Ravenswood Notes: Mangled Tusk

      One of my favorite bands, Poi Dog Pondering, is playing at SPACE in Evanston on Dec. 30 and 31, and while I bite my lip and wonder whether, in this post-omicron landscape, I dare jam myself and my wife into a crowded audience, vaccinated or not (spoiler alert: I don't) EGD's Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey steps into the void and fills our Saturday with music, as if to make up for my deficiencies. Her report:

     “Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful," from Good Bones by Maggie Smith.

     Yeah, right. It’s taken me to the medium ripe age of 52 to realize that there is more shit in this world than can be cleaned up. So what’s next? Escapism. A nervous system needs comfort. Pleasure. Joy. I will, as always, lean heavily on music as a steady source.
     From flapping my wings with Do Bee in Romper Room, to strumming a ukulele at 3, to sitting at the feet of Ella Jenkins, the First Lady of Children's Music in a basement bar when I was 5, to picking up a silver flute at 6, to Walkmans full of TDKs, XRT and WGCI radio as an adolescent, to symphonies, operas, operettas and musicals (that I was forced to attend until I realized they were cool and went on my own volition), music has been a saving grace. There is always hope to be found in the form of dancing, singing, blowing into a woodwind or a horn, shaking a rattle, slapping a djembe- or listening to everyone from noodlers to stars do their things.
     I am not the first person to notice that music is a form of church. When lost in music nothing else matters. We are allowed to feel. To be quiet, or to scream. To feel connected, even as we rest in our own silence.
     That’s why I invited Jason Narducy to have a Zoom visit this week. To be inspired. Thanks to Jason mentioning Cheap Trick, I can hear sweet voices in my head as I type today. We all know the feeling of the body and brain lighting up in response to certain sounds. With new music there’s always the chance we'll have that moment where we think “what is happening right now?” as new neural pathways tunnel and weave, thought ceases, and presence ensues. Time stands still.
     I felt this when listening to Jason’s band Split Single’s new album Amplificado. From the intro to the outro I was engaged, and have listened all the way through several times. I wanted the album to be longer. Jason’s voice is bright and strong. Some of the songs reminded me of Neutral Milk Hotel (aka NMH) with languid far away horns and clanging sounds that suggest the wheels of industry, Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths with an '80s vibe that alternates from crisp to melancholy, and Rick Springfield’s Jesse’s Girl. It's said of Jeff Mangum of NMH that some of his lyrics are literal translations of his lucid dreams.
     Jason, too, has dreams inform his lyrics. "I often [have] structural engineering type dreams where there are very complex buildings, and I am somehow either on a train going through them, or [on a plane] flying through them, in cityscapes. There's a song on the new record called Mangled Tusk where I reference that." He cracked me up by adding that the song is also "about how I have to wear a night guard- I mean most songs are about wearing a night guard." The lyrics in Mangled Tusk "structures of engineering, genius and doom is a reference to how I dream. A lot of metal and very large structures that are non-conventional shapes that I wouldn't even know how to describe, it's so equidimensional."
     I find the song Satellite on Amplificado impossible not to sing along with, and it comes with a pretty neat video. It's one of those songs I've just recently heard, but when it comes on it has the comfort of a song I've known forever. “I had the concept of someone who would wrap themselves in aluminum foil, climb to the top of a building, and try to connect with something. They made a homemade antenna— my son made the one in the video— but then they ran out of foil and had to go and get their fix for more. In the video I am trying to connect with something but there is nothing. The sky is gray. Then I look over and there’s the guy I buy aluminum foil from all the time, right there.” The point of the story is that the character ultimately connected with somebody who they have known the whole time while falsely believing they needed a special antenna to connect with something unknown. In the video, when Jason sees his aluminum dealer played by actor Jimmy Chung they break into smiles beaming towards each other. I have to admit I got full body chills to witness this joining of minds.
     The video was filmed in a parking garage in Evanston and directed by Jason’s pal Brendan Leonard. “I’m proud of it. I love the way it came out.” It seems that Jason is thriving in life, with a nuclear family, extended family, friends, and collaborators he lovingly peppers into his conversations, a new album, and two live singles that were released yesterday on Bandcamp.
     Jason has a solo (vax'd, masked, limited capacity) living room show coming up in Madison on December 11th, and a show at Gman Tavern next to Metro on Clark Street in Chicago on December 18th. You can find the ticket information here.
     When the pandemic hit, Jason’s line of work as a touring musician with Bob Mould and his own project became precarious, as did his business Inside Outside Painting. Fortunately, SPACE in Evanston hired him for lawn concerts. They were so well received that he performed them 53 times during COVID summer of 2020.
     Lyrics in the song Bitten by the Sound (on Amplificado) give us a glimpse into Jason's formative years. "All four wheels lifted at night, I’ve never seen a car sit on bricks” refers to one morning in 1979, when Jason was 8. He looked out of the window of his home on 53rd and Woodlawn to see his family’s Honda Civic sitting up on 4 bricks. The wheels were gone. “I thought ‘that’s crazy,’ then asked my mom when we were leaving to go out for the day.” It didn’t even occur to him that they’d been robbed and would have to spend the day untangling from this ordeal.
     Later Jason lived on Sheridan and Jonquil Terrace in East Rogers Park with his father— his parents had gone through a tough divorce when Jason was 4. Jason recalls seeing his mother Sally Iberg and the man who would later become his stepfather, Jim Iberg, play music together at Biddy Mulligans. Jim was the founding guitarist for The Special Consensus bluegrass band that’s still together (sans the now retired Jim) today.
     Jason was handed his first instrument in about 1977, a mandolin that he played until the strings could no longer be fixed. A year later he got his first electric guitar that he adorned with a Star Wars decal. Jason met a pal Chris Kean at Lincoln School, and through Chris met the person destined to be a friend he calls his brother, Zack Kantor. Jason and Zack shared an “obsession with playing and practicing and getting better. I had my partner in crime.” The three, along with vocalist Tracy Bradford (whose cousin is Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters) formed a punk band of 10 year olds they called Verböten.
     Early in life, Jason felt “unsettled at times due to a lot of change, and not enough security. Music provided that safe place. The sense of community. The tribe that I wanted to be a part of.” Jason is not just a part of the Chicago music scene, but a prolific and integral player, with the passion and drive to keep us entertained with his voice, musical prowess, humor, and kind spirit.
     Hope to see you all at a masked limited capacity show soon, but if not, happy listening.

Pro-choice priests and suicide girls

The Greek Slave, by Hiram Powers (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

     Since the Supreme Court seems poised to drag America back to the past, at least when it comes to abortion, we should reacquaint ourselves with where we’re headed. Get the lay of the land, as it were.
     And no, I’m not going to scare you with horror stories of botched back-alley abortions. Nor the “Million Dollar Abortion Ring” that sent ripples of tragedy through the corrupted Chicago medical and legal communities. Been there, done that.
      Rather, I’m here to reassure. To remind you that just as Roe v. Wade did not introduce legal abortion, so its overturning, should that happen, will not slam the door completely.
     The 1973 Roe decision was not the start of legal abortion in the United States. In 1971, there were 500,000 illegal abortions, true, but also 500,000 legal abortions in the 31 states where the procedure was allowed to preserve “life and health” of the mother. Four states — New York, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska — offered abortion just because a pregnant woman wanted it, as if she were in control of her own body.
     “Health” is a rather general term, vague enough for many doctors to perform abortions. Even in Illinois, where our dusty 1872 law allowed abortion “only if necessary for the preservation of the woman’s life.”
     What a circus that was. Spend a few minutes ruffling newspapers from 1972 and you encounter situations like that of the 15-year-old referred to by one headline writer as “Suicide Girl.” Committed to the Audy Home by her mother, who could not afford the psychiatric care she needed, the teen ran away, got pregnant, then vowed she would kill herself if forced to have the baby.
     She was again a ward of Illinois, which refused to let her go to one of the several Chicago hospitals that volunteered to do an abortion. It all wound up in court and in the news.
     “I have performed abortions in similar cases at Michael Reese,” said Dr. Alex Tulsky, a gynecologist there. “This is done every day, if not at Michael Reese, then at other major Chicago hospitals.”
     He observed that whether a medical condition resulted in the girl’s death, or a psychiatric one, “she’s equally dead either way.”
     Still leeway enough to give rise to “therapeutic abortion.”

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Share Eli's cheesecake for the holidays.

     "Do you want to split a piece of cheesecake?"
     It was a rhetorical question. There is only one conceivable answer, an immediate and enthusiastic "YES!"
     Though my wife, a woman of surprise, didn't say that.
     "Cherry or turtle?" my wife countered, opening the freezer. We had both kinds.
     "Turtle!" I exclaimed.
     She paused.
     "How about we take half of each?" Her eye was on the cherry, also a good call, but I was in a caramel and chocolate frame of mine.

     And that would have meant a full piece for each of us. Decadence. Luxury.

     I held out for the shared slice. For several reasons. First, there is the slow, sensual, delicate, deliberate process of sharing a slice of Eli's cheesecake, each of us delving our forks into its firm, cool, exterior, carefully working our way toward some imaginary radius dividing our beloved's half from our own. And the noble generosity, toward the end, as the precious cake dwindles and we go slower, deferring, making sure the other has their due, pushing the last remnant across the cake in the other's direction.  Here, you take this, love. What is mine is yours.

    And yes, eating only half a slice means fewer calories, moving cheesecake from a rare indulgence to a regular treat. You can eat more by eating less. 
     I was inspired to cheesecake by the Eli's advertisements, which went up on everygoddamnday.com Wednesday night, the ninth holiday season where they have appeared, without fail, like Santa, like carols, like joy itself, to welcome in the holiday season. 
     Though honestly, we've been indulging in post-prandial cheesecake more in recent months. Cheesecake used to be the realm of our boys, the frozen fatted calf awaiting their inevitable return. It was theirs, and our occasional taking some was stealing from our children. Which we of course still did.  But rarely. 

       Now, with both boys lashed to their legal oars, their returns are less frequent. Yet the cheesecake remains—we always have it on hand. The perfect treat to take out for guests. The perfect answer to the puzzlement of what to have for dessert. The perfect reassurance, glanced under the frozen peas and Eggo waffles, that you are living a Good Life. If you don't have Eli's in your freezer, then you're really not a Chicagoan. Really not alive.  

     Somebody must eat it. And that somebody is myself. And my wife. Together.
     Though it could also be eaten by you, yourself, and your husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or significant other. You are allowed. An amazing generosity of the Eli's company is that they share their cheesecake. They don't have to. They could keep it all to themselves and who could blame them? But it is available, for mere money. Sold as if it were some sort of commercial product, and not the frozen ambrosia of the gods. Available online, for yourself or for gifts. Or for both. I will give cheesecake this season because I always do, since it is always appreciated, the only downside of giving cheesecake as a present being that it becomes one cheesecake out of the finite galaxy of cheesecakes that eludes consumption by yourself. But that's okay. There are plenty, and they are always making more, in the immaculate factory on the northwest side of Chicago. Always more, and you can't eat them all, though God knows it would be a joy to try.

      And besides, this holiday season, with so much going wrong in the world, we need a chance to make something go right. To light a candle in the darkness, to savor a slice of life while we have it by eating cheesecake and to spread joy where we can by giving it.
     As a regular reader, you know I don't demand much from you. Read the stuff, don't be a jerk in the comments. There is no paywall, no subscriptions, no cup rattling of any kind. All I ask of you is that you buy one cheesecake, for yourself, or for another, once a year. Now is that time. Just click here, or on the advertisement at left, to be transported to the world of Eli's cheesecake. Then the only difficulty will be picking which one.

He’s baaaack! Lessons from the Smollett case

Ufizzi Gallery, Florence

     Has the law ever been compared to a dim cat? No? Good, then let me be the first. Waking Monday morning to see the dead mouse of the Jussie Smollett case dropped on our collective pillow is a reminder not only of walnut-brained felines, but that when Hamlet lists the reasons to kill himself, “the law’s delay” is No. 2, right after the pangs of unrequited love.
     Almost three years. Longer than COVID-19, and COVID-19 feels like forever. You’d think it should be done by now. But no. He’s baaaaack.
     Given that a trial is going on, journalistic convention discourages me from endorsing either of the two possible narratives: A) That Smollett was the victim of this strange racist/homophobic attack committed by a pair of his employees, as the defense now suggests. Or B) Smollett himself paid his two associates $3,500 — by check, since we are not dealing with Lex Luthor here — to stage the attack in some kind of cracked effort to boost his profile and hence his salary.
     I’m not publicly endorsing one or the other. Let’s just say I believe the one that doesn’t require a suspension of common sense. While we’re waiting for the jury to choose, no one can fault us, the unwilling audience, if we pass the time by trying to extract a bit of benefit out of this waste by noting three of the general lessons illustrated here.
     1) Don’t lie. Lying is a trap. Alas, the same sort of person who fabricates stuff also lacks the fortitude to admit it when caught. And so it continues.
     We’ve seen this on a national scale as the election fraud lie of Donald Trump has become the bedrock belief of the Republican Party. Worse than merely a lie, it’s a flimsy lie. They obviously don’t really believe the election was stolen from them in some amorphous way they can’t explain, never mind prove. If they actually believed that, why vote at all?
     Rather, it’s just the lie they use to grease the skids of their bad behavior to fool themselves, if nobody else. The way Smollett is ignoring the fact that at one point he did community service — not the usual route taken by victims of hate crime — before Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s special alternate system of justice for TV stars came to light and the matter was taken out of her hands and given to a special prosecutor.

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Flashback 2000: Prayer needs a 'private' sign

 

     The Uptown Poetry Slam returned to the Green Mill on Sunday after its long COVID hiatus. The most fun I've had in a while. The open-mike poets were funny and true and passionate and heartbreaking. The jazz was cool. And Marc Kelly Smith was the perfect MC, energetic and raw, reciting his own powerful poetry. There was tap dancing, and one poet proposed to his girlfriend from the stage. I was honored to be allowed to say a few words, and considered talking about Miss Eve, then didn't. I can't believe I haven't shared the following before, but here it is.

     The Green Mill is a wonderful old bar in Uptown. If you've never gone, you really should—dark, cozy, comfortable. I used to stop by whenever I could, back in the days when it had a regular pianist named Miss Eve.
     Miss Eve played at the Green Mill for nearly 50 years. She was a big, fleshy woman, and she would sit perched at the small piano behind the bar and sing, her voice rough and low. She took requests, and I'd try to stump her. My mother had been a singer in the USO, so I was familiar with a wide range of obscure old chestnuts. I'd request "Goody, Goody," and "Embraceable You" and "There's No Tomorrow."

Miss Eve

     

     "Do you know `Avalon' ?" I'd ask. "Do you know `Come Rain or Come Shine' ?" Invariably, she did. But I kept trying. One day she interrupted me in mid-question. "Honey," she rasped. "I know 'em all."
      A flash of insight swept over me. She knows them all. She is omnipotent. Divine. A god. Of course! God is a sweaty fat woman in a dark bar, playing out the tune of the world.
     Right, I know: drunk. But it seemed profound, then. I mention it to illustrate why I don't pray much. If you are the sort of person who can entertain a thought as blasphemous as "God is a sweaty fat woman . . ." then you lack the sincerity needed for prayer.
     While I don't pray much, I do appreciate prayer. It is an amazingly efficient endeavor. Prayer doesn't require batteries. You can do it aloud, but you don't have to. You can pray silently. Nobody will stop you. There is no need to clasp your hands in front of you or to kneel. You can choose to turn your eyes heavenward or not.
     This subtle, flexible quality of prayer comes to mind when I hear of people trying to make it into a public spectacle, either by forcing it into public schools or, as we keep hearing from the Southland, shouting it out at high school football games.
     Ever since the courts struck down leading prayers over the PA system as unconstitutional, rabid ministers have been encouraging their charges to stand up before games and pray.
     What is the purpose of this? Down South, they argue that they are merely continuing a tradition — God and football. The argument that a person should be able to attend a high school football game without being forced to choose whether to stand for a public display of adherence to Christianity never seems to affect anybody south of Missouri.
     What they don't realize is that this only works so long as most people think alike. As we learned this year in Palos Heights, the face of America is changing, and as our country becomes more diverse, the bullying represented by those football game prayers will become more intolerable. How would they react if, after the spontaneous Lord's Prayer died away, a smaller contingent stood up to recite the Hebrew schma as a third group went down to the field to unroll their prayer rugs facing Mecca.
     They wouldn't like it.
     You can pray all you want — in school, at football games, in a bar. You just shouldn't make a show of it. The reason is that if you recite the Lord's Prayer — your Lord's Prayer — then I should be able to shake a palm branch, and little Haji should get a chance to light incense to the six-armed elephant-head god.
     This is only fair. Yet so many people just can't get it. Maybe I should pray for them. Miss Eve, do you know "As Time Goes By"?
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 5, 2000.

‘Let’s reduce the misery’

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Before we consider the issue that U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., phoned me to talk about last week — shipping fighting birds through the United States Postal Service — we need to wrap our heads around the general idea of animals being sent through the mail.
     It is a common practice.
     “They sent me a list of things you can legally mail,” Quigley said. “Poultry, honeybees, scorpions, live adult birds, which is depressing. Baby alligators, frogs, chameleons, lizards, etc.”
     Which makes sense. Animals need to get to farms and pet stores. It isn’t like they can take a bus. Posting them doesn’t strike me as particularly cruel. Given the amount of time a frog spends hibernating at the bottom of a frigid lake, four days in a dark container doesn’t seem a crime against nature.
     But that isn’t the problem Quigley is trying to address.
     “Today we’re focused on buying, selling, possessing or receiving any animals for purposes of the animal participating in a fighting venture,” Quigley said.
     Cockfights — putting two birds in a ring, with razor talons attached to their claws, and goading them to maul each other — is one of the more obscure sub-hells of sport. Illegal in all 50 states, it is still permitted in territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.
     Maybe I’ve been softened up by COVID isolation, But I was happy just to be approached by somebody about something. Quigley could have been exercised about the Oxford comma, and I’d give him my ear.
     Earlier this month, Quigley sent a letter to Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale, asking the USPS to develop a strategy to start better enforcing the 2002 federal law against shipping animals for fighting purposes.
     “There have been 500 shipments of fighting birds, mostly from state-based farms in the Carolinas, some 10,000 fighting animals sent to Guam,” Quigley said. The birds are also being sent to Puerto Rico.

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'Better I should know'

    Reality is a stern taskmaster. That's why so many people are so loose with their facts. Not that they are averse to factuality, per se. They never fudge random fact, never claim the moon is made of chalk.

    Rather, they want a pass, want to coast, want to ignore the costs baked into their behaviors. Nobody lies to make themselves look worse, or to emphasize the gravity of their misdeeds. Rather, they attempt to deform the truth—always in vain—to bend it out of shape rather than admit that it is they themselves who need adjusting. They try to pretend their wishes were horses, mounting air and riding away, in their minds if not in actuality. 

     That's why I keep an electronic scale in the kitchen. Because when the issue is as significant as what you put in your mouth, a person tends to err on the side of more. I've eaten a salad in a chain restaurant and figured it had to be 500 calories, then later checked the establishment's website and found it was really 1,200. Just as primitive cultures lacked words for large numbers, and could 1,2,3 and "many," so I have a hard time adjusting the upper limit of what I imagine certain foodstuffs contain, difficulty adjusting to just how fattening they are. It seems to defy possibility. I used to like a good blueberry muffin, until Jewel started posting they are 600 calories. I never ate one again.

     Still, even with the best, most accurate intentions, mistakes happen. 
     The other day. I cut myself a slice of my wife's delicious homemade cranberry bread. It was a thick slice, and I figured it had to be 1.5 ounces. Then I tossed it on the scale. More than twice that: 3.3. To my credit, I did not then announce that the scale was broken. Or suspect a problem with gravity. A lot of people seem to take that route. But the cranberry bread was 330 calories whether I recognized it or not. As Sarah McLachlan sang, "Better I should know."