And no, there are no actual coins....

     We are in an era when, if you are not careful, technology will race away from you, and you'll end up a befuddled person confronting a puzzling world of alien systems and incomprehensible institutions. Thus while I don't believe in giddily embracing every new development, in case it becomes popular, you shouldn't ignore the arrival of significant developments either, just because it takes effort to comprehend them.
     Thus the installation of this "Bitcoin" machine recently between the Jamba Juice and the FedEx on the second floor of the Merchandise Mart seemed the moment to pause, bite the bullet, and try to understand what Bitcoin is, and the best way to do that is by trying to explain it to you, assuming that, like me, up to this point you've kept the whole issue on the periphery of your perception. 
    Assuming I'm not that last person who hasn't yet grasped it. If you're buying your pizza and paying your mortgage in Bitcoin, well, laugh away. I haven't joined Uber yet either.
    It isn't as if I have no idea. Bitcoin is some kind of online currency. Though that is the limit of my knowledge, along with the recollection that the whole thing collapsed a while back, which can't be true, as testified by the arrival of this machine.
    So...let's poke around. 
   CNN Money describes Bitcoin this way: "Bitcoin is a new currency that was created in 2009 by an unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions are made with no middle men – meaning, no banks! There are no transaction fees and no need to give your real name. More merchants are beginning to accept them: You can buy webhosting services, pizza or even manicures."

    Well, that is interesting. Its creator being unknown puts it in an elite group of technology—along with fire and the wheel, I suppose.
     So it's like cash, only online. You store it in a wallet in your device or in the cloud, and people have hacked them and stolen them. That said, what good is it? 
    The downside of the CNN Money description is that it doesn't seem to be accurate. Vox published an interesting account in December (only half a year ago, so I'm not lagging behind the curve that badly). Timothy Lee points out that while Bitcoin fluctuates like any currency, sometimes losing alarming portions of its worth against the dollar, despite CNN Money's claim, it actually is not quite a currency, but more of a new, unregulated open financial system, and so has enormous potential. Lee compares Bitcoin to the Internet:

     Because no one owns or controls the network, there are no limits on how people can use it. Some people have used that freedom to do illegal things like buying drugs or gambling online. But it also means there's a low barrier to entry for building new Bitcoin-based financial services.  There's an obvious parallel to the internet. Before the internet became mainstream, the leading online services were commercial networks like Compuserve and Prodigy. The companies that ran the network decided what services would be available on them.

    So what good is it besides buying drugs? Lee says they can do international currency transactions, that while Western Union charges 8 percent, that Bitcoin ATMs charge only 3 percent per transaction (on each end, meaning sending funds would cost 6 percent, and also painting CNN Money's "no transaction fees" as wrong—it isn't as if Malaysia Airlines is their only embarrassment ) an improvement, though hardly worth braving the uncertainties of the Bitcoin world, at least right now. (He also mentions the ATM's were launched in late 2013, and by 2015 there were some 329 of them).
     I explored the glowing orange machine screen, but it seemed to only work if you already had an account, and given that it accepts only $20s and $100s, I didn't quite see the point of pumping big bucks into it just to then try to find a vendor who would take the Bitcoins my money would become. Where's the benefit in that?
     I don't want to merely echo Lee's analysis, you should give it a read. The takeaway is that Bitcoin is to financial networks what Uber is to taxi services: an unregulated, technology-driven twist that might work spectacularly—as Uber has so far—or might crash and burn. The question is whether all that regulation is necessary. My hunch is, given how screwed up our own economy has been—thank you banking industry—that people going into Bitcoin in a big way are going to miss those legal protections.
     Right now, it seems only really useful to those who want to buy drugs online—that wouldn't be me. As for its other uses, I'm not exactly an early adopter. Maybe some of you have some Bitcoin experiences you'd like to share. I think I'll wait, then maybe find a place that accepts them that has something I wish to buy.  Investors have poured some $500 million into it, so somebody thinks it has potential. 

Don't bet on Chicago casino

     There is something garish about plaid suit jackets — a certain Nathan Detroit vibe, particularly if the pattern is on the loud side.
     I have a few such jackets. Though more tasteful than the "Guys and Dolls" wardrobe, I hope, they hardly ever get worn. But my eye recently fell upon a subdued blue and black job, with — geez — an orange thread.
     "Where did I get this?" I asked my wife, holding up the hanger, checking the label. A store in Cannes — and was transported to the South of France, where we intended to go to Monte Carlo. Men visiting the Casino, the guidebooks instructed, must wear jackets and I, with a Slavic peasant's obedience built into my DNA, went out and bought this one.
     A purchase that led me to feel extra stupid the next day, leaning against the vingt-et-un table at the sparsely populated Casino, along with a handful of Eastern European tourists in their motley Members Only plastic windbreakers—"jackets" in the loose sense of the term. I played for half an hour, realized I had the same pathetic pile of franc chips I had started with, cashed out and left
     This is a long way of saying that the casino reality is far from the James Bond fantasy. For both individuals and for cities. If I see one more politician or lobbyist rub his palms together, chortling over the millions untold that Chicago will pull in from its casino, any moment now, I'm going to scream. (Exactly what I'll scream, I'm not sure, maybe: "And George has a piece of land, and we're going to be farmers!")
     First, it might never happen. A Chicago casino has been a political will-o'-the-wisp for decades. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Politicians giving away the ranch, spending money they don't have, telling themselves (and us) that good old Uncle Casino will show up any moment and settle the bill.
     Second, if through some miracle, Chicago finally snags a casino, it might not work, or not work like we hope. When Harrah's opened New Orleans' first casino, its location and construction were so badly botched that revenues were 60 percent below projections, and the whole project, rather than bailing out anybody, went bankrupt. When Cleveland's first casino opened in 2012, Ohio officials estimated it would bring in revenues of $1.2 billion. In 2014, it took in a quarter of that, and state tax revenues have been disappointing. Casino taxes "hardly made a dent" in budget deficits, according to Wendy Patton, senior project director of the State Fiscal Project of Policy Matters Ohio, calling casinos "another blow to local government finances."
     So don't count your eggs before they're in the pudding.
     Which goes for more than casinos. Such as the Obama Library. Well, I guess Chicago is going to get it — all together now, fling your rough wool caps in the air and shout, "Hurrah!" — but is the decision really whether it goes into Jackson Park or Washington Park?
     The whole point of libraries is to turn to the past for instruction and understanding. So let's do that. I pick the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, because one of my strongest memories of using it is the long, long cab ride to get there, stuck on some lonely promontory, jutting into the harbor, leaning forward in the cab seat, watching the meter click, thinking, "Where IS this place?" Kind of odd to have put it here. Wouldn't you think a Kennedy Library would be at Harvard?
     The short answer is, that was the plan. Kennedy himself, a month before his death, visited the future site in Cambridge. So what happened? It took about 10 seconds of sleuthing to find this nugget on the library website:

     In 1975, the Kennedy Library Corporation abandoned plans to build the library on the site at Harvard University originally selected by President Kennedy due to prolonged delays in freeing the site for construction and opposition by some Cambridge residents who feared urban congestion caused by visitors and tourists.

     Well, that would explain it. Note the date. A dozen years of site battle hell. If I would have to bet — and I try not to — I'd say we'll have an Obama Library open, in 2027, due to delays we can't imagine, yet. Still, that'll be long before Chicago sees its first casino.

So THAT'S why we shake with the right hand...

     My wife does the shopping, God bless her. Not out of a love of stores, but simply because she knows if she sends me, I'll both buy the wrong stuff and spend too much doing it.
     But sometimes I tag along, to keep her company, though my interest isn't really held by the snagging of items on the list, and I tend to wander, like a child, and set off on impromptu anthropological expeditions, either intrigued by the DaVinci sketchbook diversity of my fellow shoppers, or studying trends in marketing.
     For instance, I recently found myself detained in the toilet paper aisle, first by this package of Cottonelle, with its "clean ripple texture" which is the sort of unexceptional euphemistic pap you'd expect, perhaps distinguished by "ripple"—good word—but leading to that  surprising "removes more."
     Oooh, I thought closing in like a lepidopterist spotting a rare butterfly, tip-toeing right up to it, aren't we? That dangling transitive verb, "removes," qualified by "more" and then just ... left there, dangling. Removes ...  more ... what?"

     Well, they can't say, of course, this being America, and we being among the most prudish, inhibited people who ever walked the earth. We can't say, we can barely bring ourselves to think about it. Which also explains all these cute animals, blubbery bears and playful puppies, trying to dance around what people do with their TP.  I haven't done a study of all toilet paper packaging ever, but I would bet cash money there are very few adults on those ever-increasing packages of toilet paper, enormous blocks that you could build homes with. Paper towels can be Brawny, can feature a lumberjack. But toilet paper isn't going to feature, oh, a smiling chef holding a big cake that will only end up ... well, you know.. 
     The only human I noticed in the toilet paper aisle was this infant, the AngelSoft baby, and I suppose if we take them at their word, that's not a human either, but an wraith, an incorporeal spirit. 
    Admire the irony in that. They can't mention what toilet paper cleans up, or show an actual person who might dab at their nether regions with it, but they are comfortable  flogging their product with dead babies, with enlisting as mascots babies who have died and are now angels.
    I don't really blame them. I don't want to write a post about the details of wiping shit either. We all know. 
    Or do we? For instance, what did people use to remove more before toilet paper? The Greeks used stones. There are books on the subject, "Wiped: The Curious History of Toilet Paper," by Ronald H. Blumer, a well-researched study. He begins slowly, as one must, surveying the various euphemisms for "go to the toilet." My favorite being, during the Constitutional Convention of 1789, the Founding Fathers were familiar with an East Coast showman exhibiting a camel, an exotic wonder, and Thomas Jefferson et al would excuse themselves from their deliberations by saying, "I think I'll go out and take a peep at the camel."
   Or the aptly-named "What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper? 200 Curious Questions & Intriguing Answers" by Andrew Thompson. The short answer: lots of stuff, from the Romans' sponge on a stick to coconut husks in Hawaii.
    "Wealthy people around the world used hemp and wool, with lace being used by the French royalty. British lords used pages from books," Thompson writes. "Poorer people used their hands, [their left hands, usually, which is why we shake with our right] grass, stones, moss, seashells or wood shavings, while the use of water was also common around the world. ... In the U.S., newspapers and telephone directories were common used, as were other books. The Old Farmer's Almanac was actually printed with a hole punched through the corner of each page so that it could be hung in outhouses, and the Sears catalogue was widely used..."
    Coyness in selling the stuff is as old as bathroom tissue itself. When the first toilet paper was mass produced in the United States in 1857 by Joseph Cayetty, it was also marketed with extreme delicacy, labeled as "Therapeutic Paper" (bold, considering that when Kimberly-Clark first started marketing Kotex, in 1920, it was sold in plain white boxes with its first name, "Cellunap" and nothing else, no description of its intended use whatsoever. But even that proved too much for both customers and drug store owners, who insisted the boxes be wrapped in plain brown paper. Kimberly-Clark changed the product's name to "Kotex" trying to lose the customer-alienating "nap," short for "napkin," and spent years coaxing the boxes out from behind counters). 
     But enough of this. I'm trying to attract readers, not repel them. Certain topics evoke memory of the voice of Nigel Wade, my long ago New Zealand press lord editor. "Steinberg!" he would bellow. "I was eating my poached egg when I read that!" So apologies all around. Something more appetizing tomorrow. 

"Wow, it's just so huge"

      When Brad Sutter was growing up nearby, of course he saw the Thornton Quarry. You can hardly miss it.
     "I've driven past here hundreds and hundred of times," said Sutter, of the series of vast limestone pits flanking I-80/94 just south of Chicago. "As a child, you're 'Wow, it's just so huge.' In my mind it's comparable to the Grand Canyon, though I've never seen it."

     So it was with great satisfaction that the 24-year-old's first job for the Walsh Group was Safety Engineer, making sure that everybody who descends into the Grand Canyon of the Southern Suburbs comes back out again.
     "Being able to go from seeing it my entire life, to work in it and make sure people go home to their families, it's extremely rewarding," he said.
     So you need a hard hat—rocks tumble—and an M20 oxygen rescue pack, since there are massive tunnels to venture into. And neon yellow vests, to help prevent being driven over by heavy equipment. And the right boots, which nobody had mentioned beforehand. It didn't matter that his guests included Mariyana T. Spyropoulos, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago and Adel Awad, senior civil engineer for the MWRD, which for the past two years has been turning the north lobe of the Thornton Quarry into the Thornton Composite Reservoir. Sutter had us cool our heels until the proper footgear was sent down from the front office.
     "Just doing my job," he said.

     Not that I minded waiting at the bottom of this unimaginably huge man-made basin, 2,000 feet across, 1,000 feet wide and 300 feet deep, which Hanson Material Services created over the past several decades by removing 76 million tons of limestone. Soon this tableau will be at least partially hidden under billions of gallons of water that would otherwise wind up in the basements of homes or in the Little Calumet River.
     "This reservoir is going to protect 14 communities, about 500,000 people, hopefully, it can save about $40 million in damages to the communities, annually," said Spyropoulos.
     Just having a big pit is not enough, however. it isn't just a matter of hooking it up to the 109-mile Deep Tunnel network and turning a spigot. You have to prep: about $400 million worth of construction was needed to create the reservoir infrastructure. Limestone is porous, for instance, and the polluted storm and waste water would leach back into the water table if the reservoir weren't sealed like a shower stall.
     "The challenge here, you have to grout the four boundaries, to create a kind of wall, a curtain," said Awad.
     That was done by digging holes, hundreds of feet deep, every 20 feet or so around the perimeter and filling them with grout.
     How much grout?
     "A lot," said Awad. Think a tube six inches wide and 150 miles long. "That spreads and forms a barrier."        

     Controlling the force of the incoming water is another challenge. Inside the intake tunnel will be four enormous steel gates, two feet thick, costing $7 million each, moving on bearings the size of garbage can lids. The 30 foot wide intake tunnel is divided into two channels, to reduce the water's force, and outside there is what amounts to a blast plate, designed to deflect the force of the flow and keep it from chewing up the reservoir bottom.
     "During a storm, when the flow come through the tunnel, it's huge force," said Awad. "You need the structure to be stable. This concrete slab will be six feet thick; it will diffuse the energy."
     The water will only be held temporarily at the reservoir; it'll flow by gravity to the Calumet Treatment Plant. Last year the MWRD extracted 200,000 tons of what it tastefully calls "biosolids"—fertilizer that ends up on park district golf courses and athletic fields.
     Back at the office, since one doesn't often get the chance, I phoned Hanson Materials to ask about gravel.
     "Our biggest customers are concrete and asphalt producers," said Bob Sapp, quarry's plant superintendent, who has worked there 27 years. "We're continuing to mine it, and have many years of reserves left."
     I wondered what is the most interesting part of mining gravel.
     "What we're mining is 420 million years old," he said. "This used to be an old coral reef. We find fossils of sea life."
     You can see the layers of rock formed over the millennia. For now.
     "We're hoping that this summer that we're going to get water in her," said Spyropoulos
     Until the water starts flowing, however, the MWRD is taking groups to see the dry reservoir. Various delegations from neighboring communities have visited, and Sypropoolos said that if interested groups contact her office, it will arrange a tour. I carefully explained, several times, that if you put a thing like that in the paper, people will actually do it. But she insisted that is okay. So for next month or so, now's your chance. Because it'll be under water a long, long time. Though if you do go, a word of advice: bring sturdy boots. Because Brad Sutter won't let you in otherwise.
     To schedule a tour, contact the MWRD Office of Public Affairs at tours@mwrd.org, or phone 312-751-6633.

Everyone going into the tunnel takes a brass tag, to keep track of who's inside. 

This rectangular entrance, leading to the active part of the quarry, is being plugged with concrete. 

Your intrepid reporter, on the scene, within a tunnel connecting the reservoir to the TARP system.

They leveled the bottom because boulders would create turbulence.

Happy Mother's Day, ma.

 

My mother, dancing at my wedding.

      Today being Mother's Day, of course I'll talk to my mother, phoning her in Boulder, Colorado, early, so she doesn't have to wait and wonder, as well as hoping to get ahead of my brother and sister, because there is something just a shade disreputable about being the last one, just the slightest hurt in her voice: THEY'VE already called. And now YOU'RE calling. Which is fine, you must be very busy with all those things that are more important than calling your mother...

     Not that she ever says that, and maybe she doesn't even think it. I do. I talk to her almost every day, just to check in, see how things are going, hear the news of my various relatives who would never contact me for any reason whatsoever, but with whom I shared a living room at my grandmother's house at various celebrations in Cleveland 40 years ago. I think we've grown closer these past few years because, now that the boys are in their later teens and flying the coop, I begun to realize just how big a hole it kicks in your life when your kids march off. I've also realized how we both share an unquenchable need to talk, one that we can satisfy on the phone to each other, almost every day, and thus spare our acquaintances the obligation. 

    Anyway, I shouldn't go on too long, because I have this tribute that I ran in the paper 14 years ago, that I believe sums her up about as well as I can. 

  

     My mother is in Finland today. At least, I think she's in Finland. Could be Norway. Or Denmark. I'm not really sure. My brother has the itinerary, and just as soon as I can get around to it I mean to find out, so I can call her up and wish her a happy Mother's Day, and she can tell me whatever she's doing there. Looking at fjords, I suppose.
     Then I'm heading off for the big barbecue at my in-laws.
     I don't write about my mother much, simply because our relationship is hard to explain. It doesn't fit the classic Victorian stereotype mother-son image — you know, dear old mum in a calico dress, her white hair up in a bun, sitting in a rocking chair before the fire, knitting warm socks for her boy, who at that moment is penning her a letter in his tent outside of Vicksburg. "Dearest mother: How my thoughts turn toward your sainted self as we prepare for the Great Battle. . . ."
     We aren't like that. My mother and I enjoy—how to say this?—a certain earthy candor that doesn't translate well to outsiders. We speak our minds, and it isn't always pretty. She said something a few months ago that illustrates the situation well. We were talking on the phone, and out of the blue my mother said: "You know, Neil, your father and I were discussing it, and we decided that you really are the star of our family. . . ." Here she paused for a moment, then added, with a sigh, "Of course, considering how your brother and sister screwed up their lives, I suppose that isn't saying much."
     (I should say that "screwed" is not the exact word my mother used, but its tamer, printable version.)
     Maybe that strikes you as a hurtful sentiment, but I loved it, just loved it, because it says so much about my mother; her yearning toward some sort of cliche sense of grace—to have the kind of family that has "stars"—slapped down by her inevitable cold clear view of the world.
     Her remark also explains how I ended up the way I am. People sometimes wonder how I can blurt out these harsh, uncharitable assessments, regardless of the setting or effect on my popularity and career. After they meet my mother, they don't wonder about that anymore.
     Your mother creates you, both literally, in the birth process, and figuratively, in the years that follow. My mother is so much like her mother, Sarah, who was the star of her little poker-playing, choir-singing, department store-clerking world of Jewish ladies in Cleveland.
     Sarah's been gone more than 20 years — hard to believe — but I can still see her, telling me about a special senior citizens episode of "The Price is Right." A woman who had worked in Hollywood in the 1930s was on the program, and the host asked her if she had any regrets in life. She said she had worked as a makeup artist on a Clark Gable movie once. The famous actor had asked her to go to bed with him, and she said no.
     "Of course she should regret it," my grandmother snapped, staring ahead coldly. "The woman's a fool. I'd have said, 'Just wait until I can get my clothes off.' "
      That shocked me, at the time. ("Grandma!" I said.) But now it's my most treasured memory of her, more than the Thanksgiving dinners or the Hershey bars she kept in her purse for us. That's who she was, a dame. My mother ended up a dame, too. At least she isn't dull.
     I wasn't always able to appreciate my mother's brio, her chutzpah, the way she marched up to store clerks; teachers; policemen and gave them a piece of her mind.
     But now I do value it, just for its rarity. Most people are so timid. Not her. My mother once was visiting me in Chicago — she visits once a year or so, when she isn't in Scandinavia or Hawaii or Australia or someplace a lot more interesting to her than the Midwest, clotted as it is with sons and grandchildren — and I took her to Andy's, the jazz club; bar on Hubbard Street. It was dark, noisy, crowded, a small band grooving on the stage. My mother excused herself from the bar — I assumed to go to the restroom. The next thing I knew, she was up on stage, with the band, singing some old chestnut. "Goody-Goody," I believe.
     That brashness is typical of her. When Northwestern officials slashed my financial aid, senior year, a ploy they used assuming that students would find the money somehow and not transfer away with one year left, my mother grabbed the phone, announcing she was going to call and get the money back. I can still see my 20-year-old self squirming, trying to stop her. "Ma, don't call the school. You can't change things like that."
     She did call. And she got the money back.
     This all is my way of saying, cut your mom some slack this Mother's Day. Sure, she can be intolerable — most mothers are, to a certain degree. But they also have their glory, and you will miss them someday.
     A number of years ago, my mother and I were in Cleveland. We were driving near the cemetery where her mother is buried. As we passed the cemetery, my mother rolled down the window, leaned out and let loose with a blood-curdling scream of "MOTHER!!!" It shocked me then and continues to do so to this day, just the sadness, the loss, the passion in that cry, something from the inner core, from the child that remains within all of us, all our lives, turning toward our mothers for that thing we have lost and want back.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 13, 2001

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Of course I'm trying to stump you.
     And at first glance this very bare room seems difficult to place.
     Which is why I like it, for contest purposes.
     Yet at the same time.
     It so plainly manifests itself.
     That I imagine somebody will know exactly where in Chicago this study in bare brown ugliness is located.
     Where is this empty place, like a stage set from Beckett?
     The prize is one of my hard-to-get-ahold-of 2015 blog posters.
     Delivered in a custom-made cardboard tube.
     From my good friends at Chicago Mailing Tube.
     So take a good look at this antechamber from a Kafka story. 
     And no, the red streak isn't blood.
     At least I don't think it was blood.
     Although I tried not to look too closely.
     Remember to place your guesses below.
     Good luck. Have fun. 

"You want this thing, I have this thing"

Amanda Palmer

     One of the many benefits of being utterly uncool is that you can shamelessly discover someone who is already familiar to everybody else. Thus I had no embarrassment whatsoever learning about this interesting singer only Monday, even though most people I asked already knew at least something about her. It's a big world, with lots in it, and I have to say becoming acquainted with Amanda Palmer embroidered this week considerably.

    Monday I first heard an Amanda Palmer song. By Tuesday I was trying to help her find a venue for a free concert in Chicago and on Wednesday we spoke.
     Fast world, this.
     The song, "Ukulele Anthem" was in a YouTube video sent by a Cleveland friend. Palmer, a "punk cabaret" singer, is seen standing on a platform before the Sydney Opera House, wearing some kind of a harness, and trailing white streamers in the stiff harbor breeze, whaling away at a ukulele, this humble near-toy of an instrument, which she turns into a metaphor for bravely creating whatever it is you feel like creating, unpolished though it may be. "Ukulele small and fierceful, ukulele brave and peaceful," she sings. "You can play your ukulele too."
    Works for me. I posted it on Facebook and tweeted it and sat down to listen to a few of her other songs, which range from a bawdy romp in praise of pudenda ("Map of Tasmania") to a confessional ode to the teen fiction icon Judy Blume to the tearful "Bigger on the Inside," whose opening lines are a spot-on indictment of online snark ("You'd think I'd shot their children, from the way that they are talking. And there's no point in responding, 'cause it will not make them stop.").

     What intrigued me first about Amanda Palmer is the honesty, humor and intelligence of her lyrics, underscored by the sense of her pushing the limits of her ability. It's one thing to caper around nearly-naked in a music video when you're Miley Cyrus, or sing when you have the pipes of Lady Gaga. Quite another when you're, as she once put it herself, describing her initial critical reception as half of the Dresden Dolls, "the fat, hairy, obnoxious attention-getter" with a vocal range of about half an octave. That takes guts, and after hearing a few songs I wondered if she ever came to Chicago. Tap, tap, tap: yes, Friday in fact, speaking to the HOW Design Conference, going on this week downtown, in her role as a crowdfunding guru — in 2012 she turned to Kickstarter, ending up with $1.2 million from her adoring fans, which led to a TED talk, seen 6 million times, on the power of drawing sustenance from others, leading to a best-selling book, "The Art of Asking."
    She slept through our appointed time to talk, but two hours later had a good excuse. Two good excuses, actually.
     "Pregnant rock star," she laughed. "It's the worst. I don't recommend being a pregnant rock star."
     She and her husband, hugely-popular fantasy author Neil Gaiman, are expecting their first child in September.
     At a performance in Dallas in April, she said she would be "disappearing into motherhood." True?
     "I am not," she said. "I'm about to embark on a five-week trip to the UK, to tour and record my little ass off."
     "Why!?" I asked, in a tone of sincere horror.
     "Good fucking question," she replied. "I don't know. I decided it would be a good idea to go over and promote my book."
     She married Gaiman, who's 15 years her senior, in 2011. I wondered how that came about.
     "Finding a partner who's supportive and enthused and unthreatened by my career was not easy," she said. "Finding a guy whose very manhood is not threatened by the hugeness of my universe was no easy task. That's one of the real attractions of Neil. He didn't even register as a potential romantic partner. I met him and thought, 'He's weird. He's old. Who is this guy?' As we got to know each other, we recognized each other in a deep, fundamental way. We come from very similar emotional backgrounds. We developed the same desperately-loving relationship with our fan bases. Though our genres are totally different, we both get each other."
     With a million Twitter followers, she periodically finds herself in the middle of the usual nasty Twitter kerfuffles — particularly the $1.2 million on Kickstarter, by far the most ever raised there by a musician, which cast a new, harsh light on her practice of sleeping on sofas in fans' homes while on tour and paying local musicians in beer. She told Salon last year that "a little bit of the magic drained out" after that, and the unfair slur "millionaire who doesn't pay her musicians" stuck to her like an ill-advised tattoo — it's the most common reaction I got to floating her name. Although, as often happens with Kickstarter, by the time she got done sending the incentive gifts back to those who funded her, and paying for the album it was underwriting, there wasn't anything left. But when I asked if Kickstarter had been a poisoned chalice, given the ill will it engendered, she disagreed.

Photo by Shervin Lainez

      "No, I would never do it differently," she said. "My fans have stuck with me, the people who understand me, have never gone away, The exercise of the Kickstarter wasn't to impress Rolling Stone, Spin and the New York Times. It was to directly connect the people in my community, cut out the media, cut out the labels, cut out the middlemen, and for all the yelling and screaming, that part worked. I made 25,000 people really happy. That's the story that never gets told, and the fact that I spent two years making an art book, touring the world and making a fabulous record. Nobody asks about that."
     Well, glad I did then. Palmer said that, in general, the online world seems less vile than just a year or two ago. "The conversation feels like it's shifted," she said, suggesting people are beginning to suspect, "maybe human beings are on the other side of this snark." (I hope to tuck myself into that group of sympathy-worthy humans, since I imagine that writing about Palmer as an outside observer will strike many of her fans as Bad Form, though I would point out to them that the right to honestly assess the world is not her exclusive domain; others may partake, too).
     Being so new to her huge universe, I thought I'd better seek out expert judgment, and consulted Marty Lennartz, the veteran DJ at WXRT. He called Palmer a "polarizing and controversial artist mainly because of her extracurricular activities. But she's a really interesting artist, both musically and visually. Her work with Dresden Dolls was a cool and weird goth cabaret act."
     That sounds right. Now she's on Patreon, where an artist's online community bankrolls his or her efforts in an ongoing relationship: kind of a mob Medici.
     "I now have 5,000 people in my life, lifetime subscribers , supporting me. I'll never need a label again," she said. "Never need press again."
     "And yet we're talking," I said, in a crushed little whisper that she ignored. I'm proud of my art too.
     Her HOW conference talk isn't open to the public, and I wondered why she didn't slip into town, deliver it, and leave. Why bother with a free show, being pregnant and all?
     "You'd have to be me," she said. "There's no money involved. Literally no money. These venues, the friendly ones, just open their doors. I play. Everybody leaves, everybody's happy. It's pretty amazing. I have a bunch of fans who are practically family in Chicago. They said we would love to come to see you, but tickets [to the conference] are 700 dollars. It's an emotional level of showing up in town and not seeing your old friend. You carve out time to have lunch."
     She put out an appeal for concert venues on Tuesday and, easily sliding into the spirit of the thing, I phoned The Hideout — they seem a pretty ad hoc kind of place — and they pointed me toward Schuba's, and Lincoln Hall. She's right, I thought, realizing I was making calls in the middle of the day for somebody I didn't know, people want to help, if you ask them. She ended up settling on the Old Town School of Folk Music, whose students noticed her request and lobbied to host the show. The administration there was delighted to be involved.
     It's a very appealing notion: you fall, and trust somebody to catch you.
     In Palmer's sharp, well-written book, she says that, among her early jobs, she was briefly a professional dominatrix, and I wondered if that didn't help her develop the approach of being supported by a community, since doms have a variety of clients who underwrite their lifestyles in return for being allowed to hang around.
     "I don't think it's a stretch" she said. "It is an unusual but very interesting exchange of energy between a dom and a client, a freelancer in a room with a dude, and incredible amount of trust involved, not abusing that trust, and then dealing gratefully with monetary exchange, It can be beautiful. Those skills are useful in rock and roll, it's the same attitude, You want this thing, I have this thing, How can we gracefully exchange with each other?"
     We were getting along so well, that I asked her how she would describe her voice. When I played her songs for my wife, she grimaced as if tasting sour milk. I told her it's a hurdle to get over, but once you do you hardly notice.
      "As far as vocal stuff goes, that blindsides me," Palmer said. "I came out of fronting a cult cabaret band. For years and year, nobody ever criticized my voice. That was the voice I sang with, unschooled, unpolished, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey. I assumed that was a great voice, totally raw and unpolished. I actually have an allergy to pop vocalists. That doesn't sound real to me...There's a bunch of people out there who hear me and think I sound like a howling cat. People schooled in indie rock, they listen and they hear authenticity. I'm certainly never going to be everyone's taste."
     I asked my Cleveland friend, who sent me the video on Monday how she knew about Palmer, and she said from her 16-year-old daughter. Since the teen started this, I suggested that she ask her daughter if she has a question for Palmer. and she did: "What do you do about imperfection?"
     A good question. But she sent me the question after the interview, alas, though, having talked to her, I feel emboldened to guess how Amanda Palmer might respond. She'd say: You embrace imperfection. You are not only proud of it, but you are strong enough to put it out there for all to see, and hear, because everyone has flaws. Be strong enough to take the barbs and generous enough to return the hugs that come from being yourself, imperfections and all. I believe that is what she's saying.

Postscript

    At noon Friday I jumped on the Divvy bike and rode over to the HOW conference at the Sheraton, to listen to Palmer chat with blogger Maria Popova about crowdfunding. I was impressed with what she had to say, about being an artist and staking out your territory, and the way to find support for what it is you want to do. It was reassuring, in the sense that if an old system of creativity, like the "be-paid-by-a-newspaper" model, goes South, as it seems to be heading, there might be another way to skin that cat lurking around the corner. Palmer used a phrase that I liked, "baked in" several times, implying that certain difficulties are inherent to particular situations. I might assemble an edited transcript on the blog in the near future, if I decide it isn't dwelling in an unseemly and fanboyish fashion. Then, she whipped out a ukulele she had brought and played her "Ukulele Anthem," which I really savored, both because I enjoy the song, and second because there seemed a come-full-circle quality, to seeing her on a YouTube video from Australia Monday morning, to seeing her do the same song live 10 feet away Friday afternoon. Afterward, I went up and asked her to sign her book, and introduced myself, and wished her well with her pregnancy, and then blurted out, "You can sing," which was an awkward and inept thing to say, but from the heart, and a kind of apology, for playing my squint-and-judge media guy role, and she took it graciously, or maybe indifferently, and either way she hurried off and I jumped on my bike and blew down Randolph Street back to the newspaper, feeling very much in the zone on a warm day in May.