Culture

What The World Needs Now is Rob Deer

Clayton Trutor

Rob Deer could sure knock the shit out of a baseball. The right handed slugger, best known for his stints with the Brewers and Tigers, belted at least 21 home runs in eight consecutive seasons during the not-quite-as-homerun friendly late 80s and early 90s. He placed in the American League’s top 10 in homeruns four times and finished his career with 230 round trippers. Problem was, if Deer didn’t send a pitch sailing into the upper deck, he usually struck out. During his tenure as one of the American League’s most feared sluggers, he chalked up some considerably more remarkable strikeout numbers. Deer, a .220 career hitter, led the American League in strikeouts on four occasions. In ten full seasons, he struck out over 1400 times. His 186 strikeouts in 1987 gave him the single season American League record at the time.
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Society

FROM THE CRANK FILE: An American (polymath) In (disneyland parc) Paris

James R. van Houtte

The former "Eurodisney" is your standard Magic Kingdom fare. Here’s a Big Thunder Mountain, Neuschwanstein-inspired castle in the middle, Main Street U.S.A., Space Mountain, Teacups, what have you. The All-American experience. That’s inside the parc. What happens outside of Disneyland Parc, well, that’s not so all-American.
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Fiction

The Eighteenth

Michael Schindel

The fairway of Southwick was beginning to brown, and as I shook my father’s hand on the tee of the first hole, I couldn’t help thinking about the economy. My father had watched CNN since the formal announcement of our national recession. He would call once a week with the same warning: “this is the worst recession we’ve ever seen. We’ll be in a depression soon. If you’ve got the chance to spend money, don’t.”

“How was the drive?” I asked.
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Culture

Kokomo: The Last Great Song by America’s Greatest Band

Clayton Trutor

I may be alone on this one, but I think “Kokomo” is a great song. Cocktail might not be much of a movie, but at least Tom Cruise’s follow-up to Top Gun gave us the last Beach Boys’ song worth remembering. The cults surrounding Pet Sounds and the long-awaited Smile have made the Beach Boys, or more specifically Brian Wilson, fashionable among rock canonists, but this approach to the band’s music shortchanges their magnificent early works and later-day gems like “Kokomo.” The omnipresence of “Kokomo” made it tiresome in the late 80s, but that hardly merits its continual exclusion from discussions of the band’s finest work.
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Society

1-A

Barry Trutor

December 1968. I had exhausted the college option. I apparently had several other options for avoiding the United States Marine Corps. I could seek political asylum, also known as dodging the draft, in Canada with Michael Hendricks, formally of New Jersey, who later would become one of the two celebrants in Quebec’s first legal same-sex marriage. I could impregnate any of a number of willing women in Benson and join Lee Greenwood with a 3-A, a Selective Service Hardship Deferment . Lee’s deferment enabled him to stay home with his wife and young family, to perform in Nevada casino lounges, and to prepare himself for future national adulation with:

• I’m proud to be an American
• Where at least I know I’m free,
• And I won’t forget the men who died
• Who gave that right to me…

Your Favorites

What’s Your Favorite Bill Paxton Movie?

American Polymath’s panel of experts spent the past month catching up on their Bill Paxton movies. Has there ever been an actor as simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous as Paxton?
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Culture

Jay Bennett’s Summerteeth

Clayton Trutor

When I read this May that former Wilco guitarist Jay Bennett had died, I went for a drive with Summerteeth. It’s been my favorite Wilco record since I first popped it in my Sanyo in March of ‘99. It’s also the album of theirs I associate most strongly with Bennett. Repeated listenings of Summerteeth reveal a band that has amalgamated its finest qualities into a single album. Summerteeth builds on the twang of their debut A.M., the fire-in-the belly of their sophomore album Being There, and the majestic tune-smithing of their collaborations with Billy Bragg on the Mermaid Avenue records. The first time I listened to Summerteeth, it sounded like my Rubber Soul. It was complex yet accessible popular music.
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Fiction

Drivers Education

C.J. Charbonneau

Cousin Andy’s birthday is two days before mine in March. He’s two years older than me but three years ahead of me in school. Mom held me back in Kindergarten because I wasn’t ready for a whole day away from her. Andy picked on me for being so far behind him. I told my cousin how the kids in seventh grade didn’t mind me being in their class. Some of them even liked hanging around with an older kid. Andy replied by either making fun of me for being fatter or having more zits than him.
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