Local poet delivers the goods

Tim Stafford at the Green Mill.

     “You’re good,” I said to Tim Stafford, passing him at the bar at the Green Mill on my way out after two hours of listening to poetry the last Sunday in November.

     I didn’t have to say that. But I’m a nice guy — shhh, my little secret — and Stafford was indeed good, the standout of the first Uptown Poetry Slam in 18 months. He recited his “The Patron Saint of Making Curfew,” a funny travelogue about being young and racing back from the delights of the city to his unnamed, uncool suburb.
     Some readers might not know about the Slam. Marc Kelly Smith began the competition in 1984, and the shortest way to describe it is as performative poetry. Not poetry as you might remember from school, read in a plummy voice from a lectern, but verse delivered free form, with bonus points for anger and spittle.
     To me, the Slam is an essential Chicago event, like a Cubs game, with a $7 cover, a jazz combo noodling on stage and Smith your sometimes genial septuagenerian host, the crusty master of ceremonies at a nightclub in hell. The next Slam is Jan. 16; Stafford will be the featured poet.
     My compliment to Stafford resulted in a copy of “The Patron Saint of Making Curfew,” his newly published collected works, showing up in the mail. No kindness goes unpunished. I immediately decided, before opening the pink and lemon yellow cover, what my criterion for writing about it would be. I flipped the book over: $10. I’d write something only if it contains a thought worth 10 bucks. Otherwise, a shrugging toss into the deep, chill waters of Lake Oblivion.
     Because most poetry is crap. Truly. I say that as lover of poetry, a subscriber to Poetry Magazine. Forgettable, overwrought, bland. The poor editors of Poetry; what they must wade through.
     That’s harsh. To be generous, most poetry is written for someone other than myself. Maybe I like Stafford merely because he’s like me. His “Like Oz,” is an ode to Chicago from a distance, “a mountain range of glass and steel/that I was neither encouraged nor discouraged to climb./It simply existed as an elaborate backdrop/to my childhood.”

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Flashback 2008: Celebrating oppression; The sure to be over-the-top opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics

The Field Museum

 

    Well this is eerie. With both the dual prods of COVID and morality encouraging some to drop out of the 2020 Winter Olympics in Beijing—the National Hockey League is the latest to announce it won't be going—I thought about writing something on that. I also considered the unexpected salvation of the Thompson Center, how odd that this hideous white elephant is suddenly a beloved icon worthy of preservation. But both felt so ... tired. Been there, done that. I've been complaining about the Thompson Center building literally since the moment it was built. 

     In the meantime, I noticed this column, from 13 years ago, when I rang both bells. Everything old is new again.


OPENING SHOT . . .

     Olympic opening ceremonies tend toward Chinese-style epic pageantry no matter where they are held. From Seoul to Sydney we got squads of acrobats, platoons of uniformed teens twirling ribbons attached to sticks and other displays of massive hoopla.
     One can only imagine how much more eye-popping tonight's Olympic kickoff will be, since it is created by the Chinese themselves.
     While we sit and absorb the agitprop, amazed, choking up at the inevitable Coke commercials with beaming youngsters handing gleaming red soda cans to old sages in conical hats and wooden clogs, we owe it to ourselves, as the freedom-loving Americas we once were and may yet be again, to pause and recognize the political reality underlying all this immense gloss.
     Did hosting the Olympics promote the rights of people in China?
     "Not at all," said Xiao Nong Cheng, executive director of the Center for Modern China, a think tank in Princeton, N.J. "This Olympics is bad, and China's people have lost even the smallest right to talk."
     Cheng pointed out that in the run-up to the Olympics, China, terrified at losing face on the world stage, suppressed its citizens even more than usual, and that indications to the contrary—such as a recent Pew survey—are merely lies.
     "The Pew ignored a basic fact that surveys in China, according to official regulations, have to be approved, and all the data filtered," said Cheng. "There are no independent surveys in China. These are controlled, manipulated surveys. The data is not reliable."
     He added that the world media, rather than turn a spotlight onto China, is instead muzzling itself in order to cover the Games.
     "If foreigners want to be in Beijing for the Olympics, they have to seal their lips and follow all the rules the Chinese government set," he said. "The Chinese government worries that the free expression of foreigners might signal to the Chinese people they are supposed to have rights to talk freely and have press freedom."
     There, just had to get that off my chest. Enjoy the Games.

ARE YOU HOT OR COLD?

     Chicago is famous for its architectural treasures, but we also have our share of dogs, though they don't get the same kind of attention.
     I am perhaps more attuned to these design disasters, having spent 17 years working in the old Sun-Times Building on Wabash, a squat barge-like trapezoidal gray monstrosity that Time magazine once called the ugliest building in the city.
     Another contempt-worthy structure is Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center—the old State of Illinois Building—much ridiculed for its hulking elephantine exterior, its gaudy, dated blue-and-orange metal panels, and the most unattractive piece of public art in North America crammed into a tiny plaza, the Dubuffet sculpture Chicagoans refer to as "Snoopy in a Blender."
     To its aesthetic failure add a history of technical problems, primarily in cooling. The designers forgot that they were constructing a big glass box, and the air-conditioning system, an energy-friendly Rube Goldberg device that involved forming a giant ice cube at night and wafting air over it during the day—just didn't work. Government employees sweltered until they added shaded film to the windows and auxiliary air conditioning.     

     So it came as a surprise when a state worker complained to me that on certain days the place is not too hot, but too cold, the temperature—he assured me—dialed down specifically for the governor's comfort, when he is in his office there.
     As much as I savor the image of an embattled Rod Blagojevich insisting on frosty temperatures, just like his hero Richard Nixon did when he was in the White House, it also seemed to demand verification.
     "It's hotter than hell in here," laughed the governor's press secretary, Dave Rudduck, denying the notion. "The building itself is poorly designed. I've got a fan going right now."
     Disappointment lasted only a moment, however, replaced by realization of an even larger story: They still haven't fixed the air conditioning? After all these years?
     Good God, how poorly does that bode for our hopes of their solving even the slightest Illinois ills? If our state bureaucrats can't even correct, over a span of decades, the dismal working conditions that they themselves endure, if they are thwarted in finding a way to cool down Helmut Jahn's glass box, what chance is there of them correcting the countless woes afflicting residents of the state? Not much.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 8, 2008

Bears down and murder’s up

     How bad is it? I watched the Bears game Monday. Part anyway. The end of the second quarter. Enough.
     Why would I do that? Beats me. It was evening. End of another unexceptional day in Year Two of The Forever Plague. The old friend who was supposed to meet me for lunch downtown canceled at the last minute. Sick. That was disappointing. I was looking forward to going into the city, or what’s left of it. Maybe watching the game would connect me with the larger world, the community spirit of Chicago.
     My announcing that I felt like watching the Bears must have alarmed my wife. She joined me, to monitor the situation.
     “They get four attempts to move the ball 10 yards,” I explained, trying to bring her up to speed.
     “I know that,” she replied.
     Earlier, when lunch was still on, I contemplated the walk from Union Station to Michigan Avenue. Not too cold. Would a raincoat do? Yes. And what if I got shot? (Is that crazy? My hunch is, it’s exactly the calculus people perform nowadays.) No worries: I’ll tell my wife to bring the laptop to the hospital, so I could write up the experience. That would make a gripping Wednesday column ...

     But would it satisfy readers demanding more about shootings? Probably not. Whatever I write about, they pepper me with with complaints: “Waffles! You’re a joke! Write about the 800 murders in Chicago?!” You’d think that would be coming from city residents frantic over the crime spike. But they’re always from people who obviously a) don’t live anywhere near Chicago and b) don’t seem to really care much about urban crime or the people it affects.
     Rather, they are are angry red-staters trying to score points on the Fox World tally board. Crime is a real tragedy and constant worry in Chicago, even among those of us with little to worry about. But elsewhere it’s a schoolyard taunt, the kind of look-a-squirrel whataboutism that passes for argument.
     What’s there to say? Murder is up in Chicago because it’s up everywhere. That’s no big secret. “The U.S. murder rate rose 30 percent between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase in more than a century,” the Pew Research Center reported two months ago.
     And 2021 is just as bad. A dozen cities will break their all-time murder records. Chicago isn’t one of them.

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Grow where you're planted

     I have 47,485 photos up in the Cloud.
     Quite a lot really.
     I try to weed them down, occasionally cutting blurry or redundant shots. It's a good mindless task for when I don't feel like doing anything else. But still I snap 'em faster than I can delete them, obviously.
    And you never know when one might be useful.
     Take this wall. I was rooting aimlessly through the photos Monday night, looking for, well, something, when I came upon the above, a shingled storefront in the town of Castro, Chile. I took it in 2019 while my buddy Michael and I were wandering around that Patagonian coast. Which sounds so good about now, when there is no prospect of going anywhere. 

     I've written about the town before; a nearby cheese shop. I liked these shingles because they were unusual, and a lovely faded red, and decorative. There was a style to their spacing. And I suppose a little composition to the shot: the window with the baskets almost seems like the canton of a flag.
    I took a second photo, of a restaurant nearby. I'll tuck it below. It isn't as good, as a photo. All those windows. But I wasn't trying to be arty, just show the interesting edging to the shingles. 

   Is there a lesson to pull out of this? Beyond "Cool shingles." I mean, I could leave it at that. But that would be, oh, a failure of some kind.     

   You have to wonder how the practice started. Maybe at one point there was a sort of unspoken competition, between shop owners, trying to outdo each other with their fancy cheap wooden shingles. It was luxury they could afford. It wasn't much, but it was what they could do.

    Hence the lesson. Embroider your world how you can, if you can, even in your modest little hamlet at the far end of the world. Because someone might come by and appreciate it, and if nobody ever does, then you can appreciate it. And that's something too. 

Leggo my (union-made) Eggo, for now

 

  
    “Eggo waffles are out,” my wife said. 

     “They are?” I replied, thickly. “I thought we still had some in the freezer.”
     I had just been contemplating pairing some waffles with turkey sausage links, as a change of pace from my traditional grapefruit and English muffin.
     She gave me the “Am-I-really-going-to-have-to-explain-this-to-you?” look. Pity, wedded to exhaustion, lightly sprinkled with disgust.
     “No,” she said, evenly. “We can’t buy them anymore.”
     Ah. Now I got it. Solidarity. The Kellogg’s Co., makers of Eggo Homestyle Frozen Waffles, is threatening to fire its 1,400 workers on strike at four plants since October.
     The issue, a “two tier” compensation system where employees hired after 2015 are paid less. The company has advertised for replacement workers, aka, scabs. A couple days ago, Kellogg’s claimed they’ve reached an agreement, but the union still has yet to approve it. A previous supposed deal fell through.
     “We’ll make our own waffles,” I said, getting with the program, after quickly doing a mental inventory of whether the breakfast cereals I actually eat are made by Kellogg’s. Nope: Wheat Chex are from General Mills, and Shredded Wheat from Post. So we’re good to go with the Steinberg household union action against Kellogg’s.
     My quick check, to gauge whether shunning Kellogg’s would actually affect me, personally, is a reminder that, as a rule, boycotts don’t work.
     At least not by materially affecting the target of the boycott, cutting sales and such. That’s because when you take the waffle-buying public and sift it three times, winnowing down A) those who know what’s going on regarding a specific situation, say a strike of Kellogg’s workers; B) those among the knowledgable who care enough to actually do something; and C) those who are willing to do that something for a protracted period of time, well, you end up with a small number of people.
     Boycotts do have other functions. They can work well as threats. A tool that is only effective if never used. Just ask Jesse Jackson.

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Come and get me, COVID

 

     Is it me, or have things kinda ... shifted the past few days? Slipped, degraded, deteriorated, soured. 

     Thanksgiving was here, and it was busy and great. The day after omicron showed up and suddenly, wham, better and better suddenly became worse and worse. Even those of us with our three shots — vaccinated and boosted and ready to rumble — pretty much have nowhere to go. We lost our horizon, as I like to say. Suddenly the clear skies grew murky. Again.
     Okay, that's melodramatic. A lot of that, too. Drama. Things are not so bad, at least for me. Just last weekend, when I dwelling darkly on how we weren't going anywhere or even having the prospect of going anywhere, I decided, "Heck, fuck it" and told my wife, we've got to get out of here, if only into the city. Chicago is right there, let's poke around, as much as safety allows. She'd never been to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen. Let's go, let's grab some lunch first. So we made reservations at a nearby restaurant—5 Rabanitos, about two blocks away—and headed out for lunch then the museum.

     That was a good call. There was nothing wrong with me that a good avocado, scallop and shrimp ceviche couldn't fix, followed by honey-glazed chicken and roasted vegetables, washed down with a horchata. Food helps.
     The Mexican museum is really an under-appreciated wonder. Colorful, provocative art, particularly the COVID-themed Day of the Dead exhibit, which I wrote about when it opened.  Art helps. I have to share George Rodriguez's "Mictlantecuhtil Offering," above and below, with its friendly little skulls and bottles, not of vaccine, but of COVID.

     Mictlantecuhti, by the way, is the Aztec Lord of the Dead. Fearsome, but also friendly. At least in this representation. Which makes sense, since it is not so much death that we are afraid of, that is rattling us, most of us, but how the rampaging illness is constraining of our lives. We aren't used to hardship. It's hard. But that's okay. Because we're strong people, and what's the point in being a strong person if you never get the chance to show of your stuff?

     That's not my original thought, it's Seneca's, digested years back and spewed forth now. But it fits. COVID is either never going away, or at least not going away anytime soon. So the trick is to neither lose our lives, by dying of the disease, but also not by so constraining our existence that we might as well be dead. Of course you have to get your vaccines and mask up — not for yourself so much but for the benefit of other people, an aspect that seems to never even occur to a lot of idiots.

     But you have to also grab food and fun where you can. Live while you are alive — which is also not me, but I can't place who said it. 
     This started out bleak, because honestly, with the early dark on Saturday evening, I felt pretty bleak. But you can be plenty bleak on your own, without me piling on more desolation. So I figure, skew into the light. No matter how long this lasts, most of us are going to be fine. So let's be fine. Or try to be.

Midwest Notes: Flying Monkeys

Paducah, Kentucky (Photo by Caren Jeskey)

     Like you, I always learn something new from Ravenswood Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey. Today that includes Calgon moments, which somehow eluded me, and allostatisis. Her Saturday report:

     We’ve all had our "Calgon, take me away!” moments. The world seems to spin around us at a dizzying pace. Just as we’ve taken a breath, another wave washes over our heads. Then another. This may result in days of feeling uneasy. We rant, we rave. We are right! They are wrong! If not put into check, the days can lead to weeks, months, years, and even a lifetime of misery.
     With a conscious effort to heal what’s ailing us—whether through standing up for ourselves, letting go, choosing battles, wise counsel, medical care, finding unconditional support from those who love us, listening to a podcast that brings hope, taking a nap, taking a deep breath, going to sleep early and knowing tomorrow may look better with fresh eyes— we can turn the tide. Humans have evolved to adapt, but it’s not always best to take adaptation lying down. Things can get better.   

     One way to prevent getting sucked down the wormhole of despair is practicing gratitude. Granted, sometimes feeling grateful when worn down is asking too much. For some it’s harder than others. Your inability to right the ship may be related to a heavy allostatic load, which I think of as a backpack one carries around. It might have an illness inside. Financial stress. The effects of intersectionality. Grief.
     What are you grateful for? A cup of coffee? Education that provided you with the ability to read and comprehend these words? Maybe you are the type of person who bursts with gratitude for things large and small every day.
     I guarantee that today we are all luckier than the folks down in Kentucky, Arkansas, and Illinois who lost everything this week. Having spent the month of May in those three states, this global warming catastrophe brought me to full blown tears. I pictured the beauty of rambling vine and moss covered countryside. The kind folks along the Ohio River. The Shawnee National Forest and all of its critters and greenery.      

     Trailers, mansions, cemeteries, and revivalist churches peppering the Arkansas hills. The Airbnb where I stayed for one night in Winslow, a house up on stilts overlooking a lake, wind howling though the night. I wondered if everyone was OK? 

Calvert, Arkansas

   I reached out to my hosts and was relieved to find out that they, their homes, their pets and ranch animals all made it through. Sadly, with the exception of a kind host who was terminally ill in May, and has left this earth. Their spouse is besotted with grief, and I’m glad I reached out. I hope I was able to provide words of comfort. I tried.
     The worst of the Kentucky storm in Mayfield is a 23 minute drive from where I had stayed in Paducah. While I was there, I worked sitting at a little table overlooking a placid pond. It was the picture of serenity. How precarious it all is.

     On the first leg of my trip, back on May 2, a tornado touched down at the airport near the tiny house on a ranch where I was staying. I was white with terror. Shaking uncontrollably. It was too late to go out into the Oz-like winds and find the storm shelter. Friends got on a group text and stayed with me until the threat was over. “Go in the tub!” There was no tub. “Go into the hallway!” There was no hallway. “Go into he basement!” No basement.
     I cannot begin to imagine the shock and horror of December 11th, especially in Mayfield KY. Here is one way we can help. A tornado touched down right here in Chicago last year and removed almost all of the trees in the field of my childhood school. We will not be untouched by tragedy and pain in our lives. But we can find comfort in many different ways, including connecting with others, helping where we can, and not being too proud to ask for help when we need it.

     Or as a typically cool-headed friend commented recently “don’t ever say ‘nothing else can possibly go wrong.’” Because it can.

Paducah Seawall