David Bittinger grew up in a prosperous western suburb of Chicago, one so pleasantly insular that he didn’t realize his family was far from prosperous. Through fate or just Midwestern provincialism, he ended up in a western suburb of Milwaukee, one infested with wild turkeys (not the bourbon, unfortunately). In the interim, he was a student in the first coed class at Vassar, later wrote lots of ads, and placed pieces on the op-ed pages of a number of newspapers. Then he recognized that newspapers were leaving little space for wise-guy freelancers . . . and were dying.
Figures of admiration include Gustav Mahler, Ivan Turgenev, Paul Klee, Victor Frankl, Tom Lehrer, Mark Strand, Mel Brooks, Stanley Kubrick, and great one-namers Shakespeare, Twain and Sinatra.
Figures of non-admiration are many, with cheerful appreciation of icons in the movie business, like that soundtrack composer who’s made a fortune re-composing Richard Strauss tone poems, and movie critics who keep proclaiming that lavishly produced drivel about comic book characters is Great Cinema. (He loves the humbly produced drivel of Ed Wood, Jr., of course, but that’s obvious, like loving Shakespeare.) David also appreciates the ever-flowing river of fishy wisdom served up by politicians and pundits who live off the caring-and-sharing-and-feeling-and-healing franchise.
David has a daughter, Holly, a talented actress and marketing professional who expertly created this web site. He has a son, Scott, who is a talented commercial photographer and talked him out of changing the font for this site. Bittinger’s commentary has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, (St. Paul) Pioneer Press, Palm Beach Post, All About Jazz, and other publications.