My stepson, age 6, on race: "So I'm black AND white. Like Charlie Chaplin!"

...but I'm now 29. Since I got this cough at about 14 and a half, I've now had it half my life.

Business as usual for me today, mostly - woke up, made pancakes, headed to the coffee shop. In a minute, I'll put on some headphones and the "Ragged Glory" playlist and start working on the YA project, which is all falling into place - I hope to have it done at the end of the month. Tonight, I have Civil War tour to run. Nice thing about running those up here in "The North" is that I've not yet had a passenger on one of those who was operating under the illusion that the South wasn't thinking about slavery in the slightest. No one has yet called me a Yankee Revisionist Historian Pig. But I've got sources to cite ready to roll if I need 'em.

On Saturday, we started filming clips for the "I Kissed a Zombie" short promo videos - the first three being filmed will be of a series called "The Zombies In Your Neighborhood." We're filming most of clips 2 and 3, featuring Ken as a zombie ghost tour guide - on Saturday, Hector played the role of the rival ghost tour guide who killed Ken on the job (though he insists Ken died of being possessed by a headless demon baby, and that he has orb pictures to prove it).

And speaking of films, will ya look at this - I'm on the IMDB!

Occasionally, I pause and think about just how much I owe to Chris Viscardi and Will McRobb, the creators of the TV show The Adventures of Pete and Pete. I can't calculate what an influence on me that show was - the only writer who influenced me on the same level is probably Pinkwater. In the commentary on the DVDs, they talk about how they wanted every episode to be "funny, sad, strange and beautiful," and that the show should have a sense of "ragged glory." I could about get a tattoo of these phrases.

"Ragged Glory" is an aspect particularly important to my current project. I've even considered working it into the title (though I don't think that'd work). HOWEVER, it makes for an easy way to make a playlist. You can find a sense of ragged glory in plenty of songs - rough songs where the sound might be a bit lofi, the lyrics might not make much sense in a literal way, but the emotion comes soaring through anyway. I think they actually got the term from the title of a Neil Young album. The easiest examples to point out are Pearl Jam's "Yellow Ledbetter" and Dylan's "I'm Not There (1956)," which are sung with dummy lyrics - the songs weren't fully written, so they just muttered and made up a few lines as they went along. The lyrics can't really be transcribed and don't make much sense - but you get the emotion behind them loud and clear.

So, here're excerpts from THE RAGGED GLORY PLAYLIST, the soundtrack to the "top secret YA project" (the working title of which is now TANGLED UP IN BLUE)

Pearl Jam - Yellow Ledbetter
Tom Waits - Who Are You
Bruce Springsteen - For You
Daniel Johnston - Walking the Cow
Del Shannon - I Go to Pieces
Neil Young - Love to Burn
Hold Steady - Stuck Between Stations
Hold Steady - Ask Her For Adderall
Dead Milkmen - Methodist Coloring Book
Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over the Sea
Counting Crows - Cowboys
The Moldy Peaches - Nothing Came Out (their only song that stays serious throughout)
Gene Pitney - Town Without Pity
The Ike Reilly Assassination - Garbage Day
Belly - Thief
Ben Folds - Not the Same
Rolling Stones - Out of Time
The Enemy - We'll Live and Die in These Towns
Jesse Malin - Broken Radio
Butch Walker - Closer To The Truth, Further From the Sky
David Rood - Only
Vixy and Tony - Burn it Down (a rough-sounding bootleg)
Bob Dylan - Tangled Up in Blue (Paris '84 version)

Working on multiple projects, as usual. This time around it includes:

- a series of short videos to promote the Zombie and Smart Aleck books. I'm finally learning iMovie! Look for about one per week starting in September.

- digging my teeth WAY into the "top secret YA project" that I've been teasing about for two years now. Working several hours a day trying to hammer this out; the original draft was written in about 2-3 weeks a couple of summers ago. Naturally, there were some BIG problems, but they're slowly being solved.

- taking Aidan to the park every evening. The moms at the park on Grand are much nicer than the Wicker Park moms.

- Went to see my 36th Bob Dylan concert (if I'm counting right) a week ago. Here's my review.

- Enjoying the weather - 60s and 70s. THIS is a summer I can live with!

- Running 4-5 tours this week!

I still can't believe the Michael Jackson news of last week - I keep expecting that there's going to be a puff of smoke at the gates of Neverland Valley and he'll jump out, grab his crotch, and say "fooled you - hee hee!" Cause you know, he WOULD.

I know I'm about the tne zillionth person to blog about this, but I feel like I have to. My first real memory of popular music is probably seeing the Thriller video, which scared the heck out of me. When I was a kid, everyone I knew agreed on two things: Star Wars was the best movie, and Michael Jackson was the best singer. I feel like Nintendo died. Jackson was probably the last singer who was so big that when he had a new song out, your grandmother knew about it.

I wasn't a huge fan, except in that I was, well, alive and listening to music, so whenever his music was in the news these last several years, I paused to hear what he had to say. Obviously, he's had less to say lately (the new tracks on Blood on the Dancefloor in the late 90s are fascinating and dark, but the video for "You Rock My World" made me think he needed some new moves), but I was very interested to see how the new concerts would go. Early reports say he was going to sing "Dangerous" and "Dirty Diana." I'll bet it would have been awesome.

I've been especially interested in seeing that he did, in fact, have lupus, which explains a LOT - not just about his skin and the surgical masks he's worn in the sun, but you have to wonder how much junk they would have had to pump into him for him to be energetic and pain-free enough to ignore every signal his body was sending him so he could dance. No one would have blamed him if he said "look, folks, I'm 50 and I've got lupus, so for these shows I'm just going to moonwalk onto the stage, then stand there and sing. And I'll probably have to do some lip synching. But the show will still be spectacular." But he never could have done that, perfectionist that he was.

It's been nice, this past week, to go back and listen to Dangerous and think of it on its own musical terms (you couldn't separate it from the pageantry, spectacle and celebrity cameos when it came out). Sure, the guy was eccentric and probably messed up (though i never believed the worst of the rumors), but now perhaps we can finally just start thinking of him as an unbelievable song and dance man and a guy who really knew how to put on a spectacular show, not just a man of mystery who led (in many ways) a tragic life and could afford to try anything to make the pain go away, and whose fame made him a prisoner in his own palace.

An ongoing complaint that I have is that moms at the park are NOT used to seeing dads there - when I take Aidan to a playground, the moms tend to give me the cold shoulder. The ones who talk to me are almost invariably ultra-progressives from Europe whose kids speak six languages at age four.

Last night Ronni and I took Aidan to a park in the evening and found - glory be - another dad who was there with his wife and his 16 month old daughter. They had sort of the same issue - they had tried to join a play group and found that they couldn't stand the snobbishness of the other moms.

She joked that she was going to start a play group of her own that required an interview.

"Question one: do you let your kids eat dirt? Yes? You're in!"



Meanwhile, the playground had recently been hit by some departing graduates with markers (who, apparently, didn't think it unprudent to sign their name after the bad words). I'm not advocating graffiti or anything, but you know those Tic Tac Toe games they have on playgounds? They had turned two side-by-side Os into boobs. Gotta admit I had a chuckle over that one.

Yesterday morning I loaded Aidan and Ronni into the car at 4:15am and made it to Des Moines in just over 5 hours for a Father's Day party my whole family was attending. I'd never taken Ronni to Des Moines before, and it was great to show her my hometown. It looked so nice that we both toyed with the notion of moving there, but I'm not sure what the heck I'd DO there, exactly.

We hung out with my 9 year old cousin, Turner, and played "How Does This Get Worse" with him. Got to see my cousin Brian, his cousin Matt, and their families, which is always great. I even got to see my old pal Ryan, with whom I collected baseball cards in 1989. We kicked back old times - it's nice when people remember the same stuff you do. He confirmed a story he told me that I've been repeating for years: in one of his classes, the kids all had to make up a new cereal and do an ad for it. One kid made a cereal called "Nards" (slogan: "Nards: Eat 'em") and another made Godads ("Gonads - they're good!") I was never at all sure he was telling the truth, but he insists it's true to this day.

Then I took Ronni to Snookie's Malts, which will appear in I KISSED A ZOMBIE AND I LIKED IT:



Would have liked to stay longer, but we had to drive back this morning so I could run a tour tonight.

....since "Howl (For Mayor McCheese)" goes over so well every time I perform it (which I do every few years), maybe I should record an album's worth of beatnik filk poetry with jazzy backing?

Hmmmmmmm......
....possibilities.....


The filk scene needs more beatniks.

I just played my first gig in over two years -a friend of a friend needed an emergency opening act, so I picked up the guitar and played what was, essentially, an acoustic Broken Chimneys gig, since I stuck mainly with songs I'd played recently for those recordings. About half of the songs were very good. The other half I managed to get through.

Set list:

Long Way Home
Doorbell Ditching at the Pearly Gates ("Scapegoat version")
New York Rain
Friday Avenue
Smoke
I Don't Believe in Summer
Satan's Parents' Basement (or most of it; I kinda forgot how to play this one)
How Mark Got Sane
The Three Bean Casserole War

The first and last songs were probably the best.

Today, we talked about mysteries. It was the best talk yet - kids got REALLY into it. It was all I could do to keep them sitting down and not jumping up and yelling out ideas (they jump up and yell all the time, but at least this time it was because they were excited about the stories).

We meet in an old mansion build by Francis S. Peabody, a coal millionare. It has secret passages, unworking bathrooms, and all kinds of neat stuff. I talked a bit about mysteries and asked why old mansions show up in so many mystery stories, then set the kids up with a mystery idea:

"No one has seen Old Mr. Peabody in years - he lives in the old mansion on the edge of town. One day, a pizza delivery guy gets a call to deliver a large anchovy pizza to Mr. Peabody. When he arrives, it looks like no one has been near the place in years. There's dust everywhere and a huge stack of newspapers on the porch. When the pizza man knocks, there's no answer. "Hellooo?" He calls. "Mr. Peabody?" He knocks again and the door opens a tiny bit. He decides that maybe Mr. Peabody just left the money on the table and steps inside. It's really spooky inside - cobwebs everywhere, empty tic tac containers piled high, and a painting of Medusa on the wall (the kids are into Medusa). And then, right on the mosaic Tudor rose by the bathroom, he sees it: the skeleton of Mr. Peabody."

So there are a lot of mysteries here - what happened to Mr. Peabody? And who put in the call ordering the pizza?

We brainstormed a list of solutions - perhaps there was a murderer in the secret passages (which brought up more mysteries - why would he kill mr. peabody, wait for him to turn into a skeleton, then return to the scene and order a pizza? to lure in another victim?) Maybe it was psychotic kindergartners. Maybe it's all a prank - the skeleton is fake, and all of the pizza man's friends are about to jump out and yell "Happy Birthday!" Maybe he pizza man is insane, and this stuff is all in his head? Maybe he's the last person alive in the whole world, and EVERYONE else is a skeleton?

Then I talked about how mystery writers trick the readers, and we talked about how we could make readers think it could be ANY of those solutions.

My biggest mistake was turning the bathroom break (it's a long walk to find a working one) into a chance to study the building for ideas. They got a LOT of ideas. Renovators had left marks and numbers on windows and boards, whcih a couple of kids were sure were secret codes. There are neat architectural bits everywhere. There are fireplaces that look like GREAT hiding places and walls that seem hollow. They got entirely too many ideas, and entirely too excited, and it was tough to keep them staying still - or in the room we're using as a classroom - once they got started.

But everyone had fun, including me!

My poor laptop. It fell out of my backpack and onto the sidewalk back in September. That dinged it up pretty good - of the two latches that hold it shut, only one now works, and the case was slightly warped.

It fell out of my overcrowded messenger bag this morning (stuffed, as it is, full of stuff from the class I'm teaching in the burbs this week). I'm not entirely sure it'll ever sit perfectly flat again. There's some fixing I need to do before I can even shut the thing at this point.

Replacing the whole outer casing is a SEVERAL hundred dollar job. Like, so expensive, from what they told me, that you might as well buy a new machine. I'm looking into options, but still. Grr. I MIGHT be able to fix it myself - or just learn to live with it, of course. Everything but the CD drive still seems to function, and I have an external one of those.

Meanwhile, I'm teaching Writing for Evil Geniuses for 8-10 year olds in the burbs. There're a couple of kids who are very good, and a couple more who WILL be very good when they learn to settled down a bit, but it's mostly a babysitting gig. About half of the kids don't seem that interested in writing, but their parents (some of whom are apparently very, very, very rich, though I take it with a grain of salt when they talk about the sports cars their dads plan to get them when they turn 16.) needed a place to drop them off. When they can sit still for five minutes, though, it becomes apparent that these kids are also REALLY smart. They all know their Greek myths, and most of them are far better-travelled than I am. They've been all over the world. We had a pretty intelligent debate about the cause of the great chicago fire yesterday, and a decent discussion about the possibilities of proton decay (Jerry Spinelli just wrote a book about how messed up a kid gets when it's discovered that protons decay (which has not really happened) and realized that the whole universe will eventually disappear) and spontaneous combustion.

Still, hyper as they are, yesterday I got them going on a game of "How Can This Get Worse." The idea here is that I give them a situation, and they go around the room telling how the story gets worse. The subject of most of our stories is Mr. Peabody, the robber baron whose old mansion the class meets in.

I will say "Mr. Peabody wakes up and falls out of bed, landing on his face. How does this get worse?"

And the first kid will say "then he falls down the stairs."

And the next will say "his house is being robbed."

And the next will say "zombie nazis are ransacking his basement."

"And he's out of tic tacs" (he's addicted to them in most of the stories).

This SOUNDS more orderly than it is. Getting them to wait their turn and stay in their seat takes a LOT of effort.

Kids who aren't THAT creative or just can't think of anything will usually go with "he poops his pants" or "his pants fall down." I get a LOT of that, but don't really mind, because when things get gross, they tend to be less violent. The first day every story seemed to revolve around tanks full of flammable battery acid and battery acid-proof sharks and explosions and machine guns. It's a common thing with writers this age - their characters don't have personality traits; they have arsenals instead.

When we've gone around the room and Mr. Peabody is trapped in his own coal mine with his brain getting run over in the streets of Chicago, dying of a disease that makes his lungs turn black and collapse, invaded by zombie nazis, and with some REALLY messed up pants and the ghost of Mrs. Peabody biting his butt, we go to part two of this game, which is "how does this get better?" Yesterday MR. Peabody discovered a miracle cure for his disease (tic tacs), took on the zombie nazis, got a new brain from a spy named Mary and a cushy new job at spy headquarters, along with a googolplex dollars to rebuild chicago after the nuclear meltdown that leveled his own brain.

There are a few kids who are WAY ahead of the rest in terms of maturity and writing ability, and I feel sort of bad for them. They'd probably be getting a lot more good work done if I didn't spend the rest of my time trying to keep the other kids in line.

I had a terrific time at Duckcon, my first con in ENTIRELY too long. It's always great to hang out with vixyish, tfabris, cadhla, and filkferengi, not to mention Tom Smith, Kathy Mar, and other such venerable A-listers of the filk world. And, of course, Ronni and I made some new friends, heard some great new music, and got to see giant singing Tesla coils performing "The Imperial March." It's been about two years since I've been to a con (filk or otherwise), and I didn't realize quite how much I missed it. We need to hit more of these. The fact that one can just walk into a hotel and watch Kathy Mar sing "Death Danced at My Party," Tom Smith sing "Take Your Hands Off the Bear," Vixy and Tony doing "We Can Be Anything," S.J. Tucker singing "Firebird," Seanan McGuire singing "The Black Death" and still have time left over to watch singing Tesla coils just blows my mind.

I only played one song myself, and it wasn't exactly a song - it was my poem Howl (for Mayor McCheese), which I did on request with some jazzy percussion and a walking bassline. Fun!

Busy day today - I'm leaving in an hour to start teaching a week long class for kids in the burbs called Writing for Evil Geniuses. I will take a class of grade-school kids and teach them such skills as evil laughs, the construction of secret lairs, and how to write a limerick. Tonight, there's a ghost investigation to run.

Speaking of investigations, we recently had another "shadow that shouldn't be there" picture in one of the ballrooms we hit on the Weird Chicago Tour. We've been hearing a lot of foot steps in there lately (which sure beats hearing gun shots, which happened a couple of times last fall). In November we got a shot of a silhouette against a wall that shouldn't have been there - it's stood up to more than six months of criticism, which is pretty good for a ghost shot, most of which are easy enough to either explain or brush off as some sort of camera malfunction. This one isn't QUITE as sharp as the last one, but it's still pretty cool. And, as I often say, there's no such thing as GOOD ghost evidence, only COOL ghost evidence. It's up at the Weird Chicago Blog.

When last we left the cereal report, I was bemoaning the criminal underuse of hazelnut in breakfast cereal. Today, I decided to put my money where my mouth was.

Cocoa Puffs With Hazelnut - I am not the kind of guy who puts extra stuff in cereal. I used to put bananas in my rice krispies when I was a kid, but that's about it, really. I don't even mix cereals that much, except for the occasional chocolate/peanut butter pairing. But they don't really make a lot of cereal with hazelnut, so I took matters into my own hands. Cocoa Puffs were on sale. So were hazelnuts. Mix in one bowl, add milk, eat. The result is one tasty cereal that is probably marginally more healthy than eating cocoa puffs by themselves.

My next step is going to be to add it to granola to imitate the hazelnut granola cereal Target has among their upscale cereals. Beating them on price is not going to be AS easy as I thought, as I was a bit off in my guess as to the price of granola. Turns out a box of the stuff runs a good 4-6 bucks even WITHOUT hazelnut in it. I was under the impression that granola was the sort of stuff you could buy in a barrel for under ten bucks - or at least in a container like Oatmeal for 2 or 3 bucks (if you shop the sales).

I realize I'm not posting here as much these days. Partly because I have twitter and facebook to deal with, I suppose, but mostly it's because I don't want to be one of those writers whose blog is just "book, book, book."

The trouble there, see, is that that's pretty much life these days, having had a bunch of project due dates converge on me all at once. I have four books coming out between September 1st and January 21st. The last two days I worked double overtime doing the webpage for The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, and I'm doing a LOT of work on the zombie book promo stuff that I'm VERY excited about, but not putting out til there are advance copies starting to circulate. But the Smart Aleck page is up and running with a staff email and everything - hopefully we'll get a couple of people to turn in "assignments" before the book is even out.

Meanwhile, back at home, Helena the cat is calming down and hasn't peed on anything in a long time. Ronni is working at home doing some freelance proofreading. Every night she and I watch an episode of The O.C. I never saw it before - certainly didn't seem like my kind of program - but I'm enjoying it as a fun soap opera. Honestly, I find that I can enjoy practically anything on television when I take the time to watch it. I think we're just going to watch the first season, then move on to giving Weeds a shot (I've never seen an episode).

Production wrapped on At Last, Okemah last week. This 15 minute version will probably premiere at a few festivals in September, right when the books start coming out.

Aidan is coming for the summer late next week! We're going to zoom off to Des Moines for a one-day trip for a family reunion that I'm really looking forward to. I'm in the mood for a Des Moines trip - the zombie book is set there, so I've had it on my brain lately.

Last night we decided to live the high life. I grilled up a couple of steaks and served them with baked potatoes and steamed snow peas, then we hit the magnificent mile to go shopping. I love living in the city! Going out in the evening on cool summer evenings in the city can't be topped. Everyone is up and around, music is playing, and the streets are alive. The other night we had neighbors hosting get-togethers on two nearby porches, and when we got hungry at 1, I was able to bike over to a place that was still serving pizza slices to go. The weather right now isn't really to Ronni's liking, being gray and in the 50s-60s, but it's my favorite kind of weather. The fact that it's June and I'm NOT sweating every time I go out is just wonderful to me.

Everything on the list from yesterday is crossed off - I am actually caught up!

I will CRASH this weekend (except for one tour).

THEN - I will FINALLY get out the Top Secret YA project that has been on the shelves nearly two years, waiting for the time to strike....

...and restarting efforts on The Back Row Hooligans.....

In the last week, I had:

- Revisions of the zombie book (DONE!)
- pass pages (printed-out book pages to check one last time for errors) on the ghost book for llewellyn (almost done, just need chapter titles)
- pass pages for THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY (about 80% done)
- movie filming
- movie webpage updates
- early website promo stuff for the zombie book
- soundtrack work for the zombie book's "book soundtrack"
- The Broken Chimney's album (recording, mixing, cover art, releasing)
- various Weird Chicago Tours business.
- article on "weird laws" in Chicago for a Chicago history book.


As of tonight, all of that stuff will be DONE.

Yesterday was the last day of filming on At Last, Okemah.

We started the day at a recording studio, where we did some overdubs and filmed Jon Langford's scene, then headed fifty miles out of the city and into farm country to film the last three two scenes.

I rode with Ben the producer and Trey the sound guy. We had a smooth trip, but Mike (the director) and the actors (Kevin, Hector and Jesse) were not so lucky. First, there was a freak-out when hey realized that they (well, I) had forgotten to bring the guitar case. They went to Kevin's house to get one, and, as they did, Kevin's brakes went out (had I NOT forgotten the case, they would've gone out on the highway and the day would have been lost, so go me). They were barely to the highway when my group made it to the rendezvous point, an outlet mall.

I called Mike and left him a message saying "Mike! I have a GREAT idea! Instead of ending with a walking away shot, I've set up a whole thing with The Gap outlet. We're going to film a montage of Winston and Miguel trying on different hats! I'll record a new wavy folk version of 'Build Me Up Buttercup' or 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' or something. It'll be GREAT! I've got it all set up with The Gap, so just get out here as fast as you can."

I was not in the car with Mike, of course, so I have to rely on eyewitness accounts of his reaction. I never dreamed that his nerves were so shot that he'd actually fall for it.

"Oh my god," he said. "This is the worst idea I've ever heard! I can't BELIEVE this! I can't even talk to Adam. I've gotta call Ben."

So he called Ben, who was sitting right next to me and told Ben he was so mad he couldn't even talk to me.

"Oh, don't worry," said Ben. "Once you see this place, you'll understand. The scene is perfect. We may need to do some choreography."

At length, Mike finally figured out it was a joke and we all had a hearty laugh. He and the actors arrived half an hour later, we drove out to an actual old dusty trail and filmed the "are you out of your mind" scene - this was the only scene in this short version of the film that is from the "on the road" portion of the film - the part that I wrote ten years ago during class in high school. This image of the folk-singer errant and his trusty roadie wandering along an old dusty trail has lived with me for over a decade, and now I got to see it come to life.

I LOVE making movies. It's a lot like being in Odyssey of the Mind again. Making this short film has been one of the greatest creative experiences of my life. And it's not done - there's still some music to record, and, hopefully, a feature-length version to make next year. As Winston would say, "onward to glory!"

Due to some other bands with the same name, The Chimneys are now The Broken Chimneys. A new version of the album is up for FREE DOWNLOAD right here!



THE BROKEN CHIMNEYS: Satan's Parents' Basement

1. Doorbell Ditching at the Pearly Gates
2. New York Rain
3. The Cold Air(Part 1)
4. Smoke (And Other Halloween Decorations)
5. Satan's Parents' Basement
6. Valentine's Day
7. I Don't Believe in Summer
8. Crooked Houses (of Armitage Avenue)
9. I Used To Be Cooler Than That Guy
10. Black is the Color
11. Long Way Home
12. Lullaby in Nine Nursery Rhymes
13.Bonus Track: Don't Forget Your Hat, Justine

Lineup:
Adam Selzer - guitar, vocals
Dustin Eddlebeck - guitars
Tony Ostanek - tuba
St. Kurtis the Vile - organ, misc
All songs by Adam Selzer except for track one, by Adam Selzer and Tanner Strutzenberg. All songs ASCAP.