rather, she whispered it to him. She told him in public, at the movie theatre, during a movie. She explained that it was because of his aggression issues that she “...wanted to be in a safe, public place when she told him about it.”

Will handled it well. There was no screaming, no outburst of any kind. He didn’t even care to know who it was. He simply placed his half eaten bag of popcorn on the floor, stood up, and walked out of the theatre. Once he was outside, he began the three-block walk to his house, but not before stopping at Van Til’s Hardware. Once inside the store, he walked to the aisle labeled “Doors, Windows, Locks & Latches” and grabbed two new door locks, one for the front and one for the back.

“You’ve had a break in?” asked John Van Til, while he was ringing up Will’s purchase at the register.

“Oh no, John, just time for a change. That’s all, just time for a change.”

“Well, get home quick. You know, they’re predicting a huge one, a storm unlike one we’ve ever seen. They’re saying it might rain for days. I ‘d ask you if you needed any supplies, but I’m all cleared out of tarps, bungee cords and sand bags.”

“Really?” Will asked, “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

“They started reporting in on the TV news this afternoon.”

“Thanks anyway, John, I think the house’ll be fine.”

"Here’s hoping,” John said as Will took his bag and headed out of the door and onto Central Avenue. “Give my best to Madeline.”

“Goodnight, John.”

He continued his walk home, walking slowly, down the middle of the street to see the sky between the massive oaks and maples that lined it. When he looked up, he didn’t notice anything really ominous or dangerous about it. It looked, simply, like a normal July sky. It was around nine o’clock, so it was dark, but there weren’t even any noticeable clouds. It looked clear. But, as he lowered his head and his line of sight, he noticed, for the first time, his neighbors scrambling, trying desperately to cover what was open and reinforce what was weak. Just as John had said, they were stacking sand bags along foundations. They were also carrying them into the houses, possibly to the basements. They were on their roofs stretching tarps and securing them to gutters and fixtures with bungee cords. They were in what could best be described as a frenzy, and as Will watched them scramble, he felt left out, ill informed, ill prepared.





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"The Van," Exerept from "Kings and Villains," a non-fiction essay (2008)

The van was an old van. At auto stores, when the boys were looking for oil filters, spark plugs or headlight bulbs, the sarcastic, know-it-all men who were forty and there for life would tell them that there was no such thing as a 1980 Plymouth Voyager. They would argue back that, “Yes there was such a thing,” and eventually the owner’s manual was retrieved. These men, these big, proud men, believing that they still knew more, would chuckle under their embarrassment, and admit that they had never heard of or seen such a thing. They would walk away with their tails between their legs like wrong dogs, knowing that they were defeated, but would never offer an apology, not to these young boys.

The van required constant maintenance. Oil changes that were needed every three thousand miles came every few days when the boys were driving from Denver to Seattle and from Sacramento to Chicago all in the same week. The attendants at lube shops would see the sticker on the windshield, the sticker that was left by the last oil change. The date would sometimes be two days prior or three. They would say, “Oh my God.” They would change the oil, and they would say, “Where did you come from? Where are you heading next?”

More often than the oil was the gas. Twenty miles to the gallon. Despite a huge tank and mostly highway miles, the gas needed to be pumped and filled much too often. Sometimes there wasn’t enough money for both gas and food. Fuel trumped nourishment, and the Voyager rambled along while the stomachs inside sat empty.

And, when the headlights went out indefinitely, the boys were forced to drive only during the day and then wait wherever they were for the night to pass. When the headlights went out, they boys had to think outside of the box. Flashlights, large camping flashlights, and duct tape were purchased. It was a plan that was brilliant in theory, but awful in application. Residents of the small town laughed as they passed. They wished these boys luck, and they continued to giggle as they left the Wal-Mart and headed to their little houses somewhere in Idaho. Flashlights taped to the hood. That was a new one. Instead of illumination on the road ahead, the heavy-duty flashlights provided nothing more than two measly dots of light on the concrete, well short of enough light to provide guidance in the black western night. Again, the boys were forced to wait. While they waited at a rest stop, they hated the van. They threw bottles of water at its broad side. They slept, not tired, but poor and stuck. In the morning, they would get to the coast, and they would be able to breathe again.

Eventually, after the headlights were fixed, the van still needed more, always more. In the desert, the gas tank repeatedly exploded its contents out toward anything in its way, a result of high pressure and a lack of ventilation. In Seattle, it refused to start. In Indianapolis, the muffler fell off. The next weeks were loud ones, but even after a new muffler was purchased and installed, the van needed more attention and even more attention after that.





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"Newspaper Once Devoted to Parodies Announces: 'It’s time to get serious.'" Parody of "The Onion" (2008)

The Onion has written it’s last joke. “This is no joke,” says Brendan Davies, a 24-year-old employee who joined the paper a year ago after graduating from Florida State University. “I was just getting into the swing of it, and them boom! They dropped it like Hiroshima.”

At 4:00 p.m. on Friday, the newspaper issued a memo to it’s one hundred and fifty employees informing them that they had better be ready to report the news on Monday, the real news. “…We will no longer be offering a comedic look at life. After extensive research and surveying, we have found that the American public is done laughing. They need something serious, and honestly, we don’t think that there’s enough of it at an adequate quality. We can do better than any of the long standing news media organizations, and we intend to.”

More than two thirds of the staff has little to no experience in actual journalism, and one writer even admitted that she had never even read a real newspaper. “Yeah, I mean it’s crazy,” says Stephanie Thomas, “I guess I’m going to be covering international affairs or something.”

For more than twenty years, The Onion has put a comedic spin on actual and fictional events in the form of a newspaper. A long respected publication that focused on making people laugh rather backing its readers into fear, The Onion is becoming its own worst enemy.

“People just aren’t laughing,” says Pete Meyers, the company’s CFO, “We’re losing our advertising to papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times.”

The paper has always been free, something that will also change with the new format. “They’ll have to pay for real news, just like the rest of us,” Meyers said of the decision to sell the papers rather than give them away.

“After letting it sink it, I think it’ll be good. I always felt self conscious about my jokes anyway,” Davies said, “Now that I’ll be reporting the real news, I think I’ll be much more confident in my work. I think I’m going to be covering finance or maybe health and medicine. I’ll have to find out for sure.”

The last issue of The Onion will hit newsstands on Monday, and the first “real news” paper, yet to be renamed, is scheduled to hit stands on Tuesday.







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