Marvels fill the skies overhead, even in the suburbs

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (NASA photo)

     The suburbs have a bad reputation. As endless tracts of anodyne nowhere, sinkholes of boredom and isolation, far from the meaningful lives of richness and significance that are lived by residents of cities. A slur formed after World War II, when cookie-cutter Levittown housing developments crowded out farmers’ fields and young couples swapped their cramped apartments in the teeming, dynamic finger-snapping city for identical contemporary split levels on quarter-acre lots.
     But it isn’t true. Or at least not always true.
     There are wonders aplenty in the suburbs. For instance, my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook has foxes, hawks, owls, its own velodrome, a speed skating culture that produced 20 Olympians, Prairie Grass Cafe, and the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy hovering just above our heads.
     OK, M51 is 31 million light-years away. But you can see it from Northbrook.
     Maybe I should just tell the story.
     Not realizing what splendors we already had at home, my wife and I drove into the city Saturday. She had a taste for the excellent Italian food at Topo Gigio on Wells Street, and we decided to go early and wander around Lincoln Park Zoo.
     The zoo was lovely, but missing a certain vital element — you know, it’s complicated, so we’ll dive into the zoo and what it’s missing on Friday.
     Anyway, after dinner — Topo Gigio let us sit at the table nearly three hours, thank you very much — we headed home, a 40-minute drive. As we turned into Center Avenue, I noticed two dark forms sitting on the sidewalk across from our house. People.
     One doesn’t sit on the sidewalk in the suburbs unless one is 6 years old, and not even then. Particularly not after 10 p.m. I figured this must be young people having a tête-à-tête. I put the car in the garage, went into the house, leashed up Kitty and came out. I gave the couple a wide berth, tracking them out of the corner of my eye. We do have a homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench at Shermer and Walters, but I haven’t seen him lately. Kitty did her business, and on the way back, emboldened, I vectored over.
     “Good evening,” I said. “Everything OK?”

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Bastille Day 2026

Paris Opera House

     During my visits to Paris — and I've only been there three times, I'm no Jack Clark — at some point, while absorbing another tableaux of magnificence, I'll at one point think something along the lines of, "Of course it should have all been blown to flinders fighting off the Germans in 1940." 
     Instead the Wehrmacht rolled in, more or less unopposed.
     Which the Americans held against them — or at least I did — for a very long time. What was Groundskeeper Willie's phrase? Oh yes. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
     That was unfair. Many other nations collapsed in front of the Nazi onslaught at the start of World War II. The fist of totalitarianism can be very strong. Look at the Russian attack hammering Ukraine. A sane nation would have never started the war, or stopped after it became clear that it had become a deadlock. Four years and counting. But Putin, like Trump, enters into bloodshed with barely a thought, and continues it for the same reason. Or rather, due to one, rigid thought: he doesn't want to lose, and one way to keep from being seen as the loser you are is to continue playing after the game is actually over.
     Americans taught the French freedom. I get the sense that, with its king and its royal court and guillotines, people are tempted to place the French Revolution before the American one, with our more modest wigs and homespun fashion. The French Revolution seems older. But we declared independence from royalty on July 4, 1776, and the French didn't manage until Bastille Day — today — July 14,  1789, the storming of the Bastille prison during the French Revolution thirteen years later.
    Now of course, it is Americans who need instruction in what it means to be free. To refuse the seduction of autocracy, of just lying back and letting strongmen roll over us and do their thing. Freedom is not won, or lost, in a moment. Its loss is a long, wearying, frustrating, heartbreaking process. We've been becoming more unfree for years now. Some of us seem to be getting used to it. Or just tired. Or given up hope.
    The president and his family personally made more than $2 billion since the taking of office last year. Mostly from a crypto currency scam. Not a vast personal fortune, on the Elon Musk scale. But enough to want to hold onto. You can see why Trump is so hot to pervert elections so that a Congress that might ask, "Is this legal?" never takes office. 
     And the American people? Well, we aren't happy, except those of us who are, no matter what. Not pleased with this direction. But what are we doing about it? What can be done? Put our faith in the degraded elections, four months away, maybe? Wait for something good to happen? Hope, as the saying goes, is not a strategy. Meanwhile, unlike the French, our own nation's capital was defaced, not resisting the enemies of freedom, but celebrating them. A physical mess mirroring the moral, intellectual, legal, governmental decay we sink deeper and deeper into, day by day. When is our Bastille Day? Certainly not today, not tomorrow, not anytime soon.

    

Is AI going to kill us all? Radio, when new, also seemed a menace

     One hundred years ago last Friday — July 10, 1926 — at 40 minutes after midnight at a frantic South Side jazz age party, Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd cried out “Valencia! Valencia!” the dance craze of the moment, and with a clatter of castanets, the group swung into the number.
     “Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor,” Radio Digest noted, after the tragedy. “Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array.”
     Twenty miles away in Homewood at the transmitter of radio station WOK, Thornton High School graduate Lester J. Wolf manned the control board, broadcasting the Moon Lite Gardens fun “throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely hearts were hungry for happiness and joy.”
     At 19, Wolf lived at home with his parents and was one of the youngest people in the country to hold a commercial broadcast license.
     Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead. Eager to get the station back on the air, Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power and received a 6,000 volt shock. He fell to the floor but quickly stood up and told the studio director he was OK. But Wolf wasn’t OK. A moment later fell to the floor again, dead.
     The Radio Digest called him “the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining,” as if there might be many more. It’s hard to tell with a new industry, particularly one based on a terrifyingly lethal technology like electricity, joined to an invisible possible menace such as radio waves.
     People always expect the worse. Radio did have risks — in the early years you had to hook up heavy wet cell lead batteries, basically big boxes of acid.

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"Bagel" and "Biden" have the same number of letters — could they make it any clearer?

     My faith in humanity is such, that I can have trouble with extreme stupidity. I think: "They must be joking, right? This can't be serious." This makes scrolling through social media a challenge. Dry humor. Or sincere idiocy? 

      Usually, alas, it's the latter.

      Take the meme to the right. What they're saying is, here is this 1967 medal, showing a plane flying into the Twin Towers. They knew 34 years ahead of time. It's all preordained, part of a long term Jewish plot.
     Now look closely at the medal, and the supposed World Trade Center. See the little nubs on top? See the writing? It's clearly a torah. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. All you have to do is look closely.

     It's the same mistake of those who see an oblong object in somebody's hands in a photo from the 1920s and declares that it's a cell phone and time travel exists. Can people be so dumb? Again, alas, yes.

     This is not news. So why am I writing about this?
     Good question. I guess Saturday was busy — working on Monday's column (AND Wednesday's column. AND preparing a string of posts to run after some upcoming surgery. AND working on the book — news about that this week. And visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo. And dinner on Wells Street, at Topo Gigio).
     So I needed to write about something. And this meme...
     I write about what interests me. Mostly. Sometimes I write about something suggested by an editor, or a reader, but I suppose that's still about something I find interesting, with a helping hand.
     Occasionally that thing that caught my fancy will resonate with readers — such as the column on Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, which pinballed across the country — so much so that an editor mentioned it to me, which seldom happens. But I knew I'd grabbed the brass ring, after John Williams asked me to talk about it with him on WGN. To me, that means I've snatched the brass ring.
     During our conversation, I said something to the effect that, if I made a practice of writing about stupid stuff found online, it's all I'd ever do. That's true. Low-hanging fruit. A duck in a bucket. Too easy. And too common. All the deniers and misunderstanders and toxic haters and glint eyed fanatics pushing every subject through the keyhole of their fixations. It's endless.
     However, sometimes something is just, well, too good to pass up. Like this meme.
     A reminder that conspiracy theories are history for stupid people. They prefer airy fictions to actual facts, I suppose, because the latter require thought, and reading, and a base of knowledge, while the former you can grab one fact — or, in this case, one mis-perception — and run with it.
     When I look through Instagram (I don't do TikTok or Threads. Instagram is plenty) and consider how much political opinion is formed by this process, and how little is formed by essays such as this one, well, the temptation is to abandon all hope. But that doesn't strike me as a success strategy either.

Etymological field notes

"Physiologie du Flaneur," by Louis Huart (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I try not to admire Lee Bey too much. Out loud, in public, that is. Because the Sun-Times architecture critic is a modest man, and it's unseemly to have a colleague, particularly one as sketchy as myself, always gushing on about you. 

      Beside, the truth is obvious, and I try not to traffick in the obvious — Lee embroiders and enlivens the paper with an endless stream of fascinating columns about the rich architectural heritage of Chicago. Someone should give him a Pulitzer Prize, right away, and the fact they haven't yet, is one of the many indictments of that particular award (or heck, maybe I blame them unfairly. Maybe he's never been submitted — he is, as I said, humble. I've never submitted my stuff, because my time is precious, and chasing awards is not worth it. I wouldn't be surprised if Lee feels the same).
     Privately admiration is another matter. I regularly look up from one of his columns, briskly gesture to it with a snap of the hand, and mentally address an unseen audience: "This! This is how you do it!"
     I can't recall ever abandoning a Lee Bey column halfway — he grabs you by the nose, drags you through whatever subject is at hand, even if its some obscure building you never previously heard of or could imagine yourself caring about until you hit that first sentence.
     Last week Lee did something which is, well, very rare, at least for me. He was writing about a massive, Frank Gehry-designed desk in the lobby of the Inland Steel Building that is going up for auction. And he unleashes this. See if what stopped me will stop you too:

     "Widely read Chicago flâneur and architecture-watcher Lynn Becker brought attention to the auction last week on social media."

     "Flâneur"? I'd never read that word in my life. I sometimes deploy words that puzzle readers, but rarely encounter one that puzzles me. It's a treat.

     See, this is the bond Lee and I have — we are not only interested in a wide variety of stuff, but we assume our readers are also interested in a wide variety of stuff and, in addition, are not stupid. (When stupid people do write in, violently objecting to some piece of sense I've presented, I sometimes reply, with genuine astonishment, "But I didn't write it for you...")
     So Lee can deploy flâneur and assume that either readers already know it or if they don't, can quickly look it the fuck up. Which I did: "A flâneur (from the French verb flâner, meaning to stroll or saunter) is a 19th-century French term for an urban wanderer who casually explores a city without a set destination, observing society with a detached but deeply engaged eye."
     At the risk of putting on airs: that's me. Well, not the "without a set destination" part. Typically I'm heading to some restaurant for lunch, or up to the Newberry Library to raid their stacks. But I give myself plenty of time, and walk, mentally twirling a cane and assessing the landscape. You can't imagine how many columns I've found that way.
     It's not an obscure term. Baudelaire waxes poetic about what he called the "passionate spectator."
     I was curious as to where Lee picked up " flâneur" so decided to do that reportorial trick and ask.
     "That's a great word," said Lee. "I think I learned it my first go round as architecture critic," (Lee left the paper for a while, to our horror, to work for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and help Richard Daley's administration not mess up architecture as badly as they messed up everything else, as well as teach and half a dozen other projects before returning, thank merciful God, to us). "I can't remember where I picked it up, some odd place like Mad magazine or National Lampoon. I thought, 'I like that word.'"

     See? Before I let this go, I have to point out the comfortable-in-one's-skin quality reflected in Lee's speculating on where he got the word. Mad magazine. Or National Lampoon. Not exactly Architecture Digest or Domus or any of those high hat trade publications. I can't imagine Paul Goldberger saying, "Yeah, it's something I glommed from a Bugs Bunny cartoon..." One of the many benefits of being a Chicago journalist working for a Chicago publication with Chicago colleagues for Chicago readers in Chicago. We get to be both flâneurs, when we choose, and normal people too.

     

'The kids feel it' — summer camp has kids singing the blues

Nyrobi, 17, left, listens to some tips for singing "I'd Rather Go Blind" at Blues Camp Chicago.

     What is the blues? The blues is pain set to music.
     Take “I’d Rather Go Blind,” the 1967 classic written by blues queen Etta James. Beaten by her drunken foster father, James spent time in Cook County Jail for forging checks to support her longtime heroin habit. You can hear it in her voice.
     But what about singers who are not Etta James, such as a high school student from the northwest suburbs?
     “Something toooooold me, it was oh-oh-ver,” sings Nyrobi, 17, slowly, in a thin, wavering voice, on a small stage Wednesday on the first floor of Columbia College, 1014 S. Michigan. “When I saw youuuuu with her, talking. Something deep down in my sooooul....”
     Jackie Scott interrupts.
     “The woman is writing this song because she saw her man with another women,” says Scott, an imposing woman with a gold ring on her left hand that spells, “BLUES.” “Imagine you saw your boyfriend with another girl. You’re not going to be singing.”
     And here she delivers a spot-on imitation of Nyrobi’s airy warble.
     “You’re not going to do that, right?” Scott continues. “You’re going to push it out a little more.”
     “SOMETHING TOLLLLLLD ME,” she belts, in a strong, loud voice. “IT WAS OHHHHHVER!”
     Welcome to Day 3 of Blues Camp Chicago, where the world of summertime childhood fun meets the snap-brim hat and two-tone shoes discipline of blues musicianship. There are studio rehearsals, sound checks and sing-alongs, plus snacks, skating and a “sneaker ball.”
     “We want them to be kids, of course. We want them to understand and appreciate blues as American roots music,” said Fernando Jones, the veteran Chicago blues man who founded Blues Camp Chicago 17 years ago.

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Flashback 1999: Deep background — Dig this: Foot by foot, tunnel moves ahead

 

      The Deep Tunnel is a vast, 110-mile-long, 30-year-old, $3 billion-dollar project. It isn't yet completed, but already is proving insufficient to the task of draining the climate-change-stoked rains hitting the Chicago area. According to a story Tuesday in the Sun-Times, the tunnel is getting fuller faster. That's bad news, particularly for homeowners in the Southwest suburbs, whom the Deep Tunnel was supposed to protect from flooding.

     I've been down the Deep Tunnel, twice. Once when they were flooding the Thornton Quarry in 2015. And for the first time in 1999, a story not before posted here:

In the Deep Tunnel, 1999

     In 2005, in the basement of a house that hasn't been built, the possessions of a boy who hasn't been born will stay nice and dry during a major rainstorm because of work going on right now 310 feet under Torrence Avenue.
     The second-to-last leg of the Deep Tunnel Project is creeping slowly forward, a foot at a time, as a gigantic digging machine eats into the dense dolemite limestone.
     Work is conducted 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by two dozen miners who, with their beards, coveralls and miner's helmets, are a vision from Harlan County, Ky., working to bring Chicago into the 21st century.
     The Deep Tunnel began 93 miles and 27 years ago. Every four days, on average, rainwater would back up a sewer system somewhere in Chicago, sending raw sewage spilling into the already polluted Chicago River. The tunnel was conceived as a man-made underground river to carry away storm overflow.
     "This is the second greatest accomplishment in our history," said new Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner Martin Sandoval. "The first was the reversal of the river."
      The Deep Tunnel is so vital to the growing Chicago area that when a small section collapsed in June, beaches were closed and water supplies were compromised. Interest in the unseen tunnels grew after that, and the Water Reclamation District invited the media down Wednesday to see what they are up to.
     Digging, mostly. To get to the digging, you step into a circular yellow metal cage, big enough for four people, that is lowered into a hole in the ground.
     The cage touches ground in a cavernous area, blasted from the rock, where the gigantic digging machine was lowered and assembled in 18 separate pieces. An electric train takes miners to the machine, two miles away and moving forward at nearly a mile a month.
     The noise is tremendous. Forty-seven cutting heads spin into the limestone across a rotating circle 27 feet wide. Every 7 feet, the machine releases a pair of "gripper pads" — disc-brakelike devices, 5 feet wide, that push out against the walls of the cave to keep the machine from spinning — and moves forward. The pads reset, and the digger's spinning face grinds onward.
     Miners must be alert. Sensors monitor for methane gas. They run into fault lines, or different types of rock — 1,800 feet of the tunnel had to go through shale, which is not as strong as the limestone, and the roof of the tunnel had to be specially reinforced as the machine moved forward, to avoid collapse.
     Meanwhile, miners atop the drill bore a pair of 5-foot-deep holes into the roof and attach a semicircular metal band with 5-foot-long hollow metal rods that are driven into the holes, spreading wide to set into the stone and help support the ceiling, which feels wet and crumbly.
     Along the length of the two miles, groundwater glistens on the walls and occasionally pours in cascades that will be shut off with grout before the interior of the tunnel — a blanket of concrete a foot thick — is poured. The crushed rock is removed by a conveyor belt and sold.
     Not only will the Deep Tunnel keep basements dry and the Chicago River pure — a bass fishing contest will be held on the river next year — but it also provides a good source of crushed limestone. The new United Parcel Service facility at 75th and La Grange is sitting on stone from the Deep Tunnel.  

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct, 21, 1999