August 2, 2008 (15 minutes after posting below)
Beautiful Children has been sold! Congratulations to Mr. Bock. Now if I can only move those copies of Art Garfunkel's poetry...

Jonathan Miles reading from Dear American Airlines (photos by Michael Dashkin)

August 2, 2008
This past Wednesday, Jonathan Miles concluded his book tour for Dear American Airlines at our store. How appropriate. The novel is set at O'Hare International Airport, so our newly paved Columbia Street (a landing strip to Ikea shuttles, Chinatown buses, and the B61) made an excellent aural backdrop to Jonathan's voicing of his protagonist Bennie Ford. Ford's white-middle-aged-rant is in the high literary tradition of Zuckerman and Schmidt, leaping from the interminable hell of plane travel into the depths of a misspent life. Hearing Jonathan read in his Mississippi accent put a different spin on the character of Bennie, who I initially imagined as a variation on the angry, red-faced, ticking timebombs of male frustration in my hometown of St. Louis. But Bennie is more than a boorish cliche--listen to Jonathan's slow burn performance on this podcast we just uploaded.

Afterwards Jonathan told us a bit about his process, akin to "method" writing. Trained as a journalist (he must have one of the most desirable positions at the NY Times--as cocktail columnist), he researched what a bad layover would entail for a traveler like Bennie. He purposely spent 30 hours in between planes at O'Hare, an experience that led to some very useful details and insights, but probably enough material to fill several volumes of hate mail literature. Merely walking between concourses at that Midwestern behemoth is enough to turn quiet monks into raging sociopaths.

However, that participatory experiment pales in comparison to the performance art of Tehching Hsieh, who visited the store the other night to see our ongoing group show (in particular the sound project "Coney Island of the Ear" by Hong-Kai Wang). For one year in the late 1970s, Tehching lived in a cage. In the early '80s he punched a clock on the hour every day for twelve months. Each punching would snap a photograph of him--which strung together created a remarkable six-minute compression of the experience. For an artist whose work revolves around time and existence, Tehching fittingly commented that his own acceptance by mainstream critics has been a test of patience. This winter he will formally be honored at MOMA and the Guggenheim.

Such feats of endurance are all the more cherished here at Freebird, where we are attempting to set the record for the most days Charles Bock's much hyped Beautiful Children has gone unsold. The hardcover has sat forlornly on our new arrivals table for five months no matter how hard we display it. Reduced to $8 it has been passed over for, among other things: Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, a field guide to roadkill, a set of Bobbsey Twins stories, a manual on flower painting, a biography of George Harrison, a Creole cookbook, and several cases of Moxie soda. But the night is still young.
--Peter Miller