Wednesday, February 13, 2019

And the greatest musical moment I’ve ever seen belongs to … Laurie Anderson



     I’ve seen a lot of great musicians perform.
     Bruce Springsteen, back-to-back with saxophonist Clarence Clemons, cooking to “Rosalita.” Annie Lennox, her carrot hair crewcut-short, keeping time with drumsticks over her head, singing in a bar in Cleveland. I’ve seen Leonard Bernstein conduct the Vienna Philharmonic and Muddy Waters sing the blues. I’ve seen Frank Zappa display his shambolic virtuosity, twice, and Yo-Yo Ma play cello so sublimely the audience cried. Or maybe that was just me. Once, at a party, Tony Bennett made a surprise appearance, stood within arm’s reach and sang, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” I’ve heard distinctive singers from Joe Cocker to Joe Strummer, of the Clash. I’ve seen Elton John pound the piano on “Bennie and the Jets” and Ray Charles caress it, singing “Georgia on my Mind.” I’ve listened to David Bowie noodle a synthesizer and heard Loretta Lynn warble “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” I’ve heard Dizzy Gillespie play the trumpet, warming up in his hotel room. Alone with me.
     So yeah, I’ve been around. But without question, the best musical moment I’ve ever seen was something performance artist Laurie Anderson did in Colorado in 1983, and since she’s doing a rare show Sunday in Chicago, I hope you don’t mind if I revisit the memory.
      I had become acquainted with her the year before, when “Big Science” came out. I remember seeing the album in the window of Vintage Vinyl in Evanston, and marching in to buy it, though I had never heard her music.
     Why? I’m abashed to say this — it feels creepish in 2019 — but I thought Laurie Anderson was a babe. The short spiky hair. The big white sunglasses. Cute as a button.
     In my defense, I was 21

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Tuesday, February 12, 2019

What is it about cars that makes us love them?



     This is my second piece from the special Chicago Car Show magazine that was included in Sunday's Sun-Times. 


     It was the sound.
     The growl of the 650 horsepower, supercharged V8 engine of the Corvette Z06 as I mashed the gas pedal, sinking into the red leather seat. All that power. From zero to 60 in under three seconds. The roar seemed to reach into my skin, grab my bones, and shake them.
     Of course, this being the 21st century, even that howl of raw power is actually under fine-tuned control. A few taps and the “Engine Sound Management” screen pops up, offering four modes, “Stealth,” “Tour,” “Sport” and “Track.”
     “Stealth is for when you are on long highway trips, and get tired of the noise,” said George Kiebala, owner of Curvy Road, an exotic sports car time share in Palatine. If you want the joy of driving that Corvette super car, without having to actually buy one, Curvy Road allows you access for a fraction of the cost.
     And why would anybody want to do that? Why spend $1,000 to drive a car that can go three times the legal limit for a few days?
     Maybe that is best answered by what Louis Armstrong supposedly said when somebody asked him to explain jazz: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
     That said, let’s try.

                                                              • • •

     What is it about cars that makes us love them?

     Being American, no doubt. Love of cars is in our blood, our birthright, with our wide open expanse of roads, the last remnant of the Western frontier. Our literature is filled with classic tales of setting out on the road in cars: Jack Keroac’s “On the Road” to Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Not to mention all those songs, “Little Deuce Coupe,” and “Thunder Road” and “Little Red Corvette.” Americans are born loving cars.
     Do you believe that? Don’t. Americans were taught to love cars.
     At the beginning of the 20th century, when automobiles were introduced, and were viewed with collective horror as too fast — pushing speeds of 15 miles an hour! — and too dangerous. At mid-century, as highways began to blast through neighborhoods and the public resisted. The phrase “America’s love affair with the automobile” was coined in a 1961 TV program, “Merrily We Roll Along,” on the DuPont Show of the Week (DuPont owned a quarter of General Motors) hosted by Groucho Marx, of all people. He woodenly walks out at the beginning, leading a horse in one hand, holding a cigar in the other, and starts talking about “that great American romance between a man and his car.”
     He’s got the “man” part right. Thinking over a lifetime of car commercials — all those sleek sedans smoothly gliding over glistening roads, sprays of autumnal leaves flying everywhere — and trying to pinpoint even one that stood out, the only ad that comes to mind is one from the 1970s for the Triumph Spitfire. Even then it might be more for the fighter plane than the car.
     “You not only get a car and a girl, but a piece of history,” the narrator promises.
     Which brings up the very real possibility that love of cars is a guy thing. Being a guy myself, and therefore biased, I consulted someone who wasn’t, putting the question to one of the cleverest women I know, Molly Jong-Fast, New York novelist and Twitter wit (as well as daughter of best-selling author Erica Jong).
     Love of cars, I asked, a guy thing, right?
     “Definitely,” she said. “Definitely a guy thing.”
     Why?
     “I can’t speak for the whole gender, but [loving cars] seems really dumb to me, and most women think it’s really dumb” she continued. “It doesn’t even make any sense. Men get something out of cars that is completely lost on me. I like driving just fine. … it seems , it doesn’t even make any sense, why you would you care?”
     Why do men care? As teenagers, cars represented freedom — freedom to sneak off somewhere with a girl. Besides cars offering logistical support for romance, men seem to believe that fancy cars impress women. Though looking at my own life, that hasn’t been the case.
     My wife was always maddeningly unimpressed with cars. In my mid-20s, Chevrolet let me use a brand new Corvette for a week. Midnight blue. I didn’t tell my then-girlfriend, merely showed up with it. She got in the car and started talking about her day. I looked at her, jaw hanging.
     “What?” she said, picking up on my expression.
     “THE CAR!!!!” I exclaimed. “Didn’t you notice THE CAR?!?!
     “Oh this,” she said, looking around, as if noticing it for the first time. “You know I don’t care for this kind of thing.”
     I married her anyway.
     Jong-Fast said that men like expensive cars, not to impress women, but to impress other men.
     “You definitely see it in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s a status thing. It’s one of those things men do for other men. Funny, because women are accused of dressing for other women, for being thin for other women. Cars are proof that men are concerned with what other men think of them.”
Neil Steinberg with the 2015 BMW i8 

     There has to be more to it than that. Cars have personalities, like people, and exotic cars are loved for their quirks as much, if not more, than their speed. I drove a 
2015 BMW i8 and was most taken, not with the obviously impressive stuff — its gull wing doors — but its little quirks.     
     Such as? The hood. It’s sealed. It doesn’t open. At least, it can’t be opened by civilians, who have no business poking around in the electric motor underneath. If you want the hood opened, take it to a BMW dealer, who knows what he’s doing. I love that.

                                                                            • • •

     I’ve been talking about other men’s cars. To me, car love is reflected in a man’s first car — heck, I’m sure some women love their first cars too. My first car was utterly impractical, purchased for entirely psychological reasons. I was 22, and living alone in Los Angeles, working a job I despised. I looked at exactly one car: a 1963 Volvo P1800, white. It was my dream car; I needed the boost.
     In some ways, the car was a disaster. It had a rebuilt engine from another car. Constant repairs. But it looked fantastic — it’s the car Simon Templar drives in “The Saint.” I once got a date at a four-way stop sign with a young woman in a convertible Mustang who shouted, “What is that?”
With the P1800. Barrington, 1984.
   I owned the car for about three years. Eventually, repairs started to get to me — the radiator started leaking, and with 1963 Volvo P1800 radiators hard to find outside of Sweden, the dealer built a new one, at the cost of a week’s salary. Eventually I had to sell it. When the new owner drove it away, I cried.
     Not to end on a downer note. Those who think that the advent of self-driving cars, not to forget Uber and the prospect of silently rolling cubes delivering riders from Point A to Point B will cool the passion that many have for automobiles are mistaken. It’ll just adapt, like all long-term relationships.
     “I love my Chevy Bolt and I’d almost rather drive it than any Ferrari,” said Curvy Road’s George Kiebala, insisting I take her for a spin. It was like driving a video game. “This whole amazing transition: electrification and how its working its way into he super car world.”
     So love of cars isn’t going away?
     “Oh no, oh my goodness no,” he said. “Definitely the opposite.”

Corvette Z06

Monday, February 11, 2019

Maybe someday a special beef dish will also be named after Jeff Bezos

Bust of Wellington, by Sir Francis Chantrey
Metropolitan Museum of Art
     Arthur Wellesley is no longer famous. Though I imagine his title, “The Duke of Wellington” raises a glimmer of recognition in the public mind, not due to the man himself, alas, but for the beef-in-pastry dish apparently named after him. History can be cruel that way.
     Wellesley was the brilliant, Dublin-born British military leader who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Big in his day. “The last great Englishman,” Tennyson dubbed him.

    He also visited prostitutes. Women who, then as now, had a habit of cashing in twice on their famous customers; once for their services, again in print. Nor were their friends more scrupulous. When London pornographer John Stockdale wrote to the Duke, demanding money to excise passages involving him from London tart Harriette Wilson’s pending reminiscences, Wellington scrawled “Publish and be damned” across the letter and returned it.
       Supposedly. The actual letter does not exist. “The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson” were published in 1824, with the Duke of Wellington foremost among the parade of famous men marching through her bed.
     Only the fullness of time will determine whether Jeff Bezos’ performance last week rises to a Wellingtonian high standard for panache. Though Bezos did the Duke one better, disseminating himself the entire correspondence from American Media Inc., parent company of the National Enquirer, which Bezos claims was blackmailing him. The Enquirer, it has been established, serves as a protective shield around Donald Trump, buying up rights to salacious stories from women he seduced, for example, then burying instead of publishing them.

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Sunday, February 10, 2019

Hot Cars in the Coldest Month




     The Sun-Times has been producing an occasional magazine to enhance our Sunday paper. In December, they asked me to write about manufacturing in Illinois, and today's edition includes an attractive publication about Chicago and cars, to mark the start of the Chicago Auto Show.
     I was happy to write this piece about 126 years of automobiles being shown off in Chicago, and another about our love for cars, which I'll post here Tuesday. But if you can, try to pick up Sunday's physical paper, because the special section has a lot more than just me in it: Richard Roeper on the Tucker Torpedo which, betcha didn't know, was manufactured in Chicago during its brief, memorable existence, as well as issue editor Ryan Smith on auto racing, driverless cars, local car collections, tons of photographs, and much more.


     In a jab at the “White City,” the faux Roman splendor of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition that disgusted modernists at Adler & Sullivan, the architects painted their Transportation Building orange, with a yellow arched entrance dubbed "The Golden Door."
     Through that door were 17 acres of 19th century America in motion: huge locomotives and street cars, handcars and sail cars, wagons and harnesses. Studebaker of Chicago showed off their latest buggies. Models of ocean steamers and famous bridges were on display, as well as historic modes of transportation from sleighs to sedan chairs.  

     And tucked in a corner, almost entirely ignored, a delicate Daimler quadricycle: the first four-wheeled, gasoline-powered automobile on public display in the United States. Along with it, a second car, an electric.
     The opening note in a century-and-a-quarter symphony that would, in the 20th century become as distinctly Chicago as deep dish pizza, the Blues or skyscrapers: the Chicago Auto Show.
     A constantly-changing car circus that almost defies description, a burst of summery sparkle and hot horsepower in the middle of dreary, frozen winter, the Chicago Auto Show draws millions downtown to ogle thousands of cars — from economy boxes like the first 2-cylinder Honda to a Packard with a V-16 engine. From steam-driven cars to a concept car to be powered by an nuclear reactor.

     Nor have cars been the only draw. Into the mix, a dizzying cast of leggy models, athletes, movie stars, TV actors and race car drivers. Knute Rockne and Ronald Reagan and Oprah. Revolving turntables, flashing lights, blaring music, surging crowds, and the occasional out-of-left-field non-automotive technological development, like television, which RCA Victor showed off at the 1939 show.
     Chicago's "First Annual National Automobile Exhibit" was held March 23-30 in 1901 at the Coliseum, a former Civil War prison at Michigan Avenue and 15th Street. Tickets were 50 cents. The cars on display were primitive; none had a steering wheel. They were steered with a tiller; steering wheels wouldn't become popular for a few more years. Many were electric, or steam-powered. A wooden, 1/10 mile track ringed the exhibition hall. Visitors taken for a spin were usually riding in a car for the first time, though the track was really intended to show potential dealers that the vehicles actually worked.
     By the second show, the track was gone, a victim of the show's success; an increasing numbers of vehicles meant there wasn't room for it.

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Housekeeping note



     Because the story I'm featuring Sunday, on the history of the Chicago Car Show, isn't going live on the Sun-Times' web site until 5 a.m., it can't be posted here until after 5 a.m., aka, when I wake up. So those night owls tapping sleeplessly at their computers between 12 a.m. and 5 a.m. and expecting to find comfort here will be disappointed, except of course for this little notice. My apologies for a situation beyond my control, but I can't link to a story that isn't online yet (and I have to link to them, because they pay for the things).
    Thank you for your understand, and for reading everygoddamnday.com. If you are looking for something to do in these wee hours, why not order a delicious Eli's Cheesecake for yourself or someone you profess to love, using the ever-wakeful link at left? The ad will only be up for another week, and I want the kind folks at Eli's to get, if not their money's worth, then at least a shimmer of value for their investment.


Saturday, February 9, 2019

The Saturday Snapshot #26



     Vanity is a two-edged sword.
     One edge is the desire to manifest yourself, to project your ego, which is responsible for most of the art and literature in the world, is the reason people leave their homes and strike out into the world. A laudable thing, to take the thimbleful of you that is bubbling around in your head and contrive to somehow paint the world with it.
      The other edge is the desire to manifest yourself, all over a perfectly nice "L" car. To not care that your tag is just going to be a blocked window for someone inside, or, rather, that the Chicago Transit Authority will have to expensively remove it, taking up a lot of time, and jacking up the cost of transportation for all of us.
      Which is more significant? I wouldn't dare try to say. The self-absorbed person starts to tell a story, and maybe the listener is fascinated, or maybe the listener is bored. Or one is fascinated and another are bored. By the same story. It depends on the skill of the teller, the inclinations for the listener. It changes with time and place. How you feel about graffiti depends on how you feel about society, capitalism, art, color, cities, trains.  I deeply admire Banksy; the above, not so much, though I sympathize with the urge that sent some kid doing it. We want to leave our mark on the indifferent world.
    These were taken at the CTA rail yard at Harlem/Lake terminal, by regular reader Francis Mullen, a rail operations switchman. He suspects they might have been done at the 63rd and Ashland yard and then moved to Harlem/Lake.
     Asked for some thoughts on the photos, he replied:
     "I don’t understand why this medium appeals to them. It’s our policy not to send these cars in service so their exposure is mostly limited to their forums. There is a cost to society, however, in that when we are short cars for service the supervisor is forced to adjust his schedule to spread the gap. So a 15 minute headway becomes 20. A severe shortage will produce noticeable delays. There’s also a cost to the shop janitor that puts aside her normal duties to clean these enormous paintings with some nasty chemicals. It takes hours to finish. I think these guys are thoughtless and arrogant in pursuit of their impish thrills. Buy some canvases already."
     Then, a few minutes later, added,
     "Besides the Kilroy was here aspect, I wonder if the transitory nature of their efforts adds to the thrill."

     I hadn't thought of that. They value them because they are fleeting, the way that Buddhist monks spend hours creating these elaborate sand mandalas, sing a little song, then sweep them away. Could be.

   
   

Friday, February 8, 2019

A woman is marrying her dog on Valentine’s Day — but wait, there’s more to it


     We get two daily newspapers delivered at home, the Sun-Times and the New York Times. I always read my own paper first — loyalty — and then turn my attention the Grey Lady.
     On Sundays, I start with the news section, then on to what I still consider “The Week in Review,” then the book section, magazine and business, working my way down through the various substrata of descending significance until I end up at the lowest sub-chamber, Style, with its dubious celebrations of flyspeck fads, grotesque genuflection to tasteless wealth, and enormous full-color Ralph Lauren ads for glitzy sequined, epauletted get-ups that would make Michael Jackson cringe with embarrassment.
     At the back of Style, the marriage announcements — “Vows” — which I don’t read so much as scan, occasionally dipping into one to check the job statuses of the happy couples, tsk-tsking over their well-off parents and gold-plated, The-World-is-Mine careers. I glance at all the photos, skipping past the same-sex couples, pausing at the comfortably hetero duos to reassure myself that the brides-to-be are not as pretty as my wife — Ha! doing better than you, pal! — a vindictive little game rigged so I always win.
     The Times also does news stories spotlighting certain couples about to be married, and last Sunday one stood out: Lilly Smartelli, posed with her arms around her groom-to-be: Bernie, a 9-year-old mixed breed cocker spaniel poodle.
     She is marrying her dog, this Valentine’s Day.
     Let me pause here, to give you time to form your immediate reactions, which I will go out on a limb and predict are: 1) the world is going to hell; 2) people are crazy; 3) the Times has slid into tabloid sensationalism.
     Am I correct? Of course I am.


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