Editor's Note: July 2011

Raindrops on Roses

by Brian K. Mahoney, June 27, 2011

Welcome to a very special edition of Chronogram. It feels electric, right?  The pages bristle with a low hum. We’ve done nothing new or groundbreaking—same pile, different flies; that’s what Tom, my neighbor, says—and yet a sense of extraordinariness remains. Perhaps it’s the way the endeavor all comes together, slowly building momentum from several sources and then, all at once, racing headlong to the finish. Like creeks flowing into a river after a summer rain. Sometimes, my view is from above, and I see the whole branchlike system of tributaries. Sometimes I’m the water, swept out to sea. Whether I’m cognizant of the grand design or lost in the mystery, I’m aware that I’m surrounded by greatness. (Yes, I’m boasting now.) My collaborators on this project are knock-down, drag-out brilliant. That’s why it’s a special edition every month. And while it’s not a brown paper package tied up with string (years ago, the magazine was indeed bundled with string), here are a few of my favorite things in Chronogram this month.

Insert Weiner
Love him or hate him, Larry Beinhart is an unstoppable satirist. Whether writing a column in these pages or novels like Wag the Dog, Larry understands that behind every good politician stands a good spin machine. And if Larry leans left, well, that’s because he thinks he’s right. This month, Larry’s penned a poem inspired by the recent antics of a certain New York congressman. His ode to the misbehaving political class (“The Last Weiner You’ll Ever Need,” page 21) shows no mercy to anyone’s indiscrete wiener, either Republican or Democrat.

In other Beinhart-related news, Larry’s send-up/exposé of fundamentalist Christianity, Salvation Boulevard, was made into a film starring Greg Kinnear, Pierce Brosnan, Ed Harris, and Jennifer Connelly. It premiered earlier this year at Sundance, and prior to its general release, it’ll be screened at Upstate Films in Woodstock on July 13 at 8:30pm. The event is sponsored by the Woodstock Film Festival, and a discussion with Larry and the film’s director, George Ratliff, will follow the screening.

(And speaking of Woodstock, seems like I’m one of the few who did not know that singer/songwriter Steve Earle lives in Woodstock. Robert Burke Warren reviews his debut novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, on page 54.)

Unnatural History
While we were smitten with Allison Leach’s staged photographs of imagined imperialist nincompoops of yesteryear from the get-go, we were concerned that the sepia hue of the “Misfit Explorers” images were too close to the tones of last month’s cover, Adie Russell’s Oui Oui, Non Non. (Possibly my favorite title for a work of art aside from Philip K. Dick’s paranoid The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Alain Tanner’s searching Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. “Oui oui, non non” is just fun to say.)

The more we lived with Leach’s goofy adventurers—revealing the basic absurdity of colonialism through their collective fiction—the more we couldn’t live without them. Similar color palettes be damned. And besides, in July we celebrate American independence. What says America better than a man waving a flag? Never you mind it’s the Union Jack. (On the Cover, page 10)