Texas notes: Good cog

 

     Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey puts up some covering fire for her homophone namesakes. 

     Karen Karen Karen! Who is this not-so-mysterious creature? Neil’s recent piece had me thinking about her again. Karen was the third most popular girls name in 1965 (says Wiki). In the 70s she was a Carpenter with a voice few ears were able to refuse. In the 80s and 90s she did not get much attention. Today she is a household name—this incarnation of Karen finally bearing the attention she has so sorely craved.
     There are multiple ideas about where the meme originated— a Dane Cook comedy routine, Black Twitter, Reddit, and “an evolution of an AAVE [African American Vernacular English] linguistic term referring to ‘unreasonable white women.’” (Wiki again).
     They are known to call the police on people of color, such as the Central Park Karen who tried to have an innocent black man arrested in Central Park by falsely accusing him of attempting to assault her in May of 2020. The next month, a San Francisco Karen called the police on James Juanillo as he stenciled Black Lives Matter in chalk on a concrete wall on his own property.
     The most horrifying part of this is that the Central Park Karen, and many others, may have gotten away with having an innocent black man sent to jail on false charges of attempted assault. It is well documented that innocent black men sit in jail for crimes they did not commit. Many have been murdered for glancing at a white woman. A culture of extreme fear of black men permeates our society and sickens it.
     This part of the meme’s meaning is the most important. Yes, it’s unfortunate that a woman’s name is being used to make a point. Women suffer enough hatred and subjugation as it is. I’d love to launch a successful campaign to rename Karen. How about Jerk? Or Donald? (Sorry Donalds, I trust this will not stick).
     What’s more important than the name is the meaning behind it and it’s good we are naming this behavior. When we try to live happily in a world with people whose emotional intelligence, ability to practice self-control, and perhaps something more nefarious is fueling them, we are all in trouble.
     These days it seems a lot of people espouse the right things. They pepper their yards with BLM signs, loudly vote against an oppressive system, and fancy themselves good-enough. My next door neighbors sometimes play music, and the bass comes right into my tiny house with a thump thump thump. I went over there around the 1st of the year with a bottle of Prosecco and wished the man who answered a happy new year. I was scared to do this, but I took a deep breath and let him know that sometimes I can hear their bass, and it was so loud at times that I was unable to have the peace needed to watch a movie in my little tiny quarantine space. I told him “I’m sure you don’t realize it, so I just wanted you to know.” I offered some acoustical solutions (which are quite simple), and offered to help pay for any supplies needed.
     He glanced in at his wife who must have been gesturing to him, and handed me back the Prosecco. He said “you’ll just have to call the police.” I said, “I’m not going to call the police. Thanks so much for being such good neighbors at the time of a global pandemic,” and I left.             Was I being a Karen? I don’t think so, since I was calm and friendly; well, maybe a bit with the snarky pandemic line.
     My neighbors are Austin originals with an upgraded Airstream trailer parked in their back yard. They always have fun giveaways placed out on the curb. Up until I asked them to be mindful about noise they were friendly. 
What we are missing in this world is humility, and a lack of regard for how others feel. You and I might see that we have been guilty of this. We feel an urgent need to get there first in traffic, and rather than yield to the person trying to merge we “stand our ground.” We want the person in front of us at the store to hurry up, not giving them time to put their credit card away. We say we care about front line workers but treat them like hired help, even as they put their lives in jeopardy to keep the wheels turning day by day. We park in parking spots not designated for 
us.
    We are easily annoyed, especially under stress, and we are all under stress.
     When I heard the thump of music the other day I practiced what I preach. I told myself, “it’s not that bad.” “Nowhere is perfect, there will always be some outside noise.” It worked. I have been practicing kind thoughts towards them. When I walk by their house I think to myself “may they be well, happy and peaceful.”
     If we can walk this earth together, hand in hand, it will be better for all of us. We will be happier if we learn not to succumb to our anger, rage, depression, anxiety, impatience and sense of entitlement. If we see others doing so, we can give them the benefit of the doubt. If we slip up, we can apologize, forgive ourselves, and try to focus on doing the next important thing.       A yoga teacher once reminded me to “always try to be a good cog in the wheel.” I have failed many times, and yet with ardent inner work and help from mentors, family, and friends I feel more well-oiled than every before. Self-care is essential. If we are not rested and well-nourished by food and support it’s hard for us to be the best versions of ourselves. Let’s minimize the Donald in us and remember that we are each others’ keepers.

Star-spangled banner still waves over us

     “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a strange song for a national anthem. Not just for its notoriously hard-to-sing melody that lurches over an octave and a half, straining toward that high F, “o’er the land of the freeeeeee.” Nor that fact the tune is an old English drinking song, repurposed.
     I mean, what the song is about. It isn’t a celebration, like Australia’s. “We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil.” It isn’t a call to arms, like “La Marseillaise.”
     No, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about surveying the wreckage. It’s a morning-after song, about waiting for the sun to come up to see if the British Navy, which has been shellacking Fort McHenry all night during the War of 1812, has prevailed.
     “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming?”
     Is our flag still there?
     Those “broad stripes and bright stars” were indeed still there. The British guns were ineffectual at the range they were being used, and the ships didn’t dare come in closer, within range of the fort’s battery.
     And though I’ve been singing it all my life, with more gusto than tune, the song’s meaning never really sunk in. It never seemed a perfect fit for the moment, until Joe Biden’s inauguration Wednesday. When Lady Gaga came out in that enormous poof of red dress and sang, our nation emerged blinking from the four-year assault it has been enduring.
     Into the very bright light of Wednesday morning, squinting into the swirling smoke, asking: “Are we still here? Are we still a nation?”
     Yes. Yes we are.

To continue reading, click here. 

Flashback 1998: Secrets of the lost-and-found

Untitled, by Jannis Kounellis (Hirshhorn Museum) 

     I was looking for clips related to the Museum of Science & Industry, and I found this. It's the kind of column that I really like, in that it's filled with things, yet imbued with an overarching sense of humanity and all its inscrutability. 

     Caitlin's "Petite Miss" diary is there, as is Alicia A. Wilkey's purse. There is a pair of skis, plus many pillows, blankets, suitcases, eyeglasses, wallets, sets of keys, cameras and cell phones. At least a dozen Bibles. Four coolers. Mike Hoffman's wallet is waiting, the cash still inside, as is Ivory Thomas' LaSalle Bank savings account bankbook.
     All are inventoried and stacked in the tidy little lost-and-found room in the basement of Union Station, a treasure trove of mystery presided over by Amtrak agent Steve Napoli.
     "What I can't understand is the wheelchairs," he said. "I've had three wheelchairs. How do you forget a wheelchair?"
     Almost every large public place in Chicago has its own lost-and-found—museums and shopping centers, concert halls and office buildings. Sad collections of ownerless ephemera, keys that will never find their locks, photograph albums that will never draw a spark of recognition.
      While lost-and-founds have certain things in common—wherever people go, they tend to lose the same things—each has its own particular brand of mystery and drama.
     "We typically have things like wallets, keys, lots of sunglasses and favorite dolls or stuffed animals," said Kate Desulis, membership and visitor services coordinator at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, who also manages the lost-and-found. "A couple of times we've had shoes, usually one. I often wonder how people manage to hike back from the trail with only one shoe."
     Desulis said it is particularly satisfying to be able to reunite a doll with its owner.
     "We often get frantic calls from the mothers who want to know if little Betty is found," she said. "They're very excited when we can tell them, `Yes, we have your doll.' "
     Carlton Bolden, special-projects coordinator for visitors services at the Museum of Science and Industry, says the most common items are sweaters, though he has noticed the shoe mystery, too.
     "The only thing I can assume is either somebody changed shoes or, who knows, maybe they bought new ones and thought this would be a good dumping ground for the old ones," he said.
     One rather personal and expensive lost item sticks in Bolden's mind.
     "At one point we had a retainer turned in," he said, noting it was never claimed. "I would think you would miss it, you would look for it. Those things aren't cheap."
     He also recalls the time a child lost her Giga Pet.
     "We kept getting calls for it," he said. "It was just like a lost baby."
     Most lost-and-founds will take steps to reunite items to their owners, though not all. If you lose your wallet at Northwestern University's Norris Center student union, you're out of luck. "We have a few wallets with IDs," said Stephanie Carr, class of '98, who works at the front desk. "For some reason we don't really call people."
     Mike Sawyer, the house manager at Orchestra Hall, says they do just the opposite there, going to great effort to reunite patrons with their belongings. He once drove to the home of a disoriented elderly patron who donned two coats belonging to his box mates, leaving his own behind.
      "We traced him through the ticketing department," Sawyer said. "That was very unusual."
     Sawyer said that the contents of the lost-and-found box varies with the seasons. "We're mostly lost gloves in the winter," he said. "Spring and fall, an awful lot of umbrellas turn up."
     One thing they don't hold past the end of a performance is food.
     "We hold them until the end of the concert and then down the tube they go," he said.
     Amtrak's Napoli said they also get lots of food. "We'll open up a bag and find a hot dog in its bun," he said.
     But they also get far more valuable items.
     "I had a bag of rubies, diamonds, emeralds," he said. "There was also a set of cruise tickets. I found (the owners) through the cruise tickets, in Florida."
     The most surprising thing about the jewelry incident, Napoli said, was the couple wasn't as frantic as you'd expect people losing a bag of jewels would be.
     "When I called, they were so matter-of-fact," he said. "They were like: `Oh, you found them. Thanks.' "

                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 19, 1998

Happy people who treat everyone nicely

A Rotary International luncheon in Fairfield, Illinois in January, 2017.

     Not much changes in Fairfield, Illinois.
     “Honestly? No. It really hasn’t changed much,” said L. Bryan Williams, who owns an insurance company there.
     The seat of Wayne County is right where we left it four years ago, 275 miles due south of Chicago, when I visited just before the inauguration of Donald Trump.
     Why go then? Well, if you line up Illinois’ 102 counties by how they voted in the 2016 election, Cook County was at one end, with 74.4% voting for Hillary Clinton. And Wayne County was at the other end, with 84.3% voting for Trump.
     Why return now? As we enter the Joe Biden administration at noon Wednesday, it seems worthwhile to circle back to Fairfield, and see how they’re doing and what they think about the four years past, where we are now, and where we’re going. Perhaps it’ll give a glimpse of what’s ahead.
     There is one change here: even fewer jobs. When I visited in 2017, the big employer in town, Airtex, an automobile fuel pump manufacturer, had just shut down, sending nearly 1,000 jobs to Mexico and China. But the lights were still on and several dozen people were still here, administering. Now the lights are off. Even the skeleton crew is gone.
     ”The community has adapted to not having Airtex here,” said Williams. “It’s become a little bit more of a bedroom community. But you wouldn’t see anything startling.”
     That depends on what startles a person.

To continue reading, click here.

Did the military save the country and forget to tell us?

 

    Are we out of the woods?

     Or will the crazy desperate thing come today?
    Not that 1/6, the rally/clown coup wasn't both crazy and desperate. But you hate to dust your hands and declare Donald Trump finished. Because there always seems to be another handful of crazy dust left in his bag of tricks. 

     But maybe .. just maybe ... the worst thing that'll happen Tuesday is he'll pardon 100 of the lowest of the low, including himself and his family. Olly, olly, oxen free. 

     Then we'll have gotten off light.

     Of course, if Trump's four years of standard shredding marks the low point of our nation's flirtation with despotism, we'll have gotten off light. There are hells below this one, traitors like Ted Cruz in a runner's crouch, waiting to lead us there, and millions upon millions of Americans obviously eager to race right behind.
     Maybe that's why I can't write any grand "What it all meant" column. Because I can't believe it's over. Maybe that's some dilute form of PTSD. The prisoner, freed, crossing his hands behind his back still, as if bound. Because trauma has a momentum. It endures.

     Were the Trump years traumatic? Not in any way like it was for the kids in those cages. Wonder when the full truth of that comes out? Not that we don't know the horrid outlines. But the details, the particulars. That'll start coming out; I'm surprised it hasn't already. Or maybe it has and our blown out senses don't register, don't let us be shocked. Not the way we should be. Or maybe it's just me. I can't tell anymore.

      Okay, let's wrap this up and get back to writing Wednesday's column. Before I go, I will say one thing, and this strays into the predictive, almost always a mistake. But why not? Everybody is saying everything all the time anyway. 

      We should be grateful for the military. As a child of the '60s, I was raised to look askance at the armed forces. The whole Vietnam War, it soured us civilians. 

     And the military hadn't been called upon to really, truly save democracy since they kicked the Nazis out of France. 

      But my hunch is, they did it again—saved democracy, that is—and people don't even know it, yet. I would bet money that once the Trump enormity is sent back to the gold-plated hell from whence it came, and the facts start dribbling out, it will be revealed that he tried to sound out the top brass to attempt a real overthrow of the government, rather than firing up his sedition rabble for their freeform storming of the Capitol. Do you have any doubt Trump did? You can't say it isn't the sort of thing he would do. It's exactly the sort of thing he would do. The sort of thing he has already done.

      I'm not certain. How could I be? Not 100 percent. Maybe whatever aide was in the room wrestled the red phone out of his hand. But call it a hunch. I would bet there is some ugly story of Trump browbeating a general or two, demanding they hand the country over to his tender mercies, and that general just shook his head and said, "Sir, that just isn't going to happen." What's Churchill's line after the Battle of Britain? Never was so much owed by so many to so few.

Online magic scratches live theater itch

Scott Silven

     After I turned this in I learned that the Sun-Times reviewed "The Journey" last Wednesday. I asked my boss if we should just scrap the column and I'd whip together something else. But he felt the two pieces are different enough to slip this through. So after you read my take, if you want a detailed, spot on review of the performance by freelancer Catey Sullivan, you can find it here.

     The initials in the title “R.U.R” — a science fiction play by Czech writer Karel Čapek — stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” which introduced the word “robot” into the English language. The production I saw at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival ended with the robot lovers, Primus and Helena, freezing on stage as the lights came up, a neat bit of stage business. I kept turning as I filed out with the rest of the audience, to see if they were still standing there, motionless, holding hands. They were. 

     That was also 50 years ago, a reminder of the power of theater to move us, shape us, take a moment, or an image, and make it part of our consciousness, forever.
     Something we’ve been missing sorely for the past 11 months — those who go to shows, anyway — and it might give a sense of how small a crew that is if you consider the verbiage spent mourning the inability to eat in restaurants versus the scant attention given the near complete loss of Chicago’s vibrant live theater. Not to forget the hole kicked in the livelihoods of thousands of actors, stagehands, wardrobe chiefs, lighting technicians and ticket salespeople.
     On-screen live performance just isn’t the same. Since the pandemic struck, I’ve seen three theatrical productions online. 
     There was a TV version of Jane Austen my wife was watching that seemed tinny and abrasive. I bailed out after 10 minutes. And I tried to introduce “Hamilton” to the boys, but we weren’t in a theater, hadn’t paid $180 a ticket, and the show never grabbed them. After a polite half hour they begged off.
     And “The Journey” Thursday night, a one-man show by Scottish illusionist Scott Silven, presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which cracked the secret of getting me to try live online performance. They asked. It’s a magic act, not a play, but I don’t mind magic. The last show I saw in Chicago before the world shut down was Penn & Teller at the Chicago Theater in November 2019. A century ago. They were good.
     “The Journey” takes place in a single room, and close-in magic works well on a small screen. The audience, limited to 30, is at times projected in the room, and the basic conjurer’s routine of asking questions of volunteers draws viewers in, underscoring the live quality. We’d been asked to bring an object of personal significance, and I brought a fossil trilobite, which meshed nicely — or should that be inexplicably? — with Silven’s theme of home and time and stones, small cairns which were part of the act.

To continue reading, click here.

"Whose Karen Is It?"

  

     National Public Radio is proud of its engaging stories, dubbed "Driveway Moments," those compelling programs whose blend of narrative, humor, pathos and suspense keeps a driver glued to the car radio, even when the destination is reached and he would snap off less captivating fare, but is forced to sit in the car in the driveway, listening.

     But after this morning, I'm wondering if lingering in the driveway is any measure of highbrow creative merit.
     The boys were home, and the car radio had, perhaps through their handiwork, shifted from the usual WXRT 93.1 FM to the unfamiliar 101.1 FM WKQX. Saturday morning, returning from dropping our dog off at the groomer, I found myself listening for the first time to the Brian, Ali and Justin show, one of their "Whose Karen Is It?" segments, where the hosts try to match a "Karen"—an unhinged, complaining woman—to her home neighborhood in Chicago.
     Before we launch into the topic, I couldn't spotlight the imaginative, thoughtful, and not-at-all entitled or in any way testy musings of Caren Jeskey without pointing out that the whole "Karen" trope is mean, unfair, sexist and past its pull date, not to forget being the slasher-movie morality of identifying someone as vile so you can unleash all the cruelty upon them that supposedly so bothered you in the first place. 

     But that realization only came later, with a bit of guidance from my wife, as illumination all too often does. Complaining men don't get the same treatment. Nor do we know whose bad moment is being captured. Maybe they're having an awful day. Maybe they're mentally ill. Maybe they're right.
     The host read a note found taped to the windshield of a car, basically extending dibs, presumptive enough after a snowfall, to a general claim on a parking space, 365 days a year.
     "I am so pissed off that these fucking transplants don't know the rules around here," it begins. "I've been calling dibs on 2 parking spots in front of my house for 5 years now without any issues. Everyone on the block knows these our [sic] my parking spots..."
     The game is to guess where in the city this woman lives. It has its own page on the WKQX web site and you can see the full social media post there. 

     The first caller  guessed that the author of the note is from Bridgeport—he himself is from Bridgeport—while allowing that the note being typed and not scrawled in a nearly illegible hand did, indicated it might be from somewhere more advanced than the neighborhood that spawned the Daleys. 
     Wrong! Complete with canned sound effect and host hilarity.

     What kept my interest was how the game was that it served as a quick survey of how residents of various parts of the city are viewed by others. Callers guessed Lincoln Park, Edison Park, Marionette Park. There seemed to be a lot of callers, impressive for a Saturday, and they greeted the hosts with "ahoy!" which had a certain Jimmy Buffett appeal.
     It went on and, eventually, I went inside and, in checking the station's web site to see who I was listening to, I realized I was able to keep listening. They must have dragged the bit out over a half hour.
     While listening, I did my due diligence. It turns out that this very segment caused controversy last fall when someone guessed Skokie. Robert Feder of course had the full story:

"It might be time for Brian Haddad to consider dropping “Whose Karen Is It?” from his morning show on Cumulus Media alternative rock WKQX 101.1-FM. Wednesday’s installment of the weekly bit (purportedly based on a woman charging her friends and family $80 per person for Thanksgiving dinner) took a bizarre turn when a caller unleashed some unmistakably anti-Semitic tropes about 'those people' in Skokie. "

     Obviously the station isn't taking Robert's wise counsel, always a mistake. Though Haddad did immediately apologize. That's good enough for me. As I've said before, if I refused to partake in the creative efforts of anti-Semites, I'd be sitting alone in a bare white-walled room listening to klezmer music while tossing cards into a hat.
      I was still listening when the mystery was solved.
     "Mark, ahoy, whose Karen is it?" said one host.
     "Everyone who lives in Bucktown only shops in Bucktown, they never leave Bucktown, I gotta think it's Bucktown, I know them," the caller said.
    "You got it, Mark, it's Bucktown!" More sound effects, etc.

     The most noteworthy thing is the callers seem to think "dibs" is a gentrified phenomenon, while I think of it as an entrenched, I've-lived-in-Mayfair-30-years kind of thing. Maybe it's both. 
     They call Saturday's show a "Throwback"—meaning, I assume, that it was a re-broadcast of a show earlier in the week.
     I kept listening, and they played "Do I Wanna Know?" by the Arctic Monkeys, which seems less crappy than I would expect on contemporary glad talk music fare.
     The topic shifted to pedicures and cutting your toenails and I was able to easily bail out.
     I don't want to overstate the case. But in my business, no wonder should go unremarked upon. Maybe I'm biased, and assume such shows are more brain dead than they actually are. I still set the station back to WXRT—you gotta dance with who brung ya—but I was encouraged by the episode. Maybe I'm looking for encouragement lately. Maybe we all are.