The Rake: Yo, Ivanhoe

Are You Lonesome for Me, Baby?

Brad Zellar — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:13:21 -0500

All day a dragon in a rented crow costume was installed in the tree outside my house, shrieking imprecations and keeping me at bay.

A few months back I reversed the mat on my doorstep so that each time I opened the door I would encounter the word "WELCOME." My hope was that this would somehow strike me as a greeting or an invitation from the world. So far it hasn't quite had the desired effect. If anything, in fact, it's made me increasingly self conscious about what seems almost like a gesture from a self-help book.

You Know How It Is. Or Maybe You Don't. Maybe I Don't. Maybe, in Fact, None of Us Does

Brad Zellar — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:22:10 -0500

What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am?

I don't know what it means, but I know it's appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end up with.

One More Cup of Coffee for the Road: In Another Lifetime

Brad Zellar — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:40:04 -0600

Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, otherwise blank window frames and the gauzy, fluttering filter of curtains), I bucked you across town through the empty streets on my stingray bike.

Another One from the Mothballs: The Art of Indexing

Brad Zellar — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:54:49 -0600

I always thought it would be interesting to attempt to tell the story of your life purely in index form. I tried it once, without a whole lot of success. I'm sure there are others out there like me, though, people for whom the indexes of thick biographies are often better and more fascinating reading than the books themselves.

Any Old Business?

Brad Zellar — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:47:00 -0600

How it is that I...how is it...or, rather, why it is that I...that I seem to keep...or, really, that I do keep, that I keep ending up...that every single night I look at the clock, I look at the clock and it's two o'clock in the morning, it's three o'clock in the morning and I...I keep ending up at three o’clock in the morning, I keep ending up sitting here with...I don't know, I keep ending up sitting here with all this shit, surrounded by all this shit? Night after night I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here night after

In Which I Take Umbrage

Brad Zellar — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:38:19 -0600

I opened my electronic correspondence this morning to discover that, scattered among the many missives from such devoted readers as Floyd Whopping Cock, there were a number of notes from acquaintances calling my attention to the fact that in the pages of the Southwest Journal local media rascal David Brauer was weighing in on the future of my employer, Rake Media Worldwide.

Let It Loose, Let It All Come Down: A Very Sad Business All Around

Brad Zellar — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:13:53 -0600

Some mysterious combination of failing light, and the smell of an unrecognized plant bring back to some men the sense of childhood, and of future hope; and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

--Graham Greene, The Honorary Counsul

What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicusread more

The Wasteland

Brad Zellar — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:46:15 -0600

This month marks the third anniversary of Yo Ivanhoe, and considering the similarly wasted years I spent shoveling words in a similar hole (Open All Night) at City Pages, I'm not much in the mood to celebrate five years of futility.

When I first started doing this nonsense I was nothing but a clueless conscript to an online enterprise that meant absolutely nothing to me. Blogging? Seriously, what the fuck?

From the Wayback Machine: My Brief History of Magic

Brad Zellar — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:46:02 -0600

Elmer Gylleck was a Chicago architect who did a bumbling comedy-magic act built around a character he called Dr. Clutterhouse. Dr. Clutterhouse would come on stage clutching a briefcase and carrying an umbrella. The briefcase was possessed, full of odd spirits; ghosts would fly from it, and gunshots would ring out whenever Clutterhouse opened the thing. When the briefcase wasn't bedeviling him, the Doctor would be having table problems (he invented a wonderful collapsing table prop) or any of a number of other slapstick scenarios that were

There Is No Bottom. There Is Simply —Or Not So Simply— the End

Brad Zellar — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:54:01 -0600

There is another kind of sleep,

We are talking in it now.

As children we walked in it, a mile to school,

And dreamed we dreamed we dreamed.

--James Galvin, from "Hematite Lake"

Maris Gomes was very young when he went to sea for the first time, and not much older --still much too young-- when the boat on which he was working was capsized in a storm and

Foolish Fire

Brad Zellar — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:47:53 -0600

The small river town where I lived and worked for a time was in a pretty and neglected part of the state. When I first moved down there I used to tell friends that it was as if I'd relocated to a remote little corner of some obscure European country. There were rolling, wooded hills, streams and creeks, and spectacular limestone bluffs in every direction.

Yo Ivanhoe Goes to the Movies!

Brad Zellar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:29:49 -0600

Believe me, I fully recognize that a guy pretty much has to be a moron and a glutton for punishment to criticize Diablo Cody at this point. Either that or he has to be a very, very brave man, a man with the stones of Anton Chigurh.

I'll plead absolutely guilty on the first counts. As to the second, well, yes, ma'am, I do believe I'm your man there as well.

What Makes a Man Start Fires?

Brad Zellar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:20:47 -0600

The word 'brain,' you know, never once occurs in the ancient scriptures of the world.
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A Dream Deferred

Brad Zellar — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:14:16 -0600

It was difficult to sleep, yet almost impossible to move. It was easy to be irritated about everything that was of no consequence, yet care about nothing that mattered.

--Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist
There is no love.
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The Beginning of a Story That Doesn't Yet Have an Ending

Brad Zellar — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:22:55 -0600

We asked the captain what course

of action he proposed to take toward

a beast so large, terrifying, and

unpredictable.
read more

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Irrelevance

Brad Zellar — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:04:12 -0600

2007 was almost certainly the first year in my adult life that I abandoned more books than I finished. For years I was a masochist about reading, and once I made any sort of investment in a book --bought it, checked it out from the library, cracked the pages-- I felt obligated to finish the damn thing, no matter how unpleasant I found the actual reading experience.

I, Too, Have A Bone To Pick With Andrew Zimmern

Brad Zellar — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:16:07 -0600

I know I said yesterday that I was going to talk about my favorite books from 2007. I'll do that eventually, I suppose, although who really gives a rat's ass? Right now I'm all worked up about something else, so the book nonsense will just have to get shoved aside for the time being.

Wamp-Wamp: The Good Stuff from a Very Bad Year

Brad Zellar — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:27:57 -0600

And the empty place got dark, and the fire went out.
--Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

It's always seemed to me that very little of the music I love in any particular year makes much of a reappearance in subsequent years. If I looked at lists of my favorite records and CDs from virtually any of the last twenty years, I'm pretty sure I could sell more than half of them for all the time I've since spent listening to them.

An Old Thing, from Somewhere Else: Something Heavy Being Carried Away

Brad Zellar — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 22:55:00 -0600

I WAS 38 YEARS OLD and washing dishes in a strip bar, forced to wear a ridiculous chef's hat because the place clung to its delusions and had the audacity to serve food. The all-you-can-eat chili special was a big draw with the oil boys from the refinery across the highway. I'd punch out at 11:00 and get the hell out of there. I still had enough pride to go someplace else to drink, so every night I'd head over to the Toot-Toot Tavern up the road. There was a decent moon over the highway and the usual prevailing stench

Let Nothing You Dismay: Rock the Bells

Brad Zellar — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 01:31:34 -0600

It's strange to me that nobody seems to expect anything in the way of an explanation these days. Nothing in the world surprises anyone anymore, unless, you know, someone decides to go all Jerry Bruckheimer with their rage.

I guess I'm not a person who can live without explanations or surprise.

Does the ticking of that clock bother you?

A Yo Ivanhoe Holiday Tradition

Brad Zellar — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:00:30 -0600

Let's suppose you --the hypothetical, perhaps wholly imagined You-- stumble in here to Yo Ivanhoe on an occasional, one-time, or even purely accidental basis (one of those Google mishaps, say), completely unaware that this little futility closet is in fact a mere, very minor adjunct to a giant media empire (Rake Media Worldwide), which produces a print magazine in whose employ I --Brad Zellar-- presently find myself, however tenuously.

From the Scrap Heap: Richard Kunkel's Christmas Pageant

Brad Zellar — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:44:09 -0600

A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about Richard Kunkel. Big things were expected of that poor fellow. Certainly no one believed that such a fine, bright boy as Richard Kunkel would stick around a tiny little jerkwater village like ours for the rest of his life. Many assumed Kunkel would follow his fathe into the Armed Forces, and would rise quickly through the ranks. Others thought certain that with that fine voice of his he would become a supper club singer. He was always getting up to sing at parties and special

Great Joy

Brad Zellar — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:49:16 -0600

It was an old, quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or child's clay, those elephant slabs wrapped in wax paper that Reston remembered from classrooms in his childhood. Six months earlier the horse had been delivered to the pasture out back of Reston's trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the truck. She didn't kick or fuss, but simply refused to budge. Reston had paid 100 dollars for the horse to save it from being put down. He had inherited his ex-girlfriend's pathological weakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds, and he had a dog

The Unfortunate Fate of Our Local Giant

Brad Zellar — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:30:00 -0600

I don't recall if the local giant ever actually claimed to have special powers. It did, however, seem to me that he conducted himself as if he had sprung from the pages of mythology.

Beauteous Munch, Popular Show Dog

Brad Zellar — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:23:44 -0600

One night long ago in a once-upon-a-time world there was a little lost dog in a faraway forest. The dog was alone and hungry, and it was a bitter winter in the forest. The little dog was settling into the cold den he had burrowed for himself in the snow around the roots of a tree, and as he curled up there in the darkness he heard the distant shimmer of bells and, a moment later, voices carrying in the forest, a great many voices joined in some happy song. The dog had never known anyone to pass through the faraway forest, not once in his lost

A Man Goes on a Journey, a Stranger Appears in Town: There Are Only Two Stories in All the World

Brad Zellar — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:21:43 -0600

Prentice had changed so much in twenty years. You could stop by the little local historical society at the County Fairgrounds and look at photographs of the way the town used to be, but pretty much every striking thing you would encounter on the walls there had been knocked down –the old courthouse with the ornate cupola, the Prairie School bank downtown, and the beautiful turn-of-the-century railroad depot: all gone—and the place was now just another anonymous town comprised of nothing but squat, rundown neighborhoods surrounded

A Kingdom of Stinks and Sighs

Brad Zellar — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:09:22 -0600

Come on, give a rat's ass, would you, you fuckers? Give it the old college try.

Sursum Corda: Give Thanks

Brad Zellar — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:42:28 -0600

I'd say it's a decent idea, Thanksgiving, even if it's one of those old, decent ideas that means almost nothing anymore. Still, it does strike me as a worthwhile thing, the notion of taking time out of your life to give thanks for whatever the hell you have to give thanks for. And surely you have something to be thankful for --come on, pull your face away from that bong for a moment and think about it.

He's Abbott, I'm Costello: Cross-Wired Conversation With My Dog At Two A.M.

Brad Zellar — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:15:18 -0600

Would you say?

I would say, yes.

Say what?

That is the question.

Yes, that's the question.

No, that is the question. No question mark.

What is the question?

Say what?

I said, "What is the question?"

And I said, "Say what?"

I heard you the first time, but I still haven't heard your answer: What is the question?

That was the question.

That?

Yes, that.

That?

Yes, goddamit, that is the question.

Tears of a Clown, Redux

Brad Zellar — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:04:04 -0600