Author: John Ostrander

JOHN OSTRANDER: The Secret Death of Bees

Okay, I’m officially getting freaked out now.

It started with a small remark from the redoubtable Bill Moyers when he appeared on Bill Maher’s Real Time show on HBO. I started to do some research based on his remarks and it came to a head recently with an MSNBC report on their website. It’s a real life event called “Colony Collapse Syndrome.” What’s it about?

The sudden death of honeybees.

“And this affects me – how?” you might ask. “I don’t use honey. I’m strictly a Splenda man. (Or woman.)” The fact is, a lot of food crops need to be cross-pollinated to come to maturity and the principle way of doing it is with the honeybee. About one-third of the American diet depends on cross-pollination and the honeybees that do the job are dying out and nobody really knows why.

According to the MSNBC article, 80% of the cotton crop is pollinated by commercial honeybees. Same for 50% of the soybean crop. Use cotton or soybeans much? 60% of the alfalfa crop is pollinated the same way. Alfalfa hay is a staple for cows – low cost, good nutrition for the bovines. Drink milk? Having a Big Mac attack? Scarcity of an item increases its price and you can bet a jump in the price of alfalfa hay will be passed on to the consumer. Same for cotton or anything made with soybeans. How much do you feel like paying for your jeans? I haven’t even gotten into the fruit and nut cross-pollination done by bees – almonds, for example, are 100% dependent on bee pollination.

Cereal grains aren’t affected so we wouldn’t starve. We’d have to do without a number of items, though, or pay a heck of a lot more for them. Oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines, for example, are all 90% dependent on commercial honeybees for the cross-pollination. You could have your Cheerios in the morning but having milk to put on them or an OJ to go with it might be tougher to get or a lot more expensive to use.

As my Mary, a farmer’s daughter, also pointed out to me, alfalfa, soybean and clover crops (clover is also cross-pollinated) put nitrogen back into the soil. Very important in crop rotation. If you just plant corn all the time, you deplete the soil and – wham! – you’re headed for a dust bowl situation. There are indirect as well as direct effects from the death of honeybees.

What’s really weird is what’s happening with the hives. The onset is sudden. The beekeepers, after a few days, find that a hive suddenly is empty except for the queen and some very young workers. Bees don’t do that. They protect the hive at all costs. In the case of hives afflicted with CCD, the workers just disappeared.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: You say it’s my birthday

I share my recent birthday with a bunch of notables; unfortunately, the most famous is Adolf Hitler. I thought it would be it would be good to use the day in part for some ruminations – where I am, where I’ve been, what I foresee, fear, et al. Actually, I can do that any day of the year; a birthday is really just a number and some of what we ascribe to that date is arbitrary. Still, might as well make use of what we got.

One thing that is about my birthday fixed is that I share it with my twin brother, Joel. Joe and I are fraternal twins; we don’t look alike, sound alike or even sometimes think alike. Joe is a conservative Republican and I decidedly am not. Joe is a life member of the NRA; I decidedly am not.

However, when I called him on our shared birthday – which I always do – he picked up the phone and started doing his Elmer Fudd imitation, which I also did. It’s the way we start every phone conversation, usually with Elmer singing something inappropriate. We’ve been doing this long before Robin Williams did. We agree that Elmer is vastly unappreciated and has an extraordinary range, from the Stones and Springsteen to show tunes (he has an affinity for Lerner and Lowe – Fudd doing “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How To Speak?” from My Fair Lady may be the definitive rendering of that song). He also can do Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, and could play Stanley in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; “Stehwwwwwaaaaaa!”

That is part of what forms me – family. In addition to Joe I have three sisters – Marge, Jane, and Pat. All wonderful people and all of them have dirt on me – as I do on them. I have an Aunt Helen who is going to 100 years old in June; her father also lived to be 100. So there is that in my DNA, although my father died much younger than that.

We lived across the street from the Roman Catholic church that I attended; I literally played in its shadow. While these days I am something on an agnostic – my gag is that I’m not dogmatic about it – I am very specifically a Roman Catholic agnostic. The god I have questions about is the image formed by the Roman Catholic upbringing. I was raised pre-Vatican II, back in the days when the Masses were in Latin. That also may be in my DNA.

I’m one of the baby boomer generation. I can’t quite remember a time before television but I remember a time when it was all in black and white. I can still reel off the names of most of my favorite shows – Zorro, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Ernie Kovacs (I was a strange kid), Fractured Flickers, Beany and Cecil, Garfield Goose (a Chicago kids TV show), Jack Paar when he had on Oscar Levant or Jonathan Winters (I was a very strange kid) and others. I remember the British invasion; as an early teen, I ushered at the Beatles concerts in Chicago. I was resistant to the Beatles until I saw A Hard Days Night; that’s when I became a fan. All part of my cultural DNA.

I got into theater because a Catholic girls H.S. was looking for boys to be part of their next production. A girl I liked attended that school and – well, c’mon. Being one of a few boys inside a girls’ high school? Of course you’re going to go there. I almost never saw the girl but the teacher/director – Mrs. Crawford – thought I had potential. I discovered the stage and that would form a great part of my life for the next almost twenty years. It also helped make me into the writer I am today.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Odd Delights

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  • April 26, 2007

I hesitate to recommend films these days – what I like you may well loathe. That said – having burdened you with a collection of “perverse pleasures” recently, I thought I’d devote this column to films that I own that I truly do enjoy, that I think are good films, and which you may not know.

Get Crazy is a 1983 film from Allan Arkush, who also directed the cult classic Rock And Roll High School and is an executive producer of Heroes. I came across it in the company of Timothy Truman while we were at a convention. We were staying at a distributor’s house and were too tired after the day’s proceedings to move. The distributor had the (then) novelty of projection screen TV and cable and Tim and I had a few beers as Get Crazy came across the screen. It sucked us in. At the time, we couldn’t decide if it was the beers or because we were exhausted but it seemed to us to be one of the funniest movies ever made. I’ve watched it many times since and it wasn’t the beers or the exhaustion; this is a damn funny film.

IMDB posts this plot synopsis of the film: “Mega-promoter Colin Beverly plans to sabotage the New Year’s 1983 concert of small-time operator Max Wolfe. Wolfe’s assistants Neil Allen and Willie Loman find romance while trying to save the drugs, violence, and rock and roll from Beverly’s schemes.” Fair enough so far as it goes but it barely scratches the surface.

To start off with, Colin Beverly is played by white-on-white Ed Begley Jr. in a terrifically manic mode. In a stroke of brilliance, his two henchman are played by two former teen idols, Bobby Sherman and Fabian Forte. That is hip, intelligent casting and a great joke in and of itself. The movie is full of little nods like that. Lee Ving, the frontsman for the punk band Fear, plays a punk musician called Piggy who has to be chained up when not performing. (Ving was also in another fave film of Brother Tim and myself, Streets of Fire.) Howard Kaylan of The Turtles plays a Jerry Garcia-ish Captain Sky. You don’t have to get all the in-jokes and references for the movie to work but boy do they add to the movie.

Malcolm McDowell plays Reggie Wanker, who is an amalgam of Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger. One of his band mates – Toad – is played by John Densmore of The Doors. How damn hip do you want a movie to be? And he looks so much like Keith Richards in the film, he could be Keith’s long lost brother. One of the best scenes is late in the movie when Wanker has a talk with himself in the men’s room after getting very high. I can’t tell you why without spoiling the joke but, trust me, it’s LOL funny.

But the absolute best guest shot has to be Lou Reed playing a character named Auden who is heavily modeled on Bob Dylan circa 1983. The in-joke is that you have a recluse (at the time) playing a greater recluse (at the time). Even if you don’t know the reference, the part is written and performed as to have its own laughs. Plus, Reed has a great song by the end of the film, "My Little Sister."

There’s others such as Paul Bartel of Eating Raoul in a bit part as Max’s doctor, Bill Henderson as King Blues and Franklin Ajaye as his driver, and more. There’s tons of music including at last three versions of “Hoochie Koochie Man.” And as much schtick as in any Police Squad movie.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Perverse Pleasures

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  • April 19, 2007

We all know what a “guilty pleasure” is – some movie, book, song, whatever that we are ashamed to say we actually like – nay, sometimes love. While we may be embarrassed by our affection we should, at the very least, be able to claim, “Well, anyway, I like it.” Even if nobody else does. I have my list of those and I suspect you do as well.

This is not the same as the strange, little known things that you love that are, in fact, pretty good. I have my list of those things also and it might be useful to talk about these odd delights at some other time.

Neither of the above are the same as what I call my “perverse pleasures.” I’m not talking about sexual kinks and peccadilloes. I’m talking about music, books, movies and so on that I know, in fact, are awful and that I don’t like but feel a weird compulsion to own them anyway.

On to confession.

The first item is Pat Boone’s 1997 CD In a Metal Mood; No More Mr. Nice Guy wherein the King of White Bread Music decides to do his covers of Heavy Metal songs. We’re talking songs such as Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water, Love Hurts, Enter Sandman and plenty of others. Oh, my ears! He doesn’t do them as Heavy Metal, of course; his arrangements turns them into Big Band tunes. When Mr. Boone sings, he’s usually off the rhythm, flat, or just speaks the lyrics. I have yet to get through a complete cut.

This is completed with a cover shot of the aging Mr. Boone in leather pants, leather vest, and no shirt, fixing the buyer with a steely stare that defies said buyer not to purchase the CD. I, of course, succumbed.

To top it all off, I was doing a guest shot on my friend Bill Nutt’s radio show, The Nutt House, on WNTI. I decided to play a cut of the CD on his show. Hey, they’re not my ratings. My better half, the lovely and talented Mary Mitchell, was listening in. I should explain that Mary is a heavy metal fan. Most people wouldn’t suspect it to look at her but she’s pretty knowledgeable and has her criterion: a good heavy metal band should look and sound like trolls. Pat Boone comes nowhere near that ideal.

Mary asked me what was on my mind to play that track. I explained that none of us at the radio station actually listened to it; we turned off the monitors about thirty seconds into the song so we didn’t have to listen to it. I think that’s where I lost Mary as a regular listener to my radio hijinks. She did listen to the track all the way through.

This is one of my definitions of love – despite having trick-bagged her into listening to something that I couldn’t, she still cares about me.

If Mary hasn’t found the CD, I probably still have it around somewhere.

Wandering over to the DVD section, I find my copy of Barb Wire. I knew the Dark Horse comic on which the movie was based and stumbled on the movie starring Pamela Lee Anderson while channel surfing late one night. I, like millions of Americans, ignored it in its theatrical release but I thought it was worth pausing long enough to see if Pam popped out of whatever she was wearing. It was late night and my standards of viewing are pretty low after midnight.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Hurling stones

  • News
  • April 12, 2007

I had a couple of other topics I was going to work on but then I read Mike Gold’s column this week and decided I had enough to say to on it and the subject of his column that I might as well do it in my own. Thanks, Mike, for supplying my column this week!

The question at hand was Don Imus’ racist remarks on his show, categorizing Rutgers University’s women’s basketball team (the majority of whom are black) as “nappy headed hos.” (For short, and because I don’t want to perpetuate the comment by repeating it endlessly, we’ll just reduce it to   “nhh”.)

Imus has since apologized at length, doing the mea culpa circuit that prominent white men do when they get caught putting their feet in their mouths. There have been the chorus of calls for Imus’ resignation or firing and Imus has said he was just trying to be funny and he’s really a nice guy and so on. As I write this, Imus has been suspended by CBS radio for two weeks and MSNBC has dropped the television show. After a ritual flogging on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show, Imus is now scheduled to meet with the women he actually insulted and their families. Nice to know we’re all keeping our priorities straight.

Caveat: I don’t listen to Imus. If I’m listening to radio in the morning it’s generally NPR and I don’t do that very often. So I’m getting a lot of this second hand or worse. I’ve never been into the whole “shock jock” thing so you can take what I have to say with that grain of salt. Also, I’ve had my own brush with hoof in mouth disease in a script where I referred to Asian people as Orientals. As has been driven home to me, Orientals are rugs; people are Asian. So I am not within sin. I’m throwing rocks anyway.

Let’s talk about Imus first. My first reaction on hearing all this was, “What an incredibly stupid thing to say.” Imus has been in the game long enough and he knows the field. He has no internal censor that suggested to him for a half second that referring to African-American women as “nhh” just might get him into trouble? Frankly, I always had the impression that Imus was sharper than that.

And then the cynical Chicagoan side of me kicked in. Maybe Imus’ attitude at the time was “Well, remarks like this sure gets people talking about ya, doesn’t it? Good, bad – does it matter so long as they don’t forget you?” Now people might listen in to hear how contrite you are, or if you’ll do it again, or because they think you should do it again. What’s a shock jock without a controversy? Or maybe he didn’t expect people to get upset – stuff like this has been his stock in trade, right? Isn’t it why people listen? Imus says what a lot of people think – isn’t that the justification? The current brouhaha is just a matter of degree.

I wonder – what would the reaction have been if it was the Rutgers men’s basketball team that lost in the Finals (they didn’t even get that far) and Imus had called them “nh (fill in the blank).” Actually, I’m betting nothing would have happened because Imus would have realized, before he said it, that it was going too far. But these are just female jocks. Who really cares, eh? Let’s call them whores because they lost a freaking basketball game. Maybe if Imus had just stuck with being misogynistic instead of racist, he would have been okay.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: The headline quartet

  • News
  • April 5, 2007

You’ve done this on tests. Which of the following doesn’t fit?

  1. Celeb fashion flops
  2. Crafting the perfect lawn
  3. Man films own death by meth
  4. Clearing home clutter

If you picked “Man films own death by meth” then give yourself an A. I plucked this quartet as is from my MS Hotmail account; after I sent off an e-mail, a screen popped up asking me if I wanted to go back to the message or to the inbox. In the left margin, there were also some news stories that I might want to pick. These were the four headlines to choose from. Three innocuous bits of news fluff and one fairly grotesque news item.

Each headline had equal value. The type sizes were all the same size. Suicide is given the same value as “Crafting the perfect lawn.” They’re all just newsy bits, one no more important than the next. In a list we sometimes assume that the top or the bottom items have the most impact but not so here. Exchange the top two items and nothing really has changed. Put the suicide item at the top or the bottom and the list changes but nestle it in the middle and it’s just one more bit of fluff.

I’ve been looking at our little headline quartet and reacting several different ways. In this context, with everything being the same, death has no more importance than crafting the perfect lawn. It’s just another widget headline. If everything has the same value, then what has meaning? “Man films own death by meth” is grotesque, it should horrify. The quartet suggests otherwise to me. There is no sense of priority here, that this one thing is more important than this other thing. The context of its appearance in this quartet suggests that the death is mundane.

Which might raise the question – is it more important? An unknown man films his own death by meth. Should his death mean anything more to me than celeb fashion flops? Is his death noteworthy or the fact that he filmed it? If there wasn’t video, we wouldn’t care. Just another meth user screwing up his life. I’m not going to pretend that I care deeply about every person who dies; I don’t. The deceased may have family and friends who will mourn him; I hope he does. Me? I’m mostly appalled but that’s about it. Maybe for me it IS just another widget headline.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Fire-bombing Dresden

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  • March 29, 2007

I’m a big fan of The Dresden Files. Which is why I can’t take The Dresden Files.

Maybe I should explain.

About a year ago or so I picked up a novel by Jim Butcher about a wizard-for-hire working out of modern day Chicago. It meshes the hard-boiled detective genre with the wizard and fantasy genre. If you know me, then you know I’m already into what I’ve called narrative alloys – the blending of genres. And I’m still a Chicago boy at heart so of course I was drawn to the book series. Butcher, not a Chicago native, sometimes gets his Chicago geography wrong – one book refers to what is obviously Hyde Park as Lincoln Park which is a very different neighborhood – but he generally gets the feel right.

As the series has progressed, the world of his hero – Harry Dresden – gets richer. He has an army of wonderful supporting characters and an overall interlocking story has emerged. While each book can be read on its own (I read them way out of order); they’re all connected and events in one book have ramifications in later books. Butcher has thought out his magic pretty well, its consistent and believable. In short, he’s created not only a wonderfully interesting main character but his own world that just happens to intersect the real world in a city that I love a lot.

In short, I’ve become a fan and I was really excited when I learned that it was going to be made into a series on the SciFi network. I remained excited – up until I started watching it.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Scattershot – TV Spots

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  • March 22, 2007

When I and Mary, my sweetie, sit around doing the couch potato thing, it’s always best to head for the commercial free stuff because it’s guaranteed that a high percentage of the commercials are going to offend her to the point of a rant. Not that the rants aren’t entertaining but I have to keep reminding her, “It isn’t supposed to make sense; it’s trying to sell something.” Or “It doesn’t work for you because you’re not the target audience.”

Generally, I try to let the commercials just wash over me without really registering them but every so often some do. On rare occasion, such as with the Mac/PC commercials, it’s because I genuinely enjoy them. More often, something sticks like tar in my mind because either a) it is incomparably stupid and/or b) my brain, warped by years of pop culture, does something with it the makers of the commercial never intended. Such as our first scattershot target.

LUNESTRA. It’s a prescription sleep aid and, in the commercial, restless people in their beds at night are visited by a luminescent green luna moths after which they close their eyes. The ad-makers, of course, want us to interpret this as Lunestra bringing gentle, natural sleep. Given the moths’ glowing green nature, however, I’ve become convinced it’s stealing their souls and that the people shown are dying. To Mary’s vast amusement (and my own) I’ve taken to screaming at the TV when these commercials come on as if it were a horror film. “LOOK OUT! IT’S STEALING YOUR SOUUUUUULLLL! FOR GOD’S SAKE – WAKE UP! OH NO! IT GOT THAT WOMAN, TOO! CAN NOTHING STOP IT?!?” Try it the next time you see the commercial; great fun.

THE CLONE OF ORVILLE REDENBACHER. When Orville Redenbacher first brought out his own line of popcorn decades ago, he also made himself the company spokesman, always telling us his popcorn was better than these others yadda yadda yadda “. . . or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.” Well, Orville was no spring chicken when this all started and eventually died. Recently, they brought back some of the old commercials and that was all right. Kind of a nice retro feel; I thought they worked nicely. That evolved, however, so that they got somebody made up to look like him with a make-up job that makes him look more like a Disney animatronic. And they use the same tag – “. . . or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.” It isn’t. We know it isn’t. This Orville has an embalmed look that makes him really creepy.

THE BURGER KING. The only creepier company spokesman on TV right now is the Burger King. You’ve seen him. Human body and an oversized plastic head that seems modeled after a young Henry VIII. The effect is like one of these licensed characters you see walking in a parade or in a theme park. Then they put him into situations that frankly make my flesh crawl. One of the commercials for BK’s breakfast line-up had a guy waking up in the morning and the Burger King was there in bed with him. The tag was “Have breakfast with the King.” The only thing I could think of was, “Dude, I don’t care how much you drank last night or how late their late night window is open, this is just wrong.” Not because the BK might be gay; it’s because he’s not human. Note to commercial makers: I don’t buy products where the commercials creep me out.

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John Ostrander: Writing 101

John Ostrander: Writing 101

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  • March 15, 2007

What does a writer do?

I did an interview recently and I was asked what advice I could give to someone who also wanted to be a writer. I get asked that at classes, lectures or seminars and I always answer by asking that question.

It’s not a trick question, although some people seem to think it is. Generally, I get answers like:

a) writers create stories

b) writers make up characters

c) writers make up things

It’s actually a lot simpler, more basic, and far tougher than all of the above.

What does a writer do? A writer writes. We don’t simply think about writing or talk about writing or imagine ourselves writing, although every writer I know does that and, in many cases, prefers to do that. It’s a hell of a lot easier than actually doing the work. However, if that’s all you do, then you’re not a writer. You’re a wannabee.

A writer writes. Every day. If you’re just starting, find a time and place that you can do it even if it’s only for five minutes. It’s like when you’re starting to exercise; you’re not – or shouldn’t – go from 0 exercise to trying to running the Boston Marathon. You need first to get into shape; with writing you need to get into the habit of writing. At first you’re looking for consistency – five to seven days a week.

I don’t care where or how you do it – in a diary, a journal, with pen and paper, on a computer or what. Text messaging is not the same thing, and you know it. It’s preferable to write in something so you can see what you’ve done, where you can refer back to earlier entries. Date the entries.

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John Ostrander: Now… now… now

John Ostrander: Now… now… now

  • News
  • March 7, 2007

There are some things they don’t tell you how to do. Sometimes it’s things no one can tell you; you just have to experience it for yourself. Sometimes it’s just stuff people don’t like to talk about. Stuff like death and grief.

I’m going to tell you what I know. Obviously, I can’t talk about what it is to die; I haven’t walked that road yet and I hope not to for a while. I can tell you, however, what it’s like to deal with death and with grief — at least, what it was like for me. As they say on the car commercials, your mileage may vary.

There are all kinds of death that you experience in your lifetime. Some are not physical — the death of friendship, the death of a dream or hope, the death of an ideal. These are no less real; the grief we feel for any of them may be no less than experiencing a physical death. However, they are different.

Perhaps the first real sense of my own mortality happened when I was about eight; it was one Saturday in late spring and I was outside on my bike. Our house was actually across the street from our church and I watched a funeral procession come up the street to the church’s front door. As I watched, I was hit with the thought that one day I would be in a casket and a boy on a bike would be watching me pass. With that vision came the realization that the world wouldn’t end with my death and that, consequently, it hadn’t begun with my birth. The axis of my own private earth shifted. I pedaled away but I have never pedaled far away enough.

This all comes to my mind because it is the tenth anniversary of the death of my wife, Kimberly Ann Yale. She died of breast cancer in March of 1997 — too soon, as many have noted. Here’s some of the hard facts I learned from that experience.

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