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by Jake Cline

“Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high, white whine of everything.”
— Ava Bigtree, in Swamplandia!

“Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.”
— The Bird Man, to Ava

Karen Russell is a Floridian. Never mind that she has spent the better part of the past decade living in New York, experiencing the reverse acclimation of a Southerner to a Northern climate. Never mind that the tastemakers of New York’s literary scene have claimed Russell as their own. Never mind that just last month, on a Tuesday morning in which the city was paralyzed under yet another dome of headline-grabbing ice and snow, Russell was perched on a windowsill in Manhattan, trying to carry out an uninterrupted conversation on a cell phone she describes as “janky.”

Yes, never mind all that. Because while you likely wouldn’t be able to find another Floridian quite like Russell in New York, you’d be equally hard-pressed to find a better representative for our state than this affable, 29-year-old writer.

A native of South Florida who grew up in Coconut Grove and graduated from Coral Gables High School, Russell garnered national attention five years ago with St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, an inventive collection of stories that offered a fresh hybrid of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic, Carl Hiaasen’s satirical slapstick and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ Everglades environmentalism. In one story, the human child of a Minotaur recounts his father’s travails pulling a wagon into the Western Territories. In another, a girl becomes trapped inside a giant conch shell. And in the title story, a school run by Catholic nuns attempts to drive the wild from its student lycanthropes, to varying — and rather bloody — degrees of success.

Acclaim arrived swiftly for St. Lucy’s and for Russell, who received her MFA from Columbia University. The book finished 2006 on a number of best-of lists, including those published by the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, and the author has been named one of her generation’s greatest writers by the National Book Foundation and The New Yorker, which last year included her in its “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers.

Now, with the publication earlier this month of her first novel, Swamplandia! — which tells the story of a family of alligator wrestlers living in the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge — Russell is being met with another wave of attention. The novel has already received positive reviews from The Washington Post and The New York Times, which led off its Feb. 6 Book Review with a glowing take by Irish novelist Emma Donoghue, and Russell is set for a promotional tour that Feb. 24 will bring her to Books and Books in Coral Gables.

It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a former tree-climbing, manatee-loving Coconut Grove tomboy whose connection with South Florida only grew deeper the farther she moved away from it. That connection crackles on every page of Swamplandia!, which continues the adventures of the Bigtree family Russell introduced in the St. Lucy’s stories “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” and “Out to Sea.” The Bigtrees are led by an eccentric, idealistic patriarch named the Chief, whom Russell describes as “an ‘indigenous swamp dweller’ who was actually a white guy descended from a coal miner in small-town Ohio, a man who sat on lizards in a feathered headdress.” The family’s business is Swamplandia!, an Old Florida tourist trap that sank deep into debt following the death of its star attraction, the entrancing matriarch Hilola Bigtree, whose show involved her donning a two-piece bathing suit, diving into a 27-foot-deep pool filled with alligators and casually emerging from it minutes later. The survival of Swamplandia! is further threatened by the nearby opening of the World of Darkness, a corporate-run theme park that Russell portrays as a wicked approximation of Disney World, in that tourists pay top dollar to experience a facsimile of Hell, complete with Devil’s Oven food stands and Tongue of the Leviathan amusement rides.

The story’s central struggle, however, takes place between the family’s youngest daughter, the 13-year-old Ava, and her 16-year-old sister, Osceola, an apparent medium whose late-night “love possessions” result in her eloping with the ghost of a long-dead dredge operator deep into the Everglades. Accompanied by a mysterious transient called the Bird Man, Ava takes off in search of her sister on an odyssey through the River of Grass that Russell freely admits was inspired by not only Huckleberry Finn, but also by the Coen brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou?

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Swamplandia! is both a celebration of the Everglades and an elegy for it, with the Bigtrees struggling to maintain a dying way of life in an ecosystem that itself seems forever on the verge of extinction, forever doing battle with invasive species of man-made (the World of Darkness) and natural (the melaleuca tree) origin.

“I grew up hearing all these stories about a virgin Florida,” Russell says. “My grandfather would talk about how the sky would be dark with birds, about how many fewer fish there would be every time he went to Flamingo, the struggle with Big Sugar. I was sort of growing up at a time of really rapidly expanding ecological consciousness. It was a time of reckoning when people were talking about how the Everglades was on life support. I was always trying to reconcile it as a kid. I thought that place was so beautiful. But it also seemed like I had been born in the shadow of a great morning, because all the adults around me were talking about how much more beautiful it was [back then]. There was a real sorrow. People seemed to really be reckoning with the consequences of phosphorus pollution, farming having diked up the headwaters, that kind of thing.”

While the novel’s pro-swamp, anti-development theme is overt, Swamplandia! is no heavy-handed screed. Russell is too smart and too beautiful a writer to lapse into stock characterizations or aphoristic grandstanding. As she did with the stories in St. Lucy’s, Russell has created a credible, captivating universe in Swamplandia! And even when her characters are flirting with — or bedding down with — the supernatural, their authenticity never comes into question. The novel’s pleasures — like those found in her short stories — derive primarily from the writing, which is rich with unexpected metaphors (“everybody’s legs acquired the cracked sheen of cockroach wings”), whip-smart dialogue (“So, is your sister like the war chief Osceola?” “Oh, no! She wears barrettes and stuff”) and enviable creativity (Chief Bigtree dubs the park’s survival strategy “Carnival Darwinism”).

Swamplandia! also serves as a rejection of the most-egregious stereotypes about the Sunshine State and, especially, our slice of it: a place where senior citizens come to die, voters screw up national elections, people don’t read, everyone sings Jimmy Buffett songs and all Miami is one South Beach nightclub. Florida-Duh.

“I think in a weird way the book must be a tiny bit of a correction to that idea, right?” Russell says. “Because it’s such a heterogeneous place, too. It’s so incredibly diverse. I even regret a little bit that I’ve ever used the word redneck in talking about it because it’s easy to default to that stereotype. You know when people talk about, like, ‘Oh, my grandparents live in Florida’? I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I’ve never felt it to be this graying state of retirees. It just seems like one of the most-alive places in the country.”

Until she turned 13 and, she says, “made the transition into makeup-wearing,” Russell would explore the mangroves along Biscayne Bay with a friend. “Weird, weird stuff would wash up there,” she recalls. “So to go down there and see what the tide had brought in was exciting.” The Russell family would spend time in the Flamingo area of Everglades National Park, camping on Watson Island and motoring around Biscayne Bay in a small boat. But they also would take excursions to places that rendered the natural world as a tacky souvenir shop, such as the Miami Serpentarium and the original Parrot Jungle.

“I’m sure there’s a direct link between that experience and the way I write now,” Russell says. “It was such a seamless part of what reality was. It
was sort of like, ‘Now, we go to the grocery store. Now, we go to this tawdry, enchanted Parrot Jungle.’ It was just all kind of whole cloth that that was what the world was. And then, I think it was later that I started to think about what a strange ratio of fantasy to reality Miami is.

“My mom was talking about this reptile house off of Dixie [the Miami Serpentarium],” she continues. “Anytime there was a tropical storm, the roof would come off it, and it would rain, like, this biblical rain of reptiles on everybody. Then, it was just, like, a regular Wednesday and it was, ‘Oh, crap — a hurricane ripped the roof off the reptile house and now we’re being pelted by tarantulas and snakes.’ ”

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While conducting research for Swamplandia!, Russell dragged her father and brother to Gatorland, a family-owned, 52-year-old theme park in Orlando known for its alligator wrestlers and snake exhibits. The park’s Gator Jumparoo Show, in which reptiles leap from their pools to snag chicken carcasses from suspended wires, appears in the novel as Live Chicken Thursdays, “a very popular and macabre attraction … with cloud-white hens suspended above [the gators], tied by their talons to a clothesline.”

“That was my big tax write-off,” Russell jokes of her visit to the park. “We got this really shitty motel with a terrifying dolphin mural. My brother and I were, like, in bunk beds. I was 26 at the time. I think they thought we were wildlife inspectors or something. Everyone was really leery of us because I had this black composition notebook. My dad was like, ‘Let’s go watch the snake show again.’ So we watched the snake show three times in a row. There was no one there that day. I don’t know what the staff must have thought. We fed drumsticks to some gators. That’s when I knew this is not going to be in any way an autobiographical novel, because I was terrified to feed the drumsticks to the gators. It was incredible to watch this dinosaur lunge out of a lagoon, lunge at a chicken breast, lunge at some white meat on a Tuesday. It’s just a very surreal place to go.”

Russell found herself in another dreamlike venue this past June when The New Yorker published its “20 Under 40” list, which also included such bold-faced literary names as Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart, Wells Tower and Nicole Krauss. Almost immediately, the books pages of newspapers and Web sites on both sides of the Atlantic began picking apart the list, with New York magazine labeling the selection process “a highbrow, literary American Idol.” For Russell’s fans, however, the announcement not only confirmed their idea of her as a writer with few — or, at least, no more than 19 — peers, it also afforded them a preview of Swamplandia! with The New Yorker’s publication of “The Dredgeman’s Revelation,” a short story that forms the novel’s ninth chapter.

“I’m anxious by nature, I think,” Russell says of learning her name appeared on the list. “So then, of course, my first thought is, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to have a stroke or develop a debilitating heroin addiction and I’ll just be writing wingdings, and they’ll be so embarrassed. [New Yorker editor] David Remnick will have to write a correction.’ Once I got over that feeling — that’s always sort of there as background noise — I couldn’t feel more grateful. They took one of my first stories [“Haunting Olivia,” in 2005] and it was just a fluky, lucky strike. I really feel like I owe that magazine so much. The stuff that I’m writing feels so whacked-out and weird to me, too. So it’s nice to have a vote of confidence.”

The constant focus on Russell’s age also puzzles the writer. “In no other industry would I be considered young,” she argues. “I’m, like, buying Oil of Olay products and have crow’s-feet. I have never felt young enough to warrant all this attention. But at the same time, my God, there’s just such a crushing volume of stuff that gets published. If they were [recognizing], like, I don’t know, petite brunet writers or picked some other basis to make this list, I would still be grateful for anyone saying, ‘Read this book.’ It’s made 30 look even scarier than it probably should. That’s my one complaint: I’ll be turning 30 and, suddenly, I’m over the hill.”

Even though the pressures of writing and publishing her first novel are behind her, Russell is feeling a bit unmoored. Her parents recently left Florida for a new home in California, she’s enduring yet another subarctic winter in New York and, after spending years with the Bigtree clan romping through her head, she’s adjusting her focus toward a new novel about the Dust Bowl.

“New York is a weird place. I’ve been here now for seven years, and it still doesn’t feel like home,” Russell admits. “I think South Florida always will feel that way. It’s so weird now that the book is done. It feels a little lonely, because I’ve been living in that world for so long. I wrote ‘Ava Wrestles the Alligator’ when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It’s such a shift not to be in that world.

“I hope I can still be a South Florida writer even if I’m writing about, like, some cow in Nebraska. I hope they don’t rescind that from me.”

Karen Russell will appear 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24 at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., in Coral Gables. Call 305-442-4408 or visit Booksandbooks.com.

Contact Jake Cline at jcline@citylinkmagazine.com.

by Jake Cline

A few months back, Salon book critic Laura Miller posted an essay titled “Why must a novel’s characters be likable?” that was spurred by her reading of Jonathan Franzen’s widely heralded and exhaustingly debated novel Freedom, which traces the fractured history of a well-heeled liberal couple’s relationship over the course of several decades. The idea that because Freedom’s characters can be cranky, stuck-up, foolish and self-destructive they therefore are unfriendable, and by extension unreadable, sticks in Miller’s craw, as it does mine.

“I’ve grown to hate such remarks,” Miller writes. “It makes me feel like we’re back in grammar school, talking about which kids are ‘nice’ and which kids are ‘mean.’ It’s a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a work of literature.”

She’s right, of course. Great books are riddled with protagonists whom lazy readers could force to sit at the losers’ table in some dopey, yet highly literary, school cafeteria: Hamlet, Humbert Humbert, Holden Caulfield, Huckleberry Finn — and those are just the ones whose names begin with H. But a pitiable nature does not an unfascinating character make, and this fact is not consigned only to literature. Michael Corleone is no one’s idea of a model husband, father or brother. The same goes for Tony Soprano. The Wire, otherwise known as the Best Television Show Ever and of All Time, boasted so many amoral antiheroes it may as well have been set in Ancient Greece. (The series’ creators settled for the next best thing: Baltimore.)

The thing is, Freedom’s central characters — Patty and Walter Berglund, their friend Richard Katz — are tough to like. They commit gross acts of betrayal, take advantage of others, sacrifice principles for personal gain, reject love, care more for birds than they do people and, perhaps most-unforgivable to some readers, generally act like arrogant pricks. As Miller so rightly points out, if these characters were real, you’d want nothing to do with them. But because they are fictional characters, specifically characters in a novel of such breathtaking scope and prose as this one, your judgment of them borders on the irrelevant. You may not like the Berglunds, their children or the womanizing rock star Katz, but you will understand them. So perfectly does Franzen depict these imperfect people that you will recognize them, if not in yourself, then in other people. And by the end of the novel — which I freely admit reduced me to a crumbling mass of tears — you will have no option but to respect them.

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The best art moves us in ways we don’t expect and pushes us in directions we may not want to go. Freedom does this, and so does The Suburbs, the third album by Montreal’s Arcade Fire and the only work this year that affected me as deeply and as troublingly as Franzen’s novel. It may have been a coincidence that these two dissections of middle-class life appeared in the same year, let alone the same month (August), but it sure didn’t feel like one as I became absorbed in Freedom, often with the anxious voice of Arcade Fire’s Win Butler playing in the background, at first competing for attention with the novel but ultimately becoming one with it. It’s gotten so I can’t listen to The Suburbs without flashing back to the pages of Freedom, and conversely, I can’t come across a mention of Franzen’s book without also hearing Butler sing, “They build it up just to burn it back down.”

Writing or singing about the potentially suffocating nature of life in the suburbs, where the American dream disintegrates as often as it materializes, if it bothers to appear at all, is hardly the most-original idea. Dissatisfied middle-class Americans are as easy to spot as Kevin Spacey’s receding hairline in American Beauty, Jimmy Stewart’s stammer in It’s a Wonderful Life or bad marital sex in the novels of John Updike. So what could a group of oddly coiffed art-punks from Canada possibly have to add to this decidedly self-winding conversation? Quite a bit, actually, though it’s not so much what Butler and his Arcade Fire bandmates say on The Suburbs as how they say it.

The music on The Suburbs is the most-unsettling of the band’s career, which is significant considering its previous albums, Funeral and Neon Bible, were masterful exercises in the art of unnerving the listener. On songs such as “Suburban War,” notes appear to descend until they have nowhere left to go but up. Bass lines bump along like an aging father lurching down a hallway toward a bathroom in the dark. Bows cut across strings like so many blades attacking Saturday-morning lawns. And when Butler doesn’t sound like he’s one disappointment away from backing the family SUV out of the driveway and never coming back, he’s like a wildly frustrated man trying to shout his way out of a straitjacket or, if there’s a difference, an office cubicle.

Yet like Freedom, The Suburbs doesn’t entirely close the door on the light, or resist raging against the dying of it. As the album nears its end, Butler sounds increasingly defiant, most clearly on “We Used To Wait,” which begins with a catalog of things the song’s narrator no longer does: write letters, sleep through the night, express love. But soon, old hungers return and Butler is reclaiming what is rightly his: “I’m gonna write a letter to my true love/I’m gonna sign my name … Gonna move through the pain … Wait for it! Wait for it! Wait for it!”

This brings me back to the likability question. It would be untrue to say The Suburbs is my favorite album of 2010. I had far more fun listening to and spent many more hours with Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding, the Gaslight Anthem’s American Slang and the Hold Steady’s Heaven Is Whenever than I did The Suburbs. (Runners take note: Those three albums are guaranteed to shave at least a minute off your mile; they’re that invigorating.) Likewise, I can’t say Freedom was the best book of 2010, since of the 30-plus novels I read this year, only five were published in the past 12 months and one, Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, was downright awful.

But like Laura Miller, I left grammar school behind long ago and have no interest in ever returning to that mindset. I didn’t always like Franzen’s novel while I was reading it, and sometimes, the Arcade Fire album offers more privileged angst than I can handle. “Oh, get over yourselves!” I’ll want to yell at the radio. (I don’t know about you, but I still feel weird talking to an iPod.) But I don’t have to like or even love the people at the center of Freedom or The Suburbs — or any work of art, for that matter — to be moved by them.

Franzen himself seems well aware of the futility of the likability argument, particularly as it pertains to his characters. After all, he writes in Freedom, “It wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.”

Contact Jake Cline at jcline@citylinkmagazine.com.

Willie Geist has been called one of MSNBC’s rising stars, and he’s one that rises much earlier than most of us. In the summer of 2009, Geist became the host of his own program, Way Too Early, on the network’s coveted 5:30-6 a.m. time slot. He follows that show’s tapaslike tidbits on the news and culture of the day by joining the panel of Morning Joe, colleague Joe Scarborough’s colorful, three-hour morning show. By the time many of us are waking up to showers, coffee and the morning commute, Geist has already been awake for a full seven hours.

“I was not and continue not to be a morning person, but there’s something about having first crack at everything,” Geist says. “I get the first look at the papers, and at Morning Joe, we’ve become the kind of place that sets the agenda. If you watch the networks over the course of the day, people end up talking about the stuff we’ve talked about, so it never feels like we’re doing a rehash. I wouldn’t mind not waking up at 3:30 in the morning, but I’m not superantsy [to move to a later time slot] at the moment.”

When Geist first launched his half-hour show, the audience was small — “the few, the proud, the Way Too Early viewers,” as Geist called them. “The joke was that it was Witness Protection television — come hide out on the show, because no one can see you,” he recalls.

That’s changed over the past year. His ratings have increased, and with DVR, TiVo and the Internet, you don’t have to be an insomniac or an über-early-riser to enjoy his comedic slant on today’s (and often yesterday’s) news. On Way Too Early, Geist essentially plows the same satirical terrain he’s worked for years at MSNBC, dating back to his first role as a nightly guest on Tucker Carlson’s short-lived prime-time program titled The Situation.

Although he’s worked primarily on shows by conservative hosts such as Carlson and Scarborough, Geist is no right-winger. But he doesn’t describe himself as liberal, either. “I keep my politics a little closer to me than others do,” he says. “Everyone on [Morning Joe] has so much political opinion that I’m not the political opinion guy.”

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Geist penned his first book, the newly released humor tome American Freak Show, with this sense of nonpartisanship in mind. The first chapter is a savagely funny critique of what a president-elect Sarah Palin’s inaugural address might be like, but Geist also takes potshots at Barack Obama, the Clintons, Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods and other disgraced celebrities.

The results don’t always work. Much of American Freak Show is filled with all-too-familiar caricatures of public figures that most late-night hosts have already exhausted — Bill Clinton is a horndog, George Bush is a numbnuts, etc. But the book has its share of inspired comedy tableaux, including a charity golf tournament set in dictatorial North Korea and a Friar’s Club-style roast of Bernie Madoff in hell.

“I had the list of characters, which is always helpful,” Geist says. “When writing a novel, you have to dream up all these people. The people were already dreamed up for me by reality, so that was nice. I knew their characteristics, so I just wanted to put them in situations that would put them on steroids and inflate who they are and turn them into total cartoon characters.”

Geist considers himself a student of comedy, but the best part of his book is the introduction, the only portion that isn’t satirical. He writes about former Illinois governor Rod Blagojovich’s blustery appearance on Morning Joe to promote his own book. Sauntering into the MSNBC studio proclaiming to anyone willing to listen that he was innocent of all charges against him, Blago lived up to everything Geist was hoping he would be, and it proved a major inspiration for American Freak Show.

“This guy sums it up,” Geist says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re famous or infamous. All that matters is you’re a celebrity. You do something bad, whether it’s a sex tape or trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, and who cares? It got you attention. Maybe pay a little fine or do a little jail time, but you’re famous, your name’s out there, you get a book deal, you get on a reality show. He just did a pistachio commercial I saw the other night during the World Series, so he’s eating it up.”

Willie Geist will appear 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 20 at at the Chapman Conference Center at Miami Dade College, 300 N.E. Second Ave., in Miami. He will read alongside South Florida’s own Dave Barry. Admission is $8. Call 305-237-3258. Visit Miamibookfair.com.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

Zachary Lipez (from left), Stacy Wakefield and Nick Zinner

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by Colleen Dougher

When Zachary Lipez, the singer for Freshkills, a post-punk band named for an old Staten Island landfill, reads one of his essays from Please Take Me Off the Guest List at the Miami Book Fair, he won’t be alone. Nick Zinner, the guitarist and keyboardist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Stacy Wakefield, the keyboardist from the black-metal band Hamsoken, will accompany him with ambient music and a slide show of Zinner’s photos.

That’s how these longtime friends, who’ve created books together for nine years, do things.

They met when they were in their 20s and living in the same Brooklyn neighborhood. “Our bands played together, so we knew each other through that and had complementary skills,” explains Wakefield, the co-founder of Evil Twin Publications. “Zach was writing and he and Nick had the idea that they would do a book where it would be his writing and Nick’s photos illustrating it. They knew that I made books, and said, ‘Hey, do you want to work on this with us?’ I got excited because I really liked the material. We had fun, so we kept finding projects to work on together.”

Wakefield, a former design director for Artforum and Index magazines, designs the books, some of which are as atypical as the group’s readings. No Seats on the Party Car, released in 2001, is a 3-by-4-inch paperback of Lipez’s poetry and Zinner’s photos. Slept in Beds, a hand-bound, limited-edition book released two years later, features Zinner’s photos of beds he slept in while traveling and Lipez’s words screenprinted on fabric inserted between the pages. In 2005, the trio’s third book of photographs and essays, Hope You Are All Happy Now, was published by St. Martin’s Press.

“They’ve all been quite different,” Wakefield says. “But [Please Take Me Off the Guest List] is really special because it’s such an even collaboration between us.”

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The paperback, published by Akashic Books last month, is larger than a CD case and smaller than a videotape. It features fold-out front and back covers, pages of Zimmer’s images and five essays on small paper pages nestled between the larger glossy ones. They’re kind of hidden in there, like the miniature books once found in Cracker Jack boxes, only bigger and with titles such as “Boring Coke Stories” and “I Like My Metal Like I Like My Women … False.”

In his essays, Lipez weaves tales of snorting coke in bathrooms, getting thrown out of casinos, being rejected by women and resigning from his bookstore-clerk job after management told him to stop drinking at work. “For the record,” he writes, “I NEVER drank on the job. I was, in fact, always still drunk from the night before.”

His stories read like interior monologues. In “Strep Throat Lover,” he addresses showering after sex. “Other than certain acts that require it, I never do,” he writes. “I’m a real snuggle bunny. Or I want to turn the lights up, have them go through their purse to see if they have more drugs and then talk about my CD collection for another seven hours. And as anyone will tell you, in the a.m., it’s a long, cruel slog from the bedroom to the tub.”

As personal as his stories can get, Lipez, who works as a bartender at Brooklyn’s Beauty Bar, says that in the interest of not humiliating himself or others, he leaves plenty out. Despite his talent for storytelling, Lipez doesn’t write every day.

“I’m so insanely lazy,” he admits. “I try to write more than I do. Normally I start with a sentence I like and then, for the purposes of this book, will try to attach it to things that happened or didn’t happen. But I don’t keep a diary or anything.”

Zinner keeps a diary, but fills it with photos rather than words. When touring, he photographs what’s around him, even from onstage looking out into the crowd. “It really comes down to documenting, cataloging all the experiences, basically like a diary. I still shoot film so it ends up being, like, 35 pictures a day,” he says. “Usually, there’s one or two from each roll with something that makes it interesting … something that resonates deeper than what actually is on the photo.”

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Zinner spent a few weeks sifting through about 15 years of work for 1001 Images, his recent solo exhibition in New York’s Soho district. The process helped him home in on the recurring themes in his work. “There are four or five themes I keep coming back to,” he explains. “Beds, definitely crowds, any kind of frame that is completely filled with heads, the opposite of that — places with nobody in them that might be suggestive of a presence — brash portraits that are very stark and funny moments.”

The photos in Please Take Me Off the Guest List were culled from his vast collection. “As the stories got more refined, Stacy and I would go through and find the photos that best suited the tone of Zach’s stories and place them around that,” Zinner explains. “We weren’t really looking for anything that would be illustrative of the stories but more just suggestive.”

The images include a madly painted bus, rows of empty seats, couples sucking face, a mouse in a toilet, crowd shots, a neon bar sign and beds Zinner has slept in, which number more than 600.

While Zinner has toured plenty with his band, this is the first time he, Lipez and Wakefield are doing a book tour. It’s also the first time they’ve released a 7-inch limited-edition record to accompany a book. It costs $50 but is bound in a fold-out poster sleeve and includes a signed photo from Zinner and a bonus story from Lipez titled “My Romantic Competition Among the Stalwarts of the Goth and Cold Wave and New Music Community.”

“It’s different from the performance we do because we actually wrote songs about the material from the book and recorded them,” Zinner explains. “One song is pretty and dreamy and I put lots of effects on Zach’s voice. Another is like a fake punk rock song and the other one is like an ’80s goth song.”

The book projects have kept the trio together through the years. “Stacy’s married now and lives upstate for three quarters of the year,” Zinner says. “We all really like each other, so it’s nice to have this excuse to hang out and do fun stuff.”

Lipez has really taken to the book-tour thing, which he points out is far different than touring with his band. “It’s been a series of extremely pleasant readings and then gorging ourselves on really good food,” he says. “Normally, you have these lows, and vans break down and everyone gets horribly drunk and you have adventures. But I don’t want an adventure right now. I wanna do the goddamn readings.”

Stacy Wakefield, Zachary Lipez and Nick Zinner will perform, present a slide show and read from Please Take Me Off the Guest List 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21 in the auditorium at Miami Dade College, 300 N.E. Second Ave., in Miami. Call 305-237-3528 or visit Miamibookfair.com.

Contact Colleen Dougher at cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.

Two of the country’s top political commentators will discuss their latest books this week at the Miami Book Fair International at Miami Dade College. Former Washington Post assistant editor and MSNBC contributor Eugene Robinson is supporting his third book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. Inspired by a surprising 2007 poll statistic that said 37 percent of African-Americans agreed with the statement that “Blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single group because the black community is so diverse,” Robinson identifies four autonomous groups comprising Black America: the Mainstream, the Abandoned, the Transcendent and the Emergent.

A few days later, Bill Press, a former Democratic chief of staff and now the host of a nationally syndicated progressive talk-radio show, will speak about his book Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America’s Airwaves. The book exposes the lies, distortions and dangerous rhetoric spewed forth from AM radio’s most infamous hate-mongers; analyzes why they’ve been so successful; and offers progressive solutions.

City Link recently spoke with Robinson and Press, whose interviews follow, respectively.

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Previous books that you’ve written, such as Coal to Cream and Last Dance in Havana, have been about specific populations in Brazil and Cuba. This book, in surveying the socioeconomic climate of Black America, may also be country-specific, but it seems a more-ambitious project, one that addresses segregation and desegregation, the Obama presidency, Hurricane Katrina, popular culture and more. Was this something of a heavier undertaking than your previous books?
Robinson: Yes, it was. Definitely. It was a lot more to try to get your head around and to make sense of, and to make sense of in a way that would be readable and not only understandable but digestible. The first two books were not necessarily easy, but they were more observation-based. In Coal to Cream, which draws on my experiences covering Brazil but also has some autobiographical stuff in it, that was difficult because it was the first book I had done, and having spent a career as a journalist, I had to learn to access that feelings part of my mind. But a lot of it was observation. Same with the Cuba book — a lot of observing and trying to understand a foreign place, getting as deep as you can. That’s not the same as trying to grapple with material from all these different sources and synthesize it.

What kind of change do you hope this book brings with the light you’re shedding on abandoned African Americans?
The one thing I really hope this book does is to prompt an honest discussion, a real discussion, and provide a new framework for talking about black Americans. Ultimately, what I hope that you’ll see when you get into the latter parts of the book, is that it may change some of the ways we think about affirmative action. But I certainly hope it makes people think about this abandoned group, and focus whatever resources we can marshal toward the people who really need that attention and those resources the most. That’s the kind of dialogue that I hope to get started with this book. I’ve been gratified at the interest people have shown and the willingness to engage in the dialogue.

There’s a passage I found particularly illuminating in the chapter on the black mainstream, and it’s about the black motorcycle group, which might attract some press for the sheer novelty of its existence, but wouldn’t be called upon to discuss a new helmet law. It reminds me that every time I see Cornel West or Michael Eric Dyson or Al Sharpton on TV, they’re called on to speak exclusively about black issues, even though they can speak eloquently about any political or social issue of the day. Have you been similarly pigeonholed as a pundit, and does it bother you?
I try not to be pigeonholed like that. I’ve done a lot of different things in my career at the Post. I’ve been the foreign editor, run the style section, been a foreign correspondent in Latin America. There are times when I am eager to speak about issues affecting the African-American community, but I go on NBC and talk about politics in general. I don’t feel pigeonholed, although I guess that’s in the eyes of the beholder.

It doesn’t seem to be an issue on NBC, but when you wrote about your one appearance on O’Reilly’s show, it seemed like you were supposed to speak for all black people.
Well, I was that time, and that’s why it was my one appearance on Fox. I think this is a systemic issue in the American media that I think is well understood but not always addressed, which is this tendency to see a black issue and go for the black pundits and scholars you have on speed dial, get them in, and forget about them on other issues about which, as you point out, they can speak with equal eloquence and knowledge. And I know that at the Post, times when I have been an editor, we’ve had discussions about that at a high level and talked about the need to diversify our base of sources more broadly and not to pigeonhole people. Those memos are like going to church. They go to church and get the spirit, and they’re going to be good, but then they might sin a little. And so it’s the kind of thing that I think we have to keep working on.

Considering the chapter on the Transcendents, were you surprised or disappointed or both at their lack of support for the president when he was campaigning?
I was a little surprised, and then I came to understand why some people were skeptical. We’re basically talking about people whose allegiance is to the Democratic party, people who had a personal relationship with the Clintons, and the Clintons were very good at establishing personal relationships with all kinds of people. And I understood this kind of skepticism that this isn’t really going to happen. To a certain extent, I had that impulse, too, at first, that this is all well and good, but we’re not really going to elect a black president. That eventually, the Clintons would wipe the floor with them, so why are we going through all this? As I started covering the campaign and seeing then-Sen. Obama and the spark he was getting from audiences, my view started to change. The key point for me were the Iowa Caucuses at the beginning of 2008, when this overwhelmingly white state showed beyond enthusiasm — almost a rapture — that Obama was able to evoke. I came back from that experience with a different viewpoint.

I was never able to handle the argument leading up to the election that we’re not ready for this yet. It always seemed like such a conservative argument that people have made to say we’re not “ready” for desegregation yet, or we’re not “ready” for women’s suffrage yet.
Exactly. Whenever I was asked that question, including on the air, I always said that it was basically a meaningless question. Firsts happen when they happen. There’s no gauge of readiness that you could put to it. It didn’t make sense to sit around and debate whether the nation was ready for this event. We’re ready when it happens.

An Evening With Eugene Robinson will take place 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 18 at the Chapman Conference Center at Miami Dade College, 300 N.E. Second Ave., in Miami. Tickets cost $10. Call 305-237-3258.

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We can tie this into your book, Toxic Talk, because it seems to be the kind of book that could be updated on a day-to-day basis. What kind of an impact did toxic talk have on the recent midterm election?
Press: Total. You’re right, this book should be online and updated every day, because there are more ugly things being said every day. I trace the current trend in real violence that we saw toward the end of this campaign back to the town hall meetings that the Tea Partiers around the country organized in the summer of 2009. That whole thing was directly influenced by the toxic talk from right-wing talk radio and Fox News. So in a way, Fox News really created this Tea Party and the atmosphere of hate and violence that we saw in this campaign. To the extent that there was a 25-minute documentary that was run toward the end of the campaign in five different states that accused Obama of taking money from terrorists in his campaign, once again of not being an American citizen, of being un-American, not loving his country …

All those relevant issues.
Yeah. But it is whipped up every day by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Michael Savage and those voices who have been engaging in ugly personal attacks against Obama from the time he first appeared on the scene. And again, we’re seeing the results of it in this political season. And it’s not just the ugly words, unfortunately. We’re also seeing them translated into actions in the woman who was protesting outside the Rand Paul event who had her head stomped on, and the guy who was dragged out of a coffee shop by three cops at an Eric Cantor event. And most frighteningly so by this guy named Brian Williams in the San Francisco Bay area, who was stopped by the police for a traffic violation, and they found three guns in his car, and he admitted he was on his way to wipe out the leadership of the Tides Foundation because he had heard from Glenn Beck that this was a dangerous organization. It’s an environmental foundation that gives grants for environmental projects, particularly in Africa, and suddenly they’re the most dangerous organization in America, and you’ve got a nut like him who hears that on the air, and he says, ‘Well, if Glenn Beck can’t do anything about it, I can!’ So it’s a very dangerous phenomenon, this toxic talk, and it surrounds us.

One of the goals of this book must be to not simply preach to the choir. Ideally, this book would change people’s listening habits and make people realize they’re being sold snake oil by these hosts. To what extent has the book been successful in this regard?
I think the jury’s still out on that. I just want to inform people and help people understand what is going on. It’s not just to change people’s listening habits, but I was really hoping, and I haven’t seen any sign of progress here, to influence decisionmakers, particularly members of Congress, that it should be a high priority to bring balance to the airwaves, that the public airwaves should reflect the great diversity of this country, which today they simply do not. We haven’t been able to get anybody to champion that yet.

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Are there any conservative hosts you like?
I think Michael Smerconish is smart and good. I think Michael Medved is pretty fair. Now, I’m drawing a blank. I used to listen to Laura Ingraham, but she’s gotten more and more shrill. So let me stick with Medved and Smerconish.

And they were not mentioned in your book, so I guess that’s saying something.
Exactly. In fact, I talked to Michael [Medved] about that, and he said, “The only thing I’m pissed off about your book is that you didn’t mention me.” And I said, “Michael, there’s a reason I didn’t mention you, because I don’t think you’re a toxic talker. So take it as a complement.”

Bill Press will read alongside political writers John Avlon and Douglas Schoen at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21 at the Chapman Conference Center at Miami Dade College, 300 N.E. Second Ave., in Miami. Admission is $8. Call 305-237-3258.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

Julie Orringer

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by Jake Cline

The lineup for the 27th Miami Book Fair International is as impressive as any I’ve seen. Catering to readers with both catholic and provincial tastes in literature, the Book Fair is also the rare event that would present the hawkish ex-president George W. Bush and the pacifistic punk icon Patti Smith on the same stage, though regrettably not at the same time. But the big names are not confined to former residents of the White House and CBGB. Many top fiction and nonfiction writers will appear at the fair, which will begin this Sunday (Nov. 14), continue during the week the “An Evening With … ” series and conclude with a weekend’s street fair and lengthy slate of author readings and autograph sessions, all at Miami-Dade College’s Wolfson Campus. For the full schedule of events, visit Miamibookfair.com. My recommendations follow.

SATURDAY, NOV. 20
2:30 p.m. Vendela Vida, Jennifer Egan and Julie Orringer: Building 1, Room 1261
Responsible for three of the best-reviewed novels of 2010, Vida, Egan and Orringer will sit together on a panel in which they’ll discuss those books and likely answer questions about their various projects (Vida co-wrote the screenplay for director Sam Mendes’ Away We Go with husband Dave Eggers; Egan is a PowerPoint fanatic) and work habits (Orringer made her fans wait seven years for her second book; the other two are somewhat more-prolific). Vida’s The Lovers concerns a grieving, middle-aged American widow on vacation in Turkey. Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is a treatise on the ravages of time, told from multiple points of view and tuned to the chords of late-’70s, Southern California punk; the bold work even ends with a 70-page PowerPoint presentation. Finally, Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge follows up her acclaimed short-story collection How To Breathe Underwater with a novel about the plight of Hungarian Jews during World War II. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times fell just short of rapture in their praise of the book.

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11:30 a.m. Dave Eggers: Building 3, Room 3210
Eggers arrived in 2001 with his magisterial, if scattered, memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the influence he has had on contemporary literature ever since — particularly through his McSweeney’s publishing house and Web site — cannot be understated. As fewer and fewer Americans turn to books for education, entertainment and enlightenment, Eggers has remained a steadfast advocate for literature as a force for good. Voice of Witness, the nonprofit organization he co-founded with the physician Lola Vollen, publishes a series of oral histories that chronicle human-rights violations and catastrophes in America and abroad. Another Eggers project, 826 National, tutors students ages 6 to 18 in writing in eight cities across the country. Through the McSweeney’s imprint, he also publishes the literary magazine The Believer and produces the DVD series Wholphin. Remarkably, Eggers still finds time to write. His latest work, last year’s Zeitoun, is an outstanding nonfiction account of the various tragedies that befell a Muslim-American family in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Time will tell if it stands as the definitive report of that sad chapter in our nation’s history — and I’d argue that it will — but for now, at least, it affirms Eggers’ top-tier status in yet another field: investigative journalism.

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12:30 p.m. Greil Marcus and Alex Ross: Building 3, Room 3210
For more than 40 years, Marcus has been writing about rock ’n’ roll with the bleeding heart of a punk and the probing mind of a scholar. He has exhaustively (and exhaustingly) crafted a mountain of books and essays about Elvis Presley, Van Morrison and British punk, as well as contemporary literature, film and politics. His favorite subject, one he’s returned to again and again, reappears in his latest book, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. As is Marcus’ wont, the book, as Publisher’s Weekly dryly noted, “seems to include every article, comment or essay in which he so much as mentions Dylan.” Still, few writers or Dylanologists deserve to be granted such an indulgence as Marcus, whose Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1998) and Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975) demand to be taken as seriously as their subjects.

Alex Ross, meanwhile, has managed something of which few writers would seem capable: making classical music seem as exciting and fresh as genres centuries younger than it. In the pages of The New Yorker, Ross routinely balances a fanboy’s enthusiam with a modernist’s ear for context, investing his reviews of live performances and studio recordings with a level of relevance the scribes at Pitchfork would be hard-pressed to achieve. Ross had a surprise bestseller with 2007’s The Rest Is Noise, his survey of 20th century music that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The recently published followup, Listen to This, offers essays from The New Yorker and original pieces such as “Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues,” which Ross describes on his Web site as “a rapid-moving history of music told through bass lines.” Another piece, “Infernal Machines,” ties together “Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Brahma, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Sonic Youth, Cecil Taylor and a dozen others.” If that sounds like a tall order, know that Ross is writer enough to pull it off.

2 p.m. Sebastian Junger and Karl Marlantes: Building 3, Room 3210
The testosterone in this room will be mighty thick when daredevil journalist Junger and first-time novelist Marlantes discuss their respective new books, War and Matterhorn. Junger, who struck it rich with The Perfect Storm, a work of reportage and imagination about a doomed Massachusetts fishing boat and her crew, is now promoting War, a wholly nonfictional account about the months he spent with American troops in Afghanistan’s deadly Korangal Valley, which he describes as “a miraculous kind of antiparadise.” Earlier this year in The New York Times, Junger reviewed another kind of book about another kind of war: Matterhorn by Vietnam War veteran Marlantes, who spent 30 years writing this now-600-page book (it once clocked in at 1,600 pages) about, as Junger writes, “a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam.” Junger concludes his review by calling Matterhorn “a brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history.” He wasn’t the only reader to heap praise upon the book this year, and given the portions of the book I’ve read, I’m certain he won’t be the last.

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SUNDAY, NOV. 21

5 p.m. Jonathan Franzen: Building 3, Room 3210
I’ll admit it: I cried at the end of Freedom, Franzen’s widely lauded, debated and mocked novel about a left-leaning, Midwestern couple, their rock-star friend, their children and, oh, the general condition of American society in the 21st century. It’s a big, important book with big, important themes that has left big, important people tripping over themselves to praise or demonize it in distinct and meaningful ways. Good for them, and good for Franzen. But as ambitious and weighty as the novel may be — at 576 pages, it’s no beach read — it connects in the most-basic, most-human way, and does so without resorting to cheap, tawdry gimmicks or Nicholas Sparks-like simple-mindedness. So yeah, it left me in tears at the end — not, “goddamn it, I slammed my goddamn toe in the goddamn door!” tears, not “I can’t believe that little kid shot Omar Little on The Wire” tears, and certainly not “the dog dies at the end of My Dog Skip” tears (go to hell — I own a Jack Russell terrier), but tears nonetheless. And I’m not alone: The New Yorker’s Ian Crouch and The New Republic’s Ruth Franklin have admitted to choking up during the final pages of Freedom. Call me a wuss if you will, but I have another word for those people who say they made it to the end of Freedom without turning red-eyed and blue: liars.

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More authors not to be missed: Wednesday, Nov. 17: 8 p.m. John Waters (Role Models). Friday, Nov. 19: 8 p.m. Patti Smith (Just Kids). Saturday, Nov. 20: 10 a.m. Walter Mosley (The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey), 11 a.m. Ferdie Pacheco (Tales From the 5th St. Gym), 11:30 a.m. Susan Casey (The Wave), 12:30 p.m. James Ellroy (The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women), 3 p.m. Sean Kenniff (Etre the Cow), 4 p.m. Gay Talese (The Silent Season of a Hero: The Sports Writing of Gay Talese). Sunday, Nov. 21: 11 a.m. Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall), noon Craig Pittman (Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Florida’s Most Famous Endangered Species), 2 p.m. Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Ben Greenman (Celebrity Chekhov: Stories by Anton Chekhov) and 3 p.m. Ben Mezrich (The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook).

Contact Jake Cline at jcline@citylinkmagazine.com.

Photo by Beth Black

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by Colleen Dougher

At 13, David Le Batard began drawing at a drafting table in his bedroom while listening to old Cajun and folk music and artists as disparate as Van Morrison and 2 Live Crew on a yellow Sony cassette player. “I’d been drawing before that, but at that time, I was drawing every night and all night while listening to tapes,” the Miami artist better known as Lebo recalls. “It put things in a certain mood and would create this really tranquil environment that I appreciated, because growing up, I was a bit antsy. I guess now they would determine it was ADD or something, but I think I just had an overactive imagination and was a bit rambunctious.”

Twenty-five years later, Lebo still has a vivid imagination. He also has a tendency to take breaks every 15 minutes during workdays that may stretch on for 14 hours. “I think that’s just been my natural rhythm of working, but part of it is that when you’re making art or creating music, it’s important to step away,” he explains. “It’s like having sorbet between courses. To me, you have to get something else in your head. So I’ll watch part of a movie or make something to eat — whatever reboots my system — and when I go back, I see it with fresh eyes. I’m generally just a multitasker. I tend to do more than one thing at one time.”

That may explain Lebo’s ability to juggle a client base that has included Macy’s, Adidas and Gibson Guitars with positions such as a three-year assistant curatorship at the International Museum of Cartoon Art, an eight-year gig as art director for the Miami band Spam Allstars and a four-year post as art director for the Langerado Music Festival. Lebo has created large murals throughout South Florida, designed a guest house for Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams, served as official artist for the 2003 Latin Grammy Awards, exhibited at Google’s headquarters and painted portraits of Damian Marley, Jack Johnson, Lil Jon and others for Universal Republic Records. Last month, Lebo’s Inspired by the Beat, a coffee-table book about the music that inspires him, was released by Art Publishing. The 1,000-book print run includes 300 boxed deluxe editions, each accompanied by an original watercolor, numbered and signed by Lebo.

Inspired by the Beat chronicles the artist’s journey from the drafting table of his childhood bedroom to concert stages on which he’s painted alongside acts such as the Dead, String Cheese Incident, Willie Nelson, Arturo Sandoval, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars and the Beastie Boys — this time live rather than on tape. (The Le Batard home was certainly a creative one; Lebo’s brother is Dan Le Batard, the Miami Herald sports columnist, ESPN contributor and 790 The Ticket talk-show host.)

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As a kid, Lebo, read about Michelangelo’s painting the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling while listening to a live orchestra. “The idea of living and surviving as an artist was, in itself, hard to get my head around,” he notes in his book, “but the concept of creating art at the exact moment of being struck by the muse was a fantasy, something that only happened in my dreams.”

Later, Lebo discovered Denny Dent, who speed-painted portraits of rock stars while listening to their music and yielding multiple brushes in both hands. “I was like, ‘Man that’s a really cool way to make art that goes outside of the stodginess of the gallery system,’ ” Lebo remembers. “I’m sure there are a lot of artists who frown on it, but to me, art should be an egalitarian experience. I felt like [live painting] was a way to really introduce it to an audience and into a crowd. I like the solitary experience of creating work in the studio, but I like it a lot more when I can balance it with doing that stuff.”

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After graduating from Florida International University in 1995, Lebo began creating large, black-and-white drawings on paper while listening to the Spam Allstars rehearse in DJ Le Spam’s tiny apartment. “It was probably about 400 square feet, with a bed in the middle of it and covered with records that took every available inch of wall space,” he says.

Eventually, Lebo acquired an overhead projector and created live animation on transparencies during jam sessions. “It was in the small, smoky, cramped house parties and late-night warehouse gatherings that these live animated episodes would play out alongside trippy psychedelic jazz sessions, almost like a Saturday morning cartoon turned inside out and upside down,” he notes in his book, “The idea was to capture and interpret the moment as it evolved, and then set it free.”

Before long, Lebo was painting his music-inspired images, with their bold black lines, bright colors and text, onto more-permanent canvases at concerts that drew tens of thousands of people. “Langerado was that jumping-off point where it started to solidify into something different,” says Lebo, who became the now-defunct festival’s art director in 2005. “I’d been doing it on a more-local level for a long time, so it made sense. I ended up doing stuff with Beastie Boys, Thievery Corporation, the Disco Biscuits. The Disco Biscuits and I have gone on to do a lot together. I ended up planning one of their album covers and have done live stuff with them about 12 times.”

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While the audience for Lebo’s images continues to grow, his sentiment remains the same. “I remember when we did Rothbury Festival [in Michigan] last summer,” he says. “Sean [McCourt] was with me and another buddy of ours, Jason. We’d look over the crowd and go, ‘Man, that’s 40,000 people. That’s really intense.’ But once the music started, it would just scale down to what it was, and it sounds kind of silly but it really became about the same thing it was about when I was a kid working with those tapes. It becomes about the mood that’s being set.”

Monte Lipman, the Universal Republic president and CEO who wrote the foreword to Inspired by the Beat, says Lebo captures that mood in an “insanely cool” way. “His amalgamation of music and art struck me like a shot of cheap bourbon, eye-popping and intense,” Lipman writes about meeting Lebo in a Manhattan gallery. “Five years later, he remains a dear friend of mine. His work covers many walls of my home and the Universal Republic offices. For me, his work is a concrete expression of his connection with music. … In a world of the homogenization of culture, Lebo glides through the crowded space like the smooth technician that he is.”

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For more information, visit Lebostudios.com. Contact Colleen Dougher at cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.

Sean Kenniff checks up on a bovine friend. (Photos by Beth Black.)

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by Colleen Dougher

With so many people losing their jobs, the workplace can feel like a never-ending season of Survivor. But for Sean Kenniff, even spending 36 days on the remote Malaysian island of Pulau Tiga during the reality show’s original season didn’t prepare him for the day he lost his job as a medical correspondent for CBS News and its South Florida affiliate, WFOR-Channel 4.

The network had laid off many of Kenniff’s colleagues, yet he didn’t expect to lose his job to budget cuts. “I was an essential part of the team,” he says. “I was assured my job was secure. I worked hard. I never missed a day of work. I never got a bad review. So it really came as a surprise to me.”

Even more surprising was the life-changing moment he experienced while headed home that day to Doral. “I was driving in my Jeep with my termination papers in the passenger seat and crying because it took me by surprise,” he recalls. “I stopped at a red light on Doral Boulevard, and there was a brownish-gray cow with horns near the fence. It was looking out at traffic, and looking at me, and I was looking back and I thought, ‘That’s how I feel. I feel so powerless over my life — like a cow.’ It was as if I am a cow.

“The seed was planted,” he continues. “It started germinating that maybe I should go spend more time with the cows, because that’s how I felt.”

Odd as that may sound, Kenniff began spending time in South Florida pastures among the animals that populate his first novella, Être the Cow. Told from a bull’s perspective, the book chronicles the seemingly insignificant existence of cows at the fictional Gorwell (as in Animal Farm author George Orwell) Farm, where Être lives at the mercy of flies, other bulls, gunmen, cattle and people who yell, “Moo, cow!” from beyond the barbed-wire fence that separates dignity from disgrace.

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While some cows find comfort in the familiarity of grazing on grass, kale and feed in a fenced-in pasture, Être wonders how he can gain control of his life. His understanding of himself and his surroundings makes him painfully aware of where all that grazing will take him and his son, Bull Calf. He’s determined to escape the farm that imprisons them. But freedom comes with sacrifice.

Kenniff’s 144-page novel, published in April by Deerfield Beach-based Health Communications, is a simple yet relevant fable that’s rich in symbolism and has earned high praise from the likes of famed animal-rights activist Jane Goodall, who noted that this account of “the drab, sometimes terrifying world of a modern ‘farm’ ” is one of the most-extraordinary books she’s ever read. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, says, “Être the Cow depicts a very human struggle” and is “one of the most important works written in a generation.”

Kenniff, who presents a daily one-minute health segment for CBS Radio, operates Healthapalooza.com and is a health specialist on the Lifetime network’s morning program The Balancing Act, didn’t plan to start hoisting himself over barbed-wire fences and sneaking into cow pastures the year he turned 40. Just a little more than 10 years ago, he was a partner in a bustling neurology practice in New York. But he grew disillusioned with the business of medicine.

“The reimbursements were going lower and lower and we employed 28 billers for four doctors,” he explains. “That’s modern medicine. I wasn’t comfortable with spending 15 minutes with a person who has a brain tumor. It might be the 10,000th brain tumor that you’ve seen, but it’s their first and they deserve a lot more attention than they currently get. I really did not feel comfortable with it, so I left my job.

“I was single,” he adds. “I was 29 and I said, ‘You know, I’ve been a good student all my life. I went straight from school, straight through residency, straight to chief residency and into practice. If I’m not gonna take a chance in life when am I ever going to?’ I gave 2 1/2 months notice and I figured I would do Doctors Without Borders or the Peace Corps. I always wanted to do medical television so I figured maybe I would start writing a journal and start up a health show — make it regional then national.”

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A day after giving notice to his partners and patients, Kenniff was on a Philadelphia-bound train to visit an old roommate from medical school when he read a Time magazine story about a new reality show called Survivor.

“I ripped it out, stuck it in my pocket and didn’t even think about it again until I was with my old roommate in Philly,” Kenniff remembers. “And we’re drinking beers, and he’s like, ‘What the heck you gonna do with your life?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll try out for this.’ ”

The following spring, Kenniff was on an uninhabited Malaysian island, competing on Survivor. He lasted 36 days before becoming the 12th of 16 contestants to be voted off the island. Later that year, he played a doctor on a few episodes of the daytime soap opera Guiding Light. In 2001, he went to work for CBS News, where he remained a medical correspondent until last year.

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Unlike Être’s search for a way off the farm, Kenniff searched for a way onto pastures such as the one he noticed on the day he got fired. “I didn’t have permission to go in and out of these farms,” he says. “So like your typical 16-year-old kid who wants to go cow-tipping, I hopped fences all over South Florida, including that one, which was riskier than others. A pickup truck would pull in and stop, and they’d look at me, and then I’m like, ‘OK, it’s time for me to leave.’ ”

Kenniff kept a stepladder hidden in some bushes near one farm and began carrying a knapsack full of things that might help explain his presence on a cow pasture. “I always made sure to have field notes, studies, pencils and drawings,” he says. “This way, if I got caught by police or a farmer, I could say I’m just doing field research.

“I knew nothing about cows before this,” Kenniff admits.

Apparently, they weren’t so sure about him, either. “Cows are herd animals and hypervigilant,” he explains, “so when there’s a change in their environment, they get really uppity and really scared. So at first, the lead cows would stand guard and watch me or [they’d] all go to the other side of the pasture.

“In getting to know a few of the cows, they all have very individual personalities,” Kenniff continues.

“Some are more brazen than others, some are more cantankerous, and some, when you look in their eyes, are very curious. I might be anthropomorphizing here, but some of them I think realize their circumstances and are ashamed to know that they’re perhaps one of the lowest links on the food chain. There’s no such thing as a wild cow anymore. They’re all fenced in, and powerless over their lives.”

That feeling is one many people now understand. “I think that’s the place where most people are these days,” says Kenniff, who this week is releasing a book of advice titled Stop Effing Yourself: A Survivor’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Screw-ups. “How much control do you really have over your job and your job security? How much control do you have over your finances with everybody that lost their savings through no fault of their own? How secure is the roof over your head when all these people have defaulted on their mortgages?”

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Knowing that many other people are struggling to pay their bills and keep their homes doesn’t lessen the emotional impact of sudden unemployment. “You feel rudderless and purposeless,” Kenniff admits. “I mean, I know that I’m a bright guy. I know that I’m a kind guy. I know that I’m a conscientious worker. But to find myself at my age, with my career, out of my job, was really a shot to the soul. It really was humiliating. I felt disgraced. I felt powerless over the situation, and I think that millions of Americans went through the same thing.

“We’re all cows in a sense — every single one of us — and we all answer to something,” Kenniff explains. “It could be a disease, it could be an employer, a drug addiction or alcohol abuse. But I think the average American has to wake up and take back some of the power and control from those who have it.”

Until that happens, Kenniff says Être the Cow’s success will remain undetermined.

“If it goes down as a little footnote that a former television broadcaster, neurologist, Survivor contestant wrote this interesting book that got some pretty good critical reviews, then maybe it didn’t do its job,” he says. “Being a success story requires a ‘What’s next?’ Does Être become anything? Does it move forward? Does it inspire other people to do exactly as I have done, to say, ‘Hey, enough is enough. I want more control over my life?’ If people start doing that, then Être the Cow has done what it should do.”

Sean Kenniff will sign copies of Être the Cow and Stop Effing Yourself: A Survivor’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Screwups 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 3 at Books and Books, 9700 Collins Ave., in Bal Harbor. Call 305-864-4241 or visit Booksandbooks.com.

Contact Colleen Dougher at cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.

John Avlon

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by John Thomason

In today’s political climate, there’s nothing more radical than a raging moderate, and nothing more unusual than an outspoken centrist. Moderates and centrists have no place to sit in the noisome cafeteria of modern politics, an endless battle of right-wing vs. left-wing, waged on the self-segregating milieus of cable news, talk radio, the Internet and, increasingly, the halls of Congress. This is the convincing quagmire laid out in Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, written by John Avlon, a senior political writer for The Daily Beast.

“This book itself is a rebellious project,” Avlon says. “The conventional wisdom in media and politics is that playing to the base is the smart move. I’m glad that my book is countercyclical. It shakes people up. They’re not used to seeing a centrist stand up and fight back.”

A book that actually deserves the title “fair and balanced,” Wingnuts identifies and excoriates extremism on both sides, from birthers to 9-11 truthers, from Glenn Beck to Keith Olbermann, from Bush Derangement Syndrome to Obama Derangement Syndrome. In a publishing world where political best sellers are written by talk-show hosts and columnists demonizing one side only, it’s not surprising that Avlon has received his share of hate mail from both political bases for daring to spread the blame.

“My answer to them is, if we only focus on the extremes on one side, we end up feeding and fueling the problem,” he says. “If you’re going to discuss Obama Derangement Syndrome, you need to deal with Bush Derangement Syndrome, as well. It makes some people really angry, but I’m convinced it needs to be done. There’s something fundamentally intellectually dishonest about the way we debate.

“In interviews I’ve done, people say that when the left compared Bush to Hitler, it was a much fairer comparison,” Avlon adds. “But Hitler is Hitler. When people confuse losing an election with living under tyranny, it’s fundamentally unhelpful to the American experiment.”

If the word hadn’t become such a tarnished Beltway punch line, you might say Avlon is a maverick. A former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and a registered independent, Avlon was one of a few writers responsible for penning the eulogies of the New York firefighters, police officers and Port Authority workers who perished in the World Trade Center collapse. His essay on the terrorist attack, titled “The Resilient City,” is considered one of the finest written about 9-11. He now has a weekly segment on CNN bringing wingnuttery to the public’s attention, and his newest book began as an outgrowth of his first tome, Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.

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Few would question Avlon’s patriotism, but it’s precisely that “few” whom his book targets. Composing the book over an exhaustive three-month period of fact-compiling and boots-on-the-ground reporting, Avlon went deep down the wingnut well, engaging directly with tea partyers, unhinged town-hall protesters, evangelicals praying for Obama’s death and birther-in-chief Orly Taitz, to name a few.

He even spoke with members of the Phelps family, the notorious purveyors of the certified hate group Westboro Baptist Church. In an effort to debunk rumors that Barack Obama was a fascist and a Communist, Avlon interviewed actual fascists and communist leaders in our political fringe, neither of whom would credibly claim the 44th president as one of their own.

“It’s very intense when you spend a lot of time with people who are pumping up fear and hate,” says Avlon, who editorialized little when interviewing extremists, letting their words dig their own holes. “I tried to be fair to the people and understand how they see things. It’s important to see who they are as people.”

Ultimately, Wingnuts is not simply a catastrophic taking of our nation’s feverish temperature. Avlon concludes the book by offering alternatives to the destructive status quo. Despite the disproportionate media coverage given to tea partyers and their ilk, Avlon considers centrists to be the new silent majority, concluding that the rise in independent voters indicates that most people are fed up with the current Balkanization of our politics.

And his words are reaching the right people. When Bill Clinton — himself the victim of murder accusations and communist slurs from the far right — used the word hatriots in his recent speech remembering the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was referencing Avlon’s book.

John Avlon will speak and sign copies of Wingnuts 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 11 at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., in Coral Gables. The event is free. Call 305-442-4408 or visit Booksandbooks.com.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

On the outside, Winnie the Pooh is a kindhearted, lovable persona, signing autographs for starry-eyed children and posing for adorable snapshots. On the inside, he’s an actor who gets through the unbearable grind of the average Disney workday by masturbating into his bear suit.

That’s one of the tamer revelations in Chris Mitchell’s new memoir-reportage hybrid, Cast Member Confidential. Mitchell, an action-sports photographer and journalist from California, landed a job at Disney World to escape a life that was falling apart — his girlfriend left him for his best friend, his successful brother shunned him, his mother was dying of cancer and his career was in the gutter. The microcosmic fantasyland of Disney World provided an escape, an ostensible retreat to the kind of magical, antiseptic innocence where dreams come true and the skies never darken.

What he found was a hedonist’s playground, a veritable Sodom buried beneath the plastic smiles and ubiquitous Mouse ears.

“All of my expectations were wrong,” Mitchell recalls in a recent interview. “I thought I was a pretty good judge of character, but apparently not. In hindsight, it’s like college. You come in out of high school, or maybe you’re on break from high school, and you’re working for Disney … Of course, you’re going to be exposed to some experimentation.”

As Mitchell reveals, in the Disney culture, deviant behavior is more than a routine occurrence; it’s a rite of passage to prove you belong. You haven’t really arrived until you’ve joined the SOP club (that would mean Sex on Property), orgiastic parties overflow the rooms of Disney’s low-income housing complexes and Cast Members (a euphemism for anyone on the theme park payroll) have easy, unlimited access to drugs if they know which Minnie or Tigger is dealing behind the curtain.

And the people, at least the ones Mitchell finds interesting enough to write about, are an eccentric bunch, many of them certifiably sociopathic. Mitchell’s best friend at the park is the kind of guy who drives out to the middle of a swamp to “liberate” a trailer-park pit bull from its neglectful owners and later tries to use Mitchell as a mule to smuggle meningitis vaccines from Cuba. His roommate, a Disney PR rep and Southern gay man who loves NASCAR and whiskey, preaches at the altar of Orlando kingmaker Lou Pearlman and tries to form his own gay boy band. One memorable scene finds Mitchell walking in on his roomie’s photo shoot, full of barely legal nude boys piled in a possibly pederastic orgy.

But some of the most enlightening sections of the book are the less scandalous ones. Mitchell provides an in-depth look at the backstage mechanics of Disney World and the rigid protocols that breed dissent and depravity. He writes adeptly about the Cast Member hierarchy, from janitors to vendors to greeters to the characters — large-egoed show-biz types with their own caste system within the cast system.

“It’s almost like a little Hollywood,” Mitchell says. “They picture themselves as these elite performers, which they are in the Disney system. You get people who love that performance element. They may not have what it takes to move out to Hollywood, but they could be someone in Orlando.”

Still, it was the potentially inflammatory subject matter that caused the book to linger in legal limbo for a decade. Mitchell wrote the book in 2000, but, as he says, “It took nine years to find a publisher brave enough to distribute it and to get through the legal elements. Kensington went through a bunch of rounds with lawyers. I had to use legal terms like allegedly — a few things changed in some places. I worried about Disney going after [the people I wrote about]. If they find out so-and-so did some ecstasy, it would be grounds for an investigation, if not full dismissal.”

To avoid the possibility of libel suits, Mitchell changed the names (and the characters they portrayed) of the people he exposed. He has yet to be threatened with a lawsuit.

Although Mitchell left Disney’s employ on bitter terms — as detailed in the book’s shocking final act — part of him misses his stint there, and if he had kids, he’d love to bring them to the park. Perhaps that’s why Cast Member Confidential is less of the anti-Disney hit piece than you might expect.

“At the end of the day, I love Disney as a corporation,” Mitchell says. “They do an amazing job of entertainment. There are mornings when I wake up in L.A. and it’s more humid than usual and the sun’s coming up, and I totally miss being able to drive to the Animal Kingdom and watch the animals wake up.”

Chris Mitchell will appear 8 p.m. Tuesday at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., in Coral Gables. Call 305-442-4408 or visit Booksandbooks.com. Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.